How RentRedi CEO Ryan Barone grew RentRedi to $1.8M revenue and 5K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is ryan brown he's the brain behind rent ready's software he's the company ceo and co-founder before launching rat ready he worked at goldman sachs and price waterhouse cooper he enjoyed speaking about entrepreneurship and why he built rent ready to improve the renting experience again property management software for landlords ryan you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right you're way cooler now that you're doing your own thing versus an accountant at pwc right you're cool factoring through the roof trying to work on it every day a little bit you know just all right fair enough so what's rent ready how are you helping property owners so the the real issue that we saw was a lot of people um are working you know nine to five jobs and they happen to own some property on the side the majority of landlords are like that they're not these massive property management companies um and right now they're kind of pegged with two difficult and not so great decisions either higher property manager where they have all the time in the world but they lose you know eight to ten percent of their profit or manage it all themselves and they pull their hairs out at night and so we kind of sit in the middle of that where they get to manage it themselves but at the same time um they don't have to uh they don't have to pull their hair out trying to do that so we provide them with software that really goes end to end in the process and helps them manage their properties themselves without any of the pain and what will they be paying you on average per month to use the technology believe it or not they only pay nine dollars a month on average and that's 12 per unit um so uh it's it's a pretty unusual a business model that we've set up uh but it has worked really nicely for a lot of landlords uh that do want to manage their property have a bit of a premium service but not necessarily pay premium price of um you know feel like they're being taxed on their growth yeah that's great i want to get the back story and the story behind your first customer but where are you today i want to bury the lead how many customers are you working with so you know we don't uh show the the customer number itself but i can i can share with landlords actively managing in all 50 states um and we've three x to that number actually this year just in the la the uh year to date so far so can you give me a sort of range are we talking like five or like 500 or like 5 000 um above the third option i'll go i'll go to there okay got it so you have about five you have about five thousand landlords already on the platform yes okay take me back to the back story here when did you launch um so really back in 2016 and uh as you mentioned i was i was going to school in new york city at pace i had gotten that my first internship at goldman actually which is right across the street from pace and it really all started when i went to try to get my first apartment myself not as a landlord but as a tenant and realized that it was incredibly difficult to rent an apartment um actually going through the application process was quite difficult and i just gone through an application process as a student which was not that difficult which was the the common app process i filled out an application once i applied everywhere i wanted it was pretty nice and easy it struck me as shocking that the uh rental industry wasn't the same way and so initially version one was just building an app myself for myself and friends and i had done our initial development um so you had real estate personally that you wanted to use your app to manage exactly so i was really just building it from the tenant perspective and it wasn't until i started bringing that to landlords that they said hey wait a minute you know our side's just as bad if not worse and in fact yeah sorry just to just be clear you didn't you didn't have real estate that you want to use your tool to manage with you or you are coming from the other side and then built into landlords exactly yeah okay interesting so so first was the first customer then your landlord you know it actually wasn't um the first customer uh in the early days were actually landlords that were uh trying to collect applications on apartments and so in the very early days it was really just by um going to different association meetings meeting with some of these landlords and getting them to adopt the platform uh when you build the software it's yourself it takes you longer than you would hope in the early days so there was quite a while of um you know building up the software in the early days before so ryan are you sole founder or do you have a co-founder i do have a co-founder got it yes you guys just decided early on i mean obviously the equity split at the beginning is a challenge everybody goes did you guys just say screw it we'll do 50 50. so the way we did well the easy thing for us is we're actually father and son um and the really nice thing was his skill set i mean perfectly compliments um i assume you're the son you're the same yes no it's not me and like a seven-year-old running around yeah absolutely so i mean his whole background sales and marketing minus uh really more so focused on the technology side and customer support side of things and so um it just works perfectly that well so what did you do 5050 or does that own more oh i mean we we don't share the equity split but i mean we we do um we do have a pretty uh pretty even split on it well no i mean i want to know more here because this is a debate every founder goes through so are you saying dad listen engineering here is more important than sales therefore i deserve more or is he saying listen son i have more experience sales and marketing is critical you could build a beautiful thing but nobody knows about it i i deserve more i mean i think it depends on your situation but i mean in a lot of cases i do lean more towards the side of saying it's easier to just split it with your founders unless you have someone that's coming in later or something like that but um i tend to lean more towards the side of saying it's um it's easier to not argue about and honestly i feel the same way about uh the investment side of things i mean when companies go to raise that money later on um i think there's there's arguments over there are big market movers where it does matter to to um to talk about how it will impact your business in in five years or ten years or in in the case of funding rounds three rounds down down the line but um i think the same applies with founders especially if you're going to be in a venture business you're going to dilute yourself as you raise future rounds um you do want everyone to be invested uh it's not good if you don't have a founder feel so ryan did you guys have you guys bootstrap this or if you raise capital so we actually bootstrapped for the first two years of it um in the very early days it was just me doing all of our development uh and mainly doing our sales and then the two of us honestly handling all of the chats that would come in um we were anytime you messaged it on red reading those first couple years it was literally us on our phone or computer messaging back um in 2019 we raised our first venture round and that was really when we brought on the the core team to rent ready we grew to about eight as a team and then uh we raised a venture round uh earlier this year so we've raised about five million dollars to date what was the precede in 2019 how much uh we raised 1.4 million one four okay interesting and then so what so you raised three three six this year right looking back i mean obviously you guys took dilution to do that most people are selling 10 to 20 of their business in these sort of early rounds do you regret that at all no not at all i mean especially from the perspective of we've looked at it uh not just from the capital perspective but what also do those investors bring in each round so um for example ti ventures um was was the lead for that very first round one of the things that we have been focused on since day one has been how do we take customer feedback and convert that very quickly into action that we can change in our business and a lot of their model and even doing their diligence on us but what it went beyond that and doing was saying uh how do you learn from those customers and that was something that we've been able to implement with them post rates um like they've helped talking to our own sales reps or talking to our own marketing team or uh support team and understanding how do we actually synthesize that feedback turn it into action create a better product and in the end result so i mean from one side of things rent ready would certainly not be what it is today without that funding but also beyond just the capital itself um there's a lot of knowledge that that comes along with those investors hopefully if you do it right which i which i feel like we've been very lucky but lucky to have so far and then ryan obviously the market's a big one you're north of 5000 customers today do you think you can break ten thousand by the end of this year is that going to take into...