Building a PropTech Venture with a Virtual Team: Discount Lots President Paul Hersko (Part 1)

Paul and his co-founder have built a capital-efficient PropTech venture using primarily a virtual team. It’s an interesting niche that is largely underserved.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Paul Hersko: I was born and raised in Chicago. I went to school at the University of Iowa and then moved around a couple of times. Now I live in South Florida. I’ve been here for the last two years and plan to stay here for the long term.

Sramana Mitra: What is the genesis of your entrepreneurial journey?

Paul Hersko: It’s a windy road. I would say it began in middle school in the early 2000s. I was in middle school and my dad was a business owner. I taught myself how to code websites using Dreamweaver. This was when most businesses didn’t have websites. I was 12 years old and my dad would just bring me around. I would go to his friends’ businesses and make their websites. I would make a couple of thousand bucks in middle school.

Then I graduated college. I worked in sales for a couple of years. I had this itch. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Back in 2015, I went deep into podcasts. Do I want to go into real estate? Do I want to go into e-commerce? I’ve been good with computers and technology.

One thing led to another and I started going down this path of learning about Amazon e-commerce. My first entrepreneurial journey was when I started an Amazon FBA business. We were importing directly from factories in China and then bringing it to the US and selling it online. I started that in 2016.

Sramana Mitra: What were you selling?

Paul Hersko: A lot of baby products. This was back in the golden era where you would import anything from China and it would just fly. There was no competition. You didn’t have to be super sophisticated. I quit my job within the first month and scaled it to seven figures within the first nine months. I was on my own.

Sramana Mitra: You quit your job within the first month. How were you financing inventory?

Paul Hersko: All my life savings. Maybe $30,000 that I had saved. I put it all into that and put it on credit cards. I just went all in on it. It worked. That was my first business in 2016. I hired my first team member and it grew.

Sramana Mitra: For the first nine months, you were by yourself?

Paul Hersko: Six months. That business continued to grow. I got burned out from it because I didn’t feel I was providing value. I wasn’t fulfilled. During this time, I was contemplating if this was something I want to be doing for the rest of my life. I didn’t think so at that time, but I just kept doing it because I made a nice living. It was a great lifestyle. I was traveling all the time. I didn’t work that much because there wasn’t a lot to do.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a PropTech Venture with a Virtual Team: Discount Lots President Paul Hersko
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