88 – Free Your Time with Freelancers Tyler Kastelberg

This transcript was generated automatically with Otter, there may be some grammatical errors.

Sean  0:12

This is the everything real estate investing show, Sean can we interview local real estate investors, professionals to go over tips, tricks, and investing strategies to help you learn about the business and to enable you to achieve your financial goals.And now, welcome to the show.Hey everyone, and welcome to another episode of The everything real estate investing show with Sean pan. Today, we have Tyler Kastelberg. Tyler is a founder of bullpen, an online marketplace for freelancers in real estate. They help your clients finding people who can help investors do miscellaneous jobs, like evaluating a deal or writing offering packages. With this business, investors will be able to focus on finding the deals and raising the money without worrying about having a large overhead for miscellaneous tasks. In this episode, let’s talk about how his business works, and how he managed to create his business even when the odds were against him. By the way, we recorded this episode with our phones. So while the sound quality might not be good, the content is great. And if you do it’s episode, subscribe to the show. In the review, we release episodes every Wednesday, Sunday, and we use the show notes on our site, everything Rei com, enjoy.

Tyler  1:18

I’m Tyler castle Berg, and I’m the founder of Bolton is an online marketplace of an underlying freelancers in real estate, and I like to, you know, sort of think of it as a up work for real estate. And there’s two sort of primary differences though. The first one is that our platform is everything real estate, there isn’t any other industries on there. And that effectively, it allows us to have a marketable, tailored experience for the users. The other differences is that our actual freelancers are all pre interviewed. And so our platform is this like hybrid of high quality, freelancers, and a number of employers in real estate. And it has made for a super interesting sort of community.

Sean  2:11

Interesting. So if you go over that one more time, basically, you started an online marketplace called bullpen, and you didn’t have a bunch of freelancers and underwriters here working for other wealthy investors or what kind of people are you connecting together?

Tyler  2:24

Sure, there are two sort of user types here, right. The the first one other freelancers and the other are our employers. I’ll start on the freelancer side, are freelancers are a big like hodgepodge of individuals, there is around like 30 of them at the moment, they sort of range anywhere from a person who has like two years of experience is out of undergrad as a bunch of like brokerage experience as an analyst who’s been doing a lot of underwriting two or more like high price one to have over 10 years of private equity, hands on experience has done like larger deals have done a number of like hybrid underwriting deals, which include hospitality, apartments, a lot of office, a lot of retail, a lot of industrial and all that kind of stuff. On our employer side of town, you have a big range as well, our employers, we have around 80 users right now. And our employer side, it ranges from a hobbyist investor off like bigger pockets who’s like, Hey, I have 20 units when you’re writing in like Houston, Texas, and I’m just not sure how to pull together or younger a model, or more like larger clients, honestly are more like high volume clients, you have a lot of like pro investors. And these investors are doing deals in places like San Francisco that are over $2 billion on or more like hobbyist investors, our users are choosing us to effectively help offset a gap in overall knowledge on our more institutional employers, they see us as a really interesting sort of value play. As you know, in real estate, our business is ultra transactional in has ups and downs. And in a transactional business like ours, you have like periods of time in which you have like 20 deals, and there are periods of time in which you have hardly any opportunities. And if you have like head count on on your balance sheet, it ends up adding a whole lot of risk on a business. So our our community is a place in which employers are finding like high quality people on a project basis. It makes a lot of sense for our more like hobbyists who do a few deals a year or are much larger investor clients who do want to go here and just attend. Okay, cool. Do you have a real estate background yourself? How did you decide to get into the business? Interesting question, though. I always had aspirations of owning real estate. And I’ll tell you the entire story. I don’t like engineering, an undergrad. And I sold myself I was interested in the more like Wall Street sort of john and i had all this experience, I was doing a bunch of like fixed income investing at the university as a part of the team and applied all over Wall Street, I was turned down by everybody how it would sort of go down as I walk into an interview, and I’d be super nervous. And I’d be tripping over words like crazy into an extent in which it was impossible to understand anything I was saying. But she’s talking about a whole lot ends up a phone in the face effectively and ended up at GV in a finance kind of training programs, awesome experience, or there’s like two years NG however, it kind of hit me that I’m not interested in being a little sort of cog in a huge organization. I was still hungry after Wall Street. And I ended up applying all over the place again. And I interviewed a bunch of places and I got an offer in SF, I moved to San Francisco on July of 2015. I work in the real sort of banking role for two years, a little under two years. As I was doing that, I think it is sort of like hit me. I’ve been like chasing after high paychecks and a career forever. And that the true like happiness, I was sort of speaking, it was in having control over a California time. So I left and I told myself, I’d invest in real estate, and I raised a bunch of money. Now firstly properties, following in the shoes of a number of the like syndicators out there right now to our database using syndications and raising all this money out of a number of like passive investors and are and aren’t investing in these projects. And I was doing that I kind of tripped over a really interesting opportunity pulled together a bunch of like offering packages. I’ve run a whole bunch of numbers, I sent it out to everybody. And I heard back out of the few like larger investors I chatted with, hey, I’m not interested in this investment opportunity. However, I’m super interested in how you underwrite and how you do offering packages you so yeah, how much would it be if you like hired me on a project or two, and I pulled on a crazy number. I wasn’t interested in doing an analyst work anymore. I was kind of burnout after all the banking days? And he said yes. And I was like, wow, all right, you know, I guess if he needs it at this price, I would do it so often on now. And then he ended up like telling a few like buddies that he’s been working with how I was doing and ended up like passed around to a few other investors. And it ended up kind of kind of like taking off. And to which I was operating a little consulting company on my own. I had hired a few analysts off like up work and I was I was overseeing all their work. And I was sort of quarterbacking all these projects, it wasn’t until like January of this year year, that kind of hit me, if I were to like hire people, I was making enough in which I could like hire people on a little income and equity in our business. And so I hired two people, a salesperson and an analyst, the sales person was doing all the sales calls, which I like, the idea of a person who like trips over words and speech impediment is on the phone and doing all the cold calling isn’t any fun. But then to i was i was like super interested in actually sort of building this as are like business and in place of, you know, a more I like freelancing and have some help doing it. So if you fast forward, for this month, our business has like taking off has over over like 10 X in the past year. And around like April of this year, I was looking around, and I saw that I have I have all these like freelancers, as analysts, our consulting price, and had all these like leads on our sales and other business. And I have been kind of like tripping over, you know, I have all these like people on a freelance basis, and actually volume of work, it was up and down. So listen real estate, and kind of hit me at that time, I have like two options in this business are a lot a lot easier, easier, easier sort of route is I operate as a as a consulting business, I have these like 20 clients, they love us. And we are okay with paying our prices. And I have like helpers. And over time, it’ll it’ll expand over time as we as we have with underwriting and do other forms like diligence, or I can take a big risk. And it would be to pretty much like pivot our business holistically into the online marketplace of freelancers. And that’s what we did.It has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And honestly, the most incredible thing I’ve ever pulled off our clients have by that in the past three months, which has been just overly humbling, as people I’ve been reaching out and you know, say things like, hey, I’d like needing a way of hiring people. And I’m not able to now I am, you know, and then are freelancers I started with with like three to four of them. At the moment we had over 20 or over 30 I had a look, that’s a good thing to know. And are actually platform online will be launching here, well launched. And it’s a beta mode over the weekend. And it’ll go like live out to the public on August 5. And super excited.

Sean  10:51

Yeah, that’s a very interesting story and a very cool journey as you had your in school, the engineering, but you never wanted to be an engineer. That’s, that’s my story is to electronic engineering out of high school cuz you High School, you’re good at math and science. So go be an engineer, but you’re 18 years old, right? 17? Because you apply the game high school senior year. So what you’re doing, you go through all that stuff, you did your first job. And you said you worked at GE but you were never an engineer GE right.

Tyler  11:18

So I was in a more kind of corporate accounting role at GD,

Sean  11:21

right. But you were already in finance, right from the get go. But then you realize corporate life when before you know same with me, you probably saw like, man, I don’t want to spend my whole life like this to your co workers were like 30 years old, and you’re like, dang, that’s going to be me. If I don’t do anything. You took a risk. Now, when you started investing in real estate, remind me again, you were trying to get into syndication? And that’s how you got connected with the syndicators or how did you start talking to them? And like, looking at their deals?

Tyler  11:46

Yes, interesting question. So it’s actually a part of my business and a journey, I consider the br our first failure, I syndicated a deal in Virginia. And I got it in touch with all these indicators through things like bigger pockets, and I was that guy who had a lot of knowledge on underwriting as the like the analytics, I would just hop on there. And I would help answer questions for people and ended up like creating a lot of interesting introductions over time. I said, so you try to syndicate a deal, but didn’t go through. But meanwhile, it didn’t go through. It didn’t go through. Yeah, I know, it ended up happening. A reason I call it a failure is that I had these these aspirations of raising all this money. And I’m doing all these deals, and it’s sort of like hit me that it isn’t as easy as that. And it also kind of hit me that there’s a difference. And entrepreneurship, and building a business and acting as an indicator. Assembly theater is a more sort of capital partner, and are making investments in in properties like with other people, it’s an awesome business. It works incredibly. However, as I was doing that, I was realizing, man, I I truly enjoy entrepreneurship in the other sense of like building out in a idea of nothing. And I think the differences is how you approach a thing like competition, I try and enter the markets, and which I don’t have any competition are our freelance marketplace is the only one in real estate. Or as a investor, I was competing against like hundreds of people who were chasing after all the same property. And I just kind of figured out, hey, you know, I can do this. And over time, I can build a business or I could like fold up the shop, I could focus on solving other problems. I feel similar. Like, I mean, there are times where I thought nice looking home, that’s what I do. I flip homes, and it makes it a lot of profit, right? If it does, if it goes well, and I’m speaking to men, but when I put home, all I’m doing is making profit. It’s kind of like a movie I saw, like, you know, pretty woman, right? It’s pretty woman, Richard Gere. he slips corporations. He’s like, man, he doesn’t do anything. There’s no nothing has been built. He’s just making money. And so I felt the same way to, I totally understand where you’re creating a business from scratch, you are like, creating something from the ground up something that you’re very passionate about to and you’re solving a real problem that people need.

Sean  14:25

Right. So I mean, I you know,

Tyler  14:27

and that’s exactly Yeah, exactly.

Sean  14:29

Okay, cool. So let’s talk more about your company bullpen. So, I’m a little bit a little more confused, is this service mostly for multi family type investors who need that specific underwriting for Who is your ideal client?

Tyler  14:43

All commercial real estate. So I’ll tell you where we are today. And then and I’ll tell you our vision for the future. At the moment, today, our freelancers have our own analysts, and have experienced in all all sectors, real estate, and includes apartments, multi family, that includes office and retail, it includes like hospitality, it includes anything, anything like low income housing, or historic projects and all that kind of stuff. Today, it’s a marketplace of a number of like analysts. However, if I look out our next like year, the actual analytics and underwriting and making right offering packages is really around like 10%. On 20% of investors like need in their actual business, investors also need a number of property accountants that they also need IR people, you know, they also need asset managers. You know, there’s there’s a whole bunch of roles in our industry that are hard to hire at the moment, when our fields are, there are a whole lot of actual jobs, this industry in which hiring on a freelance basis is almost impossible right now. And I’m going to make that possible, I say. So typically, what they’re doing is they have an in house person doing all that stuff for them, either that or they like hodgepodge a mixture. And I think like consultants, a lot of our larger clients are actually largest client at the moment, is a really publicly traded company. I mean, they have all the money in the world. And a lot of their analysts have been like leaving and in have had a lot of turnover generationally. And the the firm’s like leadership is understanding transactional on our businesses, and is also seeing that are so the bullet right here is almost over until having all this headcount on on their balance sheet is just as easy risk. And if hiring people on a freelance basis is possible, a reasonable price makes a lot of sense. Yep. That’s for sure. So the way that you guys didn’t pay plan was the same as a pork where you’re getting a cut of the sale, but a cut of the proceeds that you would give to that Freelancer or do you charge like a subscription fee x, you know, our, our revenue model is a percentage of all the transactions at the moment. And it’s a persona on MLC, it can be it can be an hourly rate, it can be a fixed price, or on top of that, rather, on our employer side, there’s a little processing fee that is added on which helps, so all the payment processing costs and all that stuff, the way however, overall, it’s pretty much identical to how companies are charging, you know, a lot like up work in fiber, and other competitors in the overall sort of freelance space. It’s a percentage of revenue.

Sean  17:59

So when you decided, I’m going to create this business,what were your steps to actually making this a reality?

Tyler  18:04

Truly, that’s really interesting question. If you had asked me a year ago, how our business I could be any year, I don’t think I could have told you this. I think it’s started as easy as I see a problem. And I, I can like hop in. And I can fix it on a freelance basis. And then as we kept like opening doors and trying out and various things, a lot of opportunities in the end up opening up. And I think that, as an entrepreneur, it’s important to have a lot of comfort in the pivot. And I think like pivoting in business is a huge part of entrepreneurship. And I think, at our stage of having under five full time employees, a pivot is a big competitive advantage over a lot of larger companies, to any, you know, any change at all. approval process, and I kind of stuff. I don’t think that I have everything all planned out. I’m just a opportunist as an entrepreneur. And are you a one night show? Or do you have people on your team helping you especially with the development side, you know, creating your website and whatnot, or so we have a full team, there’s four people who are working with us on a full time basis. And there are a number of others on a freelance basis on contract busy. Our team is all over the country them. So I can SF, head of operations is out of NYC CR engineer with the platform is out of India, and our head of marketing is out of Atlanta. And then on top of that our team has a number of of interns, and all of them are in San Francisco, how you recruit your team? And how are you financing the project? awesome question. And so the hardest part of being an entrepreneur is a team building. And I’ve done it has been through a number of like trial and errors. And so the first person I hired, it was a friend of a freelancer, the second person, I posted a job on bigger pockets, and I got the response. Other people have been over like LinkedIn, or forums like Angel list. How we hire people, though, is is really interesting question. All of our hires are on the contract for the first six weeks on our company, and there isn’t any conversation around things like equity, or any anything like long term. It’s a trial period. It’s like she is how we work and messages. If we click as a team, and actually stuff, how are we going to paying for all this? Our company has been profitable since our first day. And you know, is that a point in which I can afford to like hire people to have a marketing budget and that kind of stuff? That’s amazing. I think you’re the first person that I talked to, who is doing something to change the real estate industry, that is a very adequate industry. And that is actually profitable. They want so kudos to you on that. It’s hard to know what’s interesting. And as, as I’ve been approached a number of times out of the number of the VCs, and I feel like VCs as a little jet pack. And if everything is like pointed, all right, and as I do, I’ve got our direction, like hammered out, and everything’s a great, you know, it’s all ready to go. And I I take like VC money, it can be like, awesome into problems, like take off. The downside is, if you’re like pointed in a sort of like, wonky direction, or if you’re like visibility in the future, isn’t all the way all the way clear in and on the details like VC money that can be like deadly on your business. And so I prefer to see how far I can build this ahead of, of any VC money, and then like toilet that in the future, if it makes sense.

Sean  22:17

And what do you think is next for you guys? with extra company?

Tyler  22:20

That’s an interesting question. I’ve been focused on our platform like launch, as we do that, as long as like opening up a lot of opportunities to add a lot of users ultrafast. If we look at our freelancers on the platform. It’ll be either accountants or asset managers, some other kind of real estate team members,

Sean  22:44

essentially, you’re going to open up your marketplace to have different types of vendors who can work on a freelance basis. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Okay. Now, what are you some of your biggest challenges for your business? Or your own personal life?

Tyler  22:57

That’s really awesome question. Challenges at the moment are around like team building, and probably put a team in the place to help like build this thing really fast. I think I would put that as I’m, like, CEO problem in which in which I’m trying to figure out how to be a CEO. And I think like, humbly, I’ve learned so much in the past, in the past six months, and I know that in the next like six months, I’ll learn absolutely heinous, and it launches platform problems. That’s our primary problem right now.

Sean  23:32

Like getting more team members to work with your company, that’s your biggest problem finding the right people to work with you.

Tyler  23:37

It isn’t necessarily a freelancer has been pretty easy to find, if you look on, you know, marketing channels. Yeah, it’s our full time team. How do you like build a team? In a place like San Francisco, if I’m not offering, you know, all the music salaries of these like tech companies? You know, that’s it. That’s a huge a challenge.

Sean  24:01

So I guess you can wave a magic wand, what would be like a cure all for your problems? Just being able to hire people at a very low price? I mean,

Tyler  24:09

No, no, I don’t know. I don’t think like cheap, cheap labor is like how we do this. You know why I think our team is like pivoting as it needs to be right now. I think that as as we get to be, like larger, like open up all the roles that our team needs. That’s our interesting problem is that I know a head of marketing is important. head of sales is important. A head of engineering is important kind of a UI is important. Like all the user interfaces are, you know, I have all these roles that are huge, huge need. And I think the hard part is how do we like hire people in these like high levels? to then do like two things and not and not only one? No, it’s also interesting problem is attention. How do we capture attention on the platform, and like the attention of everyone knowing our platform, this, I think, like branding is huge, like play here. And I think how we build a brand in a community over time, it’ll be a indicator of our success, or failure,

Sean  25:17

I think is very true. And I think almost every phone company has the exact same problem. But for your case, you have some ideal models, like you have a work, you have five, right those two are similar route connecting an end user to freelancer, what were they using to promote? Even like online jobs pH, the Filipino version of upward? How are they getting people to know about them to why are they getting clients to come check them out? Wife, you mentioned condo sign in first place? Have you thought about that? What are you going to do to do more branding to get more people to know about your your services?

Tyler  25:51

I have our big differentiator. We are again, our platform is only for real estate people. And all the freelancers are going to be interviewed. And I think the huge one of those all my branding is on the real estate side. Because here’s the thing, off work is outstanding, has its weaknesses. Overall, it like bruised, and overall our marketplace model, you know, that it is it is like viable to build a 300 marketplace. I think our next evolution of that is our business of Bolton as a more industry specific, you know, option, you know, on how to get your failures. And I truly, truly, truly think it’s if we can like solve a problem, like real estate and have a really tailored answer that is for real estate. I think it’ll open up a lot of doors.

Sean  26:53

Yeah, I think there’s definitely a really nice niche real estate has made for sure. And also you’re providing a service that is above average, in terms of quality, right, like any Joe Schmo can draw something or draw a logo on Fiverr. Right, so who can analyze deals that have a certain level of education, knowledge and understanding of the product, you’re providing really great service for these people. So before we end the show today, we’re going to recap real quick. So you’re Tyler, CEO of bullpen rd calm, which is you know, marketplace for real estate investors to go and connect with freelancers who could help do like analysis and underwriting. And on the client side, it would be some sort of maybe real estate indicator, or someone in charge of a project who doesn’t want to have their own in house team. They want to have freelancers project out. And we also talked about how when building a company is team building, probably the most challenging part, branding is very important as well. How do you how do you do brand new so that more people know about your business. And you know, if you want to start a business, basically find a problem, solve it, hopefully you can be like you were your profitable day one so that you’re able to manage all your operations without struggling and trying to get VC money even though you may not need it. Because like you said, you think UC might be a jetpack, you don’t know where you’re going, just gonna end up in the water. How can people get in contact with you?

Tyler  28:05

You can reach us at Bolton, r e.com.

Sean  28:09

All right, Tyler, thank you so much for your time. And let us know about your online marketplace that connects commercial real estate investors with freelancers and sharing the story of how you decide to get into the business and your journey of entrepreneurship.

Tyler  28:22

Thank you so much, john, I appreciate your time and allowing us on the show today.

Sean  28:26

Here’s some of the key takeaways from this episode. If you want to start a business, find a problem first and then find a solution. You don’t want a lot of overhead in your payroll. So hire a TAS on a case by case basis. Don’t let your challenges hold you back. If you want to do something, you can get it done. In the worst case, you can always hire people who can do things better than you can. I hope you all learned a lot. You can find the show notes on our site, everything Rei com. Thanks. Have a great day. This was another episode of The everything real estate investing show.Sean,do you enjoy the show give us a five star rating will take less than a second and they’ll help live. You can contact me at Shawn pan realty at GO. com. That’s svanpanraotyiqo.com Thanks Have a great day.

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