The following interview is a conversation we had with Biju Ashokan, CEO of Radius Agent, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $19 Million Raised to Power the The Real Estate Agent of the Future
Biju Ashokan
Thanks, Brett. Thanks for having me.
Brett
How’d I do on pronouncing. Your name?
Biju Ashokan
Biju Ashokan. You said it right.
Brett
I got it pretty close. Perfect. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start the quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Biju Ashokan
Yeah. So, as I said, my name is Biju Ashokan. I’m the CEO of Radius Agent, and my background is predominantly in software engineering by education. I am a software engineer and did my masters from Carnegie Mellon information Systems back in 2008. And this is my second Prop tech firm. I’ve started my career in prop tech, so my first startup was called Metroplots. We ran it for about six years, got an exit. Now this is my second startup.
Brett
Amazing. And before we begin talking about what you’re building there, let’s talk about a few questions just to better understand who you are as a founder and who you are as an entrepreneur. So is there a specific CEO that you’ve really studied and learned the most from?
Biju Ashokan
Elon Musk. Sorry, I was kidding. Your notes that do not say Elon Musk. I don’t really have one person. Like, for me, if someone starts a company, they’re already in the top 1%, and if they’re remotely successful, they have all my respect. I like tech focused CEOs. The people who make really good products always inspire me. Alan Levy is one of them. And then there’s Spencer Raskoff in the prop tech industry. Pete Flint, there’s a bunch of them. But I mainly get inspired by products more than people.
Brett
Makes sense. And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you?
Biju Ashokan
Yeah, I like reading books written by sports coaches. So one of my favorite is Alex Ferguson, who is the coach of Manchester United. There’s a book called Leading, which I constantly go back to reading, which constantly inspires me and motivates me.
Brett
Nice. Yeah, I just started reading a book. I think it’s called the confidence code. Have you heard of that?
Biju Ashokan
No, I’m writing it down.
Brett
It’s good. It’s by a sports psychologist and a military psychologist, and it’s really fascinating. So I think it’s in line with what you mentioned there of enjoying a.
Biju Ashokan
Lot of analysts between sports clubs and companies and things happen at a lot faster pace in sports. So you have to be on your toes all the time.
Brett
Absolutely. Now one other question before we jump into radius, can you just walk us through what the state of Prop Tech looks like today?
Biju Ashokan
It is a down market this year, end of this year and possibly next year. The beginning too. There’s not going to be a lot of transactions. But having said that, this is a great opportunity for a lot of tech firms to make meaningful tech for real estate. I do think the last two, three years and maybe the next two, three years more. So it’s going to be heavy on Prop Tech. Things that can really optimize all the workflows that real estate agents can do and consumers can do, mortgage lenders can do. There’s a lot of interesting things happening. So when we come out of this possible recession, I think there’s going to be a lot of interesting things happening.
Brett
And this is probably a dumb question, but how do you define the difference between real estate tech and Prop Tech?
Biju Ashokan
For me it’s the same thing but there’s a lot of elements to it. So if you want to buy a property there’s take a note of players helping you buy that property. It’s the lender, it’s the real estate agent, it’s the brokerage. There’s also consumer facing tech. So there’s a lot of different departments within it I think. And for me all of it is Prop Tech. But there’s a good amount of fintech within Prop Tech as well. Got it.
Brett
Okay. Makes a lot of sense. Now let’s talk about radius. So at a high level, what problem are you solving?
Biju Ashokan
We are trying to make things really simple for real estate agents and teams to do their day to day business. We are a suite of tools and services that agents can use to make that one extra sale to make their life simpler. So they just have to focus on that one thing that they do really well, which is client communication and everything else. We are kind of the back office operation system for them.
Brett
And then how does that compare to, I guess technology first, companies like Compass, at least that’s what I’ve read about is that’s what they’re trying to claim is they are tech first. They have software that supports their agents. How does what you do compare to them?
Biju Ashokan
Yeah, so when we started off as a social network for real estate agents. So I’ve always had this one vision of having agents and a lot of agents on my platform and giving them the option to pick and choose whichever tools and services that they need. So our first phase of our product was we built a social network and that social network grew to about 85,000 agents and we kept building tools on top of it that they can choose from. So we’re kind of like an operating system right from the get go. We have agents from Compass, we have agents from Keller Williams, we have agents from any brokerage that you name using our free platform. And then as an upgrade, they can choose to hang their license with us and join our brokerage. And in terms of tech, we are obviously far more advanced.
Biju Ashokan
In terms of tech that we build for agents, we attack every single department of their workflow. It’s whether it’s recruiting other agents, whether it is educational, fintech support, transaction support, listing management, offer management, client management. If they want to grow their team, if they need marketing support, they can actually build their own brand within Radius. They don’t need to use Radius as their brand too. So if you’re an agent working for Compass, you need to use the Compass brand. But with us, that’s not the case. So in effect, we are kind of like shopify for real estate agents.
Brett
And how did you go about growing that social network and growing that community? In the early days, we relied heavily.
Biju Ashokan
On agents inviting other agents to the network, like any social network should ideally be. We used referral network as a way of getting people in. We used educational content distributed within the community to get more agents interested. But essentially all our agents came from invites from other agents.
Brett
And in terms of the profile of agents that you typically work with, you’re seeing a lot of adoption with, is it like my mom or is it my sister? Are you targeting the real estate agents who you have been there for a long time? Or would it be someone who’s younger, more digitally native, and they have a better grasp of technology?
Biju Ashokan
We go for everyone. The reason I say that is because we don’t force tech on agents like, let’s say an Apple instead, we would ask them what they want and we give them exactly what they need. So the typical real estate agent is like 45 to 50 years old and it’s a woman. So we need to target that audience, right? Mainly. And if you look at our tech, it’s pretty simple for anyone to use. Like my mom uses Instagram, so she is definitely not very tech savvy, but she gets it. So we want to make tech so simple that anyone can use it makes sense.
Brett
And what about market categories? How do you think about market categories?
Biju Ashokan
We are a tech brokerage. That’s our category. Right? And the way we kind of enter this market is we have three values. Tech first, high margins, low customer acquisition cost. And with our social network, we have pretty very low acquisition costs because we haven’t spent a dollar on marketing. It’s just the agents in our community raise their hand and say they’re interested in using some tools. And in terms of tech first and high margins, we kind of make sure any problem that is thrown at us. We have a tech solution so that it’s scalable. We don’t want to make a solution for just five people. We want to make it for 50,000 people. So I would say as a category, we are a tech brokerage.
Brett
And what’s the tech brokerage landscape look like today? Who are the major players and what does that ecosystem look like?
Biju Ashokan
There’s a lot of traditional brokerages, and even the tech brokerages today, they call themselves tech. Like you said earlier, they don’t build a lot of tech. They’re still brick and mortar, office based, traditional, conventional real estate companies with a little bit of tech, possibly a CRM or a website. We try to be a lot more than just those two elements. We kind of help them with every single thing that the agent needs to have to build a company. So the way I look at it, real estate agents are exactly like founders, right? They don’t get a salary. Everyone thinks they make easy money, they work really hard to be where they are and have taken a lot of risk to be there. So for me, it’s about powering that founder to kind of grow their business and grow their team, build a brand. So that’s how we think of our brokerage, and there’s very few brokerages that do that.
Brett
Got it. Makes a lot of sense. And outside of the 85,000 community members that you mentioned there, are there any other metrics that you can share just to highlight the growth that you’re seeing?
Biju Ashokan
Yeah, we started our brokerage under this umbrella, 85,000 agent community about a year and a half ago. We launched it in California and now we are in California colorado, Texas, Florida, Oregon, Georgia and Washington And we also launched our mortgage company, which is now Lexinston, California. And we have a similar expansion strategy there. And we are approaching close to 500 agents this year, and we probably grew like five X this year when most other companies in real estate are not showing growth at all.
Brett
Wow. And from a regulatory perspective, what does that look like as you jump from state to state? Are there different requirements for brokerages? And I’m sure there’s different requirements for mortgage companies, right?
Biju Ashokan
Yeah, it’s a process. It takes about three months to get licensed and be ready to go, but we kind of approach it earlier than we want to be there. So if we want to get to Texas in three months, we would have done all the work three months ago.
Brett
So how much of your day do you spend on regulatory stuff, would you say?
Biju Ashokan
We have a general concept, who takes care of all these things so you’re.
Brett
Not in the weeds at all with anything on the regulation side, so gladly. No, I feel like that has to be the most painful work for an entrepreneur to have to work on.
Biju Ashokan
Yes, you definitely need that’s. Another thing I’ve learned early in my career. You don’t need to be good at everything. There are people for it.
Brett
And what else, from a go to market perspective, have you guys been doing so successfully? Because that’s pretty amazing growth and amazing progress.
Biju Ashokan
Yeah. The first four years of our company corporate life, we built a community and we kept building the features of the product set in the community, which helped us grow the community base to 85,000. And that has been our top of the funnel. Most other companies would spend dollars on ads and wine and dine with agents and teams, even pay them to join a company. We don’t do any of that. It’s all inbound. It’s all coming from our premium model.
Brett
So you were a community led growth before it was cool.
Biju Ashokan
I like to think so.
Brett
And what was that community initially? Was that just on the website or did you start the community initially on something like Facebook?
Biju Ashokan
No, we had our own native mobile app, but if you look up Radius in the App Store, on the Play Store, you can download the app, and that used to be our main channel to get agents.
Brett
Got it. Very cool. And the Prop tech, real estate tech space is obviously booming there’s. Previously, I guess, before the downturn, there was a lot of funding flowing there. What have you done to really stand out with investors, would you say?
Biju Ashokan
So we have really strong investors. We have the founders, Trulia and Zillow, as part of our investor group, so there’s a lot of good advice coming from them. They’ve done all the mistakes they can, so they kind of save time for me. With all our board meetings, we’ve been very conventional, I would say, with our valuations and fundraise and everything. This last year, you would have probably seen a lot of companies raising at like 150 X revenue multiples, and we’ve never done that. We’ve raised three rounds of funding. We’ve always been at the conservative side of things, and from the get go, I think we focused on product led growth and community led growth, which attracts a certain type of investors. And we’ve been very lucky. We’ve got really good investors.
Brett
And were you tempted at all to go and raise Fu money when Tiger and CO2 were throwing around massive amounts of funding to startups?
Biju Ashokan
I’d be lying if I said, no, I don’t want that. But it was never my approach from the beginning. I think right from the beginning, it was, let’s finish phase one, let’s go to phase two. Let’s just raise money for that. Because my previous company, I’ve learned that you don’t raise money too quickly, because then there are other issues. When you raise a lot of money at a really high valuation that doesn’t make sense, then you need to be worried about a downground if you don’t meet your targets and all that. So it has to be realistic. So we’ve been, fortunately, in that space where we’ve set ourselves realistic goals and we’ve achieved goals all the way.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing and very smart. Something you touched on there in terms of product led growth and community led growth. I’d love to zoom in on that because as I’d mentioned, those are like the buzzwords today that every company is trying to pursue. But I think a lot of companies and a lot of founders don’t realize how hard it is because from what I understand, it really starts at the cultural level and you have to really instill it into the organization. It’s not like a one off marketing strategy. So can you talk us through how you’re able to instill those beliefs in that go to market approach into your team?
Biju Ashokan
Yeah, considering my background being completely tech, I think from the beginning I was trying to solve problems. Like even customer acquisition is a problem that every company has. Right. So we wanted to use tech to solve that problem. So from the beginning, very clear for me that I have to figure out a way which has a very simple premium model that can give some value to agents and then use that to kind of get them interested in more products. So that was always our strategy.
Brett
Got it. And what excites you most about the work you get to do every day?
Biju Ashokan
Would you say everything about running a company? So I would say all the marketing calls, all the product calls, everything is a product call, basically. But I think the most interesting part of my day would be all the product related calls and how I can read between the lines from other departments to see if there’s an opportunity to build something cool in there. Even when we talk to agents. I don’t know if you’ve used our community, but there is an audio and video conferencing application within our mobile app and web app, and there’s always conversations that agents are having on this platform. And I love to get in those calls and see what they’re saying, because they’re basically giving me my next steps to build whatever I need to build next. So I love listening to them talk in these platforms too nice.
Brett
That’s amazing. And last question here for you. If we zoom out into the future, what’s the three year vision for the company?
Biju Ashokan
We want to get to about 10,000 agents with the brokerage. We want to keep growing the community and we want to get to all the states in the country. And then there’s also a good user base outside of the country too so we have a user base growing in UK, Middle East, Australia, Canada, South America. So we obviously have big goals of promoting radius in all these other countries and powering agents everywhere.
Brett
Too and just to compare that 10,000 number with the large brokerages out there, what does Remax have or who is the largest brokerage in the world?
Biju Ashokan
I want to say remax is the largest. I think they have about 120,000 or 70,000 agents. And there’s this big brand called realogy, which owns a lot of small, bigger brands. They have, again, I think I want to say about 150,000 agents. Those are the two big names. EXP has about 80,000 agents. Yeah, those are the big ones.
Brett
Got it. Fascinating. Amazing. Well, unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Biju Ashokan
LinkedIn.
Brett
Awesome. And, well, thanks so much for taking the time to chat. Really appreciate it and really love what you’re building, and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.
Biju Ashokan
Thanks, fred.
Brett
All right, keep in touch. Our.
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