SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
They Doubled Revenue This Year to $300,000 Helping Real Estate Agents Edit Photos
03 Dec 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hey, folks, my guest, my next speaker is Filipino by birth and architect by training a gamer by heart and a family man by commitment does a lot of public speaking and also humanitarian by choice state architecture is now building Reva staff.com real estate visuals that sell OJ you ready to take us to the top. Yes, sir. Let's do it. All right. You are welcome. Yeah.
So I had you on about a year and a half ago.
Chapter 2: What is the core product offered by Reva Staff?
You had about 20 customers charging $75 per month on average. And talk to me a little bit about the product back then. I don't know if it's the same as it was today, but tell me what you're working on now today. What's the product look like? Well, the core product is still the same.
We were still very much in the real estate, but before we were servicing a lot of real estate photographers, but we pivoted and went and go after the real estate agents themselves. So because we were made aware that only 30% of real estate agents actually use photographers and 70% of that. actually just shoot their own photos.
And for your audience to know, we are actually doing post-production work for a lot of these real estate visuals from your photo editing, video editing, floor plans, 3D CGI, things of that nature. So, OJ, are you a marketplace today, then, or are you a SaaS company? Well, a little bit of both.
We're still serving photographers, but it's kind of pivoted to going after a SaaS use case for these realtors, going after the realtors to spend in our platform rather than going through a photographer and take shots of the properties and things like that.
So OJ, just to be clear, real estate folks, realtors can pay Reba staff to do all of the photo editing and everything for their new unit themselves. You used to though, connect them to a photographer and then relied on them to manage the photographer. Now you just do all the work internally yourself. Is that right? Yeah, that's right.
We still do real estate photographers, as I mentioned earlier, only about 30% of realtors actually use professional photographers. So there's a big chunk of realtors that doesn't use professional real estate photographers. So they take their... their visuals through their phone photos and things like that. And so right now, they would be able just to upload that directly to our platform.
And we're building a SaaS model with that, starting with $20 a month and using our platform. How many realtors are paying $20 a month? Right now, very few because we still are... Like how few? Under $10, under $5? No, we have about 2,000 realtors that are paying us. It's not that consistent. Hence, we want them to subscribe. Because right now, it's a pay-per-service.
So they are in a pay-as-you-go model, but we have 2,000 of them doing pay-as-you-go. Some of them spend $100. Some of them spend $10. So 2,000 of them, they'll pay you last month at least $1.
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Chapter 3: How has Reva Staff pivoted its target audience?
Last year, last year for, for, for one year, uh, from 20 this year, there's about 2000 of them who have gone through the platform and paid at something. And how much do they pay you on average? On average, they, they pay, uh, I'm recurring because we have realtors that pay us like $100 a month. OJ, we have to simplify this or we're going to lose the audience.
I'm just trying to get a sense of how many customers are going to pay you something this year and what's going to be your total revenue this year. All right. So for this year, we're going to hit about $300,000. Revenue. I can't average out because it fluctuates. That's fine. So 300, just stick with 300,000 in revenue from how many customers? 2,000? Yeah, around 2,000 customers. Okay.
And how many have already paid you to date? How many of the 2,000? What percent? everybody paid at least, you know, at least five bucks. Okay. Well then I just, so just to repeat this back to you, I said, how much are you gonna do this year? And you said 300,000 in revenue from 2000 customers. My then natural question was, well, there's still two months left in the year.
So how many more customers are going to pay over the next two months? And you just said, none, they've all already paid you. Right, right, right. So we have about, about 2000 customers that's already paying through the platform or ordered through the platform rather. How many are going to order over the next two months? It's really hard to say because it's going to be winter, right?
So a lot of them probably won't order in the next two months because it's going to be wintertime. Got it. All right. I won't push that further. So $300,000 this year, and that's up from how much last year? We did almost $200,000 last year.
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Chapter 4: What is the pricing model for realtors using Reva Staff?
Okay, so 180,000 last year, 300,000 this year. What I'm hearing you and your voice and sort of your body language is there's not a lot of predictability around this because they take photos one month and they don't take any the next month, right? So that makes it really hard for you to hire and build a business because there's no predictability or consistency, right?
So how many full-time employees do you have today? full-time. We have about, uh, five employees full-time and, uh, the freelancers that work for us would, would, would be about 30 freelancers. Okay. And, and you mentioned, did, I think last time we spoke, you said you were raising a pre-seed round, but you hadn't closed it. Did you end up closing that last year?
Yeah, we actually just, uh, raised this year. Uh, and, and we, we raised, uh, uh, our, our pre-seed this year. How much did you raise? 300. Okay. So 300,000 pre-seed. And was that on a note? Yes, that's right. It's a convertible note. Got it. So most pre-seed notes these days have a cap of 2 or 3 million today. Is that what your cap was? That's right. Around that. Okay. So 2 million cap.
And why do you need the money? Why is this an expensive business to build? Yeah, basically, we will be building towards a SaaS model. And we have actually investors that are very interested in us helping to build a Web3 model, which is we have the capability with our 3D artists to do like metaverse stuff. So the environments and things like that. So we're looking into that as well.
And there's a lot of side projects going on and not just in real estate. And they're looking into other verticals as well. As long as it's about visualization, photos, video, 3D, CGI, that our artists here in the other side of the world can do. That's something that we are actually looking forward to doing.
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Chapter 5: How many realtors are currently paying for Reva Staff's services?
But how many of the five employees are engineers? Just two engineers and then two account managers handling sales and things like that. And how many freelancers have like photograph editors have you used over the past year to do all the work of editing?
Guys, as OJ is reconnecting here, again, this is one of those models, a lot of predictability, but has 2,000 customers that have paid at least a dollar this year, potentially built an opportunity here to build a SaaS company, but he's got to get more engineering resources, two engineers, not enough to build an MVP here. So let's see if we can ask him more questions about that if he reconnects.
OJ, are you there? Yep. Yep. All right. So my question is, my question was, I mean, obviously you're trying to pivot more into a SaaS model, but it's hard to do that with two engineers and it's really hard to build software that can edit photos, right? What's the, I don't understand what the software opportunity is here. Yeah, so basically, it's still very outsourcing related.
So people that have jobs there in the US, they would usually outsource to us. Hence, the platform is a very basic ordering platform, right? Oh, got it. So it's not software to edit photos. It's software to manage contractors. To get those 2,000 realtors. Exactly. Yes, that's right. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, and I cut you off. What were you saying?
Yeah, so the model right now is to convert the users that we have to use the platform as their centralized workflow management tool. That means that they would pay us 20 bucks a month just for the privilege to use the software, whether to hire editors or even use the software as a media storage tool.
So instead of paying all this storage, they would just be able to store all their media files in our platform. And then as an add-on, they can actually outsource that to the network of artists that we have. So that's going to be the play moving forward. Hence, it would be more predictable. And that's our pitch to our investors. That's what we're going to be working on in building that model.
Understood. How much capital are you burning per month right now? Not so much, not so much. Probably about 20K a month.
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Chapter 6: What revenue growth has Reva Staff experienced this year?
Okay. Does that make you nervous? You've only raised 300K, which means you have 10 months of runway, 11 months of runway. Yeah. Well, we are actually also revenue generating. So the 20K burn is actually just building up that platform. Sorry. When I say burn, I mean net burn, not all your expenses. How much is your bank going down every month?
Well, it's not really going down because we're actually generating revenue. Okay. There's plenty of companies that generate revenue, but are not profitable. So their bank goes down, right? So what do you mean? I'm asking you, are you profitable or not? Not if you're generating revenue. No, no, no, no, no, no. We're at zero. We're at zero.
So every month we're not burning and also we're not profitable. Okay. Got it. So do your pre-seed investors that just give you 300K say, OJ, spend faster. We just gave you this money. You're not investing it. That's right. So they're actually investing so that we would be able to build that platform, that SaaS model.
OJ, you just said you're breakeven, which means the 300K you just got in the pre-seed round is now sitting in your bank doing nothing. How are you not getting pressure from those investors saying, OJ, burn money, invest the 300K we just gave you? Yeah, that's right. That's right. That's why we were actually, we just recently raised. That's why we haven't burned anything yet.
So the 300K is still in the bank? That's right.
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Chapter 7: How does Reva Staff manage its workforce and freelancers?
That's right. All right. Well, we're rooting for you. We hope you use it to grow. In the meantime, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? Still E-Myth. All right. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Michael Saylor right now. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Revistaff? Recently HubSpot.
It's been very helpful. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Eight hours. All right. And situation, married, single kids? Married two kids. And 36 today? Yes, that's right. All right. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20? I wish I would have quit school sooner. Guys, Revist Apple is launched in 2018.
They're helping real estate agents get their photos edited faster, quicker, and more efficiently. Over 2,000 agents have paid them at least a dollar over the past year. They'll do 300,000 in revenue this year, up from 200,000 last year. Just close to 300,000 seed round out of 2 million cap. All the money is still in the bank as OJ decides where to reinvest it.
Team of five today, going to double down on software moving forward. OJ, thanks for taking us to the top. Thanks, Nathan. Appreciate it.