Bootstrapping a RegTech Venture to $20M: PerformLine CEO Alex Baydin (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: During the period that you’re describing, vertical ad networks were starting to be fairly big. I remember we were covering companies like Adify and vertical search engines like Kayak. In this period that you were describing, a vertical ad network was starting to develop.

Alex Baydin: A couple of signals started happening. Because we were delivering this report which entailed screenshots of all the user experience that generated the lead, we started hearing from our customers that the quality of what we were selling was good and the volume is low. They said, “But that report is super interesting. How do I get that report when I buy from the vertical ad network or I buy from the large ad networks?” They were very interested in that.

Bootstrapping a RegTech Venture to $20M: PerformLine CEO Alex Baydin (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Once you decided that you wanted to own your own business, what were you going to do?

Alex Baydin: I was working at one of the internet companies that I mentioned. I actually got fired for the first time in my life. I’ve been working since I was 15. I took it really hard.

Sramana Mitra: Why were you fired?

Alex Baydin: The company was trying to get better performance out of a certain group. I was running the lead gen division there. I may have had a different communication style that my boss wasn’t a huge fan of. I just took it really hard. I ended up in the hospital that night. I felt literally sick to my stomach.

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.

Bootstrapping a RegTech Venture to $20M: PerformLine CEO Alex Baydin (Part 1)

RegTech is emerging to become a category of its own with numerous risk and compliance issues getting addressed by technology solutions. Alex has bootstrapped a wonderful business and is now doing a private equity-driven roll-up within the space.

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?

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?

Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How did you finance this company?

Min Alexander: Earlier on, there was a lot of seed funding. Early seed investors like Meeting Street Capital, Idea Fund, and Venture South are still very active with growing portfolios.

Sramana Mitra: Are these North Carolina investors?

Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is that a commission model or a markup model?

Min Alexander: There’s a gross margin. We want to be competitive on price, but we’re also saving time and convenience. Then we’re able to deliver our services for ordering and tracking through a digital interface.

Sramana Mitra: What is the gross margin for your business?

Female Entrepreneur Scaling a PropTech Venture with Over $40M in Funding: PunchListUSA CEO Min Alexander (Part 2)

Min Alexander: Along the way, you realize that real estate is one of the most un-innovative spaces. When you think about early 1998 dot com burst, it did open our society and economy to the power of technology. Why is it that all of these spaces were influenced by technology like logistics and computer science, and web marketplaces, but not real estate? That started a lot of my thoughts around so many problems. It’s all so fragmented also.

Then in 2012, I was recruited by Alta Sources Portfolio Solutions as the Head of Real Estate Services. This gave me my first opportunity to create processes and technology at scale. At that time, we were serving institutional owners of single-family residential real estate. In my free time, I started working on this business model. This was in 2014.