Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Tampa-St. Petersburg who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Wesley Roderick, founder of Real Home Profile, a social network focused on creating transparency in the home-buying experience.

Please provide a brief one-liner about your company.

Real Home Profile is a social network focused on creating transparency in the home-buying experience.

What inspired you to launch your company?

The inspiration for this new endeavor came from my experience with the home-buying process and the lack of transparency that is standard in the real estate industry.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

We are aiming to reduce the time and money wasted in the home search and home-buying processes.
Great question! I’m excited for many reasons, but primarily the fun of testing a novel, community-centered approach against a very large, very commonplace issue.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

Being a first-time founder in the tech space, it was really a hurdle of self-doubt more than anything regarding the expertise and knowledge gap. I believe in the “why not me? why not now?” principle and know how to ask questions to, and learn from, people who know more than me to help vet ideas and approaches.

Where do you see your company headed next?

Embarc Collective. We are just starting up, but I feel great about the momentum and am excited to see how the product will be received.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

Just keep going. Ask questions, find answers, make decisions, repeat. And don’t set expectations.

Why Florida?

I’m from Tampa. It suits me well.