Building a PropTech Venture with a Virtual Team: Discount Lots President Paul Hersko (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you finance yourselves?

Paul Hersko: We have a fund that we run. People can invest in our fund. Let’s say you invest $150,000. We take that money and purchase property with it and provide our investors a return. Then, we sell the land.

Sramana Mitra: What behavior are you seeing in your user base? Are people buying the land to make money off of the land or are they mostly buying just to use the land?

Building a PropTech Venture with a Virtual Team: Discount Lots President Paul Hersko (Part 2)

Paul Hersko: Then my entire life changed in 2019. My brother-in-law took me to this party. He said, “I have a good friend who owns this business. He’s our age. You might like him.” I started talking to him. I was learning about his business and he was like, “I have this company where I sell land online and people buy land with a credit card.”

We started to become good friends and learned more and more about what he was doing. I was absolutely fascinated. I was in e-commerce, which I loved. And it was real estate that I wanted to be involved with, but didn’t have experience in it.

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?

From Developer to Cyber Security Entrepreneur with $10M Revenue and $18M Funding: LoginRadius CEO Deepak Gupta (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about team? You and your co-founder brought it to almost one million ARR an a bit of seed funding. How did you build the team from there on?

Deepak Gupta: Team was one big challenge for us. We had never done teambuilding exercises before. That was something new. We got some initial people who were excited for the product. We had to talk to them and explain the vision. We got a few good team members in the beginning. They are still with us.

From Developer to Cyber Security Entrepreneur with $10M Revenue and $18M Funding: LoginRadius CEO Deepak Gupta (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What were the components of the full authentication?

Deepak Gupta: We did a user name and password with social login. We were managing the full login and registration. Pretty much the whole element of login, registration, forgot password, and user activation.

Sramana Mitra: Were you still just within the Drupal ecosystem?

From Developer to Cyber Security Entrepreneur with $10M Revenue and $18M Funding: LoginRadius CEO Deepak Gupta (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In what timeframe did you zero in on the pricing model?

Deepak Gupta: We did experiments on pricing. After 9 to 12 months, we got to a decent pricing model.

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about those experiments? What was working and not working?

From Developer to Cyber Security Entrepreneur with $10M Revenue and $18M Funding: LoginRadius CEO Deepak Gupta (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you get done in those few months when you still had the job?

Deepak Gupta: At the beginning, there was a little hesitation whether the product was going to work. As soon as we launched, we started getting customers. Customers started asking questions. In those few months, I saw that there is a big need for this product.

From Developer to Cyber Security Entrepreneur with $10M Revenue and $18M Funding: LoginRadius CEO Deepak Gupta (Part 1)

Deepak tells a textbook story of a developer turned entrepreneur. He and his cofounder started by bootstrapping with a paycheck, validated the hypothesis, and then quit their jobs. We love stories like this, as you know.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me where you’re from, born, raised. What kind of background?