How InterFace Grew to $15K–$20K a Month in Revenue with 165 Real Estate Teams (Interview with Founder Daniel Poston)

Introduction and Daniel's Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Daniel Poston. He 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

00:15take us to top?

Daniel Poston

00:16>> Absolutely.

Nathan Latka

00:17All right. Are you like a scarred broker or something? Where'd you get this idea from?

Real Estate Career and Market Collapse in 2007 to 2008

Daniel Poston

00:21>> Yeah. Yeah. I started my career as a real estate agent, selling multi family properties in the Los Angeles area, actually right around where the new NFL stadium was built.

Nathan Latka

00:36So far.

Daniel Poston

00:37>> Back in 2007, and 2008, so the absolute best time to get into real estate. Sold a couple properties and the market collapsed. And so that was was it for my real estate career.

Nathan Latka

00:54When did you realize software was your next step?

From Online Poker to Data Science

Daniel Poston

01:00>> It's been quite a path. It actually wasn't the next step at the time. The next step was actually, I played online poker professionally for several years, and online poker requires a very similar skill set to data science and analytics. When you're playing online poker, you're mining data from your opponents, and then you take that data and display it in, like, a heads up display so you can see their statistics of how they play.

01:35>> Pretty much what I'm doing now is I do that for the real estate industry. So,

01:41>> yeah, it it definitely has been a a weird path, but it's worked out very well.

What InterFace Does: Follow Up Boss to Sisu Integration

Nathan Latka

01:49Understood. And so what have you built now? What what what who's buying the software, and what do they use it for?

Daniel Poston

01:55>> Right now, our primary product is an integration between real estate CRM Follow-up Boss, which is the best real estate CRM, and there's really not a close second. And then there's a data tracking platform called Sisu. They track how many calls are being made by agents and how many appointments

Nathan Latka

02:22What's it called?

Daniel Poston

02:22>> See what?

02:23>> Sisu, s I s u. Website, sisu.co.

Nathan Latka

02:26Okay. And so we push data from Follow Up Boss into Sisu.

Daniel Poston

02:31>> So real estate teams don't have train their agents on how to use Sisu, they want their agents to stay in Follow Up Boss.

02:43>> Real estate agents are challenging to manage, they're very much like herding cats. I can say that because I used to be one.

02:53>> Real estate teams don't want to have to train their agents on multiple different systems. They want to stay in Follow Up Boss, and so we facilitate that.

Pricing Model and Team-Based Subscription

Nathan Latka

03:02They say there's riches in the niches. This is certainly a niche. Are folks paying average per month to use this technology that integrates Boss to Sisu?

Daniel Poston

03:10>> What was that?

Nathan Latka

03:12What are folks paying on average per month to use this technology?

Daniel Poston

03:14>> About $150 a month.

Nathan Latka

03:18Okay. And is that per seat, per rep?

Daniel Poston

03:21>> No, it's team based model currently, and we're going to be adding a lot more platforms. So we're currently working on an open to close integration.

03:34>> Open to close is like a transaction management platform that's really you can customize to do whatever you need it to do. Once we have that developed, we'll have pretty much a really solid ecosystem. Follow-up Boss for CRM, that ties into a platform called Ylopo that real estate teams use for marketing.

Nathan Latka

04:02Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second. But you log in, you connect

04:25your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna get

04:49a 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

05:11built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

05:37out 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if you

05:59wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into the interview.

Daniel Poston

06:26>> Then Sisu and Open To Close that that pretty much covers all the bases.

Nathan Latka

06:32Understood. But just to be clear, right now, someone can sign up with a team of a thousand people for just pay a $150 a month. Is that right?

Customer Count: 165 Teams on the Platform

Daniel Poston

06:38>> Yeah. Currently.

Nathan Latka

06:39Okay. How many how many paid what's the best way to do this? How many real estate agents are there under brokers that pay you for access to your technology?

Daniel Poston

06:50>> Typically, most teams are like five to 10 agents.

Nathan Latka

06:54I see. Okay. And how many total teams on the platform today?

Daniel Poston

06:57>> We just passed one fifty. I think we're one sixty five ish.

07:02>> Oh, congrats.

Nathan Latka

07:03Take me back to the first one. What year was that and how did you land the first First

Daniel Poston

07:08>> customer, so we're actually

07:14>> working with We set up a custom integration for the first customer and we're actually resetting that up for them. They went away from Follow-up Boss because their agents blame Follow-up Boss for them not doing their work. So they

07:29>> really When was that first customer?

Nathan Latka

07:31What year?

Daniel Poston

07:32>> It was last year.

Nathan Latka

07:33Oh, got it. So your guys are brand new, launched in 2020.

Daniel Poston

07:36>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:37Okay. Very cool. And just to just to be clear, 165 paid accounts at $150 a month, that means you're doing about what? $25,000 a month right now in revenue?

07:47We're How is it? High.

Daniel Poston

07:48>> Probably $15,000 to $20,000.

Nathan Latka

07:52Okay. So you have some folks that are maybe on grandfathered plans, maybe a little bit cheaper than a $100 Yeah. A Exactly. I see. I see. Okay. Cool. So so $15.00 to $15 a month is obviously great. Now, did you do this bootstrapped or did you raise capital?

Bootstrapped Growth and Ownership Structure

Daniel Poston

08:04>> Bootstrap.

Nathan Latka

08:05We love that. Very cool. Yeah. Have you had people reaching out? How have you resisted the urge to raise? And why is that important to you, if at all?

Daniel Poston

08:13>> I mean, I think we've had a couple people reach out recently. I think we're a pretty good kept secret right now. So I'm I'm assuming we'll get more and more of those.

Nathan Latka

08:28Do you own a 100% of the business personally today?

Daniel Poston

08:32>> No, it's about 80 to 85%. We actually are in the process of acquiring a

Equity Merger with India Development Team

Daniel Poston

08:40>> team in India. They built an AI chatbot 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.

Nathan Latka

09:00How'd you guys agree on that? That's hard because you have to value your business, value what 15% is worth, convince the developers that it's worth that amount. How'd you make that happen?

Daniel Poston

09:08>> Well, it started with our coaching program.

09:13>> Dan Martell pretty much introduced the framework that allowed us to do this. We're using the slicing pie model, a slightly

09:25>> modified slicing pie model, where you measure how much you've put into the business in terms of hours and dollars, and then you convert that to

09:38>> pie slices, where every hour you put in,

09:44>> it gets a 2x multiplier, and every dollar that gets put in is a 4x multiplier, and that normalizes everything.

09:55>> It's a great fair way of distributing equity. So we have that

Nathan Latka

10:01So how many dollars did you put in when you did that did that analysis?

Daniel Poston

10:04>> It was about 300,000.

Nathan Latka

10:07And how many hours?

Daniel Poston

10:10>> Since the very beginning of the business, was about four thousand five hundred hours.

Nathan Latka

10:17Okay. So how I guess so and then what did you value your hours at?

Daniel Poston

10:21>> So my hours, valued at $82.50 an hour.

Nathan Latka

10:26I see. So what you're trying to do is

Daniel Poston

10:32>> figure out what you're actually risking. So what could I have made if I just went out and got a job rather than start this business? So the team in India, it's a different situation. Their

10:48>> opportunity cost isn't quite as high as mine. And so at first, we were just doing straight slicing pie model when we first discussed this merger six months ago. Now with us doubling our business,

11:06>> we did the slicing pie model for their business on how much input they put in. And for my business, we just kind of figured out what we thought the business was worth and did a hybrid approach.

Nathan Latka

11:18So just to be clear, if I'm doing this correctly, 4,500 hours at $82.50 per hour would value your time into the business so far in this slice and pie model of $371,000 With a 2X multiplier, that's about $700,000 of value on your hours. Take the 300,000 times a 4X multiplier is 1,200,000 plus the $750,000 puts the total value of the business when you did this at about $2,000,000 Is that accurate?

Daniel Poston

11:43>> No. So the first part was,

Nathan Latka

11:48Your average, got it.

Daniel Poston

11:49>> Yeah. So that essentially what and it wouldn't be dollars. They call them pie slices. But that was that calculation was a pretty spot on. I think you said 670.

Nathan Latka

12:03Doesn'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 $300,000. Is that not accurate? I thought you said there's a forex multiplier on those.

Daniel Poston

12:16>> Well, we didn't have cash invested. So where where were you getting that number?

Nathan Latka

12:23I just I just asked you how many dollars you put in the business, and you said 300,000.

Daniel Poston

12:28>> Did I No. Mishear

12:29>> the 300,000 was my estimate for how many, like, hour contributions.

Nathan Latka

12:36Oh, I see. So there were no dollars contributed. You just took hours. So you valued the business total about 650, $700,000 Yeah.

Daniel Poston

12:43>> In this 650, 700,000 slices.

Nathan Latka

12:48Well, I don't know what the hell that means. Know what I know what dollars are. What what are in slices? I know what that means.

Daniel Poston

12:53>> Well, so they call them pie slices. It's a slicing pie model. And so it's a way to normalize dollar investment versus time investment. And you don't want to call it $670,000 because then that has tax consequences. So it's not a dollar valuation, it's a way of figuring out who has what equity. So I put in 670,000 slices, then one of my developers, he works a thousand hours at $20 an hour in India, and if I pay

13:27>> him in pie slices, now he has

13:32>> 20,000, 40,000 slices. And so if he has 40,000 slices and I have 650,000 slices, now we know how much equity this person has.

Nathan Latka

13:44So if this deal closes, how many total pie slices will exist?

Daniel Poston

13:50>> It would be I just looked at the number.

13:55>> It was just shy of 900,000.

Nathan Latka

13:58Okay. So they will own approximately a 130,000 slices to your 770,000?

Daniel Poston

14:06>> Exactly. Or a 15% to 85% split?

14:10>> Exactly.

Nathan Latka

14:11Which we're not calling dollars because you don't want tax consequences.

Daniel Poston

14:14>> Exactly.

Team Size and How the Co-Founder Was Found on Upwork

Nathan Latka

14:15Understood. Okay. That was very helpful. Talk to me about the rest of your story here. How many folks are on your team today pre acquisition?

Daniel Poston

14:22>> Pre acquisition,

14:28>> six, five, six.

Nathan Latka

14:29Full time?

Daniel Poston

14:30>> No.

Nathan Latka

14:31How many full time?

Daniel Poston

14:35>> Me. That's it.

Nathan Latka

14:37Okay. So where are the other four?

Daniel Poston

14:40>> Those are the acquisition. So they are

Nathan Latka

14:45I said pre pre acquisition. How many folks on the team?

Daniel Poston

14:48>> So, yeah, five, six. Five, six team

Nathan Latka

14:51members.

14:51So who who are the other four?

Daniel Poston

14:53>> Oh, the other four for so I have a developer.

15:00>> He's the one that actually started the team we're acquiring. I have Alexandra

Nathan Latka

15:07Hold on. Pre pre pre 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 Exactly. Which you're now bringing into the business.

Daniel Poston

15:17>> Exactly.

Nathan Latka

15:18I see. Okay. Interesting.

15:22Got it. Where and how did you event how did you meet him? How was the first time you got connected to him?

Daniel Poston

15:27>> I was working for a real estate team. I was a chief data officer and hired him as my assistant.

Nathan Latka

15:34Oh, okay. Very interesting. But how did you find him?

Daniel Poston

15:37>> Upwork.

Nathan Latka

15:38Okay. Very cool. So you put a little project. What was the first project you gave on Upwork? Do you remember the title?

Daniel Poston

15:45>> I think it was developer assistant.

Nathan Latka

15:48And what was that what the task say? What were you having to do?

Daniel Poston

15:51>> It was, I don't even remember. It probably wasn't very sophisticated. It was, you know, very early. I mean, I just taught myself how to code a few years ago right after my poker career. So

Nathan Latka

16:07Yeah. But was it like a scraping job? Was it writing some Python or JavaScript? Was it setting up a MySQL database?

Daniel Poston

16:14>> Oh, no. We were building a platform similar to Sisu. So I was building Sisu like platform, which is like a data tracking platform for real estate teams,

16:29>> 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.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Habits

Nathan Latka

16:36Understood. 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.

Daniel Poston

16:49>> I guess seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Nathan Latka

16:54Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Daniel Poston

17:01>> Musk. Elon Musk.

Nathan Latka

17:02Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building interface?

Daniel Poston

17:08>> It just got shut down, Stackery.

Nathan Latka

17:11Give me a different one that's not shut down.

Daniel Poston

17:18>> Circle CI.

Nathan Latka

17:20Okay. Fair enough. Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Daniel Poston

17:24>> At least six,

Nathan Latka

17:25except What's the last your situation? Married, single, kids?

Daniel Poston

17:30>> Single.

Nathan Latka

17:31Okay. And how old are you?

Daniel Poston

17:34>> 39.

Nathan Latka

17:34Last question, Daniel. Take us home here. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Daniel Poston

17:40>> To meditate.

Nathan Latka

17:43Guys, there you have InterFace.re. He's a scarred real estate agent, said, you 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 Follow Up Boss to this thing called Sisu, sisu.co, which is like effectively lead tracking. He's a got 165 customers paying a $150 a month on average right now. Just broke $15,000 a month in revenue, totally bootstrapped, less than twelve months old. Just him

18:06building 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.

Daniel Poston

18:13>> Awesome. Thank you.

Nathan Latka

18:16One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 to watch every Thursday 1PM

18:41Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

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19:25that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got to

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