GrowthFactor

MIT, Sloan School of Management

Industry: PropTech

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Clyde Anderson, Raj Shrimali, Sam Hall

Brief Description of Solution: GrowthFactor is the operating system for commercial real estate. We empower brick-and-mortar businesses to scale with confidence and optimize their store footprint. We provide a proven, end-to-end platform that has already powered over 500 successful store launches for brands like 16 Handles, Books-a-Million, and Cavender’s with over 99% of those locations meeting revenue targets. We connect tenants, brokers and landlords through a unified collaboration suite that allows seamless transfer of clear data.

Funding Dollars: NA

What led you to launch this venture? GrowthFactor started as an AI and data science consulting firm for retailers. GrowthFactor’s three cofounders all met during our first semester at MIT Sloan – Raj had been working in machine learning and AI his entire life; Sam had spent years before school learning how to operate startups; and Clyde has spent his entire life working with his retail family business. We decided to apply our collective experiences and what we were learning at MIT to help that family business make better, data-driven decisions.

Over time, as we worked closely with that retailer, we were pulled into the real estate function to answer their critical data-driven questions. For a retailer, each decision to open a store, relocate, or close was a multi-million-dollar decision. They had plenty of data, but no time to separate the signal from the noise. At the end of the day, those decisions felt like gambles.

We reached out to ~60 other retailers to figure out how pervasive this problem was. It turned out that every brick-and-mortar chain had a similar problem – they didn’t need more data. Instead, they needed to know that their most important decisions were going to be successful.

With this market signal, we decided to move on from consulting and build a platform that allows retailers, restaurants, brokers, and landlords to all gain insights and communicate in a way that enables every party to be successful.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with your venture? Our biggest accomplishments are when we’re able to make a real, positive change in one of our customers. All three of our initial customers – those that helped us build the earliest stages of GrowthFactor – have had record breaking years in real estate. Their new stores are some of their highest performing sites in years.

Cavender’s, in particular, had recently partnered with new ownership and was looking to expand much more rapidly than they had previously done. We built a full process for evaluating any number of sites, prioritizing the best ones, and understanding how every site in their portfolio would perform with each decision. Through our work with Cavender’s, they have tripled their expansion rate – from 9 new stores in 2024 to 27 new stores in 2025.

We’ve had several big milestones. We have grown from 2 to 17 customers in 2025, we successfully completed the Delta V accelerator, and we have now begun releasing never before seen features in our industry. Our revenue has tripled, we now employ 11 people full-time, and have recently opened the doors to our new office in Kendall Square.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? For our first nine months, GrowthFactor operated as a consulting firm. We controlled sales and generated revenue, but we knew a consulting model couldn’t scale at the rate we wanted. In September 2024, we discovered the problem we ultimately wanted to solve as a company: helping brick & mortar brands answer the question, “Where should we go next?”. We decided that, to solve this problem for the entire industry, we would have to forego our consulting to focus entirely on building a scalable platform.

The challenge wasn’t just realizing this but actually acting on it. We had to make the terrifying decision to sunset active projects, retire deployed software, and voluntarily cut off our cash flow. At the time, we only had one committed customer that we were helping with real estate. The hardest part was the discipline required to keep saying ‘no’ to lucrative consulting offers so we could remain obsessively focused on building our real estate platform.

What ultimately helped us stay focused was holding each other accountable as a founding team and leaning on our advisors and professors to hold us accountable. Every decision to say no to money as a young company is difficult. Having a support system that understood and supported our post-pivot-vision allowed us to build the discipline to repeatedly say no, ultimately allowing us to focus on our new vision.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? GrowthFactor wouldn’t exist without MIT Sloan. We all met at Sloan in our first semester. Sloan creates an environment where curious people with varied backgrounds can meet and empowers all its students to believe they can build and accomplish something novel in the world.

Sloan’s curriculum is second-to-none. The entrepreneurship courses, like Building an Entrepreneurial Venture (aka “GSD”), Entrepreneurial Sales, and even the core Data, Models and Decisions course are the bedrock of our company. We’ve taken these courses as we built our venture, and we have actioned every single learning into the DNA of what we have built. Without such a profoundly thoughtful and impactful curriculum, this company would never have been created.

Sloan also has an incredibly strong entrepreneurial and innovative culture. Many of our classmates were working on their own ventures, and these people became the most important source of inspiration, collaboration, and comfort. Building a company is hard. It requires making difficult decisions constantly with limited information. Knowing that we were not alone – having dozens of classmates feeling the same pain – allowed us to keep moving forward in the most difficult moments.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? The most impactful MBA class to GrowthFactor was Building an Entrepreneurial Venture, also known as “Get Shit Done” (GSD, for short). GSD is a project-based class that requires teams to pitch to get in. The course walks a small group of startups through some of the most important problems they will face, and it gives each startup one-on-one time with mentors who have successfully built companies.

Being able to wrestle with decisions and problems in real time with people like Kosta Ligris and Emily Greene was an unforgettable, invaluable experience. We were able to make more progress in one semester than most startups make in years. GSD was the most clear example of how valuable it can be to be incubating a business while in business school as you can apply learnings from the curriculum in perfectly real time.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? Early in our journey, Professor Kosta Ligris provided a critical course correction. During our pitch for the Building an Entrepreneurial Venture (GSD) course, we presented a solution that tried to do too much: holding onto our consulting business and building software tools for multiple retail functions. Kosta’s feedback was direct: focus is everything, and stretching ourselves too thin was a recipe for failure.

We took that advice to heart immediately. That same night, we worked until 3 AM at the MIT Martin Trust Center to execute a formal pivot, shedding our consulting services to go all-in on a unified brick & mortar real estate platform. Since that moment, Kosta has remained involved and supportive of our business, and was critical to our ability to actually focus. Without Kosta’s continued support, we would not be where we are today.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? The startup ecosystem, in Boston broadly and at MIT specifically, is incredibly deep and supportive. Every business has unique situations and problems, but every community of startups has people that have faced similar problems and can give advice in one way or another. We frequently exchange resources with other startups like offering support on product strategy while leveraging their advice on marketing. It is a testament to the incredible value of a collaborative ecosystem like this one.

Boston’s supportive culture extends far beyond other startups as well. We’ve had several investors come from Boston and MIT, and the local companies are excited to become early customers and champions. Some of our earliest customers – Shy Bird, Tasty Burger, and Graffito – are local to Boston and have been instrumental in helping us build all that we have to-date.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? We believe every neighborhood deserves access to the goods and services they need to thrive. That’s why GrowthFactor is evolving beyond analytics into a true operating system for commercial real estate. By connecting the right people and data, we help bring essential amenities – whether it’s a bookstore, fresh produce, or a gym – to the communities that need them most.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? Focus. Although we heard this several times in the early stages of building, it’s difficult to truly imagine just how specific you sometimes need to be in the problem you’re solving and who you’re solving it for. There have been several times where we have had to narrow our scope, say no to customers, or say no to talented team members. These decisions are difficult. Ultimately, however, with a small team, you will be much more successful narrowing your scope as intensely as possible, because you cannot actually solve more than one problem at a time.

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