How Propster CEO Milan Zahradnik grew Propster to $1.4M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is milan zarednik he's the co-founder and ceo of a company called propster with over 15 years of experience in the real estate industry he's the industry's leading voice on how the doc region is currently embracing prop tech and what possibilities this may present world wide follow along at dot tech milan you ready to text the top yee i'm excited thank you for that just be clear you're not an agency you actually have software built right uh yeah it's actually a quite interesting story props was bootstrapped out of one of one of my former agencies so it i it was an agency before interesting how in terms of revenue how much revenue the agency did before you spun out propster it was around 1.5 million and what year was that uh it was 26 yeah it was actually 2017 2016. and the end of 2017 we uh found it uh on props and you said 1.7 million agency revenue yep interesting so so what gave you conviction to move away from the agency and into software that's not a small amount of revenue to walk away from that's true and my wife was also not very happy about that but um there was a quite simple simple reason like i was i'm i was working in the industry with the agency for more than 15 years and i was really ready to do something new you know to do something big i already reached somehow the ceiling and um yeah this this opportunity popped up and i just embraced it and uh what does that mean milan popped up did you own a hundred percent of the agency yeah yeah i owned 100 of the agency and um uh props that was actually uh built out of a pilot project uh with a with a client 217. did you give the client equity in the new business or do you own 100 of robster no no uh i founded props of the three business angels from the industry but uh the client was not involved oh i see okay so so you took the the validation from the client to some of your friends with money angels raised some capital early and built this and you already had your first customer exactly the pilot project was actually paid it was a it was a uh um it was basically a paid project um and when we started um we realized that what we are doing here is actually a sas business we can build the sas business out of it and i was sharing this also with one of my mentors and uh he also and he just recently sold a company and said hey milan you have to go for this this is like huge opportunity how much was the pilot for i think it was like 20k or something like that okay 20 000 bucks so again and then how much did you raise from angels to get going um we started quite small with 150k um yeah and um um this was like the let's call it kind of seed precede um yeah back in 2017 right yeah end of 2017 actually the business started 2018 beginning of 2018. okay now fast forward to today what are customers paying you for describe the technology yeah so basically it's a sas enabled marketplace but this also something what developed through the last um last uh three years um right now on average the clients pay around 800 euros euros in per month or a year monthly per month yeah it's about 950 and what again what are they paying for when you say sas enabled marketplace what are the two sides of the marketplace yeah so um the sas business is just simply explained a configurator you can configure your apartment house or office like configuring a car online and everything what you configure online all the products and the services are coming from a marketplace so um the sas is enabling the marketplace and the market place the i the idea behind the marketplace is to get commissions out of the products which have been chosen for the configurator 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 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 i see icic okay so can you um i'm gonna go in here and try and find an example um i'm in your configuration tool and i just pulled in this very cool sort of like circular table name one of your table vendors and how do you pass me someone using your sas tool as a lead to the person and the manufacturer that makes this table um like you mean um can you explain a little bit more in detail what do you mean with table i'm using your software right now designing my apartment i drag in one of these tables to see what it looks like in the virtual design how do you pack yeah yeah this is uh it's a it's working a little bit differently so um we are a b2b sas business so uh our clients are mainly property developers general contractors and the biggest issue what they have is exactly what you just um uh what you just tried to describe like i have an individual request i want to have something individual in uh in my apartment and this is a huge issue and what we try to do is with the sales solution is really to build something more modular to guide the customer through a predefined product selection through predefined packages so you can like like a car yep so milan i i totally understand that what i'm trying to get is the other side of the market so name a sync manufacturer that you're going to give leads to or table manufacturer that you're going to give leads to from your sas yeah sure yeah we have like uh manufacturers like gibberish or villarreal like european manufacturers in the marketplace how many manufacturers have you given at least one sort of paid customer to over the past 12 months um i would say around 25 something like that okay 25 and how many how many builders right construction folks have used your sas tool to plan their buildings um right now we have around 100 clients with over 15 000 nearly 20 000 users and like 20 thousand what twenty twenty thousand users so um we the uh basically the proper developer is um um providing the solution to their customers like you have a you have a apartment building with hundreds uh hundred units and these are the users for us well a unit is not a a user it's not an it's not a a live thing what do you mean that the units are the users the unit is the apartment and one apartment is a user for us you know what does that mean who an apartment can't use software it's not a living thing who who who is the thing using the person who is buying the apartment i see okay got it got it okay this makes a lot of sense to me now um and so when you say that the average person is paying 9.50 per month is that the building owner and they have to get enough seats for all the people buying each of the 100 apartments to cover like the use yeah the so the property company is paying the license it's around 800 euros per month they they give it to the to their customers for free basically got it so you and you have a hundred of those okay so a hundred at 950 us dollars per month means you're doing about what ninety thousand...