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 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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 i just went out and got a job rather than start this business uh so the team in india uh there you know it's a different situation so their their uh opportunity cost isn't quite as high as mine and so uh at first we were just doing straight slicing pie model uh when we first discussed this merger six months ago uh now with us doubling our business we've kind of uh we did the slicing pi model for their business on how much input they put in uh and for my business we just kind of figured out what we thought the business was worth and did like a hybrid approach so just to be clear if i'm doing this correctly 4500 hours at 82.50 per hour would value your time into the business so far in this slice and uh pi model of 371 thousand dollars with the 2x multiplier that's about 700 grand of value on your hours take the 300 000 times the 4x multiplier is 1.2 million plus the 750 puts the total value of the business when you do this at about 2 million dollars is that accurate uh no so the the first part was so the the your house yeah so that that essentially what and it wouldn't be dollars they call them pie slices uh but that was that calculation was a pretty spot on i think you said 670 it doesn't matter i'm trying to get the general idea so there's basically 750 000 of value you're attributing to the business because of your hours you put in and then you said 300 thousand dollars is that not accurate i thought you said there's a forex multiplier on those uh well uh we didn't have cash invested so where were you getting that number i just i just asked you um how many dollars you put in the business and you said three hundred thousand today last year the the three hundred thousand was my estimate for how many like our contributions oh i see so there were no dollars contributed you just took hours so you value the business total about 650 seven hundred thousand dollars yeah in this model 650 700 000 slices well i don't know what the hell that means i know i know what dollars are yeah what do you mean slices i know what that means uh also they call them pie slices it's a slicing pie model and so it's a way to normalize like dollar investment versus time investment and you don't want to call it 670 000 because then that has tax consequences so it's you know it's not a dollar valuation it's a it's a way of figuring out who has what equity so you know i put in 670 000 slices then one of my developers you know he works uh a thousand hours at you know twenty dollars an hour in india and if i pay him in pie slices now he has uh you know twenty thousand forty thousand slices and so if he has forty thousand slices and i have uh six hundred fifty thousand slices now we have we know how much equities person has so if this deal closes how many total pie sizes will exist um it would be i just looked at the number uh it was just shy of nine hundred thousand okay so they will own approximately uh 130 000 slices to your 770 000 exactly or a 15 to 85 split exactly which we're not calling dollars because you don't want tax consequences exactly understood okay that was very helpful talk to you about the rest of your story here how many folks are on your team today pre-acquisition uh pre-acquisition um six five six full time uh no how many people uh me that's it okay so where are the other four uh those are uh the acquisition so they said pre-acquisition how many folks on the team uh so yeah five six five sixteen favorites so who who are the other four uh oh oh the other four um so i have a developer um he's the one that actually uh started the team requiring uh i have uh alexandra on pre pre pre-act pre-acquisition so just to be clear so what's actually happening here is the developer that you founded the business with had another business which you're now bringing into the business exactly i see okay interesting um got it where and how did you event how did you meet him how was the first time you got connected to him uh i was working for a real estate team i was a chief data officer uh and hired him as my assistant oh okay very interesting but how did you find him uh upwork okay very cool so you put a little project what was the first project game on upwork do you remember the title um i think it was developer assistant and what was that what'd the task say what were we having um it was i don't even remember it probably wasn't very sophisticated it was you know uh very early i mean i just taught myself how to code a few years ago uh right after my poker career uh so yeah but was um was it like was it like a scraping job was it writing some python or javascript was it setting up a mysql database oh no we we were so we were building a platform similar to cc so i was building uh a sisu-like platform which is like a data tracking platform for real estate teams uh essentially because that's what we needed at the real estate company that i was working at and so i was hiring him to assist me with that understood heck of a story we hope you keep doubling every year daniel this is great but in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book um i guess uh seven habits of highly effective people number two is there a ceo you're following or studying musk ellen musk number three what's your favorite online tool for building interface uh it just got shut down stackery and they gave me a different one that's not shut down um circle ci okay fair enough number four how many hours i sleep to get every night at least six except for the last night what's your situation married single kids uh single okay and uh how old are you uh 39 last question daniel take us home here something you wish you knew when you were 20. to meditate guys there you have dot re he's a scarred real estate agent said he know what i'm gonna build some software to fix this issue launched it it's very specific he's helping agents connect their systems on fallout boss to this thing called csu sisu.com which is like effectively lead tracking he's got 165 customers paying 150 bucks a month on average right now just broke 15 000 a month in revenue totally bootstrapped less than 12 months old just him building it now with a team of four or five contractors as well met his co-founder a technical co-founder on upwork daniel thanks for taking us to the top awesome thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun 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