E15: House Flipper Turns Tech Founder and Accidentally Builds 300-Person SaaS Business

Cache Flow

Jesse Burrell worked in real estate for 5 years before becoming the CEO for BatchService where he helps real estate businesses grow with comprehensive property intelligence and technology. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Cache Flow:

• The important aspects of property flipping.
• Why people lose money on property investments.
• Different proactive CSM strategies.
• The scalability of software companies.
• What companies need to grow exponentially.
• The conversion rates for real estate investors.
• What the process of building a real estate SaaS company looks like.
• The benefits of bootstrapping a company.
• Why so many successful founders come out of Google.

Resources:

• BatchService
• Jasper.io
• 8 Lessons from 8 Startups with Trajectify’s Mike Krupit
• Curotec

Connect with Jesse Burrell:

• LinkedIn

Connecting with the host:

• Brian Dainis on Linktree

Quotables:

• 00:48 - “When we first started talking it kind of became clear that you accidentally started a 300-person SaaS company out of your real estate business you were building tools for sales and lead gen and property acquisition various things you were doing in your real estate businesses and from what I gathered in our earlier conversation you didn't have any intention to build a software company but essentially you’ve accidentally built this 9-figure so you ended up shutting down the real estate companies going all in on software prime example we talk about this a lot in the software industry be your own best customer and you're a prime example of that.”
• 07:28 - “We have all these different data points and you're able to chop up nationwide data and we have a lot of distress indicators on homeowners are they absentees of a vacant home have they owned it for x amount of years do they have this much equity and you can build your own list and then you start going and marketing to those people and reaching out to see they’re more likely to potentially want to sell in certain positions..”
• 08:19 - “You make all your money and this is what my first boss told me mentor taught me was you make it on the purchase that’s where you make your money you make it or you lose it on your purchase if you buy bad you can't fix it for cheaper to make more profits you have to buy right and you have to be disciplined enough to buy right, that was something I learned at the very very beginning was don’t be desperate and make sure you buy right.”
• 30:09 - “An interview with Jeff Bezos when he was a book website, right when they first started I think it was pre-IPO and the interviewer asked him so how big can this really get, how are you going to compete with Barnes and Noble and he goes I don't know I think e-commerce is the future I think maybe someday this could be a 100 million dollar company, do you think this interview could be that video for you where your like maybe I’ll sell it for 1 to 3 billion dollars and then 10 20 years later it’s like a trillion dollar market cap or something is that in your cards at all?”
• 45:20 - “We were penny smart dollar stupid if that makes sense with some of our hires of like oh well they’re way cheaper and they’re almost as good or I think they can be almost as good but that’s not true when you get the most talented they know their worth so I think hiring the right people more quickly was probably one of the biggest mistakes.”
• 49:45 - “If we were to sell what would the purpose be, what would this be, do we want to sell, do we not want to sell? So we’re just doing hypotheticals if we did and it’s so funny because I bought this up and I was like honestly let’s say we were to sell we’re crazy enough to just try and go do something crazy all over again and I looked at him and I say we have to bootstrap it.”
• 1:01:22 - “We were lucky I won’t say that we were successful because of me part of it had to do with luck at the beginning but we turned our lucky opportunity into something very special the way we poured and developed and learned and persevered and did all those things, I think it started with a little bit of luck and that little drop of luck we grabbed it and we ran the hell out of it.”