Sect Int_Andrew Borovsky_Audio

[00:00:00] Andreas Senie: Welcome back to this expert sector interview with none other than Andrew Barofsky, CEO of RentApp, multiple time founder, executive leadership roles at CashApp, Cadre Square, co founded 8020, was a big time player, principal designer at Apple and Adobe, tuning in for the first time for the roundtable.

Andrew, nice to see you. To my audience, as always, thank you. I'm Andrea Barofsky, your host. Correctly, I roundtable founder, brokerage owner and managing director for KW commercial. Andrew, welcome to the show. 

[00:01:07] Andrew Borovsky: Uh, thanks for having me. Uh, nice to be here and thank you for, you know, to, to everyone listening.

[00:01:12] Andreas Senie: Yes. Um, you know, it's interesting having someone with your background on our show, right? So we are primarily a commercial real estate show. The roundtable includes cybersecurity, construction, finance, institutional, real estate, government policy, everything except the nitty gritty of financial technology, which obviously that's how real estate runs, right?

Finance. So your, your experience at cash app square and so forth. I'm very curious about not to mention your time at square, but first tell, tell the audience more about who you are, how you got there, how you ended up where you are today. 

[00:01:48] Andrew Borovsky: Um, sure i've been in uh tech for about 25 years now So i'm aging myself a little bit.

I got started during the during the dot com Uh over in san francisco worked for companies like macromedia adobe and apple Primarily in product design role. So my background is very much like product development Um, not not really like executive Uh functions or strategy was very much about building kind of great products um, but then as it happens, of course, you know, the You Yeah, kind of the the more advanced my career became the more I had to be involved in sort of the business questions Eventually, you know leaving apple to start my own company um Also again in the product development space and then joining um square which was my foray into payments a big reason for why I uh, I joined uh square is actually I wanted to Um, you know, shift gears from being, 

[00:02:39] Andreas Senie: um,

[00:02:46] Andrew Borovsky: and square was a great place to learn. Um, and then actually, um, after square, um, I, uh, you know, second company that I co founded was in, um, the CRE space. So I got, I got to play with that as well. Cause CRE is its own rabbit hole together. So, um, and, uh, you know, rent top is, is, uh, now the third company, uh, my first gig as CEO.

So now I've. Run the whole gamut. Um, and so, you know, learning new things here as well, but, uh, it's interesting, I think in a lot of ways, this company is a culmination of everything I've been involved in creative product development, payments, you know, money movement and real estate. 

[00:03:22] Andreas Senie: Well, so yeah, so I've got my own platform and I, I founded a platform to solve my problem as a broker, right?

So I was very much customer facing cause I was a customer. And your whole background started first customer facing coding through to solve problems Which I have found in some startups isn't the case, right? They build a product they think somebody needs but nobody needs it and then it fails Um, and you are the uh unicorn here Because all of all the companies listed here, they've all exited.

Well, they have all done well. I mean, have you had some war stories? What would you say to the audience out there thinking about doing it themselves today with AI, right here we are in commercial real estate. And everyone's like, Oh, do it yourself. You've been there. 

[00:04:05] Andrew Borovsky: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I look, I think there's a, I, I, I won't say that my, my, my journey was in any way, uh, uh, you know, consistent.

I think there was a lot of ups and downs, uh, along the way. I think you're, you're, you're spot on. It's very easy, especially actually like earlier in my career, when I was like kind of purely focused on product design, you know, all designers, um, anyone listening to this that happens to be a designer, you know, Um, We're all guilty of sort of like building things that we want to see in the world rather than customers Um, and it's actually very easy to do that when you're insulated from the business a lot of times You know, you're building something.

You're really are responsible. We're just crafting the user experience You don't get to interface with customers somebody it's always somebody else's job to do that And so you don't you know, you're really detached from the The end user and when a particular product fails, you're just like, you know, why did that happen?

It's so beautiful. Like why, why, why did no one want to use this? So, um, yeah, and the world is riddled with incredibly well designed products, um, that have failed spectacularly and we all know and use products today that are absolutely awful, uh, that are massively successful, um, Salesforce comes to mind, um, you know, among other things.

So, uh, so yeah. 

[00:05:20] Andreas Senie: Well, it's so safe. So you took your experience, right? And then you founded your first app. You became CEO of rent app. That was your, your baby. Where's that today in the marketplace. And just for the audience tuning in, for those that don't know, 2015, we had 80 vendors in the commercial real estate tech space today.

There are 20, 000 vendors. I mean, this, this space has mushroomed to the nth degree. We have funds, funds on funds that we're investing into the space when before nobody wanted to get off Excel. And for the record, as a broker, I still use Excel, continue to use Excel. But here you are pushing rent app out into the industry, a little bit of a crowded space.

Tell me the why and the where. 

[00:06:02] Andrew Borovsky: Yeah, by the way, I'm sure you've seen the meme where it's like, you know, it's like the guy holding the world on his shoulders and they usually like. 

[00:06:09] Andreas Senie: It's 

[00:06:10] Andrew Borovsky: Excel. Yeah, it's, it's, it's absolutely remarkable how much of the world's wealth, like, if not most of it, like sitting, sitting in an Excel document that's obscurely named and being emailed around.

Yeah, 100%. Um, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I'll actually zoom out a little bit and go, you know, so I had this stint at Padre, which is, um, you know, this tech enabled, uh, commercial real estate investment platform. And, you know, I joined the company, um, uh, precisely because I was interested about this world that runs on, on Excel and where most of the, uh, World's assets kind of lie.

And this is how, you know, rich people get richer. And this is how the number one way to create intergenerational wealth and all that stuff. So it was really, really curious to know how the machine works. Um, and, uh, like you said, it's interesting that space, which I guess we can refer to as prop tech, uh, 

[00:07:01] Andreas Senie: Today it's prop tech or built world or what?

It depends who's talking and how Michael Beckerman. But yeah, go ahead. 

[00:07:07] Andrew Borovsky: Yeah. Yeah. I think we, you know, I think 2010, like when I joined Square, it was all FinTech. And I think when I joined Cadre, it was PropTech. So, you know, I think one followed the other, but, but yeah, the PropTech, uh, the PropTech space is very, um, very vibrant right now.

Um, actually, uh, my, my, uh, one of my teammates just came back from Blueprint, which is this, uh, uh, conference out in Vegas, which is massive, you know, and it's basically a PropTech conference. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a huge event. Um, and, uh, and what you find is, um, that, uh, and being in commercial real estate, where you find is that, um, there's a lot of crowding in the institutional side, right?

So, um, so when you're, when you're talking about, you know, Large investors, large owners, operators of real estate, you know, tremendous number of companies, uh, founders, uh, tremendous amount of venture capital chasing those spaces, um, to create, you know, that, I mean, effectively the next excel, right? Or, or automate some piece of, of this kind of massive workflow.

But actually what was interesting is coming out of that space two years ago, and that's when we started this company is I felt, um, you know, there's. Half of all real estate in the united states that's owned by individuals, right? And actually it's more than half it's more like 60 so you hear all these stories about wall street buying main street, but The truth of the matter is that this is still a country that's, you know, where real estate is predominantly owned by individuals.

Um, and then in particular, when you talk about like rental properties, so income, income, uh, properties, right. So a third of all real estate in the United States is for rent. Um, and that includes commercial and residential, et cetera. And that's also half owned by individuals. But what you find there is no, one's playing in that space.

Um, when we started to work on rent app, like one of the key, okay. Uh, stats that stood out to us is of all the mom and pop landlords in the United States, and there's 11 million of them sizable populations like, you know, there's there's countries out there. It's 11 million people, right? Uh, they collect rent using cash.

50 percent of all rent. Collected within us. So that's about a quarter of all rent in the U S is collected using cash, which is staggering in 2024. And so what you find is you dig into this space, the long tail of real estate ownership, the United States as the prop tech revolution, even the FinTech revolution has really kind of passed them by.

Right. There's just, they're, they're effectively unbanked in some ways. Um, which was 

[00:09:36] Andreas Senie: pretty on purpose, I would argue, right? So the more it's opaque on purpose, right? So if you, uh, Saul Klein would say, if you can't, you can't rate it, you can't grade it, right? So you can't get a rating to it and you're on that route, you're, you're solving for the little guy.

You're taking? Yeah, 

[00:09:53] Andrew Borovsky: the little guy space is really interesting to me, and it dates me back again to Square, because Square is, you know, now I no longer organized. 

[00:10:01] Andreas Senie: They're huge. Well, 

[00:10:02] Andrew Borovsky: no, no, but I mean, they're customer base, right? So I, I just was gonna say, yeah, they're huge. I mean, I think, uh, I don't track the stock prices closely now, but.

You know, it's a 50 at least it was a 50 billion company that was built on the back of micro merchants, you know, businesses that were so small, they weren't even considered small businesses. And you know what they solved. It's it's it's fascinating that at the essence of square so simple that there was all these small merchants and the only way that they could.

Take payments was cash and square created the square credit card reader, but allowed everyone to use their smartphone to take credit card payments. And you know, an empire was born. So I love that space because the truth of the matter is if you can figure out how to reach the long tail of American, you know, uh, business owners and I, and I, and I list, you know, real estate owners as also business.

These are, these are cash generating enterprises, right? So they're small business owners. If you can reach them and if you can, deliver, you know, a product that makes their life simpler, that reduces costs, reduces complexity, uh, speeds things up, then there's tremendous opportunities. And most companies are not looking there.

Most companies are okay. How do I create a new product that I can sell to start with? Right. And that's a very different space and less interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm very, this is, this is my sweet spot. I love the, the, the, the space. 

[00:11:19] Andreas Senie: Well, sorry. So, so rent app is born and is growing and I'm going to be me.

But I'll direct here. So here's rent up in a bit of a crowd servicing. Yes. The long tail market. What differentiates rent app and all your learnings from cadre and those who don't know cadre was one of the few Truly successful capital raising platforms that connected capital investors are what's the difference with you because there's a lot of property management Tools the majority.

I mean you do compete against you obviously. 

[00:11:50] Andrew Borovsky: Yeah. Yeah. So so so thanks for asking. It's a great great question I'd love to answer so, uh So yeah, if you go, if you go, if you look at the, the, all of the rentals in the United States, you know, and just, let's say 50, 50, half are owned by institutions, half are owned by individuals, both start with an I, so it's great.

Um, so institutional space, that's the yardy backyard, right? So no pun intended. Um, that's where you have, you know, I mean, honestly, A dozen fantastic. Um, property management suites. Right. You know, Yardi being like the, the, the, the, the big guy. But, you know, AppFolio, Buildium avail a zebo rent ready or cafes, it just goes on.

It just, yeah. Baseline. Um, so, but they're all serving the institutional space and that really means that the product is built and it really, it's really most valuable when you have something like a hundred units. Right. And yeah, because it's like to manage 100 units is a lot of work and you need software to make yourself more efficient.

And a lot of that software software comes with, um, you know, payments built in. But the other side, as I mentioned, half of all 23 million units. For rent in the united states that are owned by people that only own like two or three units And you're not going to adopt yardy to manage three units, right and yet there are millions of people Yeah, it's it's it's completely insane So what if you want to go digital and again mass majority of these people are cash in check If you want to go digital your options are Venmo cash app, you know my old love and uh, and zelle zelle's probably the fastest growing and uh, And you know what you have there is free products, you know fundamentally, right that are very easy to use You can send money to a phone number or an email address and and you know money moves from point a to b But they're while they're really great for moving money to pay back a friend for lunch they really kind of suck at rent and and what it comes down to is Uh venmo and cash app you're not supposed to use them for business payments as part of this, you know you get into the The dark web of how that happened because that's a whole conspiracy theory involving credit card companies But um, you're you know the second you start to take business payments and i'm sure some of your customers if you ran businesses on top of venmore cash app You got that ominous email that says hey you now have to sign up for the business account now all your transactions That you know cost you two percent Um, and then Zelle is actually great straight to your bank account.

Very easy to use, but the problem is the limits are super low. So for rent, anyone collecting rent over Zelle knows this, you're going to be, you know, your rent, your, your renter is going to be paying you over three weeks, sometimes over four weeks, because they're going to hit limits. You know, as this housing has gotten expensive, it's become more of an issue because a lot of people have thousand dollar limits on their results.

So inevitably you're going to be paid, you know, twice a month. And that's a real problem for a lot of people. And so, so if you don't do that, then you have this other side is again, this professional property management software, but it's completely overkill. You're not going to be paying somebody 20 bucks, 25 bucks a month to manage, you know, three properties.

By the way, it's really complicated to get. It is like adopting Salesforce. It's again, it's great. You, you're. The investment you put into something like an avail pays off. We don't, we have a hundred units, uh, but it doesn't if you own three. So rent up very quickly. Super easy to use. You can send money to a phone number or an email.

There's just like Dell. Um, and it kind of, uh, the, and then the similarities end because we're better. So super high limits, you can send or collect up to 20, 000. There's no limits on the number of properties that you, you, you can manage. You can support up to 10 banks, a bank per property. Um, uh, it's auto pay sounds really stupid, but Venmo and Zelle don't have auto pay.

Right. So you could put your tenants on auto pay. So they pay every month and if they're on auto pay, they get to build credit, which is massive, right? So. Housing is really expensive. A lot of people are renting even longer. If you can tell your tenant that for free, if they use rent app and by the way, the whole product's free, right?

So if you could pay using rent app, you know, I get paid on time, auto pay, send money in a single transaction and you get to build credit, right? Um, so it's really, really wonderful. And like I said, the free piece is really important, right? You get something that's You know, it's easy to use a cell, but it's not powerful.

It can't be as powerful. Yeah, 

[00:15:50] Andreas Senie: it's the merchant. So you're talking about fintech, right? You're talking about payment gateways. You're talking about transactions, settling transactions. You have to come from somewhere. 

[00:15:59] Andrew Borovsky: Yes. So we use ACH. So bank to bank transfers. ACH is, um, inherently Quite cheap. Um, you're 

[00:16:07] Andreas Senie: the next generation.

No, 

[00:16:09] Andrew Borovsky: actually we use a CH we use a CH. Um, and a CH is getting better because we now have, um, RTP RTP is fed. Now, like the, the federal banking rails are getting quite good. Um, you have instant settlement, all sorts of like, uh, you know, uh, advantages to it. But fundamentally, you remember, these are like interbank rails, federally, you know, uh, um, sponsored rails.

So they're, they're not expensive to move money over ECH costs. Like, I mean, the fundamental bank costs is somewhere around 2 cents, maybe 3 cents. Um, and so when you are, if you are, if you own real estate and you go to a platform and a platform says, okay, so for your renter to pay rent, that's going to cost 10.

To move money over a 99. 9 percent margin, right? You can just like, it's completely made up number. So in our case, we just eat the cost because fundamentally, if you're competing with, uh, cash and checks, if you want to move money to digital rails, it's stupid to charge fees. And so, and we want to grow. And so the product's completely free.

There's no gotchas. Um, and, uh, our model is we're going to build products on top of it. So use, use, use our really powerful, completely free product, you know, get our platform, 

[00:17:15] Andreas Senie: which is the payment settle and that's what it is today. As it stands 

[00:17:20] Andrew Borovsky: for core stuff. Yeah. The easiest way to pay or collect rent with a lot of.

You know, bells and whistles completely free, and then over time we add features on top of it that deliver additional value, and they really are kind of in the they're both in the on the consumer side or on tenant side landlord side. I think the opportunities are in the financing space, so we just launched a feature called split pay for the renter that allows you to instead of paying your full rent on the first, you can pay half your rent on the first half your rent on the 15th.

We charge a fee for that. Right. Um, it's cheaper than using credit cards, cheaper than using payday loans. It actually generates revenue for us, keeps the whole service free for everyone else on the landlord side. Same thing, nine out of 10 customers that we have small landlords, people that have five units now to create a portfolio of five income properties, as you know, That's not a trivial task, right?

That's, that means you, you know, like to get one rental property up and running as far as there's people 

[00:18:13] Andreas Senie: by property. By 

[00:18:15] Andrew Borovsky: the time you're on your fifth, like you've put in blood, sweat, and tears. And again, you're now are, you know, what I think is a qualified operator. Well, guess what? If you want to buy your sixth property and you go to a bank, no one will lend you.

In the eyes of the bank, uh, somebody that owns five units, you're an over leveraged consumer. You have too much debt effectively, even though it's all cash flowing. And as you, as you know, broadly, again, if you go into macro, you know, uh, banks have been getting out of small business lending. Right. You know, more and more.

They're just like, 

[00:18:43] Andreas Senie: they don't want to, 

[00:18:44] Andrew Borovsky: they don't want to do this. Yeah. And I, and I actually think what we have here is a product that's, you know, we're, we're very well positioned to do small business letting and not in our case, small landlords. So how it works is if you're a landlord and you're collecting rent for five properties, your five units, and it's completely free.

Um, well, guess what? We know your cash flows and actually we have like 90 percent of the information we need to underwrite you for a loan. So our landlords, when they, um, when they're, you know, working with us for a couple of months, what they're able to do is able to come to us to rent out capital as kind of the, The working name right now as they're able to say, Hey, I want to buy this unit.

You know, it's an off market unit down the street. You know, if I want to close in 24 hours, we want to be their main source of capital and we will charge for it. This is not cheap capital. This is effectively bridge capital, but I think we can be much more efficient on, for example, closing fees and origination fees.

We want to be the best game in time and we want to be national. In a space that, as you know, again, private lending, hard money, lending tends to be hyperlocal. So there's so much opportunity to make money in a fair way where you're adding value and people are willing to pay for that value in this long tail space of real estate ownership.

I feel very comfortable delivering the core platform for free. 

[00:19:56] Andreas Senie: Well, it's. Spot on and good on for you for cornering the market. I'll almost say, and getting in here fast, right? Because you're 

[00:20:04] Andrew Borovsky: hoping 

[00:20:07] Andreas Senie: you're, you're, you're building on FinTech principles for serving under banks communities, right? You're coming in, you're providing a service, you're managing transactions, and then you are becoming the bank, right?

Rich people earn interest, poor people pay interest, giving people a way to access capital that otherwise couldn't, which is great. Yeah. And I hesitate to make, to ask this question. How do you get around someone who drops in a credit card? Can I drop in a credit card? I mean, there are places where you cannot pay rent with your credit card.

It's just that simple. That's it. Not allowed, right? And you said national, not international. So I'm curious on your thought process. 

[00:20:42] Andrew Borovsky: Uh, yeah, I mean, with regards to credit cards, look, it's a, it's your, you shouldn't be paying rent with your credit card, right? First of all. So, I mean, that's a 3 percent fee on average.

So that's, that's completely insane. It should only be used in. In in extreme situations again, this is where it gets into. It's really interesting, right? People go. Okay. Well, I want to pay rent on my credit card Anyway, even if I pay a fee because I can collect rewards 

[00:21:04] Andreas Senie: Cash back and I get points or whatever 

[00:21:07] Andrew Borovsky: The matter is that if you do the slightest little bit of math, it doesn't work, you know At best you'll break even right?

So whatever you're paying fees, you'll make back and rewards that are Effectively fake money. Um, but even that in that space, look, there's some room for innovation. So I love a company called built rewards. I'm sure you've come across that. I'm sure your listeners have, and they have a credit card you pay rent with, right?

But once again, what's interesting, what allows them to do that, right? Is there's some, there's some magic sauce, you know, that they have there where they You know, bring together the credit card networks, the banks, in this case, Wealth Fargo, they negotiated a really wonderful deal with them and the largest operators in the country to do something that maybe kind of works out where the renter effectively gets about You know, 1.

5 percent on their, I think it's closer to 1 percent honestly, but something right on their rent in a form of like whatever air France points. Right. Um, and, but that type of innovation is only possible, right. With the backing of the war of, of, of the country's largest owners. Right. So, you know, Starwood Blackstone are on, on built cap table for a reason, because you need to like have these deals, right.

With the biggest owners to be able to innovate in the space. All that stuff is not available to the quote unquote small landlord. And I mean, built works with, you know, to talk to built about rolling out their credit card product for your properties. You need to have a thousand units. Right. That's it.

That's like massive, right? What, what, uh, what are you 

[00:22:38] Andreas Senie: large transfers? Right, exactly. Exactly. Right. So, yeah, 

[00:22:43] Andrew Borovsky: so I think again, I go back to what we try to focus on. And this is again, where we're a lot like square. And I think I've inherited so much wisdom from that company. I'm eternally grateful for being able to work there and to be able to report to Jack was, you know, just a brilliant, brilliant, you know, strategist across kind of the board.

Completely different verticals. But, um, but what we're trying to do is we're trying to, you know, bring, you know, the big guy tools and services and capabilities to the little guy and, um, and square if again famously has given the technology that Starbucks if you recall in 2010, right square was unanimous with small coffee shops, right?

And I think in 2010, there was actually a revolution, like the small coffee shop became A formidable institution in about 2010, I actually largely attributed to square making it possible for a small coffee shop, small local coffee shop to compete with Starbucks, which was, you know, I think it's at the height of their, that's before they became a sugar company, right at the height of their, at the height of their scale.

And so I love that. I want our customers, our landlords, our network, our renters to have the tools that you typically associate with, you know, Luxury buildings in new york, right? I want that experience to be available in san antonio, texas 

[00:23:56] Andreas Senie: Right, you're talking seamless seamless payment experience. I mean, it's that simple 

[00:24:01] Andrew Borovsky: Seamless seamless experience around The largest payment everyone makes every month and seamless payment around half of your paycheck.

Remember You're supposed to what you're supposed to put. I remember those days when Suze Orman right told you you shouldn't spend more than 25 percent of your income on rent. Where are we now? Right? It's like 50 percent 55 percent of people's money goes to housing, right? Um, so, so, you know, it's important to be to get this right.

Experience to, you know, right. 

[00:24:31] Andreas Senie: It's a, it's a, you're providing a service to a market that needs it. And like any of the, any apps in this space, it's getting out there in front of those owners. So they know about you, which is why one of the reasons you came on today, thank you for joining us and coming on and sharing your experience.

Um, I do want to ask and go kind of into the, go to the side of it here and talk blockchain tokenization. If you're comfortable. Right. People, the shiny horse over there and say, well, why aren't we doing that? Why is it right on Bitcoin or is it? So where are you there? You're there collecting rent and you're processing payments.

[00:25:09] Andrew Borovsky: Yeah. Um, so I, uh, I like to zoom out a little bit again and I'd like this, you know, the, the, the last crypto cycle, as we know, crypto is in these cycles where everything kind of falls and goes up. Uh, the last crypto cycle, uh, has been terrible for crypto. And I'm just getting people get really hung up on like crypto or web three or whatever.

You know, we all know we're talking about buzzwords. No, yeah. Blockchain payments. Okay. And blockchain, blockchain based transfers of value. Let's call it that have really suffered because of the fact that there's been a lot of grift over the last four years. Um, right. Um, and when you zoom out, it's like, let's look at this from purely a technology standpoint.

Fundamentally, you're talking about a, Open source database, you know, by open source, meaning that, you know, it's built on standards that everyone can adhere to. Um, and this database is, you know, the nice thing about it is it's very easy to onboard onto, and that database is available to everyone in the world.

Right. So, um, and actually let's go back to That immutable 

[00:26:06] Andreas Senie: record is the whole basis of that. It's 

[00:26:09] Andrew Borovsky: what you're, what you're talking about is, is a, uh, dynamic, uh, Globally available, uh, excel, right? This is really the successor to the scale of excel Should logically be blockchain, right because it does all the same things but in a way where you know, have you you know, Everything is 

[00:26:28] Andreas Senie: recorded.

It's like it's human history You 

[00:26:31] Andrew Borovsky: have a us based fund and you're trying to get a European investor into that fund if you've ever gone through that experience, you know You know everything that that entails, right?

[00:26:42] Andreas Senie: It's gone 

[00:26:43] Andrew Borovsky: right with with blockchain based, um, you know asset ledgers, you know Operating globally raising money globally for assets that are global as well or hyper local just becomes much easier So it is it is A great technology.

Fundamentally, it's a great technology. Um, but like with any, with a lot of great technologies, the timing, it's like, where, where are we kind of, and I think it's, I think basically, so as with any greater time, I think it is inevitable. I think we're probably about 55 years at least. Out from being able to deploy it successfully, right?

We need to wash out a lot of the grift Um, you know in every cycle with all the bullshit It actually brings tremendous amount of innovation if you look at i'll just maybe i'll leave it there If you look at the last last cycle again, this like let's say that ends around 20 2018 to 2022 The biggest winners.

I think in the previous ones, it was like Bitcoin and it was a theory. The last, uh, the cycle last cycle brought us stable coins, right? Digital dollars that with probably I think the most successful company from the last cycle is, uh, well, Coinbase. Yes, but also Circle. Circle is this, you know, company, New York based company that, that, that allows you to trade USDC, which is a dollar backed currency.

And Circle has enabled a movement of dollar peg currencies around the world that we've never seen before. It's rivaling in its, in its volumes to visa networks volumes, right? So look, it's, it's getting, this technology makes moving money easier. It makes, Tracking assets and money related to those assets easier.

It's inevitable. We're just still not there yet. 

[00:28:23] Andreas Senie: No. Well, and, and again, I'll quote Saul on this. It takes 10 years for any paradigm shift from innovation to introduction to actual adoption, no matter what you do. But here you are, you're growing, you're nationwide, you chose the U. S. for a reason, not just because you work here.

Why the U. S. Market? That was the biggest slice of pie. Cause there are other markets with smaller rents, your settlement. 

[00:28:45] Andrew Borovsky: Um, U S is so unique. Uh, there's a reason, right? Why, why all the Europeans are building companies for the U S market and moving to us and et cetera. So, you know, obviously there's, there's the gigantic homogenous market, right?

So whatever, just over 300 million people speak English and Spanish. Um, right. Um, and, uh, generally kind of all interacting with things the same way. Right. The US is particularly interesting because it is this real estate culture. Like I said, half of, you know, half of all real estate is owned by individuals.

That's I don't actually, I'm actually curious. I wonder which country has the same ratio. And, and, and I can't think of anything off the top of my head. I should do this research, but, um, so tremendous individual ownership of this asset class appreciate the American dream is to own a piece of real estate.

This real estate is very stable. This is not, you know, real estate markets. I mean, yeah, 2008 was like, A real estate crash compared to what happens in some places around the world Argentina venezuela or turkey, you know doesn't even come close, right? So it's a very stable market Very valuable for that reason it is a safe haven asset for everyone in the world Everyone the world wants to own us real estate for that reason, right?

So Um, so you have this great asset class and i'm talking about residential primarily Um, and then the second piece to it is Actually, our systems are quite archaic. So in Canada, there's e transfer, right? You could, anyone can move money to each other. It's basically like a Dell, right. But on a, on a effect of like a federal level.

So, you know, the peer to peer payments in Canada are the kind of solved, right? In Europe, you can push money to a card, right? Somebody can give you, if you want to get money from somebody, you give them your car, they scan it, they move money onto the card. Um, in the U S you know, we have, we have to wait for startups, like, Like Venmo and PayPal and cash app to come around.

We, we rely on our private sector to create wonderful experiences. We don't have our payments infrastructure is terrible, right? ACH. I mean, you know, if you have somebody who's routing an account number, you can like move tens of thousands of dollars out of your accounts. Like we're insecure. We're slow.

The fees are high. It sucks. So our infrastructure sucks title around real estate sucks. 3, 600 counties. 

[00:31:00] Andreas Senie: Deal with 

[00:31:00] Andrew Borovsky: real estate registration. 

[00:31:02] Andreas Senie: Day to day real estate is 30 days. Real estate is 30 days or more. 

[00:31:05] Andrew Borovsky: Yeah, so what you have is this amazing place to innovate. And this is why PropTech is so big here.

Huge market, tons of real estate, really archaic systems and, um, and rails. So any company that can bridge that, that, that old technology, gets to benefit from this homogenous population of wealthy people that care about real estate. So it's a no brainer. I don't know if any, there's any other country in the world that enjoys the same kind of unfair advantages.

Um, well, sorry, any other places where companies can, you know, enjoy such unfair advantages. You look at UK, which has Great real estate as we all know, but it's also centralized database, you know, it's very easy to record changes to title. Um, you know, you can push money to card, like you just, there's less, there's a 

[00:31:56] Andreas Senie: lot of 

[00:31:58] Andrew Borovsky: guardrails, smaller populations.

So, so yeah, it's like the U S is, is really incredible from that standpoint. 

[00:32:05] Andreas Senie: Oh, uh, we are certainly a place to flourish, right? That's why innovation happens here, Silicon Valley. I mean, 70 percent of real estate investment is investment. It's all happening. So here you are, you're taking money from rentees, giving it to landlords of any size, what is that sweet spot?

Is it one to 10 units, 10 to 20, one to 50? 

[00:32:26] Andrew Borovsky: You know, we don't care, honestly. I think at some point you probably need more than payments. Um, I'm trying to figure out what that threshold is. I'm going to say 20. Right. Uh, just based on our customer base, because after 20, your accounting becomes so much more complicated that you probably want an integrated system.

Again, I'm throwing out there like something like a folio. It's interesting to at 20 units. You probably don't own 20 units. You probably are now starting to manage somebody else's capital. Right. So now you have investors and you're basically managing a fund. And so you probably want, you know, a portfolio is, is not so much property management, it's actually investment management.

Right. 

[00:33:01] Andreas Senie: So you're talking about optimization and capital stacks. Yeah. Quick and fast. 

[00:33:08] Andrew Borovsky: We're much closer to the stripe. Right. So, um, but there's so much wood to chop in this, like. One to 20 units right again. This is where the vast majority of U. S. Population and the vast majority of rental inventory in the United States is owned by people that own 1 to 20 units.

And the problem there is very acute. So I don't worry if somebody graduates out of rent top. First of all, it happens incredibly rarely, right? There's very few people that leave, uh, reached that level. Um, and second of all, it's the right thing to do. And so look, at some point, maybe we'll catch up to them.

But right now I'm really focused on this small business. Um, 

[00:33:44] Andreas Senie: you're gonna, you're gonna get it done perfectly instead of going a mile. We have 

[00:33:49] Andrew Borovsky: the same. We have the same problem at, uh, at Square to some extent, right? Because people would graduate Square's point of sale system and we had to figure out what to do at some, uh, when Square started out, even when we went public, um, you know, the, the sweet spot was small business, but, um, for us to get to revenues that.

Started to move the stock price. I'm in square IPO, 9 and it went up to 300. But I mean, right now it's pretty much stabilized around 70. I would say to move that stock price from its IPO price of 9 to something like 70, um, involved square going up market. Right. And up market for square men to go from small business to medium sized business.

And I think that's probably the strategies you build your moat with small businesses. And eventually you go up market, probably not all the way you don't go to enterprise, but you probably deliver some features, um, that appeal more to that medium sized business. So you can scale them. I'm a huge 

[00:34:44] Andreas Senie: fan of that Commodore 64 model, right?

If you're sitting out there long enough and healthy enough, you'll get bought. Become that enterprise. Uh, well, you know what I'm saying, those on call. Yeah. I mean, I 

[00:34:54] Andrew Borovsky: don't wanna talk, I don't wanna talk exit strategies, but yeah, I mean, I think you're, yeah, I mean, you know, things, things will happen to you magically as long as you're, you know, hyperfocused on, 

[00:35:04] Andreas Senie: it's intentionally, it's auto-magically.

Right? You're, you were intentionally it'll, 

[00:35:08] Andrew Borovsky: it'll feel magical, you know? It's one of those, yeah. When people, when people say half of everything is luck, I believe in that full, full, uh, you know, full stop. But, uh, but then I, I forget who it was, but there were. There's some, some, some, some super smart person said this, like you, that you, you don't control luck, but you can increase the surface area of luck.

Uh, you increase the surface area of luck through hard work. So I'm in that space. I'm just increasing the surface area right now. 

[00:35:35] Andreas Senie: Well, you're, you're, you're home. You're highly tuned into a niche area. And because, and I would say, because of your background in product development, you know, not to go build something the industry doesn't want, which is 

[00:35:48] Andrew Borovsky: also true.

It speaks to what you said to also when you talked about kind of the ups and downs of companies like, you know, yes, most startups dive indigestion, right? It's not not because not because they can't swallow one thing. It's because they're trying to swallow five. And so that's your I think to me, that's always one on one is like, and with this company, it's interesting if you look at, you know, our on our website, um, You know, we talked about building a financial network for real estate.

I mean, talk about, you know, a vision that's this big and what we've done over the last two years has been, you know, editing down, stripping away everything, you know, from that core mission down to what is like the one thing we can do really, really well. And. And we ended up with rent payments and rent payment.

We are doing this really, really well. Um, and we're going to do that until we become massive. And then we're going to grow, grow again and zoom out again. 

[00:36:38] Andreas Senie: Well, so, so now I'm going to ask, so what does the next step look like? What is your product roadmap? So here you do rent payments really well. Yeah, and you hit your targets whenever they're done.

Yeah, what's that next feature function? Where where are your sites next? Yeah, I think it's gonna be That yet because you're not 

[00:36:56] Andrew Borovsky: no, no, well, I think it's uh, no, I think we want to be we want people to know why um Why they should work with us because of the fact that you know First and foremost, we're here to stay and we're here.

We have a very long term vision that that vision is Is very ambitious, you know, we're and it's it's fundamentally around, you know We will be profitable and we will grow if we deliver real value to our customers So we're really focused on that. Um right now again, you know, most americans are really hurting We're talking about consumers renters Again, housing payments are really really expensive people get twice a month rents do once a month Uh creates this huge budgeting headache for people.

So we're really focused on split pay Um, you know that that feature has been kind of in in this, uh pilot mode for the last year You know, just four weeks and I already have anecdotes from customers that are like You know, this is just totally like a life changing, uh product for me Um, it has allowed me to kind of like, you know, you figure out my finances.

I was feeling desperate um We we have and we see uh, when you send a payment a renter sends a payment to the landlord Uh, they can they can attach a note And we've had people that have adopted split pay and they send a note to their landlord and I can read them Um, I'm not sure if they know that, but, but it's like, it's like, Hey, you know, Doug or whatever.

Um, you know, I want to use rent out for my rent payments. Um, I hope, I hope you don't mind if we switch to this payment platform. Um, they have this feature it's called split pay. It's really, as you know, I've had a hard time. You know, on time on time. And this is really going to help me out. Uh, you know, as I, as I kind of navigate this, this period of uncertainty, and that's what I want to hear.

So I'm hyper focused on that delivery value to renters. That's going to really drive a lot of scale. Um, next six months, we're going to, you know, switch gears and then we're going to deliver some landlord features. And again, I go back to rent that capital. I'm really excited about, we're going to pilot this.

We're going to take, take our top Transcribed Top hundred operators on our platform, um, and, and extend credit to them and get them to grow their business and get them to acquire some real estate. Um, and, uh, and we're just going to keep, keep oscillating. Um, so that both net, both sides of the network are growing, you know, at the same time, but yeah, it's going to be really focused.

We're never going to do two things at once. We're going to do one thing at once, uh, one thing at a time, super, super well. 

[00:39:07] Andreas Senie: Well, and you said something interesting there. So the rentee, Can you to actually introduce this over to the landlord? It's not the landlord who has to start the 

[00:39:16] Andrew Borovsky: process. That's right.

It's the number one way 

[00:39:18] Andreas Senie: versus how I'm doing it. 

[00:39:19] Andrew Borovsky: That's right. That's the number one. And that's a, that's really different. Uh, no one else is doing it this way. Yeah. Uh, because, um, uh, you know, it's to answer this question. Well, if there's 11 million small owners out there, how do you, how can you possibly reach 11 million people?

Well, we assume that that means that there's 11 million renters out there or probably more than that, right? Uh, probably more like 20 million renters out there, uh that talk to those people And so to us the renter is the sales force So we bring innovative features to the rent to a renter like credit building for free Slip pay for a fee and then what they do is they introduce us to the landlord and and the landlord that doesn't pick up the phone or open the door to your typical sales or who would say you're a renter.

That's the landlord's 

[00:40:02] Andreas Senie: done it a certain way forever. You have now, you have created a free sales force, which is incredibly clever. 

[00:40:09] Andrew Borovsky: Yeah. So, so, so just to just, just want to highlight that. So if you are a landlord and you're collecting rent right now, uh, guess what? You don't have to download anything. You don't have to sign up.

You tell your tenants to go to rent dot app. That's the website. Um, and from there you can download apps that they want to, but rent dot app, you could just use the web and your renter. All you need to tell them is go to rent dot app and send money to this email address or this phone number, whatever you tell them, right?

Um, and they do all the work. The renter creates an account. They link their bank account. They set up how they want to pay. And then you get a notification as a landlord, you'll get an email or SMS and I'll say, Hey, okay. Which bank account do you want this money to go to? And once you link your bank account, you don't have to only have to do this once all future payments Just go to that bank account.

You never have to download anything. You don't have to sign up for anything Um, you just get notified the it's the epitome of like, you know, the payments fade into the background So as a landlord, I think this is an incredible experience for the landlord Especially a lot of landlords tend to be older and they don't want to figure shit out Well, guess what like your renter figures everything out You You just need to link your bank accounts very easy.

You can type in your routing and account number. It's that simple. Um, and then everything just kind of happens automatically. 

[00:41:20] Andreas Senie: Well, automatically, right. 

[00:41:22] Andrew Borovsky: Automatically. Yeah. 

[00:41:24] Andreas Senie: The, uh, what about your property manager? Right. Do you find that they're in the way or they they're jumping on? They're like, you 

[00:41:30] Andrew Borovsky: know, they want to do this.

Yeah. Uh, some of our, some of our most, uh, we have an ambassador program you can actually sign. You could sign up@refer.rent app if you wanna check it out. Um, if you have a network in real estate, we'll actually pay a, a bounty for you to kind of talk about us. Uh, you know, it's, it's, it's not, it's not gonna be around forever.

We're just kind of doing it as with scale. But we have this ambassador network, a couple hundred people on there that are primarily property management brokers. And they're, they just talk about it because if you are a broker, I mean, I'm, look, I'm sure you know. At least three other people i'm gonna i'm gonna say three but i i'm thinking five you probably know five people You know a guy like you maybe ten, okay But that are collecting rent and they're probably doing it in a completely archaic way zell venmo cash check, whatever it is And uh, so what we find is when when we when we tell them about this product three I limits, you know, digital, you can track it.

Not a black hole, by the way, 800 number. If you have a problem, you can call our support team. People love it. So, so far the industry support has been massive because nothing exists. We, there are no competitors. 

[00:42:39] Andreas Senie: No, you're spot on. You're almost spot on in that statement. There are, there are plenty of property management type tools, community engagement apps, all this noise, right?

These, these mile wide, a hundred different feature rich tools. I could deploy. But there's nothing as simple as what you just said. Digital digital version of cutting a check, although it's the next generation doesn't even know what that is. Yes. It's, it's the tap and go pay, which is so unique, which I love.

I think it's great though. You truly benefited from your time across your, your different companies and taking everything they had to teach, uh, program and the NFX network lessons. Yeah. 

[00:43:20] Andrew Borovsky: I mean, truly it's, you know, I'm in my forties and, uh, uh, I love being in my 40s because they're just like I just having that benefit of I get people a lot of people I meet a lot of 40 year olds.

People turn 40 and they're like, holy shit. Like everything that happened before this was like, I was just trying to, it was like a demo mode. I was trying to figure out what I like in life. And like at 40, you're like, okay, these are the things I'm liking. And these are the things I'm going to do 

[00:43:45] Andreas Senie: something to be good at.

Yeah. It's 

[00:43:47] Andrew Borovsky: kind of like, so it's a great age. Uh, It's a great age to be at. And yeah, for me, it's the same thing. I've made so many mistakes. Personally, I've learned, I've watched other people make mistakes. I've also seen other people be incredibly successful and I feel, you know, incredibly, um, lucky and empowered and energized right now to be able to put all those lessons into, uh, um, uh, into practice.

Everything we do right now feels actually quite effortless, but it feels effortless because there's a lot of work 

[00:44:13] Andreas Senie: in the background. It's 

[00:44:14] Andrew Borovsky: been a decade. Decades of things kind of sucking. Yeah. . Yeah. 

[00:44:19] Andreas Senie: You don't know what you don't know, right? Totally. 

[00:44:21] Andrew Borovsky: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:44:22] Andreas Senie: And especially when it comes to technology, it looks so easy and at the end of the day, yeah, not 10 people.

I know there's many more for the record. Yeah. Three generations real estate. And you're right. Excel and check is fine. It works well. Yeah. But the simplicity of this is fantastic. The fact that you found the tenants to be your sales force. That's a pretty unique play. Um, hopefully you'll see it at CRE Tech coming up here in November.

You should be there. That's Beckerman's event. Appfolio is usually there. Um, you mentioned a few of them. Yeah, I mean, 

[00:44:54] Andrew Borovsky: again, we tend to, we tend to, we've gone to a few of those conferences and it just tends to be a different audience, just much more institutional. Much bigger. Yeah, so we're sort of like, you know, we're, we're sort of, 

[00:45:06] Andreas Senie: let me back up.

Where do people find you outside of here? Do they, can they come see you at a, at X event or is it just online? How did they, so 

[00:45:14] Andrew Borovsky: we've been, we've been, we've been attending some conferences, um, that are much more on the, again, rent specifically, like, SFR events, right? The single family home rentals, right?

That's a space that's not very institutional. So I find whenever I go to events that are focused on SFR space, I tend to find, you know, our sweet spot customers. Right. Um, but honestly, if you go back to the fact that we're trying to recruit renters, you know, most of our marketing is, A lifestyle marketing on instagram and facebook, right?

Which 

[00:45:47] Andreas Senie: is the most highly impactful to begin with 

[00:45:50] Andrew Borovsky: and yeah, but it's but yeah, but it's like, you know It's it's much harder. I mean that we're talking about like ad optimization, which i'm not an expert I have to learn, you know over time also hate the space to be honest But but you have to know what what it's like, but you know the customer acquisition cost You know through marketing through an ad on facebook To okay, get me a, Hey meta.

I want you to get me, uh, get me that, that, that guy, girl that owns three or four units in Texas, right? That is going to cost you hundreds of dollars to find that person. Um, and yet 80 percent of 25 year olds rent. So all I need to do is like a, with a blindfold, if I poke a room, a room of 20 year olds, I'm going to hit a renter.

[00:46:31] Andreas Senie: Right. 

[00:46:34] Andrew Borovsky: So, so your, your customer acquisition costs are much closer to like You know, selling, I, I don't know, like, uh, I'm trying to figure out like a 

[00:46:44] Andreas Senie: very, very cost effective from a funding standpoint. I was going 

[00:46:48] Andrew Borovsky: to say a toothbrush, but it's like, but it's like not even toothbrush. I don't know. Like, uh, Like, uh, a meat thermometer, like we're, you know, that type of product you're talking about.

Yeah, you're competing with products that, you know, sell for 20 bucks, right? Versus versus if you're, if you're, if you're, if you're doing, if you're in the CRE space, you're competing with mortgage companies, right? The 

[00:47:12] Andreas Senie: equipment's expensive. The tech is expensive. There's a lot of it now. Most of the tech is expensive, but it still doesn't talk to each other.

Um, you're SOC 2 compliance, right? I saw that, which means you pass X amount through your system, which means you are highly secure. Not trivial. Yeah. That is, no, that's a huge accomplishment. People don't know. 

[00:47:32] Andrew Borovsky: You're actually the first person. You know, one of the biggest issues we have is we find the vast majority of people don't know what SOC 2 compliance says, even though it's It's both expensive and extremely difficult to, to, to get through.

But yeah, we bothered to do it. Yeah. 

[00:47:45] Andreas Senie: It is the IRS audit through the ages over and over again, every minute of every day, just to be there. 

[00:47:51] Andrew Borovsky: And we're working on PPI compliance, which is the next, the next, next threshold, again, kind of completely unnecessary in some ways, right. Because you, you can operate without those things, but, uh, you know, we're very proud of the fact that the technology is, you know, industrial grade.

[00:48:05] Andreas Senie: Yeah, and it should be right because you are taking payments. You are taking 

[00:48:08] Andrew Borovsky: a huge amount of money, right? 

[00:48:09] Andreas Senie: Um, 

[00:48:11] Andrew Borovsky: that's right. 

[00:48:11] Andreas Senie: Remember one of the guys on the show is the one of the top 10 cyber forensic guys in the country Yeah, hey, I would have brought him on but didn't want to spook you. So I we we work with 

[00:48:21] Andrew Borovsky: Yeah, we work with uh with hacker one, which is um, effectively, you know, it's yeah, it's people Uh, it's people, they're basically they're hackers and we pay them to try and penetrate our system.

So they will, they will try to hack us every month they do it. They, um, uh, so they go through and they try to sign up for accounts to try and move money. And, uh, and so, so they're looking for holes in our system and, and, uh, you know, we're, we're, we've generally been pretty good. 

[00:48:47] Andreas Senie: Important to you consumer who put your credit cards in there.

That's in your part of five and others. At the end of the day, it's 

[00:48:53] Andrew Borovsky: sad that we're leaving it. We're living in a world where every month or so you get a notice from a company that says, Hey, sorry, we leaked all your data. We're almost desensitized to it. It's crazy, right? 

[00:49:04] Andreas Senie: Well, and many and many companies, there are companies out there that simply will bypass security because they're like, well, it happens.

We gotta let's make it rich. Let's make it look better. But I can, I can appreciate from where I sit in the Siri tech side. And as a tech sector expert, what you've done and how much attention you've paid to things that others have just skipped over because you couldn't. 

[00:49:26] Andrew Borovsky: Thank you. 

[00:49:26] Andreas Senie: I appreciate that. I want you to notice.

And it looks great. So we can get you on the Apple store, get you on Google play. We are introducing you through tenants. You're out at shows you're here on this podcast. You're obviously out on other podcasts. Uh, you got a referral network. You got an ambassador network. You got a free sales force. Where'd 

[00:49:44] Andrew Borovsky: I miss?

Can you tell me what 

[00:49:46] Andreas Senie: would you do differently? I mean, what do we know? Oh, the integrations. Are you? Are you rest API? Can we integrate you into other systems? 

[00:49:55] Andrew Borovsky: Not yet. And again, it has to do with the fact that our target customer just doesn't ask for this. We tend to. So we're very, you know, as a small startup, we're a siege day startup, right?

So so we're very early in our journey. We're extremely well funded by wonderful investors. Um, but but we're we're very early, right? So small team 25 people. And so we have to be super, super focused on what are we? What are we spending our time on? So our approaches every month, every rent cycle will listen to what our customers are asking for.

And we deliver that feature. We don't, you know, try and invent things or spend time on things that we think is important. So A. P. I. Calls comes up. Not, not frequently enough. Um, I'll give you an example. If something comes up all the time, an integration with an accounting system, so we just shipped, um, and you can download all your transactions into a CSV file or a QuickBooks file, right?

That's something that's, and by the 

[00:50:45] Andreas Senie: way, you can report it out. It now 

[00:50:48] Andrew Borovsky: you, you get to download it. Yeah. It's much easier to import it into QuickBooks. And you know what, that's 80% of what people have been asking us for, right. So, um, yeah, we, we'd love to get integrated with more. Um, you know, other property management software platforms so that, you know, if you have a tenant portal through a, uh, a p.

m. platform that there's a rent app option, you know, in the list, it just takes time. Um, by the way, you can integrate with yarding. It just takes time. And so we're just 

[00:51:18] Andreas Senie: energy. Oh, 

[00:51:19] Andrew Borovsky: yeah. So we're just, you know, going back to this, you know, We spent time and energy on the sock to compliance. We thought that was more important right now So we'll get around to it.

I think I think honestly within the next 12 months You'll see an api from us and you'll see more integrations Next six months. We just have to be uh, you know much more focused just on core growth and delivering a really consistent You know solid experience, uh for our core customers 

[00:51:42] Andreas Senie: keep sticking to the basics, which is what you should do Good for that.

Um, so out to our audience who tune in every month, this show will air the week after the round table monthly show. Don't miss it. Catch it anywhere. You get your audio anywhere. You get your video. I want to, again, thank you, Andrew, for coming in, bringing to market such a great looking product. I will admittedly say I signed up to be a broker in your referral program because why wouldn't I?

Yeah, 

[00:52:09] Andrew Borovsky: exactly. No downside. Yeah, 

[00:52:12] Andreas Senie: that seems simple enough. And I'm, and I'm sure Darren might have tested a bit, but who knows? I can't speak for him. It looks incredible. Um, what is, what's the one lesson you'd give to anyone else coming into the industry, maybe looking to start their own tech? Or even some veteran looking to switch that their forties going.

Hey, it looks good over there. 

[00:52:34] Andrew Borovsky: Yeah. Yeah. Look just early innings tremendous opportunity. I've been i've been in prop tech since essentially 15, right? So that's almost nine years 

[00:52:42] Andreas Senie: and 

[00:52:42] Andrew Borovsky: the vast majority of things we talked about in 2015 are still not here Right. So there's just so much, there's so much wood to, and by the way, everyone knows you, you go in there, you, you, you think a problem is obvious because everyone's talking about it.

That doesn't mean it's been fixed. Uh, 

[00:52:58] Andreas Senie: we're just talking. 

[00:52:59] Andrew Borovsky: Yes. Every, everyone knows what the problems are, but very few people have been able to figure out how to, how to actually tackle them. And so then I'll just. Say one more thing when you choose a problem to tackle make sure it's just hyper narrow, um in this space Uh, I mean residential Especially commercial commercials.

The whole stack is just up for grabs Um, so there's a there's there's always going to be this like, uh, you're going to be oh fuck I just want to do everything, you know, like oh I want to fix this entire workflow and it's very very hard Sorry for swearing on your show, but, uh, but, uh, but, uh, but, uh, but what I would say is 

[00:53:39] Andreas Senie: you'll be successful in prop 

[00:53:41] Andrew Borovsky: tech.

There are so many tiny problems that are, that are, that are hard to solve still, but if you solve it, you actually can build a very formidable company in this tiny niche space. So I say, look at the stack, identify these small problems, go after them first. Uh, don't get greedy. resist the temptation, you know, to do everything.

[00:54:02] Andreas Senie: Yeah, listen to your customers. Listen, solve the problems complained about. Don't solve the problem. You're thinking, listen 

[00:54:09] Andrew Borovsky: to your support team. 

[00:54:10] Andreas Senie: Yeah, and for the record, those on the show and those bar and wine, here's a guy in FinTech in merchant services. His entire background is in this area. He didn't jump over and say, Hey, I want to handle construction tech.

You went right where your background was, which God 

[00:54:25] Andrew Borovsky: knows, have ideas. It doesn't mean I should do it. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:54:30] Andreas Senie: For another time. 

[00:54:32] Andrew Borovsky: No, I mean, it's like, as I said, there's, there's things, there's all sorts of things I want to be a part of, and I just have to say no. 

[00:54:38] Andreas Senie: Yeah. Oh, no. It's the most powerful thing you can say.

[00:54:41] Andrew Borovsky: Super, super important. Yeah. 2, 

[00:54:42] Andreas Senie: 080 golden deal hours a year, right? Monday nine to five. Oh wait, your startup. It's not nine to five. 

[00:54:50] Andrew Borovsky: That's right. That's right. 

[00:54:51] Andreas Senie: Again, want to thank you for tuning in and want to thank our audience for tuning in. I want to thank Mr. Mendoza, our producer for making us all look good all the time during this show.

As we move forward into the end of the year, don't forget to join us. Don't forget to join us at ICSC, depending on where you are in the country. We're all here to listen, learn, uh, in many cases to provide support and add value. If not, in every case to add value. In this case, specifically with Andrew, to add value, to make you make a seamless rental payment and management of your smaller portfolios.

Smaller is not the right word. You're a growing portfolio. That's a better word. 

[00:55:30] Andrew Borovsky: That's right. 

[00:55:31] Andreas Senie: Hey, how long did it take for you to land on the free and easy way to collect rents? That one line statement just for the audience. 

[00:55:38] Andrew Borovsky: Probably, we probably need to change it because it's a little bit, it's probably not, not tight enough.

It's funny because you could spend so long riffing on what the tagline is. I think that one's good enough right now, but we could probably be a little tighter. 

[00:55:50] Andreas Senie: So it's fair to say to the audience, perfect is the enemy of good, and good is good enough, and 

[00:55:54] Andrew Borovsky: good is getting good. 100%. That tagline was 100%.

Like, I think this is okay. I know we can spend six more months on this, but let's just stop. 

[00:56:03] Andreas Senie: Yeah, let's go. Let's go. Um, I had a founder that said this to me, and I'll never forget it. It stuck with me. I use it all the time. We're in the streetcar phase, not the stock car phase. The streetcar phase, you just got to start winning the race.

The stock car phase, you start fine tuning the colors and so forth. Thanks again for tuning in Mr. Mendoza. If you would lead us out, 

[00:56:23] Prroducer: thanks for tuning in to industry sector expert interviews. Brought to you by Krakow AI, your source for the latest in real estate and technology. Be sure to follow us on all social media at CRE Collaborative and check out our past episodes for more expert advice and strategies.

See you next time.