Yash From Momentum (00:00)
Hello and welcome back to Building
The show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful SaaS business. I'm Yash, your host for the show where every episode we bring to you the stories and strategies of founders who've been in the trenches conquering churn and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Jason from GetKera. GetKera helps DIY landlords simplify property management. We're excited to hear the story and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins.
the losses and everything in between. So buckle up, grab your headphones and get ready to dive in the world of SaaS. Hey Jason, how are you doing today?
Jason Matthews (00:39)
And then great, Yash, how you doing?
Yash From Momentum (00:41)
I'm doing great as well. And thank you for joining us for this episode. So let's start with the basics. Tell us what is the big bad problem that Kera is trying to solve for today.
Jason Matthews (00:56)
I don't think it's a bad problem. The conversation started because one of my friends was like, hey, how does your dad do it? My dad is a landlord. How does your dad do it as he's growing with all the stuff that you need to do as a landlord? And actually right now he just does everything himself. He has all these pieces together.
solutions where he uses Excel for some stuff and he uses QuickBooks for some stuff and he uses like e -transfer which is a way to transfer money from bank to bank in Canada. And I started thinking about it, like these big big players, they're not doing it like that. They're not piecing together stuff. And being a software engineer, like maybe we can build something.
Yash From Momentum (01:44)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Matthews (01:51)
First I started looking out there, I'm like, hey, maybe someone has already done this. And there is a few solutions out there. We have some competition there. But I realized that it was never quite what I wanted. It never had the user experience that I was expecting for something catering to small landlords. So we're like, hey, let's go ahead and build it and see what happens.
Yash From Momentum (02:15)
That's a luxury that a lot of software engineers have. Let's build it and see what happens. in our case, it was sort of fairly similar where I am not a software engineer, I'm a mechanical engineer who worked as an investment banker, but I had a co -founder and a good partner who was a software engineer. And so that was sort of the approach that we took as well. That let's build an MVP, let's put it out there, let's give it to a couple of people that we know.
get their feedback and see what happens, right, essentially an experiment. And that's interesting. So today, how would you define the stage that Kera is at, right? Where are you today? What's the status quo?
Jason Matthews (02:56)
From a funding point of view, we would be a pre -seed company. We have no revenue so far, so we are at the beginning. And from a product point of view, I would say that we're a little bit ahead of MVP. We release a product, we start marketing it at the beginning of the year. We got our first active lease, which that's how we made our success,
A lot of people measure in active daily users, a lot of people measure in signups. For us, the product is not something that people use on a daily basis, or would they need to. And that's the goal. The goal is that they should be able set up and forget it. But we do measure it on how many people trust us to put their lease on the platform, invite their tenants and receive their payments and do all those stuff. So we have one active lease
Yash From Momentum (03:35)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jason Matthews (03:53)
And luckily we've started getting some demos and it took a little while to get some steam. We're almost six, seven, eight months in from our first customer. It took a while to get some steam, but it seems like as we're moving on, more people are getting interested and we're getting bigger landlords. We now have on the phone someone that has
between seven and eight properties that is very interesting to move forward. So I would say that things are moving up, but they're moving up slowly.
Yash From Momentum (04:32)
Got it. Got it. And so one of the other things that I also wanted to understand from you was on the side of this, is where most of the small ticket SaaS that we see in and around, which typically started, let's say $9 or $19 or $30 per user per month or something to that effect.
they have reserved demo for large ticket customers, for enterprises or for mid -market and stuff like that, let's say the average contract value is $20 ,000 or more or something like that. With Kera, one of the things that I noticed is that you still have a demo on the website. And so what is your thought process behind that? Despite being an inclined user with a small ticket size, we also had demo.
upfront, were charging $9 and $19 per user per month. had two plans. And one of the things that I realized as we scaled up was that having a sales -led motion where we had SDRs, BDRs, and people who were doing the demo, for a small ticket size, the economics was not working. So for the economics and customer acquisition cost to lifetime value of the customers to work out, we needed
the $19 user to discover us by themselves, sign up by themselves, activate by themselves, become a paid customer by themselves with little or no usage of support or anything like that. And it was only for the deals that were $15 ,000 a year or more where we could have account managers and people who were demoing the product. So I was curious about this. So what's the thought process behind this?
Jason Matthews (06:22)
Yeah, sure. Completely right. You're 100 % right. And I've worked enough to start us on companies to know that this does not scale. But I think I've been an entrepreneur long enough to hear that phrase, do things that don't scale. And what we're getting into right now is that we're new enough and we don't have that confidence, right? People don't have that trust.
Yash From Momentum (06:37)
yeah. Yeah.
Jason Matthews (06:50)
So being able to have face -to -face time really moves the needle. So the thought process here was, hey, this may not scale, but don't think that ahead. Think about getting your first 10, first 100 users, and as you're moving forward, then scale things. It makes no sense to build this massive ship.
with one person on it. Right. So we said, hey, we'll open demos. It's a website. We can change it at any time. So open the demos. And as people are starting booking and as we start becoming more successful, as people start hearing more from us, it may be something that we have to remove and optimize the site more for conversions.
Yash From Momentum (07:19)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I think do things that don't scale. Paul Graham said that and which very famously, I think, Airbnb founders sort of took that very seriously. And they did in their early days. For all the listeners and viewers, if you don't know that, do check out the search for Brian Chesky or Airbnb do things that don't scale. And you'll come across the anecdotes that they share about this as well.
The other piece that I want to understand is how are you building a SaaS product? In my limited experience, it is a very taxing process. Because I've always been a service provider. And when we started building the SaaS product, it changed from
We always had clients who had requirements. And then now, with the SaaS product, had cohorts of customers who had problems. And then we had to identify insights from those conversations. And so it's extremely difficult to build a product that just works on its first or second goal. There lot of some cases you need to pivot, some cases you need to.
like build a separate set of features or target a separate ideal client persona and so on and so forth. With that, having said that, how are you able to manage your full time position at Intuit, which is obviously like a very large group of SaaS? What would you call it? Like a very large software company.
Jason Matthews (09:16)
I would call it tools for small businesses.
Yash From Momentum (09:21)
for small businesses, right? And so people may, for people who don't know Intuit, it is a company behind QuickBooks and TurboTax and a couple of other really large softwares. And so how do you maintain the balance between building a SaaS product and making sure that you're giving your 100 % at Intuit as well?
Jason Matthews (09:42)
Lack of sleep. Yeah, it ends up being I work full time and I guess morally I want to give my 100 % to this company. So I give 100 % there. And then after 5 o 'clock, I give my 100 % to Kera. And doing that and balancing, a fiance, I recently got engaged.
Yash From Momentum (09:44)
well. Got it.
-huh.
Jason Matthews (10:11)
and then having friends and a regular life, things, things are moving along a little slower. but that is the risk that you take, for that safety, right? a lot of people may say, Hey, quit your full time, quit your full time job and go like deep into it. I have a different mentality, like mindset.
Yash From Momentum (10:12)
Congratulations. Yeah.
Jason Matthews (10:42)
My mindset is if you can't have someone pay you to do what you're doing, then you may not have something at all. So for me, it's like, I will continue working into it and I will grow this business. And if I can't get funding, it has to be something wrong with me, the way that I'm approaching funding or the product or the market.
Yash From Momentum (10:50)
Yeah.
Jason Matthews (11:09)
because something that I've never heard an investor say is, well, I'm not going to fund you even though you have a million users and a bunch of equity.
Yash From Momentum (11:20)
Yeah, no, that's 100 % true. And so there's always a huge debate between these two things, right? Where some people would say that entrepreneurs are those people who like jump off the cliff and then build their parachute on the way down. And I'm like, you be that guy. So I don't wanna be that.
Right? So, yeah, no, I don't want to do that. I mean, ultimately, ultimately, it's a product that I'm building and I'm trying to create value. And there's no relationship between the amount of risk that I should personally take versus the value that I will be able to create. So if, I mean, just because I take a lot of risk doesn't mean that I will create a lot of value.
And just because I take less risk doesn't mean I create less value. There's no relationship there.
Jason Matthews (12:16)
Yeah, I think what happens is that people attribute the time, right? If you take the risk, then you have way more time to get this over with, right? You have way more time to pivot, you have way more time to talk to those customers, you have way more time to do those things that don't scale. Suppose if you have a full -time job
and your customer is calling you at one o 'clock in the afternoon and you're like, I'm on stand up. I can't handle it, So I do attribute some of it to having more time. That being said, I feel like these are things that you can work around, right?
Yash From Momentum (12:49)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And so one of the things that I've also seen happen is that because you have, sometimes because you take an insane amount of risk, you end up making decisions that are very short -sighted, right? So that like give you ROI tomorrow, give you ROI next week, give you ROI next month. And so like...
It happened to me, right? So left my job, started a company, then instead of selling licenses for out of the box SaaS product, because I wanted revenue, I started selling customizations to the SaaS product. And so the first three customers that I had, we had three separate instances. Very short -sighted, right? So it took us six months to deploy. But then these were not in the best interest of the company. But since I was worried that, you know,
it's going to take a large amount of time. I made a couple of mistakes, made some decisions that I wouldn't have if I had. So in a way, like it may offer you less time to work on it, but it will give you in totality more time with peace of mind. So you're able to make decisions that genuinely, but there are pros and cons for both of these.
Jason Matthews (14:18)
But you were lucky for you. You went and you look for ROI. There's founders that end up back into a corner that end up taking an investor that does not have their best interests at heart. And they really get to lose everything. having that struggle may not be the best for everyone.
Yash From Momentum (14:32)
yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Jason Matthews (14:48)
If it works for you, go ahead and do it. Yeah, for me personally, there's a family, you have to put food on the table and I'm not willing to risk their safety to scratch my itch, right?
Yash From Momentum (14:50)
Yeah, go ahead and take it.
Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. And so how would you, so like, do you have some sort of a framework in mind where, where you've thought, when you say that, okay, like how should you think about it? Like, do you say that, okay, at this amount of revenue or MRR, or at this amount of funding, or when the company gets to a point where, where it
Jason Matthews (15:08)
Thank
Yash From Momentum (15:28)
it pays me X amount of dollars. Like how do you think about it? So that you will move full time into it. And how should a person who is currently thinking about starting a side gig along with a full time job, how should they think about it?
Jason Matthews (15:43)
So for entrepreneurs, it's a little hard. I've also done freelance, and in the freelancing world, it's a little bit easier because it's supposed to be once you get about 90 % of your salary and you're growing, then you're safe to move on. For entrepreneurs, it's a little bit different because things are happening a little quicker. You may be getting customers faster than you're getting
like funding or those meetings, right? At some point, you're to have to make the decision of, should I take the sleep? That being said, you don't have to jump with nothing done and then you're risking just falling. Hey, maybe you have 70 % of the parachute built and at this point you're trusting that you can build the other 25.
Yash From Momentum (16:30)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Jason Matthews (16:43)
down the line. That being said, there is no perfect metric. There's no perfect balance. But it really depends on your life and how much you have in savings and how much do you need to live a comfortable life? Are you willing to take some risk and sacrifice? Me personally, I'm not. But that being said, I understand that because I'm not,
I'm going to need be able to show way more. If I'm going for investment, I'm going to need to be able to show that, hey, we're doing very well and you're putting your money in the right place. Opposed to, hey, I'm quitting my job and I'm putting everything on this, give me money.
Yash From Momentum (17:37)
Yeah, no, that's fair. That's an interesting way of thinking about it as well. So how would you, like, do you, in that case, like, you define short -term or long -term goals for Kera in the sense
I see on LinkedIn, I was also able to see that we have about nine people who are engaged with, who are associated with Kera. And all of them are remote. And I'm assuming some of them are part time as well.
and they have some other engagement. And so in those cases, like how do you set your short -term, long -term goals, any internal frameworks that you use to make sure that, to make sure, and since they are remote, their hours would be different and the amount of time that, or the face time that all of you get together with each other is also going to be a little different. And this is like coming from me.
individually because I don't understand that. I tried working remotely during COVID because I had to, but it was extremely painful for me. How do you manage all of that?
Jason Matthews (18:48)
So we have about nine people, almost 10 people working with us and everyone's working without pay, including myself. And I think everyone's working, the promise that I give them is that you'll end up learning a bunch of stuff. You'll end up learning a bunch and you get what you put into it, right?
If you treat people like adults, they normally tend to act like adults. But that being said, this is not the first time I've done this. This is my second venture. And something that I did learn was that you need to probably keep people occupied, right? They need to feel like they're invested in whatever is going on. So you need to give them that face time. You need to be able to give them enough tasks and...
And it has to be something that they enjoy to do. We just hired four engineers and they're all doing very, very well. I know that right now the market is not the best, especially for your software. But this should make their resume a little bit better. And in exchange, we're getting help building this
And hey, if everything works out, everyone gets super rich. And if it doesn't, everyone gets a bunch of knowledge and a better step for their next
Yash From Momentum (20:21)
This is very refreshing to hear because one of the challenges that, how did you attract and find these people because one of the challenges that I've seen a lot of potential of future SaaS founders face is they are not able to identify those early team members who are willing to contribute.
like was there a method to this, was there a process to this, was it just you being lucky or them being, like how did this happen?
Jason Matthews (20:52)
So there's this site called AngelList. I think now it's called Wellfound. We posted a job post in there. We use Wellfound pretty often. And we got about 150 engineers that were applying. We shortlisted about 20 or 30. We interviewed those 20 and 30. And we ended to 5
Yash From Momentum (20:58)
Yeah well found.
-huh.
Jason Matthews (21:22)
or for it, I guess. But there is no shortage of people that want to work on something cool. We actually we found our one of our co -founders to World Fund as well. Nick was he's a sales manager and I'm a tech guy. as much as I am a people person, I have not the best at sales, especially when it comes
Yash From Momentum (21:49)
Ha
Jason Matthews (21:50)
marketing and understanding and learning all these different things. So we hired for it and now Nicos R is CRO and he's doing great. But there's no shortage of people that want to do something and take that risk.
Yash From Momentum (22:01)
Interesting.
Got it. well found. So that's interesting. We'll check that out as well. I know about the platform. It used to help startups raise capital. Like a few years ago, we had a profile over there. We found our first investor on AngelList or Angel.co as it was called. But since they made, I think, the change to well found and helping companies attract, acquire talent.
We've not been there, so I should check that out. This is interesting. this brings us towards the end of the conversation, which is where I have a question for you that our previous guest had asked you. And so one of the questions that they have is, do you think about, in the self -serve journey, how do you think about activation and the experiments that you run to make sure that more and more people, like
as high of a percentage as possible of the people who are signing up, they become activated within the product. And how do you define activation at Kera?
Jason Matthews (23:15)
So let me start with the latter. Activation at Kera means that you have gone through creating an account all the way to have an active lease, which means that there's four steps that you have to go through. You have to connect your bank account so you can receive those payments. You have to create a property. You have to create your account, obviously, and you have to invite a tenant. That tenant has to accept that invitation. That means that you're fully activated. It means that you went through
all the steps and now you have an active lease. How do we go through activation? Well, we actually touch upon that early on. We try to get in -person time. We can book a call, book a demo, talk to our customers, which again, another cliche, which is talk to your customers.
Yash From Momentum (24:08)
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Matthews (24:12)
Most people don't want to get talked to. If you can go as far as, I am interested in investing my time that I have to do anything in the world to talk to you, you already have a foot in. And it's going to be up to you to get it all the way to the other side. But for the most part, it's, yeah.
Yash From Momentum (24:15)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Matthews (24:42)
You need to talk to those customers. And I'm not the best at reaching out to these customers, but we have an amazing team. And I'm so lucky that I don't have to do this alone. Myself, I'm massive on the technical side. Sager is huge on the design and product side. And Nick is in it when it comes to activating customers and bringing people
Yash From Momentum (25:11)
And so talk to your customers is one of those things. You should brush twice a day. Everybody knows that you should brush twice a day. Few people do, though. And everybody knows that you should talk to your customers. But few people actually go out and do it. And it's extremely important. And strongly recommend that. That's sort of a recurring theme across all episodes that we've done up until now.
as well and so that's massively massively important. What's the big challenge at Kera that you are trying to solve for today?
Jason Matthews (25:45)
Trying to solve for today, getting money probably. But more than that is being able to balance the fact that you're actually not getting paid to do this and balance that with your personal life and your personal struggles. Sometimes it's more like the gym. Sometimes you get up and you don't want to do it, but you kind of know that you have to. At least you knew to be able to see any progress.
Yash From Momentum (25:49)
raising capital.
Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Matthews (26:14)
And so I guess our struggle has been mostly like the management of time and being able to strap up your boots and say, okay, well, let's go for another
Yash From Momentum (26:27)
I think it was a pleasure having this conversation with you Jason. Thank you for joining in for this episode and for all the people who have been listening or watching this whether it is on Amazon Music or
YouTube or Spotify, you will be able to find the link to GetKera in the description. It's getkera .com. And if you are a landlord, do sign up, manage all of your properties, ditch the spreadsheets, ditch the patchwork of apps and integrations and Excel sheets or whatever it is that you have. Check it out. Today it's a bunch of nine, 10 people who got in together to build a great product.
and go out there support them. Until next time.
Jason Matthews (27:11)
All right, thank you.
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