How InterFace CEO Daniel Poston grew InterFace to $263.5K revenue and 165 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is daniel poston his vision at interface is to create a reality where every residential real estate team member feels like they're optimized they have an optimized tech stack that has turned them into the iron man of real estate and has enabled them to focus on changing lives through home ownership daniel you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right are you like a scarred broker or something where'd you get this idea from uh yeah yeah i started my uh career as a real estate agent uh selling multi-family properties in the los angeles area uh actually right right around where the new nfl stadium was built back in 2007 2008 so the absolute best time to get into real estate uh sold a couple properties uh and the market collapsed and so that was um that was it for my real estate career when did you realize software was your next step um uh it's been quite a path so uh it actually wasn't the next step at the time the the next step was actually uh i played online poker professionally for several years uh and uh online poker is a very requires a very similar skill set to like data science and analytics so when you're playing online poker you're you're mining data from your opponents uh and then you take that data and display it in like a heads up display so you can see their statistics how they play and pretty much what i'm doing now is i do that for the real estate industry so uh yeah it it definitely uh has been a weird path but it's worked out very well understood and so what have you built now what what who's buying the software and what do they use it for uh so right now our primary product is an integration between uh real estate crm follow a boss which is it's the best real estate crm it's really and there's really not like a close second uh and then there's a data tracking platform called sisu uh so they track you know how many calls are being made by agents and how many appointments what's it called see what sisu s-i-s-u uh website csu.com and so we push data from follow boss into csu so real estate teams don't have to train their agents on how to use sisu they want their agents to stay and follow boss it's uh real estate agents are challenging to manage uh they're very much like herding cats i can say that because i used to be one uh and so real estate teams don't want to have to train uh their agents on multiple different systems they want to stay and follow a boss and so we kind of facilitate that they say there's riches in the niches this is certainly a niche what are folks average per month to use this technology that integrates boss to see sue uh what was that what are folks paying on average per month to use the tax um about 150 a month okay and is that per seat like per per rep uh no it's a it's a team-based model currently uh and we're we're going to be adding a lot more platforms so we're currently working on an open to close integration uh so open and close like a transaction management platform uh that's really like you can customize and to do uh you know whatever you need it to do and once once we have that developed we'll have pretty much a a really solid ecosystem uh so follow-up boss for crm that ties into a platform uh called y-lobo for the real estate teams youth for marketing oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna get a different valuation a vc is gonna pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're gonna do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and then see sue and open close that that pretty much covers all the bases i understood but just to be clear right now someone can sign up with a team of 1000 people friend just pay 150 bucks a month is that right uh yeah currently okay how many how many paid um what's the best way to do this uh how many real estate agents are there under brokers that pay you for access to your technology typically most teams are like five to ten agents i see okay and how many total teams on the platform today uh we just passed 150 i think we're 165-ish oh congrat congrats take me back to the first one what year was that and how did you land the first customer uh first customer so uh we're actually um uh kind of working with we set up a custom integration for the first customer uh and we're actually resetting that up for them uh they went away from follow-up boss because their agents blamed follow-up boss for them not doing their work uh what year uh it was last year oh got it so your guys are brand new launches yeah okay very cool and just to just be clear 165 paid accounts at 150 bucks a month that means you're doing about what five thousand bucks a month right now in revenue um or is it high probably fifteen fifteen to twenty thousand okay so you have some folks that are maybe on grandfathered plans maybe a little bit cheaper than a hundred yeah exactly i see i see okay cool so so 15 00 to 15 grand a month is obviously great now did you do this bootstrapped or did you raise capital uh bootstrap we love that very cool um have you had people reaching out how have you resisted the urge to raise and why is that important to you if at all um i mean i think we've had a couple uh people reach out recently uh i think we're a pretty good uh kept secret right now um so i'm i'm assuming we'll get more and more of those do you own 100 of the business personally today uh no it's about 80 to 85 uh we actually are in the process of acquiring a uh team in india they built a ai chat bot and didn't have great product market fit i need the developers and so we're in the process of merging companies right now and so they're getting about 15 of the business how did you guys agree on that that's hard because you have to value your business value what 15 percent is worth convince the developers that it's worth that amount how did you make that happen uh well it started with our coaching program uh dan martell pretty much introduced the framework that allowed us to do this we're using the slicing pie model kind of a slightly modified slicing pie model where you measure how much you put into the business in terms of like hours and dollars and then you convert that to uh pie slices where uh every hour you put in you it gets a 2x multiplier and every dollar that gets put in is a 4x multiplier and that kind of normalizes everything and then uh you can you can it's a great fair way of uh distributing equity uh so we have that uh so how many dollars did you put in when you do that analysis uh it was about 300 000 and how many hours um since the very beginning of the business it was about 4500 hours okay so how i guess so and then what did you value your hours at uh so my uh hours i valued it uh 82.50 an hour uh so what you're trying to do is figure out what you're actually risking uh it you know so what could i have made if...