Elzie sits down with Meng Chen, the founder of Portfolio Bay, a software designed to help early real estate investors transition from full-time work to full-time investment pursuit. Meng talks about his experience in real estate investing and how he struggled with managing properties, tenants, and accounting. He created Portfolio Bay to automate his processes and handle payments automatically, leading him to see the potential of creating a business out of it.

They discuss the Lean Startup methodology and how it allows entrepreneurs to approach uncertain outcomes in steps, through building, measuring, and learning. They also dive into the importance of validating assumptions, the role of failure in success, and the idea of using real estate to build a financial runway before jumping into entrepreneurship.

Tune in to listen to Meng share how his transition from a full-time employee to a full-time founder was more about having personal conviction that what he was doing would work and seeing value from his product among users. They also talk about how people without software engineering skills can take steps to build a platform and how Meng manages competition by focusing on solving user problems rather than differentiating from competitors. So, don't miss out on this episode on real estate investing and how Portfolio Bay is changing the game for early real estate investors.

Episode Highlights:

14:07 - I would say I will keep working on it. There might be pivot in terms of solution, in terms of what the product is, but I'll keep working on it until it becomes a successful company. And that's just the value of real estate. It brings in to me like my own personal life. It's not just about investing in real estate and make some money. It's about having the flexibility, like financially, to pursue things that you are more passionate about. And eventually, if you stay long enough and you have the passion to go really hard on it, you're going to be successful. So, that's my belief.

17:15 - I learned everything myself. I didn't come up with the right framework in the very beginning, and the first version of the product isn't perfect. I actually went through multiple iteration and at some point, I had to rewrite everything in three months to make it under a more sustainable and a better framework that can be extended better, easier in the future. So, I definitely made a lot of mistakes like in the web development side.

19:10 - For me, as a founder, I'm no longer just focused on the engineering. Because as a founder, you have to look at every part of the business. Engineering is one part of it, and there's an even bigger part that I don't have the background on it, is the marketing. And the marketing has multiple component, like the SEO. People spend their whole career and be expert just on this one thing, so you can go really, really deep on it. And for me, I have to spend a lot of time learning whenever I'm driving, whenever I'm just not working on Portfolio Bay. I'll always have something just like a podcast or listen to a YouTube video either talking about SEO or talking about marketing in general, because that's my short weakness in all the skill set for doing the Portfolio Bay things.

26:49 - From my point of view, funding is kind of an amplifier on the success and the failure of a startup. So, if your startup is working and are in the right trajectory, having the funding really amplifies your success and it can make your success much bigger and it can make you go faster. But if you don't have the right idea or like there's some flaws in the business model, having the funding, it just amplifies the failure because you're going to spend the money but not getting enough traction to the next stage and get the next round of funding. And that's why startups die.

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