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Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 6)

Sramana: By the time he invested in your business, had he already sold the business in England?

Brian Requarth: Yes, he already had an exit in 2007, three weeks before the financial crisis. He was 27 years old. He sold it for a lot of money and when he came down to Colombia, I told him that I want to transition from the old business of websites to this new business. The business was break-even at that time, but we were hardly making any money from our old business with the websites and the real estate agents in the US. We had to change our whole model and we had to launch these websites in other countries. He financed a lot of the transition. In 2007, he wrote a big check for a couple of hundred thousand dollars to enable us to make the transition into the marketplace model in Latin America. I had plans earlier of going with him to build the business in England but then I met my wife. >>>

Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 5)

Sramana: Tell me more about financing, what was the financing strategy that you followed in the company?

Brian Requarth: We decided to bootstrap for a long time.

Sramana: How long did you bootstrap?

Brian Requarth: We started in 2007. We didn’t have cash flow to support the expansion to Brazil in 2009. In 2010, my family invested a little bit of money. My first professional investor was Simon Baker who was the CEO of REA Group in Australia. Today, it’s a $6 billion market cap company. >>>

Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 4)

Sramana: How long did you do a critical mass of a particular listing such that the marketplace on the other side would become interesting?

Brian Requarth: During that time, we didn’t have enough listings from customers that we were offering free trials to. So we actually built a robot to go out and get the listings for us. At that time, we hired our first employee—an intern from Brazil to work with me in Bogota. It was just cheaper that way. We then started scraping the listings from different websites, which actually enabled us to create more traffic because we started generating more visits. >>>

Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 3)

Sramana: What did you find to take feedback from him?

Brian Requarth: He was just Brazilian.

Sramana: That’s it? That’s the qualification, that he was Brazilian?

Brian Requarth: The other qualification was that his family had a simple construction company. It had nothing to do with home-building, but I thought he perhaps knows something about real estate market. He didn’t, but he started researching the market. Perhaps the excitement was contagious >>>

Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 2)

Sramana: What’s the name of your German friend?

Brian Requarth: His name is Thomas Floracks.

Sramana: So Thomas was doing the technical work, you were doing the sales and marketing work in this little web development business that you put together?

Brian Requarth: Yes. He built the first couple of websites. I would sell the website and he would go build it. We basically did anything that we could do ranging from a website for a Christmas tree farm that sold Christmas trees to a product called QuickClot that was used in military warfare situations to stop hemorrhaging. Our portfolio was quite eclectic. I realized that we should focus on more verticals. So we started building real estate websites in Columbia. And then around 2005, VoIP was just starting to happen, and I bought some VoIP lines and started selling real estate websites in the US market. >>>

Building an Online Real Estate Business From Brazil: Brian Requarth, CEO of VivaReal (Part 1)

We’ve done Entrepreneur Journeys stories on a few Latin American entrepreneurs like Marcos Galperin (MercadoLibre), Ricardo Villadiego (Easy Solutions), Rodrigo Teijeiro (Sonico), and Martin Migoya (Globant). In this story, we bring you Brian Requarth, whose scrappy maneuvering has resulted in a $10M+ business with $30M+ in financing – a tough act in Latin America.

Sramana: Brian, let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Tell us where you were born, raised, in what kind of circumstances?

Brian Requarth: I was born in a small town in California called Sebastopol in Northern California. I was raised in a middle-upper class environment. My dad was an entrepreneur and had a small business. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: InRule COO Rik Chomko (Part 7)

Sramana: What does the business look like today? Where are you now?

Rik Chomko: Last year, we had one of the biggest revenue growth we’ve ever had. We grew revenues by about 45%. We’re feeling very good about our business in Europe and North America. We have good traction in the market. We’ve done a great job this year of raising awareness and that was really a struggle for us. I can’t tell you the number of times that we had someone say, “I wish I knew about your product three years ago.” So this year, our goal was to make sure that we don’t hear that again. >>>

Building a Global Software Company From Australia: Bigcommerce Co-Founder Mitch Harper (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: So merchants in India can pay in Indian currency to subscribe to Bigcommerce? There is a problem in India with currency as you know.

Mitch Harper: They have to pay us in US dollars, but they can accept in their local currency.

Sramana Mitra: That’s an issue in India. A lot of people find it difficult to buy services in USD.

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