How Radius Agent CEO Biju Ashokan grew Radius Agent to $3.1M revenue and 200 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is bijou ashokan he graduated from carnegie mellon university back in 2008 and founded two startups in property tech his vision in real estate is to build a software suite aka shopify for real estate agencies agents from across the world to make property buying and selling easier for consumers uh bishop are you ready to take us to the top all right so if people want to follow along the website is radiusagent.com tell us how it works who's paying you today uh it's primarily real estate engines and real estate team leads so the goal of the company is to kind of create a an operating system for real estate agents and teams uh for lack of a better comparison it's kind of like a shopify for real estate agents right where we have agents with everything that they need both in terms of tech in terms of services in terms of benefits everything everything that can make an agent independent or an asian team independent that's what we provide i feel like all my friends that like quit their usual jobs and you know they're like you know what i'm gonna go sell real estate because i'm in austin texas and real estate is hot but then like six months later half of them are now not at in real estate anymore right how do you deal with how do you deal with churn yeah there's a lot of them and i think that's because of uh the intrinsic characteristics of real estate and how it works everyone wants to make money and they think from the outside by looking at instagram that it's so easy to sell a property by just like you know showing a topic but there's a lot going on in the background you need to know a lot about the area the neighborhood you need to know about the paperwork compliance so much to learn so the key is to provide technology that helps them with education and training quickly so that they can get get up to speed and start selling quickly so we have a course called 90 days to success for agents like your friends who want to start with a career in real estate where we train them and we call this the accelerator program so when they sign up what are they paying you per month on average to use the technology yeah about 250 a month is the subscription but more importantly whenever they close a deal they pay us a flat fee for the transaction as well what percent uh it's a flat fee it's a thousand dollars per transaction so whether it's a million dollar house or a thousand dollar house they're paying you a thousand dollar flat fee exactly because it doesn't make sense it's just the same amount of support so paying a commission to your brokerage makes interesting and give me a sense of size in 2020 or 2021 how many close deals on the platform uh so 2021 we had close to 500 i think uh transactions in total this year we are planning to expand to eight more states so we we were just in california in the last year uh this year we're gonna have we just raised our series eight so we're gonna expand to eight new states and we're gonna get to like two thousand agents by end of the year and we are hoping each each agent closes minimum of eight to ten transactions so that's that's kind of that's the kind of deal and how many agents today on a platform 200 wow okay and i mean can i can i take 200 times 250 bucks a month you guys are doing just on that side of the business about 50 000 bucks a month in revenue yeah so if you just take the subscription but if you take uh transaction revenue as well you can calculate about 12 000 rpo region in a year 12 000 are who you mean annual or monthly yeah yeah yes you can take 200 times 12 000 to get your annual revenues of about 2.4 million is what you're saying yes interesting and that's what is that what you did last year we closed the year that's close to 2.1 or 2.2 but this year we already had 2.4 uh in the in the sorry in the first 26 days you've already had done 2.4 million in revenue that's that's what we are tracking towards with the current number of agents and the deals that they close for the year or for just for january so the way we calculate is in january we we have a number right that we made as monthly if you multiply that by 12 2.4 is what we get 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 to 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 founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 founderprep.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 okay but you just said last year that's about what you did you're planning to be flat this year or your run rate right now is unrated right now that's 2.4 yep i see got okay so just just to clear up any ambiguity here in december of 2021 uh you did about you did a you know if you did 500 deals closed last year divided by 12 to get an average per month you close about 40 to 50 deals per month so that's 40 000 to 50 000 in thousand dollar transaction deal volume plus another 50 000 a month from the 250 a month fees so you're doing total about 100 000 per month in revenue as of a month ago right okay and where were you exactly a year ago so december of 2020 we hadn't even started appropriate so we were at like 50k per month in revenue just from our subscription products i see okay very cool so so you basically went from you doubled over the past 12 months and what do you plan to do this year triple quadruple we want to do five x's here uh we want to expand what we did in california into eight new states [Music] is it as simple as putting these numbers in a pro forma and saying multiply times another state it's never that simple is it uh we we are the way our product is unique is because we have a solution network of rails relations which works on top of our approach so we have about 76 000 agents using the free product which is a social network and we basically source our agents from that product so every agent who joins us is a through the product that they should interest in the brokerage how do you attract them what's the free product you've built it's like a social network so you uh it has elements of like facebook it has elements of clubhouse it has free academy where you can you can go through courses uh we also have a leading place where referrals and exchange between agents through the platform so it's very very agent specific how did you get the first thousand users on the network though i mean this is not easy to build yeah it took a while it took about three four years for us to like nail that social network product uh for real estate agents to get to a point where agents invite other agents so right now all our users in the free product are have come through our agents inviting other agents this is so cool okay i just saw something very cool on your website at the bottom up i see a pop-up 10-minute radius agent brokerage interview with a very compelling little countdown timer right join the next webinar 258 257 256. is this effective...