How Realync CEO Matt Weirich grew Realync 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...