Day Two
This is a follow up to my Day One post from more than three years ago!
I’m still not a great writer (much prefer talking cus I don’t have to be as succinct) but I found that I actually referenced my Day One post many times to customers, future & current employees, advisors, partners and myself.
My current, fully bootstrapped, startup (Syndi Co dba APM Help & Fyxed) is at a pivotal juncture where we have venture-backed competitors in the rather large addressable market of rental property services that is starting to see some crazy investment & consolidation.
From day one, we’ve always prioritized radical transparency, refreshing responsiveness, doing things right the first time, and customer happiness above all.
Due to the increased well-funded competition, I’m being pressured to fundraise in an attempt to keep up or at least not get left behind but I’m anxious about what taking on institutional investors will inevitably do to our company culture, priorities, and quality.
Over the course of a couple of weeks, I asked almost every one of our early employees what their thoughts were and what kind of company they wanted to work with. To my relief, 100% of them wanted to focus on quality, retain control, and go long (even if it meant doubling our timeframe for achieving the same milestones).
Get Taylor Hou’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
So that’s what we’re going to do!
Listed below are some new and old checkbox items to methodically check:
- Hit $500k MRR ($6M ARR)
- Continue investing in tech (customer relationship, automation, quality control, and distribution)
- Help state regulatory agencies leverage our audit tech and resources
- Go further downstream in what we’d like to call “property management in a box”
- Hit $1M MRR ($12M ARR)
- Redefine SaaS as Service as a Software
- Becoming the platform and not just one of the players
- Coming full circle would still be interesting but not as inspirational
- Hit $2M MRR ($20M+ ARR)
- Achieve a meaningful exit for our staff while staying true to our culture
Our mission is to clean up the industry and make it better while our vision is to become America’s property management back office or “PM-in-a-box”.
