Justin Alanis took a personal frustration within the rental industry and turned his idea into a $57 Million all cash acquisition. In this episode, Justin shares his story on raising money, having less than 3 months of cash left, and what eventually led to a major acquisition by Real Page, a $7 Billion publicly traded company.

Justin describes how he went from an idea to getting his first $25k check from Sean Conway, his good friend, to help with getting things set up. He leveraged FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out] and salesmanship to sell the idea to customers before a single line of code was even developed. This led to his first $1.2MM seed round, which eventually led to raising over $20MM from institutional VCs and ultimately an exit. This is his story.

Soundbites

Transcription Snippet

Dan Daugherty

Welcome to the very first episode of the Big Exit, I'm your host Dan Daugherty and I'm very excited to have Justin Alanis as my first guest. Justin built and sold his previous company for $57 million in cash to Real Page in 2018. Justin, thank you for joining us.

Justin Alanis

Thanks for having me Dan, I did not realize that I would be the first guest, I'm honored.

Dan Daugherty

Well, thank you and, as you know, we go way back. For the listeners listening. I met Justin - Gosh, probably what seven or eight years ago when you first closed your seed round and we were at a conference - I think in San Francisco it was probably AIM or NAA and you had a small little booth. I think it was you and one other person and you and I hit it off. Fast forward eight years later and you having a really big exit to Real Page, which is a publicly traded company worth about seven billion dollars.

Justin Alanis

Yeah, it was an amazing journey now that you think back all the way back to that time. Probably when I met you, we probably didn't even have a product yet. Frankly, we were probably pitching vaporware at the time, but ultimately, as you know, we were able to build what our customers wanted and yeah did have a a relatively successful exit to Real Page at the end of the day.

Dan Daugherty

Well, let's start at the very beginning. why did you build Rentlytics? What challenges or problems were you solving for?

Justin Alanis

I think, like a lot of other entrepreneurs who don't come from the tech world or maybe even some that do come from the tech world, I was solving my own personal frustration in my previous job. I started my career in commercial real estate - private equity and I bounced around to a couple of different companies and started out as an analyst early on and then rose up to becoming a VP and partner at a large real estate private Equity Company.

All throughout my journey. I saw the same problems over and over again. The problem really revolved around data and access to information. It was crazy to me that I was running a multibillion dollar portfolio and yet I didn't have access to my information, except on maybe a monthly or quarterly basis.

The information was not that good when I got it. It made no sense to me that I could not get access to information in real time to be able to make more sophisticated and data driven decisions across my portfolio. So I I moved to San Francisco in 2010 to be with my fiance at the time, now my wife, and I saw my other friends in technology.