How Oneio CEO Juha Berghäll grew Oneio to $5.7M revenue and 80 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is kurt averill he's the co-founder and ceo of ember where he's responsible for leading the development and execution of long-term strategies and identifying key opportunities for growth within the industry he's obsessed with helping people own the vacation home of their dreams where they can create lasting memories of family and friends he's a serial entrepreneur and has taken more than one company from inception to scale having raised over 70 million of venture capital uh financing at his prior startups kurt you're ready to take it to the top absolutely thanks for having me you bet man so before we get into emma real quick quick on your backstory so what was your last company company's called canopy um so canopy's in the as a sas software solution for accountants uh interesting and we're founder there did you join a little later on i'm not founder yep solo founder inception through scale and it continues to do really really well that's amazing what year did you launch that business 2014 and this was the accounting practice management software yeah yeah exactly yeah git git canopy fascinating okay so that was 2014 and then i guess what made you leave canopy and jump into ember so i left in 2019 took a bit of a sabbatical and then kind of went back to my roots my family uh is kind of a generational home builder and so my parents and then also my grandparents built second homes for people in lake arrowhead california which is a destination outside of los angeles interesting now how did you replace yourself i mean obviously i think you guys raised significant capital how much did you raise a canopy uh we raised um at the time that i left it was about 70 million yeah so that would have been what that would have been just post series c it was like a b a b-1 i think yeah you guys have quite the fun i'm looking except quite the funding history not traditional there's some debt mixed in there's some up down all over the place huh yeah yeah yeah okay so i guess that's a good lesson here first too before we jump into ember how did you replace yourself as founder right so leave it in good hands and make sure you're exiting gracefully there yeah i mean i think like as founders you have to realize that you know there's going to be a time when you're there with the company growing it and then there's going to be a time when it's time to move on and for me it was like a deeply personal decision uh to move on to the next thing um the way i viewed it is i think you know i thought that there you know a after five years of being a founder at a high growth startup you're ready for a sabbatical and so taking a sabbatical was probably one of the best things i've ever done and then you know b um i think you know as an entrepreneur what i love to do is build and create and so i knew that i could go out and build you know the next uh you know the next thing and that's what really gets me you know gets that's what motivates me it's what keeps me going in the morning and gets me up and and and rolling and are you able to share when you left there in 2019 you sort of went from zero in 2014 to how much ar when you left oh yeah no i'm not able to share unfortunately yeah no no when you leave you're always under strict nda's that's the way it works yeah i mean it's your company that was three four years ago i'd be surprised if those are still active today you can't share anything about the range you grew it to besides the amount of capital you raised yeah just the amount of i don't think it's raised i don't think it's terrible to judge any company how much capital they raise it's it's a horrible metric oh 100 agree 100 okay all right amber uh you go back to your roots uh why vacation homes why partial ownership if that's the model and explain the marketplace to me yeah so we kind of fit right in between you know an airbnb and a whole home vacation home right so if you think about your options you have uh you know you have a handful right when you go on vacation our thesis is you know we're looking for people who are going to the same vacation destination on a regular basis right these are typically vacation destinations that sit right outside of a large metropolitan area so it'd be st george utah which is a gateway to zions national park to salt lake city it'd be bend oregon to portland it might be the hamptons um to new york city or you know cape cod to boston where you're going on a regular basis right and um for that your options are basically to airbnb which is you know fairly expensive as we know and then um or you buy a home outright but the challenge with buying a home outright i mean it comes with the benefit of having the home and being able to use it whenever you want the downside is most second home owners don't use the home that often and so um you know they're only they think they're going to be there six months out of the year but they end up only being there six to eight weeks out of the year and then it's just that second home becomes a second job because homes are work and um you know whether it's just fixing a faucet or paying your property taxes that's just work it's just a lot of things that are going on in that home so what ember does is kind of bridges the gap it sits right between an airbnb and a full home ownership where we take a home and we buy it with an llc and then split it into eight different shares and a person can buy anywhere from one to four shares of that home um now think about these homes these are high-end vacation homes the goal is to like make it so that when you walk in there's a wow factor um your friends and family walk in it's it they're when we buy the homes uh you know they're high-end then we also furnish the homes and with high-end furnishings and and hand it over to the owner group totally turnkey at that point we uh manage the property so that we abstract all of the work that comes with the second home away from the ownership group so that they can just enjoy their vacation but while still retaining that ownership in the asset that can appreciate over time 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 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 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 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 valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath 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 evaluation 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 yep let's look specifically at 2293 north saratosa road palm springs california you've got it listed right now up on the side it's potential buy 224 560. now is that what you would pay for one eighth ownership or is that the total price of that's not the total price of the house that's the one eighth ownership yeah that's right yeah it gives you six weeks out of the year at that home and um you know if you wanted to be there six months out of the year you buy you know half the home instead of instead of one eight right which we have some customers who do yeah so so 224 000...