How Kukun CEO Raf Howery grew Kukun to $5M revenue and 25 customers in 2025.

From $1M salary to SaaS founder: Raf Howery’s leap Pretty cushy job you quit. Yes, correct. It was a difficult choice to make, but for me, I never look back and I never regret it. What revenue or what salary you gave up to go all in on the startup? Close to a million dollar a year or lots of other perks. If you have 20 paying customers, right, paying $20,000 per month, that would put your monthly recurring revenue around 400,000 per month. Is that a fair calculation? Yes, correct. How much time do you need? Is it at 2026, 2027? When do you think you can break 5 million of AR? I think we're poised to do that next year. If somebody's listening to this podcast and comes to you today and offers you $10 million all cash to buy 100% of the business, do you sell? All right, folks. My guest today is Ralph Howry. He's the CEO and founder of Cocoon, founded back in 2014 after a career at Keep Gemini. He's now scaling in the space of we're just going to call it property data as we dive in. So, Raf, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, I am. All right. So, tell us what you do in like one or two sentences. The homepage says the PICO score get credit for upgrades. What does this mean? Well, we are about in sort of improving the value of every single home. It is the largest single investment that most of us make. And what we do is we help everyone maintain it, figure out how to increase its value, how to optimize its value, and then we help those businesses that want to serve those consumers helping that customer doing that. So think of a wealth manager, think of a bank, think of an insurance company that wants you to invest in your home, can maintain it, improve its value. That's what we do. We build the data, the analytics, and the software to enable that. Okay. So like if I just put in if I put in like a random address, man, cell yeah, let's just do Austin, Texas here. Um, what's happening on the Okay, so why doesn't you So is this all are you only in certain states? No, we are near a national, but sometimes certain properties if they're either new constructions or um maybe there is no public data available, we can do that. Maybe try a different address. I can give you a different address if you like. What Kukun does: Property data platform for financial services Well, well, let's just look at one of these, right? So, Elder Resort, Port Richie, Florida. So, price 285. So, I guess just to be be clear before we jump in deeper here, you have four homeowners and four businesses. Are you How is your revenue made up? Are homeowners paying you or are banks paying you? uh it's mostly a business uh so banks, insurance companies, brokerages. What we do on the homeowner side is we help homeowners but we also use that to enhance the user experience to understand better what people want and that allows us to enhance the software for our uh enterprise customer but most of our revenue is in the enterprise space as a set. So to be clear, a company like a bank or a mortgage broker, right, is wanting to work with a homeowner. If PNC Banks wants to do more mortgages, they will then you will sell directly to them and then they will help get Cocoon used by the homeowners they're looking to do loans to. Exactly. Yes. We white label the software. They insert it on their web pages or on their app and then they enhance it with other things they have. So it becomes like it's their own experience but it's really most of it or part of it is white labelled by us. I see. Okay. So how many B2B customers those white label customers are you serving today? Are we talking five big Early GTM strategy: Realtor distribution and product-led growth enterprises or 5,000? Uh no it's not in the 5,000. It's definitely not in the five either. We are in about the 20 to 25. Okay. So pretty high touch then sales cycle if there's 20 to 25. Yes I would say that. Okay. And which of these sort of use cases are the are the biggest? Is it 20 realators or is it more mortgage brokers or banks or real estate investors? Which one's the biggest use case? I would say banks and lenders are the biggest uses case because there's a very clear uh ROI driven from generating more loans when you use this service. So there's a direct correlation between the increase in loan apps and what they what those applications that we offer. Uh other businesses see a different so for example if you think of an insurance company they're mostly to maintain the assets make sure that there's no risk and yeah maybe they partner with a lender and generate more business. So it's a very different ROI and a very different use case, but the banks are are the core of it followed then of course by the real estate industry. Okay. And so for a hypothetical bank that's using you, let's just stick to that for a second. How do you price? You don't have pricing on your website. You have a contact form. So is it a one-off negotiation each time? How do you structure this? So because it's a it's a suite of product. We basically depends on how many of the products they want to white Monetizing B2B: Banks, lenders, and white-labeled APIs label. So the price shows with that but basically think of it as the number of addresses that they want to engage with within a band per month. So let's just say a bank says I want to hit this kind of volume. I want to engage 100,000 customers a million customers a month. We price it by those bands and then as they increase they go to the next band. Okay. Is that fairly I mean if I asked you for the average number of customers per month that a bank wants to you know use you on is 100,000 the right number there or is it smaller? A single bank I would say I mean I can't share numbers just obviously because of the contract uh terms. Well no I said I'm not asking you to share your actual I'm saying on average yeah I would say uh you're look it depends on the bank and the size of the bank. So that's very hard. A large bank will see probably hundreds of thousands. Um, it depends also on their marketing where they put it. If if they put it within a a signed in experience, that's a lower number, but a much higher engagement. If you put it on the public site, that may be a higher number, but then it becomes a function of how well they do the marketing and the closing after. So, there's an engagement with, you know, integration with Salesforce, Adobe Audience Manager. So it what we've seen is that every bank is different and every bank some banks are better at certain things while others are better at other things. So it's really not a very specific formula u but yes or let's just say a large bank or let's say a regional bank will see hundreds of thousands. Okay. Uh okay I guess maybe a better way to ask this might just be across your whole system how many of these are you processing on a monthly basis? SaaS pricing model: Tiered by address volume and product bundles That's a very good question. I think because it's a suite of products, if I have to aggregate all of those, um, I'm going to say per month, but we're talking about a year or per month, I'm going to have to guess around maybe somewhere between 400,000 to 500,000 between the big and small clients. Yeah. Yeah. So 400,000 across 20 banks, right? To get to the average, the average bank on your platform is doing something like 20,000 per month. No, it's five banks. The rest are other in. So we sell to the fintex, we sell to the propt tech, we sell to insurance companies, sell to brokerages or in any business. And that's so I I would not say that 20 is all banks. It's what I'm trying what I'm trying to get to is just your usage metric. This is more complicated than what I was trying to get to. Let me just put it differently. Your average customer, whether it's a bank or somebody else, your average business customer is processing about 20,000 applications or uses of your platform per month. Is that a fair statement? That's a fair statement. Okay. And it's across a bunch of different product suites depending on what their use case is. That's correct. Okay. Got it. For that hypothetical average customer at 20,000, right, a month generally, what would you price for that? Is that a $1,000 a month contract, a million dollar a month contract, something different? No. No. It's uh it just ranges between it depends on the bells and whistles, but it ranges between $10,000 a month to about let's say 50,000 a month. Guys, remember I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So, sign up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, "Nathan, I found you through YouTube." And I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out Average contract value: $10K–$50K/month per enterprise customer founderpath.com. Okay. And how do you how do you decide what pricing axes to price against? Because again, you have us. You have a bunch of different products, more than 10 that I see listed on the site in terms of the things they can get from you and you can price each of those differently. Plus, you can price for product upsells. How do you decide the I mean, it feels like a very complex pricing structure. No, actually, it's a pretty standard. Think about it this way. I have a band that say a 0...