034: Helping Business Owners Effectively Streamline their Business Operations (w/ Raj Bhaskar)

Summary: Rak Bhaskar is the co-founder and CEO of Hurdlr, a mobile business management application that is targeted at entrepreneurs and small business owners to help them bridge the gap between manual spreadsheets and complex small business accounting systems. <br> <br> He is also the founder of Visual Homes, a leading real estate rental management platform designed specifically for subsidized housing programs. In 2010, he sold Visual Homes to Yardi Systems, a global leader in real estate software solutions. He also worked for Yardi for 2 years in a business development capacity. Raj holds a Business Administration, with honors, from The George Washington University   <br> <br> Current core revenue streams <br> <br> Hurdlr’s core revenue stream is Mobile SaaS which users pay a small monthly fee to use.    <br> <br> Starting out in business <br> <br> He was passionate about business from a young age and also grew up within a business-oriented environment. Was selling candy in the fifth and sixth grade after which he moved on to selling sodas at golf tournaments in high school. He also had a car detailing business and shovelled snow in the winters. <br> <br> Always wanted to work for a start-up before starting his own business. After graduating college, he worked for a wireless software start-up for a year and then started his first business, Visual Homes which he sold to Yardi systems after 10 years. He worked for Yardi systems for a year and a half just to create value for the company while also gaining the perspective of being the employee of an established company. <br> <br> Visual Homes idea <br> <br> The idea for Visual Homes was based on helping local communities thrive through public and affordable housing. It also helped real estate agencies thrive in supporting the communities. The technology platform was primarily built to help in financial and compliance management of housing agencies. Visual Homes helps in determining who is eligible for public housing, among other things. <br> <br> The idea for Visual Homes was not originally Raj’s. There was a business that had developed a similar technology so Raj bought it without paying for it upfront (had an agreement with the owner of the business to pay him later on) and derived the new technology from the old one. The old technology was targeted towards small agencies, but after Raj developed the new product, he targeted it towards medium and large agencies.  <br> <br> Growth strategy at the beginning <br> <br> Raj looked up the top 500 housing agencies in the US and cold called all of them. Within 6 months, he landed his first contract, worth $500,000. That enabled him to meet all the financial needs of the business and build it up gradually. He initially outsourced the app enhancements to developers in India to keep his costs low. <br> <br> Transitioning from a business background to a technical one <br> <br> It helped a lot that Raj had started off his college education with computer science for three semesters.  <br> <br> Current growth strategy <br> <br> Raj still uses cold calling while including demos and the building of long term relationships. That worked for the first five years of Visual Homes and within the second five years, the business started growing exponentially. <br> <br> Tip 1: Know the market you’re in and understand what the sales cycles are like so that you can develop a realistic and achievable business plan <br> <br> Tip 2: When you over-deliver on value, and provide your clients with exceptional unmatched service, they will always refer you to other clients <br> <br> Knowing the Visual Homes idea would work <br> <br> Raj persevered a lot and always made sure he over-delivered on value to clients which led to a lot of referral business coming in. <br> <br> Starting Hurdlr <br> <br> Released the Hurdlr app to the public more than a...