Today we’d like to introduce you to David Fiedler.
David, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My co-founder, Eli Gordon and I originally met in Los Angeles in high school and were both highly entrepreneurial and loved the idea of starting a business together. After debating and dissecting dozens of ideas over the years, we finally found one that we found intriguing enough to pull the trigger on.
It was a service for large mortgage companies and their consumers to manage their transactions. We built a platform that could assist a buyer with selecting a real estate agent, managing the sales and mortgage process, as well as all of the other components that go into these complicated and quite cumbersome real estate transactions.
We were ultimately acquired by a mortgage company that was a customer of ours to build out a division around our concept. That was in 2011 and my co-founder and I learned a ton and were really excited about starting a new company that leveraged some of the experiences and relationships from that chapter.
We learned a lot from our customers who were moving and how stressful and painful that experience can be and wanted to come up with a solution that can make things easier for them. The idea for Kandela was born which we started in 2012 and our mission was to make moving simple and easy. We partner with all sorts of companies in the moving space such as mortgage companies, real estate brokerages, gas and electric companies, and many more. They refer our service to their customers as a value-added benefit.
Today we assist thousands of customers every month around the U.S from our offices in Los Angeles.
Has it been a smooth road?
From our experience in business it seems like there is never a smooth road and that is the challenge and fun of being an entrepreneur. It requires a tremendous amount of curiosity and problem solving and the ability to quickly adapt in order for a business to survive those critical first years as a company.
One of our toughest struggles included getting the attention of the service providers like DIRECTV to take us seriously as a company to partner with so that we could provide their service to our customers. It was a bit of a chicken and egg thing where if didn’t have a marketplace of broadband, video, phone, security, then referral partners wouldn’t feel that our service was valuable enough to offer to their customers, and on the other hand, if we don’t have customers than the service providers wouldn’t want to work with us. So this was a critical problem to solve and took a lot of persuading, cajoling, and creative problem solving to work through.
Today, Kandela works with all of the service providers and has the most robust and comprehensive offering of any company in our space that includes categories like Broadband, Video, Phone, Security, Moving Companies, Insurance, Home Warranty, and many others.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Kandela provides a concierge experience to people who are moving into a new home. We are partnered with home service providers from a broad range of categories (television, internet, home security – to name just a few), and with a single phone call, new homebuyers or renters can speak to a friendly and knowledgeable concierge who will educate them on the best home services available, discuss pricing and service options, activate services, schedule installation times, suggest moving companies and other services, and help in every way possible to bring their new home to life.
We are most proud of our culture which is uniquely an L.A story. Today, many call centers are based offshore or in rural parts of the country. But our concierge team are all based in L.A and is comprised of people from all over the U.S who come to L.A to pursue their dreams of becoming an actor, musician, or writer. We play a small role in facilitating that dream as we provide a fun and flexible environment for members of our team to earn a good wage while allowing them to take time out of the office to make an audition. In exchange, we get some of the most talented and engaging people who have made Kandela a great place to work.
We have people in our office who have done nationwide commercials, are on television series, or have done other creative work.
And we have done that while building out a reputation to our partners as a company that delivers on our promise to provide an outstanding customer experience.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
L.A has been a great city for Kandela and we can’t imagine we would be nearly as successful anywhere else. From the incredible talent pool to city organizations that have partnered with us like the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP), we have been really lucky to have launched here and definitely recommend it to others. There is a large entrepreneurial community that knows how to support and mentor others who are thinking of building a company in L.A.
Contact Info:
- Address: 8306 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 874, Los Angeles, CA 90211
- Website: www.kandela.com
- Phone: 1-888-826-8449
- Email: concierge@kandela.com
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