How Realync CEO Matt Weirich grew to $6.7M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is matt wyreck he's the co-founder and ceo of real link having founded the company where nine years ago mats on a mission to make multi-family touring leasing and communication real and transparent with their video leasing solution the company has helped teams all across the united states increase their lead to lease conversion rates and decrease sales cycles the company's partner with many of the nation's largest property owners and managers and is actively being used in over 220 000 units today the company's multi-family leading virtual leasing and resident engagement platform enables live video tours live virtual open houses and do-it-yourself pre-recorded videos of properties matt you're ready to take us to the top absolutely excited to be here nathan this sounds like something a frustrated realtor who took some python classes in college would build is that the case not quite no um so i actually don't have a formal background in real estate or anything like that it was uh more of the consumer pain point that drove me to to start the business i was moving from purdue university up to chicago about a two to three hour drive not terribly far but it was that real estate search process back in uh 2011 that really opened my eyes to how inefficient the real estate search process was and that that may 2011 was actually when facetime came out and was just a light bulb moment of putting different things together about what could have been done to streamline that search process for me and so yeah it was a perfect storm of different circumstances coming together and led to an opportunity that here we are 10 years later working on the b2b sas side of it instead of the consumer side of it and uh hopefully making a big difference to the industry who who is the business paying is the agent is somebody else the brokerage yeah so we're actually multi-family focused so we're working with large multi-family owners managers and developers of apartment communities student living senior living even military installations and things like that and so it's the the on-site teams the property management teams the leasing teams that are using our platform today and they're using it to streamline the touring experience in that lead to leads part of the funnel to connect with prospects and consumers in a more efficient and transparent way and what are these folks typically paying to you you know for you to use the platform and how do you upsell is it purely based on number of units yes we actually are a flat fee per property a lot of the prop tech companies hitting multi-family are charging on a per unit basis it makes it more affordable for smaller properties but significantly more expensive for the larger properties and a lot of our clients are those larger 250 unit and larger buildings and so to make it an efficient easy to implement platform for them we just charge a flat monthly fee per property and there are upsell opportunities uh additional functionality that they can pay for services that they can opt in for and things like that as well and so what is that average price point for property yeah so the average price point for real inc is right around that 325 per month and that's unlimited live video tours pre-recorded video tours cloud storage integrations all of that interesting so you're not upselling this like number of toys or anything like that it's really number of units and and is there any other utility-based upsell number of seats at the leasing agency or the multi-family owner so there's uh functionality internally with being able to download the videos and some different integration points and things like that that will upsell it on um those are like feature based upsells are there any other utility-based upsells like number of x no so we early on when we launched our company we actually charged based on usage and what we found very quickly was that the only result that drove was teams trying to minimize their use that's used yeah and as a sas platform you want to maximize usage and roi on it and so we got rid of usage-based uh fees and functionality um and really did the math to make the most sense around what can we do flat monthly fee unlimit the usage and really inspire teams to go uh all out on virtual leasing now you shared with us in the bio that you sent me that you already are across 220 000 units but roll that up one level how many clients is that yeah so we're actually pushing 500 000 units now on the platform which is great so uh rolling that up on a property level where around 1400 uh individual properties using a platform between the u.s and the uk and is that is that like i imagine one multi-family person paying you on their credit card could manage a hundred properties i'm trying to get a sense of like the where the i guess where the credit card or who the person or the organization is well i will say first and foremost i wish they paid us on a credit card that is a pain point a lot of multi-family still physically cuts checks and wow a lot of physical checks coming in but um yeah when you roll that up to our enterprise clients we have about 150 enterprise clients so i mean those are not the levels where it's worth your time to have an inside sales organization run a high touch process because they're paying for so many properties and so many units underneath exactly and the great thing about our go to market strategy we're very much land and expand so we'll get our foot in the door and launch in three or five properties in a portfolio of 50 and have room to expand within that portfolio and take it from a five property client to a 25 to a 50 property client over time and potentially much larger right i mean if you have 500 000 units and 1500 properties i mean isn't that like 300 or something average units per property that those are these are huge apartment complexes or something they are yeah our average average property or our average unit count per property i think is 280 or something yeah yes these are big these are big big okay interesting um okay very cool take us back to day one uh so you mentioned your problem in 2011 when the move happened did you start coding and building this thing immediately when did you guys write the first line of code yeah it definitely didn't uh so i actually when i was moving to chicago i was starting my career as a consultant at accenture doing management consulting and i was on the road for three years straight doing consulting and so i kind of sat on the idea for a minute and couldn't get out of my mind and couldn't get out of my mind because as a consultant on the road every week for three years straight i saw that pain point iterated time and time again of not physically being able to be at the property to tour it or physically being there but cramming it all into a weekend and exhausting yourself over a weekend trying to tour properties and so it was a pain point uh i saw reiterated time and time again at accenture and so finally i was at a work event and one of my then colleagues my now co-founder ani him and i were talking about what's next what's life after consulting look like and he was a part of a startup at northwestern when he was in college i wanted to do something entrepreneurial so i pulled the idea out of my back pocket pitched him on it and the very next weekend we were in my apartment whiteboarding laying the foundation what year did you guys launch that so that uh was 2013 when we first started scoping and speccing out and running focus groups and all that and we brought on a chief technology officer along with us because neither of us had extensive background you have to give them you have to give them equity or just pay them a lot of money no equity yep there's really like three of you guys that own the majority of the business exactly and then we uh so we started speculating in 2013 and then we launched our mvp in 2014. 2014. okay and then did you get your first customers in 2014 you could call them that yeah we had our first people on the platform using it and um we when we first launched we were actually focused on the residential for sale side of the industry so we were partnering with caldwell banker keller williams century 21 and brokerages like that working on the for sale side of the industry but we realized very quickly that was not a b2b go to market strategy brokerages did not want to pay for technology for their agents and so we had to sell agent by agent by agent and it just was not an easy or feasible go to market strategy for a startup and so uh we got our first multi-family client uh in 2015 and then in 2016 we really made the decision to go all into multi-family put the residential for sale side behind us and go full steam ahead and here we are half a million units later and so were you guys basically pre-revenue living off savings in both 2013 2014 until that multi-family client in 2015. yeah so we did a friends and family round of funding uh end of 2013 i believe it was uh we raised 330 000 so very small 130 uh 330. so we we made that stretch much longer than it should have and we didn't do a formal seed round of funding until 2016 when we did a 1.1 million z round so we we went a long time off of savings and ramen and really bootstrapping the heck out of it the 1.1 million c that you guys did did you end up going on pricing that or do you convertible no safe sort of deal yep it was uh it was a price ground oh you did fight it interesting that'll be cool all right cool so so first customers you thought were going to come from the coldwell bankers of the world you pivoted in 2015 and said we're just going to direct to multi-family how did you land that first multi-family customer thankfully it was a personal network uh early on when we were seeking that product market fit um it was an annoying amount of networking events and meetings and things like that but it was a there was a lot of attention on the tech space in chicago at that point we launched our company in chicago and there was an accelerator that was starting in the prop tech space and there was a multi-family owner who was interested in partnering from an innovation standpoint and so we sat down with them launched in three communities early on to just prove out the value proposition and i always say product market fit smacked us in the face the second we launched into those multi-family communities the usage went up and to the right the roi the use cases value proposition everything was abundantly more clear than anything we had captured working with india what does that mean in terms of 2015 your first real real your real year of revenue remember how much you did 2015 i want to say we we did maybe i think it was like 60 or 70 000 in revenue you remember the feeling i i thought it was a lot i going from nothing and being able to actually keep the servers on with by clients paying us to keep the servers on and things like that felt good um and then yeah going from three multi-family properties to 25 hitting hitting that 25 property milestone was huge uh that was in 2016. oh wow okay and then you're up at 150 today uh 150 logos about 1400 properties yeah well when this is i want to make sure i get the verbage right so i so when you say three to twenty five are those clients properties or units properties yep so that that 25 was across three or four enterprise clients so you sort of went from one enterprise to four enterprises today 150 enterprises and then obviously you can calculate units and properties against that as well but but just be clear the the 325 price what you told me earlier that is per property not unit or per enterprise it's for property correct yeah yeah yeah i know it's a bit convoluted yeah the the multi-family industry speaks in unit counts and because we charge per property we talk in property count and so a bit convoluted well it's tricky to figure out what to price against right that's what i'm asking some people might have probably built the same business you've built and priced against units others might do the same thing but price against the enterprise and you said no we're going to be a property yep exactly um which is strange because you have such a range i mean you mentioned you have people on your onboarding with only five units per property they're still going to pay 325 when someone else has 500 units per property so that was uh again sorry for any confusion on this so that was portfolio size so five properties in a portfolio but those properties still could be 150 250 unit properties oh i see so if if a property is under 100 units we have custom pricing for them on a per unit basis so that flat 325 per month is for 100 unit and larger buildings i see i see i see okay can i so can i take 325 bucks a month times 1500 to back what you guys are doing like almost half a million in mrr or something like that yeah roughly obviously we have varying price based on discounting for size portfolio and some upsells on different functionality and things like that but yeah we're we're right around that 5 million mark you feel like you can break the 500 000 a month like this year you think that would be the six million run rate absolutely yeah we actually have bigger goals than that for this year so uh uh 20 2020 was quite the quite the year of growth we grow grew over 400 percent in 2020 um and we're we're not looking to repeat 400 growth in 2021 but looking to really ride the tailwind and all the attention on virtually seen as we settle in as an industry what this new season looks like of digital plus physical and the combination of everything in between as markets are opening up properties leasing centers are opening up and all that and so just to capture the 400 here where your growth from 2019 to 2020 what was the european 2020 one you're doing 400 a month today what were you doing a year ago so we actually hit 1 million arr in january of 2020 um which was a huge milestone for us and then we ended the year at 4.5 ish give or take holy cow that i mean that's crazy growth in one year what happened covid yeah the the second leasing centers shut down uh because of shelter and place and quarantine and all of that they they had to turn to virtual leasing to keep business running and they were using our platform offers do-it-yourself pre-recorded video creation live video tours and things like that and so we were perfectly primed in position to allow these leasing teams to continue leasing and managing their properties without any physical in person wow wow 1 million 2019 4.5 million end of 2020 now today about five five and a half million dollar the goal is eight so we're we're pushing hard uh we've got uh we've got a good good uh good trajectory for 2021 and feeling pretty bullish about where we're going as a team we've more than the crazy thing about it january of 2020 we were a six-person team and now we're a 35-person team so how many engineers on the team uh so when we add our engineers in we were at four and now we're at 15. 15 engineers out of the 35. so heavy heavy tech this isn't a this isn't a tech this isn't someone that's not a tech company calling until the tech company you actually do have there's some real effect there how many sales reps that carry a quota uh so now we're at six um i used to be one third of our sales team so it feels good to have a sales team beyond myself what did you say there's always a tricky question for sas founders what did you set the quota for your first sales hire that wasn't you the founder it was uh so the her first quarter we were very flexible on it we set goals but not necessarily a quota uh we wanted to see what she could do um stepping in we transitioned some of our accounts over to her so that she could farm and work on growth of those enterprise accounts um and then from there we really based it off of realistic activity levels and what we think they could produce on a quarter-over-quarter basis we so far all the reps that have joined the company we've handed them a book of existing enterprise clients to grow that business and so we're trying to set them up for good quick win success uh getting their feet wet and so we've really settled of a goal quota of around 180 properties per quarter give or take what does that mean from the new arr per quarter per rep uh per rep so if they're adding 180 properties rough that we could expect them to do about 600 000 arr a quarter yeah that's that's aggressive so you've got you basically have a quota target of 2.4 million of new er per rep per year it's impressive yeah i mean if you can make it work that's great i mean typically the ratios you see there are something related you know it's about a million dollar quota target with a full ot of 200 grand or something like that right exactly you know and this is the first year we're feeling it out we're shooting for the moon um and we definitely recognize there'll be some settling in with the new team and sales org we've brought on a heavy-hitting industry leader uh christy picker to come on and lead the sales org she's been in the multi-family space for 20 plus years and knows it inside and out and so making last shifts a lot of changes as we settled into having a sales org and it's one of those things the the land and expand the the farming and that growth for us um has typically made up about 75 to 80 of our sales so expansions expansion revenue is 80 here we are exactly and so we're really multiplying those early numbers obviously are easier but 80 expansion is great what's gross revenue churn so very low um thankfully we're at less than ten percent annual uh sorry so net your your net dollar retention's gonna be like 150 160 right now yeah exactly yeah that's great hey look we're out of time but i want to capture quick other quick questions here are you still building all this capital efficient on just the last 1.1 raise or did you raise more so we did a 22 million round with susquehanna growth equity uh this past fall we didn't put a full 22 million on the cap table we did some cap table cleanup liquidity event things like that for some of the prior investors but big equity partner and we're very excited about uh what they mean for the business how much of the 22 million was secondary uh secondary meaning it didn't go on the balance sheet didn't go to operations in other words it was it was early employees would get a little off the table you could take them off the table early investors took off the table gotcha gotcha um so out of the 22 million valuation secondary was probably call it two-thirds oh wait sorry the 22 million is the cash you raise or the valuation you raised at valuation yeah so okay sorry how much did you raise uh about 16 out of 22. oh wow you well you decided i mean you wait why did you decide so early i mean you basically did a majority sale to business it was it was a very interesting year to say the least um without diving too much confidential information we had a lot of a lot of strategics knocking on the door we had a lot of m a conversations going on um and there was a lot of range of interest rate ranging from doing a series a to minority growth equity majority growth equity and full strategic acquisition yeah wow and ultimately at the end of the day we went with the partner that gave us the most confidence in partnering with us to get where we believe the company can go yeah so 10 million of 16 was basically secondary you guys got some early cash out which is great you create a win but a 22 million valuation for your growth rate that's super low i mean uh 1 million to 4 million and 12 month period and and then you go raise that only a five act like some i'm i'm missing something here the that was actually the high end of the valuations that we were getting in the thick of it obviously so we we did that round we closed it in october of last year so we weren't at 4.5 yet at that point and they were really basing it off of the growth indicators and for a lot of underwriting of those deals they'll need to see those historic trends of quarter over quarter growth and we had two quarters of insane growth but it was two quarters of momentum and so there was that risk factor that uh they were trying to take into consideration and we definitely could have wrote it out waited another couple quarters for uh additional proof points but we we found a partner that we believe in with susquehanna you make a lot of money by selling too early or selling a chunk of it too early so there's nothing wrong with that but the rationale is helpful guys there you have it matt wyrick built a real link after he had his own issues back in 2011 moving it's a virtual tool that allows folks like brokerages agencies multi-family owners to give virtual leasing tours they've grown crazy million bucks in 2019 run rate 4.5 end of last year 5 million today they sold uh they sold 16 million they took in 16 million on a 22 million valuation in 2020 so a big secondary chunk there but now they're primed for growth of the partner they like we'll see what happens next matt thanks for taking us to the top thank you so much nathan appreciate it one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm 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 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