How Happyco CEO Jindou Lee grew Happyco to $57.8M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is jindo lee he's a ceo and founder of happyco a software provider to the multifamily property management industry before happyco he worked in the video gaming industry on titles like mortal kombat and gauntlet he also founded and exited a few other tech companies as an ex-soccer player and studied graphic design at the university of south australia junior you ready jindo you're ready to take us to the top yeah yeah let's do it all right so you basically stole all my audience's childhood with mortal kombat and gauntlet huh oh yeah it was uh it was fun it was um you know games that i grew up with as well right and so uh working on getting to work on those titles was was well it was kind of a double agent it was really really fun to be able to do that but on the same token you got to see how the sausage was made and you're like man this isn't as great as i i thought it would be yeah yeah yeah we recently had howard on uh who's running start engine now but he was about activision back in the day and then obviously launched huge titles like call of duty and world of warcraft and such and once you realize how those things are made you start to go oh my gosh the psychology is incredible yeah it's um it's i remember like there was one um it was going to like recording studio trying to do the audio for i think it was maybe gauntlet or one of those titles and um this this is what killed my my whole childhood right in this one moment so i was like really excited to go check out how um the recording was done and this audio and i think they were trying to record like the death sounds you know like that kind of stuff and so i was like oh i'm going to go in and check it out i was trying to find the recording stream i couldn't find it and finally i saw this sign you know like recording in progress whatever i looked in and i saw this guy um you know the sort of the simpsons character that's like overweight eating pizza and a you know his box on his tummy and then he's just going right i'm like oh man i thought there would be at least like some actor from hollywood or something uh but it was just the pizza guy and i was like man that really sucks that's hysterical all right now you're building happy co so tell us what the company does and is it pure place ass um yeah for the most part it is a a it's a sas model that we we are adopting so um maybe i'll take a little bit from the top so happy co what we do is we actually believe in in building um stronger health healthier and happier communities and you know we actually believe that life is short and we want to help people live their best lives so um in a very roundabout way we actually offer very beautiful um like what i call our easy to use people-centric software and technology for the multi-family real estate industry so who's actually buying uh it's it's property management companies there's asset owners that manage and own residential real estate specifically in the apartment industry okay companies buy okay and the any geographical kind of just kind of center and cities rural um i mean the huge focus for us is is north america so um like multi-family as an asset class like the apartment industry only really exists in the us and really america it yeah it's it's crazy because i i came from australia um so this accent you're hearing isn't irish uh it actually throws people off and they're here and they look at me like i don't know what to do but um so in australia there is just single family like for rentals it's just single family or condos right so you can buy a prop buy an apartment but you can't really rent one um from like a uh like that's institutionally owned um so really this this only exists in the u.s um having said that it's actually starting to explode in other cities like you know i know in europe it's getting pretty huge now south america is getting pretty big um and so i think it's starting to catch wind and everyone is is trying to model the u.s sort of um the bus the model that we have in the u.s so yeah it's getting funny yeah okay so these guys are paying and now i know we we're short on time so i don't want to go down every customer core so i mean on average what would you say one of these folks are paying you per year to manage their properties um so what actually what we do is actually sell software to them right to to do um yeah yeah that's what i'm asking what do they pay for the software between like uh anywhere between on the enterprise side between like a 50 to 100k acv is what we typically see but again if i force you to average across your entire base what would you say that kind of average acv is um if i took out all the smb then i would say around the 70k okay but but again i i guess what i'm asking really is the reason i'm asking an average is that will tell us who your like main cohort is do you have a like a large majority of your writer when you made it from smb no um our our focus today is really on the enterprise side so anyone that manages you know 2 000 apartments and above um our largest customer manages a couple hundred thousand units okay uh historically though are you now moving up market or have you always had kind of average acvs of 70 grand no we our when we first started our average acv was maybe 500 a month a year yeah so um we started off in the smb space and and that then we over time and probably in 2017 we've made this jump from the smb to enterprise okay yes yes so see i want to understand that trend so so get i want to dive into that but first just that's now you know why i'm asking so today what would the average entire customer base it's obviously lower than 70. that's a very tough question i i um call it uh about five thousand dollars okay if you kind of got across all our customer base so that's really helpful now take me back when did you have the moment we're like ugh i love these customers but we've got to go out market yeah so i i can tell you exactly when it happened so um if you took went back so smb is you might manage um uh like 200 properties right like 100 doors so the moment that it blew my mind was we had a call in 2016 and some guy rang and said hey i want to use your software to to do inspections i'm like oh great um how many properties do you manage he goes well we own and manage a hundred and ten thousand units and i was just like yeah we can handle that and hung up the phone and we're like holy crap we did the math and then we're like that's that's amazing that would have been the equivalent of signing up um you know a thousand smb customers and so we actually launched um to them and the cool part was with an smb customer you you spent probably one support ticket a month on an smb customer paying you 50 bucks a month right and then with this enterprise customer um that was paying way more we only did one support ticket a month as well and it was a very uh it was an easy question to answer it wasn't like hey how do i turn on my ipad yeah um it's that big aha moment i'm like you know what i want to keep doing that this that's smart so okay so when did you launch the company we launched it in officially in 2012. okay and the payment enterprise was what year 2016. 2016 pivot enterprise okay and what's team size today uh we're just about 55 people in the company oh very good and have you decided to boost drop the company or did you take dilution and raise we've we we bootstrapped for the first uh maybe nine ten months and then the rest we've kind of had to raise some kind of jindo gosh this was gonna be a bromance i was following in love and now you tell me you raise how much how much did you have to raise yeah we've raised about 11 million dollars today okay i mean not horrible but still a big chunk why'd you have to raise i mean what what is the most cost intensive thing about what you're doing so like people right it's like hiring people and and then with sas models as you probably know in your view viewers know um there's this sort of value of death where you kind of have to build stuff you don't get enough revenue and so you have to kind of figure out creative ways to do that um i would have to if i went back and and redid everything um i would probably not raise a single dollar yeah yeah i mean by the way i think most founders generally would say that now was the 11 million equity or was there any debt it was all equity all equity okay yeah i think most founders would say that so all right let's go let's let's i know we're jumping around but let's go back to the start here for a second how did you get the first hundred customers okay so um the way i sort of started this was i actually owned a bunch of real estate and i really loved investing and then um through that process i had property managers that would be managing my properties and they had um they were giving me these reports of the inspection reports of pen and paper and i'm like what the hell is going on i pay you good money 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