Q&A With the Render Competition Winners, TitleWise

We are now entering the fourth year of the Render Competition, in which we award $100,000 to a new cohort of 8 startups. The winners use these investments to scale their solution within and beyond the Greater Louisville area. As we open applications for 2023, we’re catching up with the winning founders from last year to hear about their competition experience, lessons learned, advice for future applicants, and an update on what’s to come.

Today we hear from Jennifer Mason, founder of TitleWise. TitleWise is a SaaS platform for real estate title researchers, offering fully customizable digital worksheets, reports, and databases for any project, county, state, or country. A lack of existing standards for title research reports, and a dearth of digitization, result in routine losses in labor costs, errors, omissions, turnaround times, and transaction close rates. TitleWise’s founders are industry experts who created the platform as a solution to their own problems as owners of a third-generation research firm.

Why did you decide to apply for the Render Competition?

After bootstrapping the project to serve our needs at the title company and validating TitleWise’s efficacy for ourselves, we commissioned market research and customer satisfaction surveys. With proof of product-market fit, the Render Competition offered the opportunity to scale our product to new customers outside the original case study. For context, TitleWise competed in the first round of the Render Competition for three consecutive years before advancing and ultimately winning. Render’s high standards, supportive team, and judging panel were all aspects of the competition that attracted us, and we were able to apply what we learned each cycle to improve.

How are you using the $100K, and how will it help you scale?

The $100K investment has enabled us to hire an experienced COO and move our engineering team in-house, saving $1.4M against the previous agency model. The prize also funded customer support infrastructure and marketing campaigns, and expedited our product launch. There is also the validation that comes with inclusion in the portfolio, our relationship with Render was instrumental for conversations in subsequent fundraising efforts.

What did you take away from your interactions with the judges?

The judges had a keen ability to apply their experiential knowledge to TitleWise’s value propositions and market scenarios, without necessarily knowing many specifics about title research. Their perceptive questions enabled our team to reflect on how to highlight key ideas, which later translated into conversations with potential customers and future hires.

What is your impression of the Louisville and Southern Indiana startup community?

This startup community is engaged, energetic, and supportive. As a founder, I can ask a few people for advice on a problem, and an incredible telephone tree begins to come to life. Players in the community freely share their network connections, ideas, and encouragement.

Why do you see Greater Louisville as a good place to grow your business?

Greater Louisville, and specifically Southern Indiana, is a wonderful place to grow a business. As a lifelong resident, I understand how beneficial a tight-knit community with a few degrees of separation is for a business owner, small enough for personal relationships, yet large enough to scale your company within a dynamic market.

What role do you see your startup playing in the regional economy over the next 5 years?

We are ideally situated in a high-concentration area of title researchers. TitleWise aims to scale our SaaS platform, expand into marketplace services, and build advanced automation capabilities over the next five years, operations that will all be executed here within our region.

What’s next for your company in 2023?

TitleWise will increase its capacity for enterprise sales and is on track for an initial $500k ARR by year-end. Upon closing our seed round, key personnel will move to full-time, with additional hiring in marketing and sales. On the product side, TitleWise will also offer integrations with key settlement software tools.

What motivates you to continue to grow your business every day?

I have experienced firsthand the beneficial change TitleWise brings to title companies, the impact is real. I am motivated by my ability, and responsibility, to provide quantifiable improvements to how title research is performed and presented. I always ask: how can we set high standards for quality without compromising high standards for work conditions?