How Vantaca Reached $50M ARR with 500 Customers Across 6 Million Homes (Interview with CEO Ben Currin)

Opening: Vertical SaaS in Unsexy Markets

Ben Currin

00:00What I saw as an opportunity, these kind of not sexy vertical software markets that were sneaky big.

Nathan Latka

00:06>> What you bootstrapped in terms of revenue before you took out external capital in 2022?

Ben Currin

00:10Call it high single digit millions.

Nathan Latka

00:12>> Okay. So between 5 and 10,000,000. Sure. If you were doing caught high single digit millions in 2022, let's do the worst case, 5,000,000. And you also said you 10xed since then. That would put you at around 50,000,000 ARR this year. Am I in the right ballpark there?

Ben Currin

00:23Yeah.

Nathan Latka

00:24>> How many customers are paying for the platform today?

Ben Currin

00:26Right around 500 professional community association management companies. That has within it 50,000 communities and over 6,000,000 homes.

Nathan Latka

00:38>> Folks. My guest today is Ben Kieran. His focus has been to build a successful company with a thriving culture that improves lives of businesses of vantaca's customers. If you haven't heard of vantaca before, they're really building software focused on HOAs, really hard market to sell into. We're gonna jump into it today. Ben, you ready to take us to the top?

Ben Currin

00:54Let's do it.

Ben's Background and How He Joined Vantaca

Nathan Latka

00:55>> Alright. So give us context first. JMI is involved in this business as a private equity play. Are you the original founder or you were placed in by PE?

Ben Currin

01:03Neither of those things, which which is fun. So, I I I joined the team. My business partner is Dave Sawyer, who's the original founder of the business. I joined Dave and a couple of the founding team members who were working in a services business that Dave owned and this is one of those stories of a vertical SaaS software company that was built out of the industry. So he owned a community association management company, think HOA management

01:31company, started to work together with some folks in his team to build software for that company. They became the first kind of beta customer and I joined kind of the next day, if you will. But there's lots of hard work and blood, sweat, and tears that I did not participate in that first year of kind of beta testing and all that stuff. But I joined Dave and kind of the founding team right at the beginning.

Nathan Latka

01:51>> And what year was that?

Ben Currin

01:52That was '20 late twenty seventeen, early twenty eighteen.

Nathan Latka

01:56>> So What's the archetype there? Were you like the engineering lead and he was the industry guy, or what was the relationship?

Ben Currin

02:01No. So Dave definitely the in engineering guy, or sorry, the the industry guy. And both of us are engineers, but not software engineers. So he's an electrical engineer by background. I'm a nuclear engineer by background. He spent, years and years and years, a couple of decades in community association management, partnered with a couple folks who had, built, SaaS applications in this space before and kind of wrote the initial code. I came in and grew the team,

02:24grew the strategy, in the industry. So kind of a couple of technical, non technical, partners, I guess you could call us.

Nuclear Engineer to HOA Software CEO

Nathan Latka

02:32>> Wait, Ben, you have to connect these dots. How does a nuclear engineer end up running a HOA software company?

Ben Currin

02:38It's it's a great question. I guess there's there's no, I don't think there is any normal path to running an HOA software company because no one goes to school to to kind of work in community association management or HOA management as it is. But my path, I went to the United States Naval Academy for my undergrad education and ended up as a nuclear engineer and a submarine officer in the Navy. So I spent time traveling all

03:04over the world, having big adventures, kind of doing that. That was really important to me to serve our country and to do something like that and also to have a big adventure kind of in my twenties, which I am glad and grateful to have done. But I always had kind of an entrepreneurial itch and knew I wanted to build something and loved technology, loved to tinker. I like to build little projects and do different things. And

03:28what I saw as an opportunity, not HOA, I didn't know anything about the HOA market, but these kind of not sexy vertical software markets were sneaky big, either had a payments component or a financial services component or had a big ecosystem around it. Started looking at things in pest control and otherwise and just through kind of networking and talking to people working in these industries, someone actually introduced Dave Sawyer who was working of all things on

03:57an HOA management software platform for his HOA management company to me and said, you guys should get together. You're talking about all the same things. I don't know what this HOA market is, but let's get after it.

Nathan Latka

04:08>> Interesting. Interesting. This makes tons of sense. Okay. So he he he was in the industry running a management company, had so much pain. He started building his own code, got connected with you. You guys hit the ground running really hard in in 2018. Let's I wanna fill in the story between 2018 and 2025, but I also don't wanna lose the audience if they're going, what the heck is an HOA? You know, maybe they're a millennial, they're

04:27>> going, I've never lived in a neighborhood before. Tell us what you sell here while I'm on your website. What's the product?

What HOA and Community Association Management Software Does

Ben Currin

04:31So so the we call the industry community association management because it's more than just HOAs. But what the heck is an HOA? An HOA is a homeowner association. Even if you haven't lived in one, you've probably heard of a homeowner association or HOA or some kind of meme about it. It's you know, these are typically neighborhoods or communities that have some sort of common area property. Think clubhouses, amenities, golf courses, restaurants, pickleball courts, just nice landscaped

05:00grass, anything like that. But it also encompasses condominium buildings. So if you live, you buy a condo, there is a shared common piece of real estate. It's the elevator, the lobby, the roof, the things like that. And there's a structure, a little kind of almost like a little city that has a little constitution that are the covenants that kind of manage how you have to live in those communities. You can not do certain things like not

05:26paint your house pink, which preserves property values, but you also get benefits like the use of these amenities and common area assets. So there's a whole industry of specialty property management that really focuses on serving just these community associations, serving owned real estate instead of things like multifamily rental. And those are our customers, those professional community association management companies.

Nathan Latka

05:49>> Interesting. And how many customers are paying for the platform today?

Ben Currin

05:52Right around 500 professional community association management companies. That has within it 50,000 communities and over 6,000,000 homes.

Nathan Latka

06:03>> Interesting. Interesting. You just sort of broke it down. And sorry sorry. 50 sorry. 500 logos 500. 50 ks communities, and then 5,000,000 homes?

Customer Count: 500 Logos, 50,000 Communities, 6 Million Homes

Ben Currin

06:136,000,000 homes.

Nathan Latka

06:14>> 6,000,000 homes. Really? And okay. Sorry. Where are you selling into? Are you bottoms up selling to one homeowner, then you spread, or you're top down selling to Yeah. The logo

Top-Down Enterprise Sales Model

Ben Currin

06:22Absolutely top And we even started kind of far upmarket large management companies and we've gone kind of further and further kind of across that segment as we go. So our first customers had, you know, 50,000 plus doors or homes that they would manage at a time, but we sell to the community association management company. Those folks, we become the general ledger system of record for them and for all the communities that they manage as well as

06:46the system of work for all the work that gets done within that community coordinating with vendors, collecting dues, paying invoices, reporting, as well as the system of engagement for them to provide a technology kind of front door for all of the homeowners and residents in the communities that they manage.

Nathan Latka

07:02>> Mhmm. Most smart software founders upsell against utility metric. Usually, it's maybe number of seats. In your case, you could upsell I'm curious what you upsell against. Number of homes, number of communities, number of pickleball courts that are moving around. What's the thing you upsell against?

Per-Door SaaS Pricing and North Star Metric

Ben Currin

07:13Yeah. It's the kind of the ultimate North Star metric is number of doors. I mean, we we care a lot about the number of, you know, primary users. Early on, we thought about that a lot, the number of professionals working in Vantaca every day as community association managers. But ultimately, that North Star metric is the number of doors that are engaging with their communities through Vantaca as the front door.

Nathan Latka

07:32>> Okay. And that would be your 6,000,000 homes?

Ben Currin

07:34That's right.

Nathan Latka

07:35>> Interesting. Industry standards in this space are like between 50¢ and 1.50 a door. Are you sort of in that range?

Ben Currin

07:41Yeah. I think that's like that's ballpark the right the right range to think about for SaaS. Obviously, can really change depending on are you managing single family, low amenity HOAs in Lincoln, Nebraska where there are it's very light what your HOA does for you as a homeowner, or are you in South Florida with a highly amenitized condo building where you've got valets and on-site staff and restaurants and, you know, other amenities? Obviously, those those dynamics change

08:07kinda sector by sector and the dynamics of the management company as well as the range of products that you consume. Are you using other financial services products like payments? We now have Vagintiq AI kind of throughout the platform that's really changed how our customers engage with us. But that's kind of the right banner way to think about the metrics.

Nathan Latka

08:26>> Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 into 550 software companies so far. Again at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say Nathan, I found you through YouTube, and

08:49>> I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. I'm reading your body language and listening very carefully to how you're structuring your sentences and words, and what it's telling me is, I think you're potentially beating 1.50 a door because you're doing some really creative creative things and adding value in other ways. Is my read right there?

Ben Currin

09:06Yeah, I think that's generally right. Again, you're talking about, you know, price per month per door. You know, we have some of our products that are priced like that and others that are more consumption based and things like that.

Expanding into Payments and Ecosystem Products

Nathan Latka

09:18>> Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. Can we dig a bit deeper here on other business models? You already talked earlier, like, why just do SaaS? If you're already ingrained and a guy from the space like Dave knows the space well and you guys built this great code, why not do payments? Why not do loans to community centers? Why not do, like, whatever? How are you thinking about sort of what spaces to go into now that you have

09:39>> a beachhead, a mousetraps already are already in these 500 community manager relationships?

Ben Currin

09:43Yeah. It's it's a great question. And so to be clear, we started with with just a SaaS solution. We started with that beachhead. That that was the pure kind of single product for for multiple years. Over time, it's really expanded. Everything from payments, we have a payments platform and a payments product that is used across our customer base. That's both inbound payments from homeowners to their HOAs as well as outbound from HOAs to vendors. We provide

10:07a number of different treasury services for community association banks to connect them to the deposits that they are linked to through those associations, which is significant. A place where a lot of relatively low cost deposits are kind of aggregated by community association banks, as well as other products around kind of the vendor management ecosystem that are folks doing work in these HOAs, whether that's landscapers or electricians or insurance companies, etcetera. So we've over time really stretched

10:39into a lot of the different components of this ecosystem. But to your point, the beachhead and and the first and most important vital product for us has and will always be that SaaS product that is the general ledger system of record.

Nathan Latka

10:50>> Okay. And that still today makes it more than call it 60% of your total annual revenue?

Ben Currin

10:54Yeah, that's fair.

Nathan Latka

10:55>> Interesting. Okay. On the payments product, is that just a nice value add you do for free or do you sort of take a traditional 2% to 3% take rate on GMV going through the platform?

Ben Currin

11:03No, it's less than that. I mean, it's certainly less than two to 3%, but we also I'd say it's a value add for our customers, but it's also a way for them to strip out a lot of the friction between them and their customers. So if you think about living in an HOA, do you mail a check to your clubhouse every month? Do you drop it off or can you set recurring payments? Something like that, that

11:27sounds so simple, but that's what we're walking into often in the way these HOA management companies have to manage things like their payments processes. So we're stripping out a lot of the friction as much as we can.

Nathan Latka

11:40>> Interesting. Interesting business model, interesting use case, very specific niche, which we love. Tell me more about the private equity story. Again, you get going in 2018, you guys scale 2019. When did you bootstrap up to? Like when did you raise your first external capital?

Bootstrapping to High Single-Digit Millions Before 2022 Raise

Ben Currin

11:53Yeah, so we didn't raise any real external capital until 2022. So it was the summer of twenty twenty two, which was great. I mean, that kind of run and really 2018, we had had a couple of paying customers late twenty seventeen is where like kind of we got this first folks, 2018 first year in market. So we had had about five years of survival under our belt in terms of bootstrapping the business along and growth was

12:18really good. This has never been a highly capital intensive business, but we saw an opportunity in 2022 that we really had gone from just capital efficient to capital constrained and knew we wanted to invest more in product, knew we wanted to invest more in engineering and really take a big swing at this industry. And so we partnered with JMI Equity in a minority investment in 2022, which was great. They've been fantastic partners to us. We've grown

12:46the business more than 10 x since then. So that's been a great kind of growth story since 2022. Then based off

Nathan Latka

12:54>> homes or revenue?

Ben Currin

12:57Revenue.

Nathan Latka

12:58>> Okay.

Ben Currin

13:00Homes not far off either, but certainly revenue. And then this past year in terms of funding, we did a minority recap, brought in another minority investor in Cove Hill, Cove Hill Partners. That was fantastic. We closed that investment and announced it this fall, which again has just further added fuel to the fire for us and allows us to keep taking a big swing at this industry.

Nathan Latka

13:26>> Let me try and unpack a little bit of that in case someone else is listening in there, your version of 2018 thinking, man, maybe in three or four years I want to go this sort of minority route. 2017 you had a couple of customers. Are you comfortable sharing sort of first year where you two are working together? 2018, what was total revenue that year? Do remember?

Ben Currin

13:40Yeah, mean, very little. Think 2018 in the low 100 thousands of revenue.

Nathan Latka

13:46>> Okay. And then do you remember the year you passed your first million?

First Revenue Milestones: $100K in 2018, $1M in 2019

Ben Currin

13:49It would have been the following year.

Nathan Latka

13:51>> Okay. That's pretty good growth.

Ben Currin

13:53It it happened relatively quickly. And and and I think you gave you're you're giving us or me a little too much credit that we had plan to bootstrap it along and then do a minority round. Neither Dave nor myself are in kind of the VC or PE kind of world from our background. So we didn't know what we didn't know. We just knew that we saw an industry, we saw a problem set, we knew this could

14:19be a really big opportunity. We knew if we just continued to do the work, we would be able to find these opportunities as they presented themselves. And so we really didn't have that perfect plan to do that. It ended up being the right thing to do, but we just continued to try to reinvest everything that the business could give us back into the business and go find our potential for growth and go find more customers. And

14:40we were lucky enough to develop a really outstanding reputation very quickly in the industry because we won some large influential and very successful customers who were able to post extremely great results on their side by using our software, and we were able to continue to kind of reinvest in the business that way.

Nathan Latka

14:58>> That's obviously a great story. Did were most of those earlier customers the reason you could close those enterprise accounts early on was because Dave came from the industry, so he had connections there. Was it you cold calling, knocking on doors, hustling?

Ben Currin

15:09I'd say it's all of of those things. You know, it's not it's not just one thing. I think we we did have some really good connections in the industry, but that certainly wasn't it. We were quickly selling to strangers, but what we were able to do is really show the results of our early customers, even Dave's management company who is experiencing tremendous growth by utilizing a much newer and best in class technology platform and really do

15:34kind of show and tell with all of our customers who really, of our early customers were willing to be great advocates for us and open their kind of doors and, and show new prospective customers the success that they were having. And so our customer success is really what fueled us.

Nathan Latka

15:50>> And then before we get into the external capital story, want to give you guys a complete credit for what you bootstrapped to. Are you comfortable sharing what you bootstrapped to in terms of revenue before you took out external capital in 2022?

Why They Raised: Capital Constrained, Not Capital Inefficient

Ben Currin

16:00It high single digit millions.

Nathan Latka

16:02>> Okay. So between five and 10,000,000. Sure. Okay. Very cool. So at that point you said you knew you were capital constrained at that point. Why? Did you know you could spend money on ads and you didn't have profits to do that or you wanted to go buy a company? Like, what made you guys look at each other one morning and go, man, we we are capital constrained.

Ben Currin

16:18Yeah. I I don't think it was a single thing. What what we found is that we were able to consistently, as we reinvest more in the business, continue to, you know, open up the constraints of our capacity. Things like onboarding and implementation, things like delivering on a product roadmap that would continue to open up new markets, things like just continuing to invest ahead of sales and marketing to open up capacity. We had really, really light sales

16:44and marketing investment for the first several years of the business. And so all of those things together, we just realized every additional dollar we were able to put in the business, 5 or 10 more dollars come out within a pretty short period of time, but it's just what is that time delay and how much can we short circuit that time delay? And so all of those things together kind of had us look at each other and

17:03say, hey, this is the moment where we know this is working, we have the playbook, now we need to scale and it's worth investing ahead.

Nathan Latka

17:10>> And then can we fast forward to today and then I want to wrap up with your take on AI and product roadmap you guys have for next year. But if you were doing caught high single digit millions in 2022, let's do the worst case, 5,000,000. And you also said you 10x ed since then. That would put you at around $50,000,000 ARR this year. Am I in the right ballpark there?

Ben Currin

17:27I won't give you an exact number, but you're not orders of magnitude off.

Minority PE Structure: Primary vs Secondary Capital

Nathan Latka

17:32>> Okay, fair. I mean, I'm just using your to be fair, I'm just using your numbers. You said 10x since 2022, you said 2022 is high single digits. Okay, fair enough. So take me through the minority sort of negotiation there. For somebody else listening negotiating their own minority, I mean, why did you guys do minority instead of majority? How did you decide on the amount of capital? Was it all primary capital or was some of it secondary?

17:52>> How did you think about that?

Ben Currin

17:53Yeah, great question. So it was a mix of primary secondary capital. We had some folks we were solving for two things. Primarily, we were solving for cash into business. Right? So starting from that chunk and saying, okay, we know we want to capitalize the business, put some what can we forecast over the next three or four years on kind of an aggressive front, which was still relatively capital efficient at the time. And then also we had

18:17a couple of folks who had been working in the business for several years at that point who really had the business had grown and exceeded their expectations. We wanted to provide some liquidity to some early kind of members of the company, which we were able to do, and that was great. And so that's kind of how we thought about the mix. In terms of why minority versus majority, mean, it was clear to us that that was

Retaining Majority Ownership Through Minority Rounds

Ben Currin

18:38a checkpoint that would accelerate growth. I don't know if we perfectly saw over the next three or four years 10x over that period of time, but we saw that as a possibility. We saw a minimum of five plus x, so why would we wanna sell more of the business at the time than we had to? And so that's been great. And really we approached this most recent investment similarly. We wanna capitalize the business first, provide some

19:03liquidity to some earlier investors. You know, we did a friends and family round right alongside JMI, really small dollars, but truly friends and family, return some capital to them, amazing. But and then, you know, retain majority, you know, control and kind of the ownership of the business to go and to take a big swing at this.

Nathan Latka

19:20>> So is JMI and Early Family still on the cap table or that's why Coville came in, they took out JMI and Early

Ben Currin

19:25JMI rolled is still on the cap table as is most of the friends and family. We just provided some liquidity to those parties.

Nathan Latka

19:34>> Very cool. Alright. As we wrap up here, we got to talk about like AI briefly. Right? How are you thinking you're you're deep into it. You see a lot of data. You're touched connected to a lot of doors. How are you thinking about like AI and your product road map on a go forward basis?

AI Strategy and the HoAI Acqui-Hire

Ben Currin

19:45Yeah, it's a great question. It's been the single biggest game changer for us certainly in the last two or three years. So we've been building internally with AI for several years and putting products in front of our customers as well. And then kind of the big bang moment for us was late twenty twenty four. We acquired a small kind of business, really almost acqui hired a couple of really talented partners out of Y Combinator, a company

20:14called HoAI that joined vantaca. We still operate that product as an independent product brand, but within vantaca, closed that kind of late twenty twenty four and very quickly has become a really meaningful part of our business. Almost all of our new logos onboard both vantaca and h u a I together. And what h u a I is, is really an agent that lives within the Vantaca instance that relentlessly pursues all the tasks that humans would have

20:44otherwise used vantaca to do. So executing customer billings, answering homeowner questions about bills, paying invoices, creating reports, solving complex problems. It's quickly grown, to touch really every bit of vantaca and every bit of the homeowner experience. We have an HVI voice agent that replaces or supplements a call center for management companies to answer homeowner calls and solve billing questions and create follow ups all through kind of our customer base. So that's been, really transformational in terms

21:17of how we engage with our customers.

Nathan Latka

21:19>> Well, Dave, people wanna wanna if people sorry, Ben. If people wanna watch you guy you and Dave execute this strategy over the next twelve months or so, where's the best place they can follow you guys online?

Ben Currin

21:26Yeah, I mean, so that's a good question. Our marketing team would hate my answer. I'm not wildly active, neither is Dave, neither is Howe U, the founder of HYI, who is now my partner. Vantaca is. So the vantaca website's good. We have multiple channels. There's a vantaca podcast, Guilty by Association, to play on association management. There's tons of good stuff out there. So I'd keep up with that. And certainly if you're within our industry, you'll see

21:54us in all those channels.

Wrap-Up and Where to Follow Vantaca

Nathan Latka

21:56>> Guys, Ben's partner Dave had an HOA management company in 2017. He said, I gotta fix all the inefficiencies, let me build software. Ben said, let me join you in 2018. They hit the ground running, break about $300,000 of revenue in 2018, way more than double in 2019 up to about a million bucks of revenue. Hit caught 5 to 10,000,000 of revenue in 2022, totally bootstrap before they go, let's pour fuel on this fire, and they did

22:17>> with a minority investment from JNI, an acquihire of a YC company in 2024, now investing in growth, call it north of $4,050,000,000 bucks of AR, somewhere in that range, right, but 500 community managers, 50,000 communities, 6,000,000 homes helping these communities run more efficiently with both software products, payment products, project management products, you name it, they're vertically integrated. Ben, thanks for taking us to the top.

Ben Currin

22:41Thanks Nathan, appreciate it.

Nathan Latka

22:42>> You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.