Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 6)

Min Alexander: This business builds one by one. That’s a competitive moat for us. Folks that think they’re going to blast and market, that doesn’t necessarily happen in an industry like ours. It’s taken so long to disrupt it at scale. You need all the components. You need the technology and infrastructure to keep it simple and very accessible. You also need relationship builders who are holding these clients accountable in the markets that we’re in.

We build the brokers. We’ll have transactions that are also consistent. As long as we’re serving the brokers and delighting them with our quality, they’ll keep coming back. Every sales transaction brings two homeowners that we can serve throughout their entire homeownership journey. We have a seller who sold their home and a buyer who bought the home.

Then we also have a 50 to 60-page inspection report that gives us 400 plus unique data points on that house that they just bought. We hold more insight that we can share with them. When you have data, we’re also able to partner with the homeowner in their journey to say, “In the next 12 to 18 months, you’ll want to look out for these three roof failures and do the work before you have an event.”

This is really the vision that we have to create access, simplicity, and joy in home ownership so that the reactive component is almost non-existent if we’re doing what we need to.

Sramana Mitra: Great. I’m going to switch gears a little bit. What has been your experience as a female founder? There are different kinds of viewpoints on female entrepreneurs.

Min Alexander: This is really loaded. At the end of the day, trying to create something new that very few others can see is a challenge. As for female founders, there are not many of us. In my personal experience, this fundraising process has opened my eyes to some challenges in the industry but haven’t experienced them firsthand. I’m not without supporters who are about the encouragement and empowerment of women and women founders.

I recently read something. We raise our boys to be brave and we raise our girls to be perfect. When you want to create something, you can’t be in a mindset of perfection. You need to break through walls and break rules. You need to be fearless and not worry about what others are thinking. The fact that it hasn’t been done before, very few will believe you.

I found that, in my position, people are intrigued walking into a room when fundraising for example. The investment bar was high for me in terms of what have you proven. In terms of due diligence, I felt they wanted to see a guarantee that I would be able to support them.

Sramana Mitra: You can’t get $35 million without proof points and metrics. The good news is you have metrics. The reason you have been successful in raising an oversubscribed $39 million round is that you have metrics.

Whether it’s male or female entrepreneurs, you have to have metrics to raise large amounts of financing. Even to raise small amounts of money in the early stages, you have to have metrics. We work with thousands of investors. The vast majority of investors we work with want to see metrics. Very few invest in concepts.

Min Alexander: Absolutely. I’m also a first-time woman founder and first-time CEO. There are many components to that.

Sramana Mitra: You’re right that the bar is higher for first-time founders. The bar may be somewhat higher for female founders. For serial entrepreneurs, life gets simpler. Even failed serial entrepreneurs get benefits because the VC sees that they have done something.

I loved listening to your story. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander
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