How Radius Agent Reached a $2.4M Revenue Run Rate and a $50M Valuation with 200 Agents (Interview with Founder Biju Ashokan)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Biju 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 or agents from across the world to make property buying and selling easier for consumers. Biju, are you ready to take us to the top? Yep. Alright. So if people want to follow along, the website is radiusagent.com. Tell

00:24us how it works. Who's paying you today?

Who Pays Radius Agent and How It Works

Biju Ashokan

00:26>> It's primarily real estate agents and real estate team leads. So the goal of the company is to kind of create an operating system for real estate agents and teams. For lack of a better comparison, it's kind of like a Shopify for real estate agents, right, Where we help 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 agent

00:51>> team independent, that's what we provide.

Nathan Latka

00:54I 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 in real estate anymore. Right? How do you deal with how do you deal with churn?

Biju Ashokan

01:07>> Yeah, there's a lot of them. And I think that's because of 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 property, 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 paperwork, compliance,

01:30>> so much to learn. So the key is to provide technology that helps them with education and training quickly so that they can get up to speed and start selling quickly. So we have a course called ninety Days to Success for agents like your friends who want to just start with a career in real estate, where we train them and we call this the accelerator program.

Nathan Latka

01:51So when they sign up, what are they paying you per month on average to use the technology?

Pricing Model: Subscription and Flat Transaction Fee

Biju Ashokan

01:55>> 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.

Nathan Latka

02:03What percent?

Biju Ashokan

02:04>> It's a flat fee. It's a thousand dollars per transaction.

Nathan Latka

02:08So whether it's a million dollar house or a thousand dollar house, they're paying you a thousand dollar flat fee.

Biju Ashokan

02:12>> Exactly. Because it doesn't make sense. It's the same amount of support. So paying a commission to your brokerage doesn't make sense.

Deal Volume, Agent Count and the Revenue Math

Nathan Latka

02:19Interesting. And give me a sense of size. In 2020 or 2021, how many closed deals on the platform?

Biju Ashokan

02:26>> So 2021, we had close to 500, I think, transactions in total. This year, are planning to expand to eight more states. So we were just in California in the last year. This year we're going to add we just raised our Series A, so we're going to expand to eight more states. We're going to get to like 2,000 agents by the end of the year. And we are hoping each agent closes minimum of eight to 10 transactions.

02:51>> So that's the kind of deal that breaks.

Nathan Latka

02:53And how many agents today on the platform?

Biju Ashokan

02:55>> 200.

Nathan Latka

02:57200. Wow. Okay. And I mean, can I can I take 200 times $250 a month? You guys are doing just on that. So this is about $50,000 a month in revenue?

Biju Ashokan

03:04>> Yeah. So if you just take the subscription. But if you take transaction revenues, well, you can calculate about 12,000 ARPU per agent in a year.

Nathan Latka

03:1512,000 ARPU, you mean annual or monthly?

Biju Ashokan

03:20>> Annual annual revenue.

Nathan Latka

03:21Yeah. Yeah. So you can take 200 times 12,000 to get your annual revenues of about 2,400,000 is what you're saying? Yes. Interesting. And that's what you, is that what you did last year?

2021 Revenue vs. the $2.4M Run Rate

Biju Ashokan

03:31>> We closed the year at close to 2.1 or 2.2, but this year we are already at 2.4.

Nathan Latka

03:38The, sorry, in the first twenty six days, you've already hit done 2,400,000 in revenue?

Biju Ashokan

03:42>> That's what we are tracking towards with the current number of agents and the deals that they close.

Nathan Latka

03:51For the year or for just for January?

Biju Ashokan

03:54>> So the way we calculate is in January, we have a number, right, that we made as monthly. You multiply that by twelve, two point four is what we get.

Nathan Latka

04:04Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

04:27your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

04:51get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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

05:13not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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

05:39going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS 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

06:01if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link, this link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into

Run Rate Confirmed and Where They Were a Year Ago

Nathan Latka

06:27the 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

Biju Ashokan

06:34>> Run rate right now is 2.4. Yep.

Nathan Latka

06:36I see. Got it. Okay. So just to clear up any ambiguity here. In December 2021, you did about you did, you know, if you did 500 deals closed last year divided by 12 to get an average 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 a $100,000 per month in

06:59revenue as of a month ago. Right? Okay. And where were you exactly a year ago? So December 2020.

Biju Ashokan

07:06>> We haven't even signed up the brokers. So we were at, like, 50 k per month in revenue just from our subscription products.

Nathan Latka

07:13I see. Okay, very cool. So you basically went from, you doubled over the past twelve months. And what do you plan to do this year? Triple? Quadruple?

Biju Ashokan

07:20>> We want to do 5x this year. We want to expand what we did in California into eight new states.

Nathan Latka

07:27Is it as simple as putting these numbers in a pro form a and saying multiply times another state?

Biju Ashokan

07:32>> It's never that simple, is it?

Free Social Network and Agent Acquisition

Biju Ashokan

07:35>> Are the way our product is unique is because we have a social network of freelancers agents which works on top of our brokerage. 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 through the product that they show interest in the brokerage.

Nathan Latka

07:56How do you attract them? What's the free product you've built?

Biju Ashokan

07:58>> It's like a social network. So you, it has elements of like Facebook, it has elements of Clubhouse. It has free Academy where you can go through courses. We also have a leading place where referrals and exchange between agents through the platform. So it's very, very agent specific social network.

Nathan Latka

08:18How did you get the first thousand users on the network though? I mean, is not easy to build.

How the Network Grew Organically

Biju Ashokan

08:22>> Yeah, it took a while. It took about three, four years for us to like nail that social network product 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.

Nathan Latka

08:39This is so cool. Okay. I just saw something very cool on your website. Bottom left, I see a pop up ten minute radiusagent brokerage interview with a very compelling little countdown timer. Right? Join the next webinar, 02:58, 02:57, 02:56. Is this effective?

Biju Ashokan

08:51>> Yeah, super effective. It makes it feel like the webinars, like, kind of stopped, right, like in two minutes. So people sign up immediately to be part of it. And we have multiple webinars that run at different times.

Webinar Funnel and Sales Tactics

Nathan Latka

09:06So like today, like this one I just clicked, it says, Sera Tahani is running it. Do you run like 10 of these a day or one a day or one a month or what?

Biju Ashokan

09:14>> About 10 a day.

Nathan Latka

09:16Run 10

Biju Ashokan

09:17>> Yeah. We do 10 webinars a day. And if you log into our mobile app, if you're a registered even if you're not a registered agent, you can find out. We also have a clubhouse type of features where our sales team host rooms where we have recruiting rooms where agents from the network can try and ask questions about our brokerage.

Nathan Latka

09:38How do you incentivize I mean, is she a full time are these presenters full time at radiusagent? Or are these people you're incentivizing just to do a webinar to get exposure?

Biju Ashokan

09:46>> Kiara is our VP of Growth,

09:49>> and they're all full time employees.

Nathan Latka

09:51So she does that, like, I mean, I see the webinar. Today, 03:00, 03:15, 03:30, four, 04:15. Sierra is doing all these basically back to back.

Biju Ashokan

09:58>> Yeah. That it looks cool, isn't it? It's prerecorded, and it feels like it's a live webinar.

Nathan Latka

10:04Oh, I see. These are not live.

Biju Ashokan

10:07>> Yeah. But it it seems like a live webinar. It's we use this tool called e webinar. You should check it out.

Nathan Latka

10:13Yeah. I see that. Ewebinar.com. Do you ever get any pushback? I mean, people type a question in the chat and then the live presenter never answers it. Don't they go, Biju, this is bullshit.

Biju Ashokan

10:21>> We This is not respond to chat requests live.

Nathan Latka

10:25Oh, I see. So it's a record The video is a recording, but the chat you monitor. Yeah. Super interesting. I love that. People are always nervous about, oh, I don't wanna do a, like, a fake live webinar. Is it live? Is it not? But, like, this combination seems to work for you.

Biju Ashokan

10:39>> Yeah. And we sometimes immediately call these agents who ask a lot of questions too. Our sales team immediately gets a call scheduled for.

Nathan Latka

10:46Okay. You've mentioned some funding. Let's get the backstory here. When did you launch the business? First year?

Biju Ashokan

10:52>> 2015. Back then, was just a keynote presentation. But we launched our first product at the end of twenty sixteen, which was an attempt at a social network in a certain way, but that didn't really pick up. But only at the end of twenty eighteen, social networks began,

11:10>> agents in other regions. And in 2019 and 2020, we built a lot of products in the background that could one day help us when you become a brokerage. 2021 is when we launched the brokerage, a full service brokerage and a subscription and a flat fee commission structure. And today we've added more things to that arsenal. We've added our accelerator program. We've added leads, lead gen as one of our benefits. Next week, we're also launching health benefits

11:39>> as another add on to our group. So we are going all out on becoming a full service provider.

Funding History and Series A Details

Nathan Latka

11:45And how did you have you funded this? When was your first raise?

Biju Ashokan

11:48>> First raise was in 2015 as a pre seed. And then the second raise was in 2018 series seed, and this year, two weeks ago was our Series A.

Nathan Latka

12:00So the 2018 seed, how much did you raise then?

12:05How much? 4,000,000. Okay. $4,000,000 then. And then how much did you raise just recently?

Biju Ashokan

12:12>> We raised 13.1.

Nathan Latka

12:15For your series A? Yeah. And and why do you need that much capital to build this tool? What's expensive?

Biju Ashokan

12:21>> It's right now, I mean, we didn't raise a big pre seed on the seed round because we were just building the product. Now we've nailed the business model, and now we just want to expand in multiple states. Mhmm. Increase the sales. That's the main expense. We want to put some marketing budget to it.

Nathan Latka

12:39And when you go on and close the series a for 13,100,000, about what valuation were you able to get?

Biju Ashokan

12:45>> The series a?

Nathan Latka

12:46Yep.

Valuation and Series B Plans

Biju Ashokan

12:47>> We we have a $50,000,000 valuation right now, and we want to close the series B in the next six to eight months.

Nathan Latka

12:5450 valuation, 50,000,000?

Biju Ashokan

12:56>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:57That's pre money or post?

Biju Ashokan

12:59>> Post. Post money.

Nathan Latka

13:01Okay. So you raise it about a 37 pre 50 post with about 1,200,000 in run rate.

13:09Does that make you nervous?

Biju Ashokan

13:12>> 2,100,000 in run rate.

Nathan Latka

13:14Okay. So again, tell me how you get there because there was 50 last year in December, like two months ago, a month ago, there was 50,000 in recurring fees from 200 customers, right, a month. And you're closed oh, got it. We took an average of closed transactions last year when really they were probably back.

Biju Ashokan

13:28>> We we ended 2021 at a two point two two point one or 2.1, 2,200,000 run rate.

Nathan Latka

13:35We wanna

Biju Ashokan

13:36>> get to 10,000,000 by end of the year.

Nathan Latka

13:38Yeah. What I'm reverse engineering though is, okay, so if you ended in December, which was about a month ago, was doing about 2.1 annually. That means you're doing about a $170,000 in revenue that month of which, right, of which 200 customers paying $250 a month made up $50,000 of it. And the other 110,000 were from a 110 closed deals, a thousand dollar transaction fee.

Biju Ashokan

13:59>> Yeah. So in transaction fees, when we give them leads, so we have a lead marketplace. When radius generates leads for our agents, they pay a 35% commission on top of the flat fees. We make a little more than thousand dollars.

Nathan Latka

14:15Yeah. So there's that's consistent with what we've been talking about. Right? A thousand dollar flat fee or there's a commission as well?

Biju Ashokan

14:20>> There is a commission when the lead is generated by Radius.

Nathan Latka

14:24Oh, I see. And how big is the commission?

Biju Ashokan

14:26>> 35%.

Nathan Latka

14:2735 Wait. Three to five or thirty five?

Biju Ashokan

14:31>> Thirty five of their commission.

Nathan Latka

14:33Oh, of their commission, not the deals.

Biju Ashokan

14:35>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

14:36I'm like, holy crap. I'm in the wrong business. Okay. So so if they're if they sell a million dollar property and they make $60,000 because it's a six cut, you would take 35% of the 6,000 or what is that about? $1,800

Biju Ashokan

14:51>> If we give that lead to them.

Nathan Latka

14:53If you give them a lead. Okay. That makes sense. Got it.

Biju Ashokan

14:56>> They're not paying anything upfront for that marketing for that lead. So they've gotten the lead for free, but it's up to them to close it. So when they close it, we make more.

Nathan Latka

15:05I see, I see, I see. Okay, got it. So when you raise it at 50,000,000 valuation, you're really getting something like a 24 X revenue multiple, something like that. Yeah. Okay. And now you mentioned aggressive growth plans. Why do you want to go into a series b so quickly? Can you spend $13,000,000 in the next six months?

Biju Ashokan

15:21>> No. We don't want to spend 13,000,000 in six months, but we just want to raise it to grow faster in more states. Mhmm. Because we have the advantage of having 76,000 agents in the network, and they're all from different states and cities. So we could easily turn that switch on and launch our brokerage in different states. So we just need the funding to have a sales team and doing all the processes behind the set of brokerages

15:45>> in these states. Mhmm. Mhmm.

Sales Headcount, Team Size and the Bangalore Office

Nathan Latka

15:47Yep. That makes sense. How many folks on the team today, and how many of those people are sales?

Biju Ashokan

15:53>> Right now, we are recruiting for sales. We just have three people in sales. In fact, we hired a third one a few weeks ago.

Nathan Latka

16:01How many full time total?

Biju Ashokan

16:03>> We have about 60 full time.

Nathan Latka

16:07Six zero?

Biju Ashokan

16:08>> Yes, six zero. And we have a product and support team in India and rest of the remaining functions are all in The US. Design, customer success, case, market, constant.

Nathan Latka

16:19Chennai, Pune, Bangalore, where are headed? Bangalore. Bangalore. Very cool. Yeah. I I meet so many fast growing. Ascom is where their dev teams are like Pune, Chennai, Bangalore, Bangladesh. It's incredible talent over there.

16:34What what's the going rate right now for senior engineer in in Bangalore?

Biju Ashokan

16:38>> For 60 to 80 k.

Nathan Latka

16:41Wow. That's incredible. Okay. And how many engineers do you have total?

Biju Ashokan

16:44>> We have 15 today. We're looking to recruit to increase the team size to 30.

Nathan Latka

16:49Is it getting more competitive to recruit top tier? Yeah.

16:53Who are the big high who who are the big companies over there sucking up all the talent?

Biju Ashokan

16:57>> Oh, there's so many. I mean, I can't name the top five. There's so many names that I've never heard of in my life who are offering 100 ks's and 80 ks's.

17:07>> Every company in the world, I think, is setting up a back office and back load now.

Churn Rate and Agent Retention

Nathan Latka

17:12Yep. Yep. Okay. Talk to me a little bit more about churn. What was your gross dollar retention over the past year?

Biju Ashokan

17:18>> So that's the thing. So average churn rate in this industry inherently is really good because it's every agent stays with a brokerage for two to three years. The average being three years. The only agents who churn are the agents who give up on real estate completely. So in the last year,

17:40>> out of the 200 agents we've recruited so far, we've only had eight agents leave the industry completely, but the rest stay down.

Nathan Latka

17:48Got it. So 4% churn effectively over a year. And then have you had more than 4% expansion? So your net dollar retention is above 100%?

Biju Ashokan

17:57>> Yeah, definitely. How far? It's just an industry characteristic. It's nothing to do with, like, if you're able to keep agents for more than three years, then it's on radius, right?

Nathan Latka

18:09What percent of your revenue was expansion over the past twelve months, your revenue growth?

Biju Ashokan

18:14>> So, again, most of our revenue comes from transactions. So for us, expansion revenue is basically us training the agents to do better in terms of number of sales. So we've built an agent development team that just focuses on training them to do better, giving them more leads. So, it's seasonal and it's also transaction based. So, it's not a percentage increase, if you know what I mean.

Nathan Latka

18:37Well, sure. Is. You can just compare to the same section each year, right? So, if you look at December 2020 revenue, but across your agents versus December 2021

Biju Ashokan

18:46>> We we our brokerage is only a year old.

Nathan Latka

18:51Okay. You could okay. So you could still do it then for the year.

Biju Ashokan

18:55>> Yeah. So what I I can tell you is when agents join us, before they join us, they average about six to eight transactions. Now they're averaging 12 to 15.

Nathan Latka

19:05Is that the right number to measure the number of transactions or is it should it be measured deal volume? This like, add up all the prices of what they sold?

Biju Ashokan

19:13>> It's the number of transactions because we have a flat fee.

Nathan Latka

19:17Oh, no. You just mentioned if you give them the lead, you take 35% of their commission.

Biju Ashokan

19:20>> Oh, yeah. For that revenue model, it's it's based on the number of the property value. But most of our revenue actually comes from the flat fee.

Nathan Latka

19:29So like when an agent joins you from some other brokerage, what do they usually do in GMV at that brokerage? And then how much better do you make them in the first twelve months in terms of GMV? Yeah. Isn't that the right metric? Isn't that the right metric?

Agent Income Improvement and GMV

Biju Ashokan

19:41>> Yeah. So that's one of the main reasons why agents join us. When they work for another brokerage before they join us, they're used to paying like 30% commission to their brokerage for every transaction they close, regardless of who generates that lead. So when they join us, they keep all 100% and they just pay us that $1,000 flat fee. So from an agent's perspective, their income just went up from making 120 ks in a year to like

20:08>> 180 to 200 ks a year. Mhmm. And that's kind of the one of the main KPIs that we track, like how much are we increasing there at the of the day.

Nathan Latka

20:16What was the total GMV of the 500 deals closed on your platform last year?

Biju Ashokan

20:22>> It was give me a minute. You would imagine I would have these numbers on top of my head, but

Nathan Latka

20:29It's the one I would care about. I'd be like, man, how do we get to a billion?

Biju Ashokan

20:32>> Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

20:35I'm sure you have it.

Biju Ashokan

20:36>> Yeah. Yeah. I have it.

Nathan Latka

20:39I'm gonna guess audience, you guys guess too. I'm gonna guess an average of $300,000 per sale. So that would be well, California, actually, let's bump it up. 450,000 per sale times 500. I'm gonna guess 225,000,000.

Biju Ashokan

20:56>> We have closed you are actually pretty close, my friend. We're at $215,000,000 close.

Nathan Latka

21:05Oh, come on, baby. I was almost right on the money. Alright. 215,000,000. That's that's pretty good stuff. And then if you you said you wanna get up to how many closed deals in 2022?

Biju Ashokan

21:15>> We want to get to by end of the year, we want to average 2,000 agents closing eight to 10 deals a year. So

Nathan Latka

21:2416,000? Yep.

Biju Ashokan

21:25>> Yeah. Very cool.

Dilution, Sole Founder and the Cap Table

Nathan Latka

21:26That'd be that'd be a great goal to hit. Talk to me about dilution, right? Were you the sole founder? Do you own 100% before the investors?

Biju Ashokan

21:34>> I raised three rounds, but I'm the sole founder. Okay. I don't own those.

Nathan Latka

21:40What you sold, I guess, the series A, you told us valuation there. When you did the 4,000,000 seed, what cap was that at? Or was it a priced round?

Biju Ashokan

21:47>> It's all priced rounds. I mean, you always lose about 25 to 30% in the first two rounds, and then it starts getting better when you start making revenue.

Nathan Latka

21:58Got it. So you're sorry. Is that a code of saying your seed was eight pre 12 post?

Biju Ashokan

22:03>> And I mean, pre seed is also dependent on which accelerator we went to, where

22:08>> you start, all those.

Nathan Latka

22:09When did you do your pre seed? What year?

Biju Ashokan

22:12>> 2015.

Nathan Latka

22:13And and how much equity did the accelerator take?

Biju Ashokan

22:19>> I'm not sure if I can disclose it, but it's in that five to 10 range.

Nathan Latka

22:24Five to 10. Which accelerator did you use? Was it in India or in The States?

Biju Ashokan

22:28>> Oh, here in New York called AngelPad.

Nathan Latka

22:30Oh, of course. Yeah. AngelPad. That's a that's a well known accelerator. Got it. And what I think their standard deal is like, what, a 100 for five to 10%, something like that?

Biju Ashokan

22:38>> I think they do 50 back then. Two fifty. Yeah. Now they might have changed it, but back then it was 50 k.

Nathan Latka

22:43So $2.50 to Angelpad, 4,000,000 seed, 13.1 series a, that's what you raised. Mhmm. So you diluted by 20 ish percent three times, basically.

22:52>> Yep.

22:52Got it. So you own about 52% of the business right now, something like that, 53.

Biju Ashokan

22:58>> And along with the other co founding team, right? Like you

Nathan Latka

23:02make some and

Biju Ashokan

23:04>> you give away stock options. So every round you've you probably want to create 10% or 5% stock options that there's that extra dilution there.

Nathan Latka

23:13Yep. Yep. So so how many do employees own today, including like not founders, but employees, key hires?

Biju Ashokan

23:20>> About 15.

Nathan Latka

23:2115. Okay. Yeah. So that's fair. Yeah. So investors like 40 or 50. ESOP pool, 15%. Co founders about 35 to 40. Yep. That's pretty stan pretty darn standard. Very cool. Yes. Alright. Anything we missed about your story?

Biju Ashokan

23:36>> No. We can keep talking. There's a lot of questions, but I know you're it's a fifteen, twenty minute long podcast.

Nathan Latka

23:42Yeah. No. I mean, I love it. This is a tough space because churn is usually very, very high, but it sounds like you figure out a way to get it under control. And I'm rooting for, I mean, how much is it going to cost you to open in a new state and what are the costs associated with that?

Biju Ashokan

23:53>> It's more regulatory. So there's a lot of process paperwork that you need to do to get a license in a different state. And it takes about two to three months, But it doesn't cost much. I see. It just costs the cost of a managing broker.

Nathan Latka

24:08So what are you raising all this money for then if they're really a bottleneck is time, not money?

Biju Ashokan

24:12>> It's time and the sales team and and all the marketing budgets to get the initial 100 agents to join.

CAC and Product-Led Growth Advantage

Nathan Latka

24:20See. What do you spend right now to get a new agent on who then pays you, you know, 10,000 the first year?

Biju Ashokan

24:25>> We our CAC is about 2,000 an agent.

Nathan Latka

24:28Oh, wow. That's a very I mean, way, it's like a two or three month payback then, right?

Biju Ashokan

24:32>> Yeah. And that's because of the product, the social network aspect. For regular brokerages, they don't have the convenience of having a social network of agents using their products. Let's take a Coldwell Banker or Remax, Keller Williams. They only if you join them, you get you're part of their social network. Unless you join them, you don't get to be part of their network. Right? In our case, it doesn't matter which form you work for. You can

24:55>> still sign up on our product and start using the tools. That's tech arbitrage. Yeah. So the product led growth is probably the most important and unique value for our company.

Famous Five and Wrap-Up

Nathan Latka

25:07Very cool. Biju, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Biju Ashokan

25:12>> Oh, this might be a little off topic, but I my I'm a big fan of Sir Alex Ferguson.

Nathan Latka

25:20Alex Ferguson?

Biju Ashokan

25:21>> Yeah. So he's written a book called Leading. So he's a famous sports coach of Manchester United. I love that.

Nathan Latka

25:30Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Biju Ashokan

25:34>> No. It's a bunch of CEOs. There's no one CEO that I follow.

Nathan Latka

25:42Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building radiusagent?

Biju Ashokan

25:46>> What do you mean? Online tool?

Nathan Latka

25:47An online tool that you use.

25:50Figma, Trello, Slack, Zoom.

Biju Ashokan

25:52>> No. We use a ton of quite a bit and Slack too. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

25:56Okay. Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night?

Biju Ashokan

26:00>> Five.

Nathan Latka

26:01Wow. Okay. And situation, married, single, kids?

Biju Ashokan

26:04>> Married, no kids. One dog Okay. Or

Nathan Latka

26:08Dog and a startup. How old are you, Biju?

Biju Ashokan

26:11>> 37.

26:12>> 37. Last question.

Nathan Latka

26:13Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Biju Ashokan

26:16>> The art of fundraising.

Nathan Latka

26:20The art of fundraising. Coming from a guy that's pretty good at radiusagent.com. They have tech arbitrage because of the 70,000 realtors they have in their community. They now bring those realtors on their platform, feed them leads. They're a full time brokerage as of last year, did about $2,100,000 in sales last year, hoping to four or five X that. This year, closed a 13,100,000 series A just last week at a $50,000,000 valuation. His team and the other

26:41founders still own about 40% of the business, employees own, call it 15, investors the other 40 looking to scale rapidly here. Again, charging real estate agents $250 a month to use their platform plus a thousand dollar closing fee, plus 35% of the realtor's commission if the platform gives them that lead. $250,000,000 in deals closed last year, hoping to scale up this year. Biju, thanks for taking us to the top.

Biju Ashokan

27:02>> Thanks, Nathan. You're good at this.

Nathan Latka

27:05One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday one

27:30p. M. Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at two p. M. Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's

27:51an acquisition, a big fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people

28:13are saying. Sign up for that at nathanlatka.com slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have

28:32to counter those people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.