Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much have you raised in total so far?

Min Alexander: Our Series A round was $39 million. We had targeted $35 million. It got others really excited. We ended up declining other funding. We could have been well over $45 million.

Sramana Mitra: The story was pitched to me as a $5 million-plus company. Do you want to add some color to that?

Min Alexander: Last year, we closed the year at $5 million in revenue. There was a month around Q2 where we were looking at $240,000 a month in revenue. Right now, we are over $3 million a month in revenue. We’re on track to hit $50 million.

Sramana Mitra: The partnerships have started kicking in gear and snowballing.

Min Alexander: Absolutely. We’re projected to grow at just under 10x of last year. We closed this round at over a hundred million. The multiples are certainly good. We’re just focused on continuing growth. Our team size has also grown. Last April, we hit the milestone of our hundredth full-time employee. It’s been an exciting time.

Sramana Mitra: You are in various local markets. Do you need teams in those local markets?

Min Alexander: We do. There are so many others with models that are building out to disrupt this industry. Some of them take on more of an aggregator model where they’re centralized. I’ve spent the last 12 years providing inspection, repair, and renovation for institutional owners. You realize you cannot assume you know what’s going on at a local level, especially when it comes to people’s homes.

For most Americans, this is going to be the largest investment they’ll make in their life. Having the local groups, we live and work in the communities that we serve. Having full-time employees who are local and committed to the work has been very important for us. We have full-time employees in every market that we’re in. I don’t see us ever being an aggregator or going fully virtual.

Sramana Mitra: What is the logic of how you choose to be in a particular community? How do you choose?

Min Alexander: We had a meeting of the minds moment with my management team very early last year. There were a couple of markets that weren’t growing. We paused on those markets where we weren’t growing until we can figured out what are the root causes of what’s clicking and what’s not clicking.

Our growth strategy has always been revenue. When we know that we’re converting 50% of our customers, that’s when we know this mousetrap is right. It’s serving our clients the way that we want. Now we can replicate it at scale, but we do want to go slow in order to go faster. I’ve launched 50-state brokerages. If you can’t get the process and the model right, you just replicated the same non-working model. I have a lot of folks with heavy operations experience.

I am an operator. I was the Chief Operations Officer and General Manager at a company called Auction.com. We had a local presence in 23 states with auctioneering. It was very field-focused and very similar to what we are doing today.

The way that we build out the model is there are two components. Because we have institutional clients as the major investors, they have an existing portfolio which alone could keep us very busy. But we have a guaranteed revenue contract. We go where our partner needs us. We have a baseline revenue for institutional businesses. Just because it’s a higher volume, it’s also a lower margin.

Once we get into a market, our institutional clients help us get to sustain the fixed cost. We have a dedicated sales manager. Then of course handymen services. Our margins are much higher when we are able to do some of the work. The vast majority, we partner. That’s the base layer. We always need to have an anchor client in all the markets that we need to be in.

The second layer is because of the brokerage agreements and relationships that we have, we’re able to activate them. We actually have a deep bench of our brokers and agents that we’re able to activate and call through a lot of cold-calling, visits, coffees, and meetings.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander
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