The SaaS growth strategy that helped a first-time founder build a real estate investment SaaS to ~$9k/mo

24-year-old Donato Callahan is a first-time founder making anywhere between $7k and $20k per month with his real estate investment SaaS.

Two things are responsible for getting him here: Partnering with influencers on webinars, and having the audacity to ask for things he has no business getting.

Here's what Donato has to say about his journey. 👇

Learn to grow a SaaS by talking and failing

I always say you should talk to ten people with ten years of experience in a field you want to pursue. By the time you start, you'll have 100 years of collective wisdom guiding you.

My cofounder and I are both first-time founders with no previous experience with startups, capital raising, or tech. So, we learned by talking to people.

And failing — a lot!

Success leaves clues and failure leaves landmines. Best to take a map of where other people have stepped and blown up.

Side hustling a real estate SaaS

I worked as a geo-spatial analyst for the Department of Defense, but I spent a lot of time investing in real estate.

I was having trouble finding good places to invest in — properties that would make me money with less risk. When you have little money, a mistake in the real estate industry can end you before you start. Then, as you grow, you need to be able to get more efficient at identifying opportunities faster as there are fewer and fewer good deals waiting around.

I couldn’t find a solution so I thought, why not build my own solution? And that became BrightInvestor.

I kept my job for two years, while building it on the side. I was at my desk from 6AM until 4PM. Then, I’d go home to 20 missed calls, 30 texts, dozens of emails, and have to attend to both my real estate investments and BrightInvestor.

And that’s not even mentioning the process of raising capital and trying to allocate spending effectively — which vendors to trust and which ones not too, negotiating terms, and prioritizing the roadmap.

If I had known how hard it was going to be, I may not have done it.

It's taking way longer than I thought. And it has been way more expensive than I thought.

But, here we are, and I'm better for it.

Nearing the $10k MRR milestone

BrightInvestor is a B2B SaaS product for real estate investors, agents, lenders, property managers, and other real estate professionals. Our goal is to make real estate investing easier by providing all the data investors need. It’s $99/mo, and we nominally make money from affiliate kickbacks as well.

Our MRR ranges from $7-9K after our first year, with our biggest month being $20K+. That variation is due to our annual payments, which create a lot of volatility in our revenue.

The month when we brought in over $20k, we hosted an co-hosted affiliate webinar with a prominent influencer in our space. It brought in over 50 paid signups in a single night.

Build your SaaS slowly; grow it quickly

I truly don’t understand the concept of “MVP in 4 weeks and grow!” We built our MVP slowly.

Good things take time to grow. Be patient.

We used react.js and vue as our primary languages for BrightInvestor. And there are lots of tools that allow us to run the whole operation: ConvertKit, MeisterTask, Slack, Novo, G-Suite, AWS, and more.

Even after building the product, there was — and still is — a lot of iteration and customer feedback.

Building the right team

I haven't written a single line of code for BrightInvestor. I came up with the idea, designed the initial mock-ups, then shifted to project management and sales. That meant I had to find the right people to bring the vision to life.

Now, I have one co-founder and team: a project manager, two developers, sales manager, consultant, videographer, marketer, legal, and a tax guy. Everyone on the team is a contractor for legal and tax purposes, and due to the volatility in the work required.

Finding the right people was hard. I essentially had to date them.

My co-founder and I spent 5 months initially "dating" before starting our company. Since then, we've prioritized doing co-founder dates every month where we get in a car, drive around, share our dreams and goals and personal problems. Through that, we've become dedicated to each other's success.

After solidifying the cofounder relationship, referrals were key to our hiring process.

The most important thing is to treat your team like people. Know their spouses, their kids, their struggles, and they’ll have ownership over the process like no other.

Having the audacity to ask

In addition to a good team, this journey has required — and greatly benefited from — my young audacity. I ask for things I have no business getting.

Take data licensing, for example. It was too expensive for us. So I reached out to a company, saying something along the lines of, "Hey, so I'm going to do business with you for a long time. We're a new company and, over time, you'll make lots of money from us. But, to get started, these data licensing fees don't make sense. So, instead of $2k/month, give us 3 months for free as we do the initial build out, then 3 months at $500/month, then 3 months at $1k/month, then 3 months at $1.k, and then $2k until our 2 year contract is up. If we can't do that it's not going to work for us."

And they agreed. I did this half a dozen times. You can too.

SaaS growth strategies

Our primary growth channel has been expert partnerships and webinars. Beyond that, we've dabbled in Google ads, and social media marketing.

Leveraging expert partnerships and webinars

Co-hosted affiliate webinars have been huge for us. We usually convert 25-40% of the attending audience on our webinars.

Our best webinar yet had 500 registrants, 150 attendees, and about 50 people converted to paid. The reason it was so successful in that instance was that our partner was a prominent influencer in the space, so sourcing is important.

To do this effectively, you need to understand your partner’s goals and their audience. You need to make sure that your partner is actually going to promote the event through their channels. And you need to promote it yourself at least 2 weeks in advance.

Way too many times have I had an event where someone with a 60k following forgot to promote it and only eight people showed up.

As for the webinars themselves, we create a free presentation about real estate market research and tips and tricks for finding good markets and good deals. Then we present a case study demo of how our product makes the process easy.

We give our partner's audiences a discount for signing up through the partner that day. And we send follow-up emails, offering a recording of the webinar.

Our partners get an affiliate kickback of 10% of any sales.

Hiring out for ads

We’ve been using Google Ads for about five months so they're new to us.

Right now, our CTR is between 15-25%, which is pretty good. We're working on improving the audiences and re-targeting more folks who look like the ones who have completed purchases.

My advice is to find an agency or person with a proven track record of success in your space. And make sure you dedicate the time to truly collect the data you need to see it work. It is not an overnight process.

Reducing churn through usability

Reducing churn helped a lot too. We've seen churn drop from 22% to 6.5% in about 5 months.

To get here, we had to fix a lot of bugs and random errors. Then, we had to redesign the UI to be more attractive.

Then, we added a new feature that we call "speed mode". It basically took all the settings that you manually had to enter every time you did a query and made them automatic defaults. Now, you only have to click one button to get an answer. It reduced the average button clicks per session by 57.

So essentially, we made it easier to use and we're continually adding high-demand features at no additional cost.

Focus on your customers' processes

I’ve always tried to do right by people. That means refunding people if the product didn't fix their problem, going the extra mile to create content for partners, giving users the chance to roast me and the product, listening for feedback, and actually caring about people's experiences.

All of this has given BrightInvestor a stellar reputation. It also gives us great feedback. Customers volunteer their time and energy for free to make us better because they see themselves as a part of the company.

We've spent easily 100 hours on the phone with power users, and they have completely shifted the company's direction.

But it’s important to remember that what people say they want and what they actually want can be very different. Learning that was a big “aha” moment for me.

So I like to find out what they actually want by asking about their processes. If you find out what their process is, you'll know what they need. And you can insert your product into their process by adding the necessary features.

Raising capital for a real estate investment SaaS

So far, we’ve raised a little over $350k from friends, family, colleagues, and even some customers who asked to invest. Doing that meant giving away about 15% of the company.

In the beginning, my family invested because they wanted to support me. Then, friends started investing because I had proven to them on other projects that I was dependable, reliable, dedicated, and made things happen. Then, people started coming to us because they believed in the product and wanted to be a part of its growth.

Raising money is easy if you have built a foundation of trust. At every stage, you have to constantly network with people and provide value to them outside of your business to create a relationship. Only after that foundation was laid could I give them the opportunity of joining us on our journey, sharing what we were doing, what our plans were, and how they could be compensated.

Every time I asked someone I didn't know very well, it was a “no”.

Your SaaS may require a season of sacrifice

Most businesses aren't worth building.But if you're going to do this, then do it.

It's a sacrifice of everything else for a season. So, make sure the people you're doing it with are in the same season of life, or do things that don't require them to be in the same season of life as you.

And you should absolutely build your business to sell someday. It keeps you organized. I'd like to sell once we command a valuation of $100M to $300M via an ARR of $10M to $25M.

Feel free to follow along! Check out my site. Or if you're interested in real estate investment, have a look at BrightInvestor.