How REISift CEO Tyler Austin grew REISift to $5.4M revenue and 1.3K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is tyler austin he's a husband father former air force serviceman and a seven-figure real estate investor and also today the founder of rei sift a bootstrap sas company in proptech helping real estate investors scale their sales and marketing he also holds bachelor's degree from florida tech and computer information systems all right tyler are you ready to take us to the top let's do it all right so what got you in i imagine it was your own real estate investing but what got you into real estate in the first place um i got tired of traveling 50 of the year uh for the government basically so i started dabbling in real estate and you know wrote my own scripts because i was a cyber guy by trade um to solve my own problem and that kind of ended up slowly developing into hey other people want to use that basically and so tell me about those people who are your customers today so our customers today is more than what we originally thought out to be was originally uh you know real estate investors uh wholesalers in real estate people who are doing a lot of outbound marketing direct to homeowner um so that's a lot of and i would say probably 80 of our customers are still those types of people but now we also have a lot of real estate agents starting to use this as well and um even companies like roofing companies anybody who who wants to learn more about uh and do more efficiently you know you know direct to homeowner marketing okay and so i imagine tell me about churn there right a lot of people try this stuff when they churn quickly because they just they don't have them you know they don't have a hustle yeah that's dude uh initially it was um it was pretty tough but we're actually at like a five percent churn right now which uh uh with micro smb customers which is a lot of what we have a lot of you know people getting into wholesaling right yeah i want to get into you know real estate let me go ahead and you know throw like 200 bucks at it um and it was a big problem uh initially and we've really went from about you know 10 11 churn down into that five range and sometimes we get about six percent but that's monthly yeah but you know from from uh it makes me feel good because i think a lot of people in our space some of our competing products and uh others that are similar in our space um you know there's floating around you know nine or if not 17 18 so i feel good about it and so what do you charge i mean what are these customers paying on average per month to use your technology so we have a base plan of 49 a month um that has a restriction a lot of restrictions in it and then we have a 99 a month and then a 299 a month when you average that all out what do you say like the sweet spot is uh our sweet spot our our uh average from where our customers are sitting a lot of them are in that professional plan we did some adjustments to get a lot more people in that mid-tier plan at 99 but i would say a good split and spread is uh 25 in essentials um you know 45 to 50 in that professional plan and another you know 25 to 35 percent in that business plan so so make those conversations make those numbers easy for me then the average customer is paying 100 bucks a month oh yeah yeah our poo is about 100 100 bucks a month yeah okay interesting take me back to customer number one when did you guys launch and how did you get the first customer so we i officially called it rei shift in uh like february of 2019 i believe uh our we pre-launched and and i did a youtube video i ended up getting like 50 customers um that paid us before there was any product and so that got us to about 2500 or so mrr um and we officially launched in september of 2019. sorry 2500 or 25 000 an mrr 2500 nmr okay that yeah um and so then uh so that got us uh there uh and then in really our big growth catalyst was in around june of 2020 we launched a challenge funnel essentially and um and that was where we started really getting a lot of retraction to kind of teach people how to really do you know real estate marketing teach us how that works it's very popular on the inner circles but the common sort of staff member does not know what a challenge funnel is yet yeah so what we did is um i realized that a lot of our turn was was because of uh micro smb you know entrepreneurs not being good entrepreneurs so we had to fix the the mindset of the the customer coming into the gate about business not really about our product um so we created a challenge to solve that problem called the auto legion challenge where in the um where we marketed it as hey you have a problem getting leads come in and and we're going to teach you how to get those leads but the first you know week and a half of that challenge is actually how to actually set up your business you know what kind of revenue do you want to make how do you even calculate that kind of information so that gets them adopted and confidence into what they're doing and then we say okay cool now you have the foundations to know where you want to go and you know what to do to get there let's teach you how to actually implement it and we use we teach them how to implement you know generating leads through using our product um which adopts them into you know the product itself and understanding it and how to use it and then at the end of that product we have essentially an upsell or that challenge is an upsell um to put them in sorry what's the challenge though tyler is it how many leads you can get over a 30-day period um no ours actually our challenge structure is two weeks of education on how to how to market how to properly bring in big data and get it managed and then get marketing to it and then the second half of it the second two weeks is um actually marketing to see how many total you can get so we kind of split in half we market it as a 14 day challenge but once they get into we're like psych it's actually a 30 day challenge 14 days of education and 14 days of of actual like doing the work so how many leads did the winner get of that challenge um we do it we do it every single month so we've had people that have come out of it making a hundred thousand you know some even even more than that um closing multiple deals through the challenges and i mean we have we've had like i don't know somewhere around like three or three thousand or so people gone through that challenge since last year um a ton and every every month we have you know it's a rolling challenge now so we basically automated it but here in january uh we do like a reset for the year where we're going to do the challenges live again to bring in a bunch of new revenue from the customers we already have plus bring in some new update the content because as your product updates right and we have a lot of new features we've done since last year um so we need to update the the challenge to get you know more of that feature adoption in so you guys there you have it the question for you is uh what challenge can you launch in january that gets your you know customers excited but also by nature almost by default gets them using your product more to decrease churn so three thousand folks in there now that winter uh tower that might take home a hundred thousand bucks in terms of just revenue from a challenge how many leads is that usually from you know because of the way that we teach how to market in real estate um you know it's a lot different than nutritional norm a lot of times they have to get you know 75 or so leads to get like one deal and a lot of times it might only be you know seven to ten thousand dollars on a deal um the way that we educate we teach people how to find like the one percent of the four percent of people who might want to sell to you right now um so they really narrowed down their marketing and they might you know only generate 10 leads but they get a deal from it so that's a big part of what we teach is is happening so what would that winner do how many leads that winner do the hundred thousand um it just really depends if someone got if someone locked up a real estate contract and they got a hundred thousand dollars from it it could have been their first lead it could have been their tenth or fifth i'm not quite sure what in the scenario of that person but i mean people close deals and enduring the challenge all the time so i see um yeah it's hard to started to pick yeah okay so challenge is working nicely how many customers are you serving now today um right now i actually had it opened up um here we have active customers thirteen hundred okay thirteen hundred so that would put you at what about a hundred thirty thousand bucks in revenue right now um about 140 yeah 140. okay very cool and where were you exactly a year ago uh exactly a year ago let me go back i'll tell you exactly it was probably like maybe 40 or so maybe okay and then go back to 2019 where you get like four or five grand a month in revenue back then so what are we in we're in november right now...