At Inman Connect last month in New York we had several folks eager to meet Tyler and Robert, the founders of Easy Agent Pro. Mostly to make sure they actually existed.
Today we’re going to talk all about how Tyler, a professional clarinet player, and Robert, who at one point was running a yoga towel company, met and came to create Easy Agent Pro and build our digital network of 120,000+ agents.
Let’s jump back a few years…
Tyler and Robert met while working a part-time job in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Ty was getting his MFA in music at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and Robert was, well, working on the latest tech innovations in the hot yoga world. He also graduated from UNM’s school of management.
In addition to playing with the New Mexico Philharmonic Orchestra and Santa Fe Symphony, Tyler, like Robert, also started his own business called The Discerning Clarinetist.
Although both of their business ventures were service-oriented, a classical musician and yogi may seem like an unlikely pair. But the two did have one other thing in common.
Coffee.
They both enjoyed coffee and often ended up taking to the local Starbucks to talk shop.
If you’ve followed EAP for a while, you’ve probably noticed that Tyler really likes to talk about Starbucks.
Now you know why.
It was in a Starbucks coffee shop that Easy Agent Pro was born.
Well, kind of.
Before Easy Agent Pro, there was PageOne NOW.
This was an integrated reputation management consulting company.
Basically, they designed websites and offered digital marketing services for anyone and everyone. But this really was the basis on which Easy Agent Pro was built.
The problem was that even with steady business from a variety of industries — including banking, gaming and, of course, real estate, the new business partners were still living in the feast or famine cycle that is all too familiar to business owners and entrepreneurs.
As graduation was nearing for Tyler at the end of 2014, the two introduced the Easy Agent Pro blog and chose to solely serve real estate agents. Bringing over a few clients they had been working with at PageOne NOW, Tyler and Robert related a lot to the drive and determination of agents.
They also identified a growing hole in the industry and knew exactly how they could fill it. The problem they recognized with real estate technology is that it needed to evolve. There are and always have been endless opportunities to capture leads, but the means to do so digitally weren’t immediately available in a convenient way.
It wasn’t always easy to set up a landing page or even add a blog to a website. So the pair set out to take old marketing technologies and present them in new, more actionable ways.
Beyond Marketing
However, Robert and Ty didn’t initially want to build lead-generating websites for agents — even though they received multiple requests each week for customized agent sites.
The first thing they wanted to do was offer a digital marketing course and presented it at a webinar at the end of 2014.
At this same time, Tyler’s grandmother was losing her battle with cancer. Just hours before Tyler was preparing to present the webinar, she passed away.
And then no one bought the course.
With the holidays fast approaching and no capital, Tyler and Robert were feeling the pressure.
You can probably empathize a lot with this. Maybe you’ve even found yourself a similar situation when your lead funnel seems to be drying up and you can’t catch a break.
As more and more agents continued to reach out to the team for web design, they decided to give it a go right after the New Year and launched the first Easy Agent Pro site in January 2015.
Tyler started publishing more and more blog content and brought Marketing Strategist and your favorite EAP Youtuber Kelvin on board.
By November of 2015 Easy Agent Pro introduced their first LeadSite platform and began rapidly developing custom tools and applications to help agents generate leads online.
So that’s how Easy Agent Pro was founded and we’re just getting started!
What’s next?
Stay tuned!