How LeaseLeads CEO David Freund grew LeaseLeads to $1.5M revenue and 70 customers in 2024.

guys there you have it launched an agency helping real estate or those in real estate launched their own websites back in 2015 to 300 can sales then grew that agency to about call it a million point seven 1.7 in Revenue before saying you know what I want to go build the software thing because other agency co-founder kept the agency kept a little Equity but now David split off and built lease leads dot Co which is effectively templatized websites for these folks but also more importantly apis and Integrations that allow them to update their sites automatically they've got 70 customers paying on average or they're doing about 80 000 a month right now all in on Revenue 25k of that is pure SAS the rest is productized service but churn's almost non-existent because they spend so much setting up and integrating and onboarding those 70 customers hey folks my guess it is David freund he's the co-founder and CEO of lease leads he boasts a virtual leasing agent that helps to increase tours and leads for multi-family properties more than 300 percent he lives in Denver Colorado also a competitive Enduro mountain bike raker musician and coffee snob David Ray takes to the top let's do it all right what what makes your coffee choices snobby um I live really close to this place called sweet Bloom that is absolutely phenomenal um and when I don't get it from there I order from Onyx on benville so I guess it's a little bit of the price point but um I've gotten really picky about my coffee it's amazing I I many times will go to Denver just to work at a Union Station for a day during the holidays it's so pretty there and uh I would just get whatever coffee is nearby but this is cool okay so where are you like an ex real estate agent or what got you into this space how did you learn about the problem so actually we've been in web development for real estate for probably six years or so and we've been working in the API space really nerdy granular API space all these guys use all these different systems to feed in floor plan data you know rent's always changing especially here in Denver availability things of that sort but it would never display on their website you either use kind of the crappy websites that they have out of the box or you get a big custom site but the problem is the data is static so really early on we got really into the API space and uh really saw a problem with this dynamic dynamic information on both the website and a lot of the conversion tools that were out there so that's really so were you I mean were you did you get exposed to this were you running an agency building custom websites for agents exactly yeah I was running an agency for about five five or so years before this to what you launched in 2015. yep and have converted it slowly and then really aggressively this past year into more of a SAS type product there's still a pretty heavily service based component with the website development but you know as you've probably seen through our site like we've standardized a lot of it through templates yeah that's super interesting so 2015 the first year of the agency do you remember how much revenue you did I think the first year we did about 300 000. that's awesome for your first year that's super cool yeah okay so what did you scale the agency up to how many people full-time as of like what 2020 I guess so when we started we were really really big on the freelance model so I would say it's a little bit skewed if I give you the full-time numbers we got to about nine um and I I recently split off with my business partner because he was mostly focused on the SEO side of things but we got to about nine full time but we had a freelance team of almost about 50 people and those are like vetted thoroughly vetted like extended team members uh for freelance there that's wild okay so your best you're at the agency maybe what was it 20 20 in terms of Revenue 2020 uh we did about one points uh about one and three quarter million Revenue one one and three okay one point seven five something like that yep and then and then walk me through I mean some of the most successful stats can they start off like this is an agency but there's friction right you have a co-founder what if they want to stay with the agency and you want to do SAS how do you split it does the agency own any portion of lease leads like how did you do that negotiation oh my gosh I uh we could spend a lot of time there but it was super fun I learned a lot about business structure and selling assets and defining value of them it was it was hard in the moment but it was one of the best learning lessons I've ever had um you know I would say my business partner at the time we definitely wanted to strangle one another but now we just we're on great terms we love one another um I stay in touch with him every quarter he's crushing it with his business um but so who owns the agency today do you guys still own the agency together or no you shut it down yeah so he runs the SEO agency it's called intergrowth um and they are they're doing really well last time I talked to him um he's just wanted to stay more on the agency side of things and I really wanted to double down in a SAS Venture I saw the opportunity here and I had a lot more kind of knowledge and exposure in the API and development space along with my business partner Dylan so that's really where I jump full-fledged into this so interhyphengrowth.co was is the agency you got it yep okay so you own no equity over there anymore no profit sharing no nothing I actually do I own some help yeah as part of the transfer um my my shift was making into a parent company and kind of a holding company for all of our different Ventures and in in part of that was getting samasa or uh getting some 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to 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 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 raise they sold 22 percent of 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 interesting yeah okay so so what about the spin out how do you keep a clean cap table for lease leads is the agency on the lease leads cap table uh the intergrowth is not at all no association there um I was able I was able to do a clean cut buyout for that interesting okay so you plus your co-founder that you found who is not related to the agency are now 100 of lease leads you got it okay very cool this makes a lot of sense okay so question for you for your first customers on lease leads do you have permission to sell to folks who are customers of the agency I do yeah they're one and the same so really what we did is uh the the agency model that we were doing web development for um we brought over to lease leads so we really turned it into a recurring product so what we found out was they want this pricing information coming through and they want their leads going to their portal and then we also added some things...