How Realatom CEO Yulia Yaani grew Realatom to $498.1K revenue and 5 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is yulia yani she's the co-founder and ceo of real adam the leading technology platform for commercial real estate debt industry this is her third startup prior to real adam she managed commercial real estate investments for amstar global partners a u.s private equity fund as well as work for a related group in florida she received her mba from columbia university and holds series 7 and 63 licenses julia you ready to take us to the top yes i am oh thank you all right real adam so you pinged me before this is nathan i don't know if i'm right fit i'm not a sas company yet why do you say that interesting thing we are we are now but um we you know we've been building it for the last two years and we started very very lean we didn't have any money it was me my co-founder and one one developer but we had a vision that we wanted to bring uh digital innovations to commercial real estate landing space uh and my background is in commercial real estate i and because you do not produce sas overnight i we took a different approach we didn't go out and raise you know a few million and build the product and then release it are you bootstrapped today uh we raised money last year uh well cows let's say you can't tell this whole big story about not raising money then tell me you've raised a bunch of how much have you raised uh we raised 3.7 billion okay 3700 now when you now when did you launch company though what year we launched it uh at the end of 2016. uh in beta okay and and we've been building it till the end of last year okay and so now you're transitioning to sas help people understand what the company does for people that are not familiar uh yes absolutely i real atom is a software company for commercial real estate lending industry the market is very large uh 3 trillion in commercial loans out outstanding but very behind on technology uh our users are commercial real estate mortgage brokerages property owners and uh investors and lenders they use our platform for three main reasons first for market analytics uh on real adam they they get to fill the market in real time second for the tools that help them uh to originate more loans and third our customers uh use real atoms uh to build more customer relations in the industry what is this lenders and borrowers is this the person who pays you is it the person that wants to invest in commercial real estate or is the fund or who um well uh all three parties um borrowers uh if they want to use our technology mortgage brokers if they want our technology and lenders if they want to use our technology okay and on average what do they pay per month uh around the 1 750. okay 1 000 that's very specific 1 750 per month what do they get for that uh for that that they get set of tools they make uh their life more efficient uh they get real-time market analytics and those who need it they get a bonus uh extended network of lenders we have over 700 lenders that are active on the platform okay is that 700 customers uh yes 700 lenders yes okay but are they all paying i we have been free for lenders till now okay so 700 lenders uh using for free how many are paid total total paying customers uh we have a few paying customers like five or one or ten i just launched i we just launched and we have uh buy okay five that's very good you shouldn't be embarrassed about that by the way everyone starts with zero so five customers today now does that include is that just lenders or does that include also the borrowers and the mortgage brokers it's actually mortgage brokers mostly mortgage brokers so five of them are paying right now and they're paying one thousand seven fifty per month so you're doing about eight thousand seven hundred dollars per month right now on revenue is that right uh yes okay and exactly a year ago you were no revenue right yes okay were you making any money at all since 2016 or no you were just uh bootstrapping and and going off your own your own savings i we we made some money in 2017. uh it's really irrelevant to us right now because uh since then the concept uh changed completely so we are mostly focusing on this i mean we're only focusing on the sas right now in 2017 how much total revenue did you make uh we made few hundred thousand okay a few hundred thousand like 300 uh somewhere around that okay and you use that to fund the development of real adam what it is today the sas product yeah we use it uh initially just to uh to fund our in initial bootstrapping and was this mostly like consulting gigs you were doing i yes we uh worked as a as a mortgage broker basically like a traditional one yeah yeah we knew the industry we worked uh uh as a mortgage broker just to bootstrap us to something and then we went through 500 startups uh you're probably familiar with them and after that we raise money no that's great that's great i was just with marvin who leads the san fran program of 500 startups he's our partner oh very good he's our mentor he knows i mean i just talked to him a couple of days ago that's good i was i mean i literally just spent five days in dublin with him we were speaking at a big double and tech conference so that's great he's gonna love us you're on so you went through 500 startups that's good um you raised 3.7 million dollars to date um doing you know you just turned on kind of the sas side of the business what's your team size today how many people uh we have 16 people one six yes one six okay now you raise capital so i assume you're burning every month to drive growth but i want to know how aggressive you're being right so are you burning 10 grand a month 100 grand a month how much are you burning uh we're burning uh anywhere between 120 and 150 per month okay and how did you get to that number like how are you managing that i we have a team of 10 people on the product side and the rest are on the sales and operations i guess my question is are you comfortable burning 120 per month considering you've raised 3.7 uh like like how do you get to you know how do you make yourself comfortable with that uh we are comfortable we are much more comfortable now than we were even nine months ago because at that time honestly speaking uh we burned a lot of money per month like how much was it like three four hundred we did within like three hundred thousand a couple of months and that was a disaster and what did you have to do to get that lower i we you know our goal last year is was to get as many users on the platform as possible because as i mentioned to you we've been building sas and we've been testing it with the market we wanted to get as much uh uh feedback from the market as possible and uh because of that we are you know absolutely expanded our uh uh marketing and inside sales and that was all burned okay got it so you fired you you need to be clear you fired people basically to get your burn down to 120 000 a month we did yeah and they were mainly sales people that you overhired for yes yeah interesting um okay very good and then talk to me about customer acquisition cost today what's it costing you fully weighted to get a new 1700 a month customer it's it's costing us problem around uh 25 000. okay 20 and how are you spending that money uh we're spending that money on um at this very moment we're spending that money on con consultants who are helping us to build their sas sales pro uh uh process and on our sales people okay so just be clear that 25 000 that doesn't include any engineering expenses it's just your sales and any of your direct paid advertising right yes okay got it so that's a 14 month payback period on a 1700 a month account right yep are they paying up are they paying that full 700 bucks a month or are they paying for the whole year up front or they pay monthly uh we have two options we have quarterly and everything up front oh okay so so it's 700 bucks a month but most people what pay for 12 months so 20 grind up front uh yes okay good so your it helps with the cash gap obviously uh that's that's good what about churn is it too early or do you have any indication of what church absolutely too early okay got it um good so it's too early to look at churn it's too early to talk about probably expansion revenue uh let's move forward um i mean are you looking at raising additional capital anytime soon uh yes we are okay how much do you hope to raise i i'm thinking right now about uh a bridge if we need it my hope that we will make enough enough revenue uh in the next um six seven months that we don't have uh to think about this for another year and then we will go for uh serious a what is 10 15 million uh but if we need a bridge we will go probably for a couple of million bridge um sometimes uh in q3 so let's say like maybe a three million dollar bridge around in q3 uh on what terms do you think or would you hope i well i if we have a uh consistent growth uh months on over months in the next uh four months uh is going to be better terms if we don't you know we have to go to our current investors and uh uh do you want to raise a three million on a on a like venture debt or actually...