Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 545+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Propify - Plaid for commercial real estate, building unified API software for property managers and property technology companies
Thanks to Max M. for the intro to Propify
Ben Katz, GM of Health & Fitness @ Appex - a startup Product & Growth leader rounding out a wide ranging skillset with each step he takes. Because it’s not about how you get there, but that you get there
Thanks to Alexa M. for the intro to Ben
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - e-mail me directly to learn more!
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q3 Startups Highlighted: Snyk, FeatureByte, Neural Magic, Notable Systems, Akooda & Posh AI
Q3 Operators Highlighted: Alexa Murray / WHOOP, Kieran O’Driscoll / AtScale, Max Milhan / Rhino, Ries McQuillan / Vested, Dave Barron / HubSpot & Sam Richard / ngrok
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted
Propify
Founders: Ben Keller, Nickolas Johnson & Remen Okoruwa
Founding: 2022
Mission: Connect all owners, operators, & renters with their property data
Employees: 6 & 80% Local
Workplace: In Office, Flexible, or Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & ~$3M raised
Investors: Y Combinator, Prudence.vc
Key Customers: HappyCo, Level
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Propify is “Plaid for commercial real estate”, building unified API software for property managers and property technology companies. Founded in 2022 by Ben Keller, Nickolas Johnson & Remen Okoruwa, this early stage team graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 class on a mission to create the easiest way to integrate in Proptech.
Ben & Remen worked together at HubSpot and teamed up with Nick to originally work on an idea called Rentdrop. Their first foray into serving the real estate industry, they spent a year tackling the digital payments problem between landlords and tenants. Their software helped facilitate a cleaner payment process and they made progress but, through that first year building Rentdrop, they obtained a deeper insight. As a payment platform, the biggest roadblock to the company’s growth wasn’t the quality of their payment app experience but rather the distribution limits of their various property management integrations.
Rentdrop wasn’t integrated with the software that property managers were already using like Yardi, RealPage, Buildium, etc. They had a great rent payment mobile app but these were mission critical integrations. And all Proptech founders have a similar problem. Distribution is holding them back from growth.
As they reflected on the payment app they’d built using Plaid, which had itself previously democratized payment access, could there be a similar product to build for the property technology space? A little fix up, a flip, and Propify was born.
Their API acts as a universal translator for properties, residents, units, vendors, general ledger, etc. They track all of these data objects so users can pull data out and put it in back in via the same consistent model. This standardization speeds up the integration process for technology vendors that need to access all this data.
Over the past year the team has built out 8 software integrations including RealPage, Entrata, & Buildium and plan to get to 10 by the end of 2023. They believe they’ve already reached critical mass in supporting the majority of the most popular multi family rental management software platforms.
Propify is a B2B SaaS tool, sold through monthly subscription, with additional charges for high usage. Their average deal size is five to six figures and they’re already on track to hit seven figures of ARR by the end of 2023 from almost $0 at the start of the year. The team has grown to 6 full-time employees.
Remen cites Y Combinator as massively impactful, teaching him and his cofounders the mindset & skills needed to build a fast-growing startup while also giving them access to an amazing community of founders. “We wouldn’t be where we are today without YC.”
Operators to Know:
Remen Okoruwa, Co-founder & CEO
Nickolas Johnson, Co-founder & CTO
Ben Keller, Co-founder & COO
Ian Benton, Senior Software Engineer
Maxwell Cohn, Software Engineer
Key Roles To Be Hired:
More roles coming soon!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key milestones Propify is looking to achieve in 2023?
Could you share some details about the competitive landscape and positioning?
Which proptech channels are most advantageous or disadvantageous to company growth?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2H 2023?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Propify you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more property managers into the digital age. All multi-family aficionados applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Ben Katz, GM Health & Fitness @ Appex
Career Summary / Sustainable Growth - Product & Business Case / Career Insights
What is the best way to build a career? It’s probably best to start with the end in mind. Or you could learn from Ben Katz, a startup Product & Growth leader rounding out a wide ranging skillset with each step he takes. Because it’s not about how you get there, but that you get there. As the GM of Health & Fitness at Appex, Ben is building the foundation for a long career in entrepreneurship.
Ben grew up locally in Westford, the oldest of three children with two younger sisters. His mom set the tone, instilling work ethic and an ethos of being a person of your word. His dad was a software designer, always pointing out the practical (or impractical) ways that products were built and used.
When Ben was in high school, he ran a landscaping business moving lawns. Generating a bunch of referrals, he grew to employ some of his classmates on the wrestling & football teams, making a healthy spread between his clientele and workforce. It was his first experience running a business and he loved it.
Staying local, he headed off to Babson to study Entrepreneurship. There was a special energy at the college that hardwired your brain to “do your own thing”. They make a deliberate effort to help entrepreneurship feel so much more realistic & achievable. As graduation approached, investment banking was a potential career option, but as he began networking and understanding the specifics of the career, he realized that path wasn’t for him.
Aspiring to start his own business, he began to thoughtfully plan for the skills he would need to obtain for his journey. First up? Learning how to sell..
He started at Experian where he sold their Data Quality products, an incredibly valuable experience where he learned how to sell and acquired the “soft skills” needed to be successful in a GTM environment. He ran meetings, crafted e-mails with compelling narratives, and learned prioritization. After about a year, he had mastered the basics and he felt like his rhythm of learning and growth trajectory had slowed.
Ben wanted to find something more strategic, so he took a role as an Ecommerce Strategy Associate at Wayfair. He worked on the Merchandising team in their Flooring group. Flooring had unique challenges, not often really sold on the internet, so he & his team had to figure out how to position themselves. They built a samples program, working closely with suppliers to learn about consumer expectations. It was during his time at Wayfair that he discovered product management and realized that this was the skillset he needed to learn to accomplish his long-term goals.
Ben made it his mission to learn the craft. He networked across the organization, meeting with as many Product leaders as he could inside and outside the organization too. Ryan Durkin, a Boston area Product leader, gave him phenomenal advice about breaking into Product Management and even shared a guide that helped him focus his efforts.
As Ben worked to make the jump over to Product Management at Wayfair, an opportunity presented itself. And it’s always better to be lucky than good, right?? WHOOP had an opening for an Associate PM role and, even better, one of their team members used to work with Ben at Wayfair and referred him for the role. To double the good fortune, the hiring manager had even gone to his high school, just a couple grades apart. And of course, he had the qualifications too!
He launched his Product career at WHOOP, starting on the monetization team. Ben and his team were responsible for optimizing customer LTV (lifetime value). They handled revenue expansion for existing members, as well as retention & churn prevention, and monitored overall business metrics to reduce involuntary churn from payment failures.
Payment failures are particularly important for WHOOP since they’re giving their customers expensive hardware for..effectively free. If that first payment fails they’re out the cost of goods sold and the acquisition cost. What we in the biz call a “double whammy”.
Ben spent his first six months optimizing the failed payment flow and his team drove a 5x increase in the rate at which users fixed their payment issues. Next, he took on the acquisition team overseeing both monetization and acquisition. Ben was responsible for checkout flow optimization, growing their referral program, their affiliate program, and more. During this time, his team built features that drove new users to refer 30% more friends!
Most recently, Ben took over the WHOOP storefront team responsible for accessories and, at that point, overseeing all Product in the growth vertical. One of the most influential people in Ben’s product journey at WHOOP was Nate Giacalone. He learned everything he knows about Product from Nate and describes him as “one of the best operators I’ve met in my life. I wouldn’t have had as fast of a career progression on the product side if I wasn’t coached by someone as high quality as Nate.”
Ben has always had a goal of starting his own company. Through a friend of a friend, he found a role that was uniquely suited for him. He started at Appex this past month as the GM of their Health & Fitness Portfolio.
Ben is responsible for buying, building, and growing their portfolio of health & fitness mobile apps. His job is to figure out how to grow things, what to buy to expand their portfolio, and evaluate if there are any gaps in the market. A perfect training ground for an aspiring entrepreneur.
Sustainable Growth - Product & Business Case
At WHOOP, Ben developed an exceptionally well rounded understanding of software product growth. He got to see and influence the three main levers for driving sustainable growth - acquisition, retention, and LTV optimization.
The main thing he learned? Balance.
A lot of early stage builders and problem solvers might think you’re trying to build something that customers are going to want to use more. To solve for the user, basically. But it’s not just the user problem you’re solving for. Balancing the business case is just as important. There are tradeoffs.
For example, when you’re shaping a premium offering (like they do at WHOOP) you’ll have to ask yourself “what does the customer want and what are the associated unit economics for the business?” How do you blend those (sometimes) competing objectives?
Thinking strategically is much more powerful than short term metric hacking when long term business impact is the real goal.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
The More You Learn, More You Earn - “Whenever you’re considering a career decision, there are three levers you have. The value of these levers change over time. First, general happiness. Do I feel like this work is fulfilling and like the people I’m around? The second is the financial incentive. And the third is ‘how much am I going to learn and how much closer is this going to get me to my long term goals?’ Early in your career you should over index on learning, even when it’s easy to over index on the financial piece. I’ve really reaped the rewards of some of those short term financial sacrifices I’ve made”
Extreme Ownership - “If you’re the person that says I own this and I’m going to figure out how to get this done, it’s never going to hurt you. The quality of output is going to be way higher if you feel responsible and accountable. When you lead by example this way The people around you can also feel that energy and the entire team gets elevated because you all care about the outcome.
Get Outside Your Comfort Zone - When you’re outside of your comfort zone is when you’re learning the most even when it feels like you’re wildly underwater. When you come out on the other side of that, that is experience you can rely on. You’re making tears in the muscle so that it comes back stronger and you can lift the weight”
Eventually, Ben wants to start his own business. If he won the lottery tomorrow, he said he would spend the next part of his life starting different businesses every 3-5 years so he could learn in a lot of different areas. The current opportunity he has at Appex gives him the opportunity to get valuable reps with talented colleagues so that he can obtain more critical early stage, hands on experience. Ben plans to use his three lever framework to evaluate all current and future opportunities.
If you want to learn more about Ben, you can find him on LinkedIn, growing or acquiring apps at Appex, or closely tracking his health & fitness with WHOOP. Thanks for sharing Ben. Excited to see the moves you make in the coming years!
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt