BuildingLink: Surviving A Competitor With Big Funding

How do you sell software to some of the toughest buyers on the planet?

Jerry Kestenbaum is the founder of BuildingLink, which provides a web-based integrated platform for over 1,000 luxury residential buildings.

I met Jerry through his son, who came to a Mixergy cocktail party that I did in NY. I raved to him and said, “the building where I live runs on your software. You brought into the internet age. Thank you.” That led to this interview.

Jerry Kestenbaum

Jerry Kestenbaum

BuildingLink

Jerry Kestenbaum is the founder of BuildingLink, which provides web-based integrated platform for over 1,000 luxury residential buildings, their residents, staff and service providers.

 

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Full Interview Transcript

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Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. Home of the ambitious upstart, a project where over 700 proven entrepreneurs have come to tell you their story, help you learn from their mistakes so that you can go out there and build their own success story. And hopefully come back here and do an interview yourself and tell people what you learned.

And in this interview I’m going to focus the conversation around this big question. How do you sell software to some of the toughest buyers on the planet? Jerry Kestenbaum is the founder of Building Link which provides web based integrated platform for over 1,000 luxury residential buildings. I met Jerry through his son, who came to a Mixergy cocktail party that I did in New York. And I walked over to this guy, I raved to him about how much I loved Building Link. I said, “Look Zach, because of Building Link I get my packages. Because of Building Link I know when someone has something to sell in my building. Because of Building Link I feel like my building where I live is brought into the Internet age and isn’t just the slowest part of my life. I love it and I asked him for an interview with his father, which is what we have here today. And Jerry, thank you for doing this interview.

Jerry: Thank you, Andrew. Glad to be a part of your library of 700 successful companies.

Andrew: And my number’s already out of date, by the way, right? It’s now longer, over 1,000. It’s over 1,200 buildings that you’re working with?

Jerry: That’s correct.

Andrew: Yeah.

Jerry: [??] We’ve added, because I’m slightly related to the real estate industry. And the real estate industry one of the first rules is you know exaggerate the numbers. I have to say none of these numbers are exaggerated. We’ve actually added 71 new buildings since January first of this year.

Andrew: Oh, wow. Congratulations. So, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to go through a chronological telling of your story. And along the way, here’s what the audience to know. We’re going to find out how Jerry survived a competitor with big funding. And if you ever have a competitor with big funding, you’ll want to, you’re going to want to hear that and arm yourself with that. With his experience. We’re going to find out where his profitable idea came from. And if you’re ever looking for a profitable idea for your own business pay attention to that story.

We’re going to get Jerry’s no waste of time guarantee. And I know that because he went through our pre-interview process and I loved that. I want you to hear how you can get anyone to listen to you by making this kind of guarantee and we’ll hear it as part of Jerry’s story. And we’re also going to hear the incredible thing that happened because of his success. What he was able to do. A lot of times in these interviews we hear about the highs and lows. I want you to hear one of the reasons why it’s worth it. In fact, a couple of reasons and we’ll save that for the end of the interview. But use that as inspiration through your hard times.

All right Jerry, I want people to know what this, what this product is. And why don’t we start by telling the story of a woman who lived in New York who found herself in San Francisco. What happened? Can you tell that story?

Jerry: Sure. So, there was a gal named Emily. And she would not really be your typical tech guru. She was a 63 year old, very organized lady executive, secretary administrator. She was using Building Link in one of her buildings in New York. Using Building Link in one of your building in New York means that the system basically handles all of these communications, your package tracking notifications, you know when your super has made a repair request, if you have a visitor that they’ve let in that they given your keys out.

It basically handles all of the communication between you and your building staff, and she bought an apartment in a lovely building in San Francisco, S.F. Watermark, very high end, and she moved in and she was looking for some packages and they had no record of where they were and they were lost and she couldn’t find them, and she said, ‘you guys are nuts, this is San Francisco, this is the cultural mecca. How could you not have a system for doing this,’ and they say, ‘well, we don’t need a system, we’ve got Post-It notes, we’ve got this, we’ve got that.’ She says, ‘you guys are behind the times. I hate to tell you,’ and they sort of laughed at her a little bit, but they humored her. They said what does a 60 some odd administrative secretary from New York going to tell us San Francisco cool dudes about technology.

She said, ‘look, I’ve got to show you what they’re doing,’ so we pulled up a screen share program. They had no speaker on, it was like in the basement of some place there, and she said, ‘OK everybody, call in on your cell phones.’ We had a conference call where we had seven people calling in separately on their cell phones in the same room, and we did a quick demo of our product and I don’t know exactly what role she played, but the young folks quickly took over and said, ‘this is a great product, we’ll take over now,’ and they were one of our first clients in San Francisco.

Andrew: That’s the kind of excitement that the product, the Building Link builds in its end users which are the residents, and it’s also showing the kind of hesitation that building owners have to adding any kind of technology and how they’re not prepared for it. I mean they didn’t have, they had to get on their cell phones you said, in order to connect with you, so you’re selling to some tough clients. Whoever is sitting in my audience probably is not selling to the kind of clients you are. They’re much more ready to hear my audience pitch than your clients were to hear yours. I want to go, as I said, in chronological order, but I’ve got to ask you about one of your challenges which is that one of your first customers did something to you that I hinted at in the beginning. Do you know what I’m talking about?

Jerry: The large customer?

Andrew: Yeah. Your first large, large customer.

Jerry: Yeah.

Andrew: 17 buildings.

Jerry: Yeah, we were talking, anybody who tries to start a business now, you’ve got a hundred false starts that you think is going to be your roller coaster ride up, and then one out of every hundred of those actually pay off, but we actually had a fairly large customer, it was our first large customer that came on, liked our product and said, ‘we’re going to put this in 17 of our buildings,’ and it’s like oh my God, from here on in it’s just going to be great. Mind you, this is 2003, I don’t think the term “viral” was created at that point.

Andrew: It was, but it hadn’t made it’s way outside of the internet culture.

Jerry: OK, so the word “viral” hadn’t gone viral yet.

Andrew: Right.

Jerry: A little meta problem, and so we were very excited and we put all 17 buildings on, and then a year later they said, ‘oh, by the way, you know we forgot to tell you, we decided to have someone basically copy what you did, and build our own version of it,’ and we lost what was then a third of our business in one day, which was basically two years, so that was a very big setback and it’s interesting the way these things attack you. I would say that really powered us to really want to, I wouldn’t say get even, but wanting to sort of eat crow. I would say to this day we have 1200 buildings, those 17 buildings is equivalent to two weeks’ worth of new business, but to this day I’m still running towards the goal of having them come back to me, hat in hand and say, ‘you know, you were right, we couldn’t have done it without you.’ It’s a tremendous motivator [??]…

Andrew: I love hearing that. I love hearing your fire. I love hearing that it’s still there even after you put your mark on so many buildings and built it so far, and you have built it far. We’re not going to play with the camera angle because we finally got in a good spot, but if we were to, people could see that you’ve got a beautiful floor space over there, right? Can you tell me about that?

Jerry: We do. It’s interesting because we moved into this beautiful space of our own just a year ago, and it’s a funny thing when you talk about a company feeling like they’ve arrived, at what point you feel secure. I just told you a story about something that made us feel very insecure and I would say after that story, it’s very hard for somebody like me, there are young folks that are willing to believe that everything they touch is going to turn to gold, but that’s not necessarily my generation. It’s very hard to really get a sense of have we really arrived or is it all going to fall apart? Is there going to be another call tomorrow, and the truth of the matter is, we have 1000 buildings. I really can’t picture what 1000 buildings look like. I simply cannot picture anything bigger than like 70 buildings, so as we were growing, I never quite got over that feeling of, ‘OK, but could it all cave tomorrow?’ Maybe that’s a good feeling to have, maybe if Kodak had felt that way we’d have a Kodak today.

For me, the point when I finally got over that was when we moved into our new offices. It’s really just, we were, we were in a much crowded space, in space that we were renting and we finally, we finally stepped up to the plate. My wife was very encouraging, it’s a scary move, and said ‘don’t worry, if after 9-10 your company hasn’t collapsed, it’s probably not going to collapse in the next few years. Bite the bullet’ and we bit it. We bought a beautiful space and we outfitted it and morale is so great and for the first time I feel like no one is going to take my company away from me. It’s a good feeling to have.

Andrew: I want to hear how you built it up and, by the way, you mentioned your age, do you feel comfortable telling us how old you are, how old you were when you launched the business?

Jerry: Yeah, I launched it around 11 ½ years ago, I’m 58 now, so 46-47. I had other business concurrently. This really started alongside a chemical business and it really started as a hobby.

Andrew: Your family had a chemical business, that’s where you were just before you launched the company, what were you doing in the chemical business?

Jerry: Well, I’ve got a couple of degrees. I’ve got a doctorate in clinical psychology, so I’m good in psychology, I’m in good in research, I’m good in computers, and I was involved in that family business and in terms of building out different computer systems, CRM systems before, I think, I don’t really know if the word CRM existed then. A spreadsheet before visacap was invented in 19, I don’t know what 70 something? So I was involved in technology, process, solutions, and then all the fuzzy personnel related stuff as well.

Andrew: What does that mean; by the way, it’s a chemical, what’s a chemical business? Do you make…

Jerry: Yeah, our business, our business is, we were the largest distributor of refrigerant gasses, like the chlorofluorocarbons, the stuff that hurts the ozone layer, and then the good stuff that saves the ozone layer.

Andrew: I see.

Jerry: and then we became one of the two largest recyclers, so that’s how we get to wear the white hats and the black hats. Recycle the bad gasses and we prevent them from being released. It was an exciting piece of business but at some point…

Andrew: And it was started way before people were as environmentally conscious as they are now.

Jerry: That’s correct.

Andrew: And you sold it at one point, right?

Jerry: Right. We sold it around 40, it was actually bought by a large chemical company, Air gas, who was looking to get into the refrigerant sector, and it was a very good time, we weren’t looking to sell. I was kind of excited about it because this is the company that had purchased 300 companies over the intervening 10 years, they’ve averaged 30 a year and they have not kept any of the computer systems in any of the companies that they purchased, but they kept ours.

The reason, by the way, the reason that I think that’s significant, just in terms of your viewers, is not to say I’m a great computer system designer, it’s to say it was designed really with very careful attention to the pain points. Pain points of our sales people, pain points of our customers, I just stayed really, really close to what’s bothering people, which are the shoes that are too tight? We just kept on tweaking it and we ended up with very, very innovative solutions, not even by being that creative but just by being able to listen to what bothers people and when the company was bought, nobody wanted to give it up and they had to [??] and now they’ve got about a tenth of the company using that system.

Andrew: How much of your own money, you didn’t get any outside funding, but you invested your own money…

Jerry: Right.

Andrew: how much did you invest in the business??

Jerry: Well, I invested millions of dollars.

Andrew: Millions of dollars to build building Link.

Jerry: Millions of dollars.

Andrew: Are you profitable now?

Jerry: We are.

Andrew: You are.

Jerry: We are. I don’t try to be. Every time, our profit grows 20-30% a year, I add more people. More support people, more programming people. We are, we’re building out a wonderful platform, there are more and more synergies in terms of things that we do. Just the other day we had these really serious request but we have these really [??] request as well. Just the other day a couple of our customers who run shuttle busses from, they have, their properties are located far away from public transportation, they run shuttle busses to the nearest public transportation and they said ‘hey, can you include a shuttle bus app in your application?’ This is the kind of thing that some people would launch whole companies around but to us it’s like, that’s a nice little piece. I’m not really focused so much on getting rich on that piece but it rounds out our platform and so we’re in the process of adding a shuttle bus tracking process for our [??].

Andrew: I saw that. Here in D.C. there are buildings that are so far away from…

Jerry: Right.

Andrew: public transportation that they have shuttle busses and as soon as we saw buildings with that, I don’t care how beautiful they were, I don’t care if they had a swimming pool in my living room, I immediately said to Olivia, I’m getting out of here, I can’t deal with that. I am that addicted to public transportation here. All right, so I’ve got a sense of where you are. You said it was a hobby and I had mentioned earlier something about where you got the idea. Can you tell the audience about how you came to?

Jerry: Yeah. Sure. Sure. I mean sure this is a little bit of rehash of following the pain points thing. Because I really, I had read a wonderful book called Go It Alone, and I wouldn’t say the whole book is good. But there’s a chapter about, you know, what are the eight things to ask yourself before you start a business. And they make the point how much easier it is to start a business that’s revolutionary versus evolutionary.

So Building Link for me started eleven years ago. And my building that I lived in had to reach me at an emergency. And there was a leak upstairs and they had to break into my apartment. And then they were trying to call me at a phone number that was a summer phone number I hadn’t used in like six years. And I went down to the front desk to say where did you get that phone number? And I saw this address book with scratch offs and names and cross outs. And then I turn page after page and the whole book was like that. Every resident in the building was like this spaghetti mess of contact information. And I said you know what there’s got to be a better way. This is 1999, this is like, you know, modern times. There’s got to be a better way of doing this.

And I started building out features. And it’s very interesting, I built out some features based on the real pain points that I saw. And then I built out other features based on how I thought buildings are to run if they were run the right way.

And the first set of features really took off. And the second set of features, you know, took off seven years later.

Andrew: I wanted to hear that because that’s a theme that I’ve been hearing in a lot of interviews here. And you expressed more clearly than the others. The idea that the average person complains the entrepreneur builds. And the same thing was told to me just the other day by Charles Hudson, who said, he was sitting at a conference, he wasn’t happy with the conference and the guy sitting next to him said, well if you’re not happy build a better one. And he went out and he built this business that told the story of how he built it and sold it.

So you decide you’re going to get in the space. You don’t have a ton of experience building software companies as far as I know, this is the first tech startup that you had first software startup. What’d the first version look like, that you, you built it yourself right?

Jerry: Right.

Andrew: What did that first version look like?

Jerry: Well, it had very little graphics. It focused more on the functionality. Our target audience at the time we thought were, you know, obsessive compulsive engineer [??] that like to have perfect control of their buildings.

And this is actually another funny lesson as well. Because we figured, you know, this is a tool for organizing your building, later on we said, people sometimes buy with their eyes, and their minds and their hearts, it appeals to the people who say this is cool, let’s just do it. But in 1999 it was too far out there. It was too novel. It appeared to the people who understood what it did.

We thought our first customers were the ones that were really, whose buildings were a mess. You walk into a building and it’s just chaos. And they say these people are going to love what we have to offer because they’re so disorganized. And what we found was really just the opposite. That the building’s that were the most organized were the ones that understood what we were trying to do. And were great use of our products.

So our first clients were people who really understood, we’ve got to get our act together here. As our product progressed we started expanding it to appeal to just people who just have more of a visual reaction, hey this is cool, we should have this, I’m going to like this, my resident’s going to like this.

Andrew: Can you tell me about, what are some of the features in the first version? What did it have to do?

Jerry: Well, the first version had all the basic stuff. The repair requests, residents could put in a repair request. They could answer surveys. There were some really interesting things, putting in front desk and visitor permission instructions. There was never any software niche for doorman staff buildings, you know. The software for real estate was always an extension of the accounting back off of software with a little nod to repair requests.

But we were living day to day with a group of people, the doorman, the residents, the staff, the mechanics, other people, the board. And that was not a service community. That was a neglected community. So that was the community that we really tried to reach.

Andrew: I see. Was there anything in that first version that you added, that now, that after you launched you said nobody needs this, what was I even thinking?

Jerry: Sure. It was funny and maybe it’s a New York thing. There really are cultural difference. There’s a lot of stories about all those stakes that marketing companies try to do when they move a U.S. product to China and vice versa. There’s a real cultural thing at least in the real estate field for sure, which is a very traditional field.

When you go from East Coast to West Coast. The East Coast is very pessimistic, you know, what ever I do is going to backfire and I’m going to get blamed for it. And so only innovate when you have to. As you hit further west coast, people say, ooh that’s cool, that could be good, there could be up side, let me try it.

So when we started on the East Coast. People had us put in all these controls, such as there’s an emergency construction field. They wanted to make sure if the staff member clicked to see what my emergency instructions were, which is in the event that something happens call the doctor or this friend, that there was an e-mail that was sent out automatically alerting the property manager that some staff member glimpsed my emergency instructions. Because oh my God, do you know what terrible things could happen if a staff member wanted to get a sense of my emergency instructions. So there were all these quirky paranoid “let’s think of anything could go wrong” features that we had to put in. Nobody ever wanted them or used them.

Andrew: You made a point earlier that I want to emphasize that you thought you were going to sell to the people who needed you most, the most disorganized buildings. One of the ways that you found that that’s not the ideal customer is when you talked to, do you remember, talking to Greg’s building, an ex-Navy person?

Jerry: Yes.

Andrew: Can you tell that story?

Jerry: Yes, that was really the moment when this hit me. We walked into this really large Manhattan building, 400 units. We got an appointment with the property manager. The property manager, Greg, was an ex-Navy officer who had run a ship and mechanics. In the Navy, you really have to get your equipment working beautifully. He says, “Come follow me to my office.” I’m walking through this building and I’m looking at the halls, and they’re painted beautiful battleship grey, and all the pipes are polished and you can eat off of the floor. Everything is organized. I said, “This guy is not going to be a customer. He’s going to say, ‘I could do it better'”. He saw what we did and he just loved it. He said, “Give me a proposal.” I said, “Do you need us to show it to your board?” He said, “No, I run the ship here. I want this tool. I get it. I need it.” So that was really an eye-opener. The sales cycle is a thousand times faster if you figure out who you should be selling to.

Andrew: Seth Godin said that, and opened my eyes to that. He said, “Look for people who already share your world view and sell to them.” It’s much easier to sell to people that share your world view than try to get someone to change their world view and then to accept your product into their lives. That’s why I wanted to get that story out there because that’s a perfect illustration. I would think that a building that was disorganized would say, “Thank you. Jerry, thank you for saving my life.” But they don’t know it. It’s too advanced, maybe.

Jerry: Right. People tremendously underestimate peoples’ tendency to change; not just their world view but even just their habits. All the successful inventions, Click Once and even Seamless, which I use for ordering all the time, they just hone that, “How do I make the friction point between the customer and how they use my product disappear to almost zero?” It’s amazing, the difference between a one inch friction point and a zero inch friction point, the difference that it makes is really worth a lot of effort.

Andrew: We’ll spend more time talking about how you got customers, but I’m curious about that first version and when you got developers to work on it. You’re not funded, which means you can’t just offer options and shares the way that people in Silicon Valley might. You’re also not living in the heart of the tech world where you’re expected to do that. How did you incentivize the earlier developers to work with you?

Jerry: I would say that I incentivized them, but they incentivized me. This was a hobby. I was focused on my building and a few friends’ buildings, building something out that worked and something that could be an idea. Really, we made a critical decision, this was a separate play, we decided to charge for our product. Nobody was charging for internet software in 1999-2000. That’s another point, I felt like if I’m going to build something that takes a long time to build, and if I’m going to put my heart into it, I want to know that I’m building something of value. The best way to find out if you’re building something of value is to ask people to pay for it.

So it’s an interesting idea, that little step from free to now they have premium. You get to hedge your bet. You get to say, I don’t know if I’m producing any value, but I have this premium model, so as long as I’m signing people up for free, it means I’m getting closer to revenue. No, you’re not, not until you cross that divide. So we had these developers working, and this was a hobby, and at some point one or two of the developers that were working for us outsourced said, “If you could pay our salary, we’d like to quit the company that we’re working with (that was developing this), we’d like to quit and work with you, and work on this full time.”

I said, “What are you talking about? This is my hobby. You’re not going to quit a good job, you’ve got bills to pay.” They said, “No, what you’re building is really cool, I see it’s solving problems. People like it, there’s a very big market, there’s a lot of potential”. And, you know, they got me scratching my head and I said, “Oh my God,” they gave me the courage that I didn’t have. They wanted to throw in the towel, they wanted to throw in their lot with me, so I would almost say that they incentivized me. And two of those people are with me today. My CTO has been with me from the very start, from eleven years ago.

Andrew: And these are people who, you hired an outsourcing company, an outside development company to build if for you and they said we love your project so much we want to work full time on your project, not on the others, you just need to charge-

Jerry: The two people that were working on it.

Andrew: Two people. [??] And how did you know?

Jerry: It’s on a completely different note. It turns out that I was being charged by that company four developers when there were only two working on it. That happened for about a year. So it’s a very interesting thing sometimes to sort of drop in on the people who are supposedly working on your account and say, “OK, let me meet everyone, tell me what everyone is working on.” But the two people that were actually-

Andrew: So they built the first version, you didn’t hand build it right? I see they built it. When you say you, you mean you had it built for you.

Jerry: I designed it, I’m good at databases but I was not an ASP programmer.

Andrew: And it is hard when you’re not an ASP programmer to hire ASP programmers and watch what they’re doing and know who’s doing what, and so I see the value of bringing them in. I also want to talk a little about charging because you’re right, we don’t talk enough about revenue in this base. We don’t talk enough about charging. Can you tell me a little but more about why it’s so important to charge, especially since this is a hobby at the time it was?

Jerry: Right, for me personally it was important to charge because I’m not really good at building things that are easy to build. I like to build things that are hard to build and I like to build things that, because they are hard to build, they build serious barriers to entry. I like the notion of, there are a lot of good business ideas that people quit after three years and they are really five year ideas, if you just stick with them for five years. So I like building those things, and so when you’re building something like that you can’t wait so many years to find out your on target. It’s very interesting,

I’ve been reading some of Steve Blank’s [SP] stuffs on the lean launch pad stuff at Stanford where he has his entrepreneur class at week number 3 or 4 he has each one go out and talk to fifty, a hundred, three hundred potential customers and find out what they actually say about their idea. So there’s now a discipline that says, really, really test your revenue model hard upfront. Don’t simply fall in love with your idea and just believe that it’s going to work out. But, you know, that was a pretty new concept then.

Andrew: I see, and charging, if I’m getting you right, what you’re saying is charging lets you know that people really want and value what you are creating.

Jerry: Yeah, and they give you feedback. It’s like marriage. You don’t have to worry, if you want to find out what you’re doing wrong, get married. You know what I mean, it’s that kind of a thing. When people are paying you they let you know what they really think.

Andrew: It’s absolutely true. You know, I used to do interviews and just do interviews and just publish them all for free and it wasn’t until I went to Mixergy Premium, MixergyPremium.com, where we started selling courses that people got more vocal, that people bought in. Not just financially, but emotionally bought into the mission and would let me know when things weren’t going right and would get me to get back on track because now it’s their money on the line. Now they’re not just clicking a link, now they are bought in and they want to make sure that what they paid for delivers a value that they want. And it’s great for me, I want to be held accountable like that.

Jerry: That’s right. So, I have a chance after this to go on MixergyPremium.com and take out my credit card and sign up.

Andrew: Do it. You can do it right now while we talk.

Jerry: [??]

Andrew: I like it, thank you Jerry. Yeah, MixergyPremium.com people. How did you know what to charge for? One of the challenges when there isn’t anyone else charging for software, as there wasn’t in your spaces, that you can’t say, “we’ll do what they do but charge less,” or, “we’ll do they same as they do, charge the same but add more features”, you have to make up your own model. How did you come up with that? It took me a long time on Mixergy Premium to find out what it’s supposed to be.

Jerry: Right, I would say we had a couple of goals. Early on the goal was just to get people to pay anything for it. Which was kind of novel. Now it’s a whole different ball game. If you’re going to charge anybody, anything less than what you ultimately want to charge, our philosophy is to tell people what our ultimate goal is. We launched new servers for web based printing of laminates resident ID cards and I tell everybody our ultimate goal is to charge this amount for it, even though I’m not going to charge you for the next two, three, four years because if you set the place holder in advanced, people don’t get nuts on you; “you’re ripping me off, this is a bait and switch.” If you don’t, it’s so hard to move the needle.

So, it is pretty hard to figure out, it is pretty hard to figure out what to charge but I feel like, when it doubt I’ve always tried to be very honest with people, when in doubt I say to people, here’s what I would like to be able to charge, I can’t do it yet, I’m going to try and give you as much value as I possibly can so we can get to the point where you’re going to tell me, yes, you can charge me that amount, we’ve arrived at that value. That’s really kind of the best that I can do. There are a certain number of people that are honest enough that they’re going to say that, you’ve earned it.

Andrew: Interesting. So you’d go into a building and you’d say, I would eventually like to charge your whatever, let’s say $1 per resident, I can’t yet, but I’m going to keep adding value, I’m going to keep listening to you as you tell me what features you want and can’t live without, and once we get to a place where I can charge you, I don’t know, a buck per resident, we’re going to start charging you and everyone else.

Jerry: Right, right. When I get to the point when I’m delivering you $3, I say my value proposition is to give you $3 of value for every $1 I charge you and then when I say to people, and in the real estate industry people love to negotiate, it’s like if you don’t go back to your boss and say, don’t worry, I screamed at them, I hollered bloody murder when we quoted this price; you’re going to get fired. So what I try to tell people is don’t spend all of your time trying to tell me how I can charge you less, try to tell me how I can give you more value because then we both win.

Andrew: Right.

Jerry: If I charge you $1 and give you $1 value and you get me to charge you .50 cents, what have you got? But if I can charge you $1.50 and I can give you $10 worth of value and we, really it changes the formula and if you really mean it and you’re really investing, and we invest all of our money and programming, you develop a certain credibility that you’re not taking money out, you really are trying to work with people to give them better solutions. Over time, even in the very skeptical real estate industry there’s a sense of fairness that emerges and when we do raise prices, people say, you know what I don’t have it in this year’s budget but if you can work with me you can put it in next year.

Andrew: How do you give a landlord $3 in value for every $1 that they pay? I, from what I see, you make it easy for me to get my packages, that’s not delivering money to them, it’s just delivering happiness. You make sure that, you guys have an internal Craig’s List for the building, which allows me to, so anyway, how do you do it?

Jerry: That’s right. So, so the thing is we really, just because we have a platform, we distribute the goodies to the different audiences. This is a feature for the residents, this is a feature for the board, this is a feature for the manager, and this is a feature for the on-site person. So, the thing that you don’t see is that in an average building they’re going to lose 2-3 packages or 4 packages a year or dry cleaning or laundry. Not necessarily things that they lost but things that they can’t document, that the housekeeper picked it up and stuck it in a closet and the resident, in all good faith, claims that it was lost.

The funny thing about packages, when you open them up they come from all sorts of stores, but when they’re lost they all are from Armani or one of those expensive stores. All lost laundry and boxes always contained very valuable things. That’s one of the interesting fantasies, at what point does the content get switched, I don’t know. Buildings, they can write a check out for $10, $15, $20,000.

Andrew: All right.

Jerry: Another example. The system tax repair requests, OK. So you say, big deal, how much is that worth? In every building you’ve got, at least, one or two people that aren’t going to pay their rent for 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, a year, or two years and going to incur lots of legal costs and when it gets to court they’re going to say ‘my apartment’s uninhabitable, there was this noise coming out of the bathroom vent and I’ve been complaining about and I have a heart condition and no one’s fixed it’ and so to be able to document we’ve been in there three times in the last few years. So it’s an interesting thing that when you’re in a negotiation people will never tell you the value to them. So buildings will say ‘oh, it’s just packages, it’s just maintenance, why should I pay so much?’ But we know, we know the real value.

Andrew: How do you know the real value? I’d like to be able to know the real value I bring to my customers and I’d like to know where the hidden value that I could deliver is. How did you know that about boxes?

Jerry: You’ve got, even in the real estate industry, you’ve got enough people when they really are enthusiastic about your product that they’ll forget that they’re playing poker and they’ll tell you ‘this is so great, do you know what just happened last week? Before we had this we would lose everything’ so when you reach a certain trust level that people don’t feel that whatever they say is going to be used against them, that they say, this is not a win/lose proposition if you make, if you tell me you love my product I’m not going to use that to get more money out of you. I have an independent value proposition that I’m going to use, people share with you more information.

Andrew: But how do you know it ahead of time, is there a way to ask a question of a customer that lets them figure out a problem that they didn’t even recognize they had. Like, you know, we don’t lose it every day but when we do lose a box it’s expensive for us.

Jerry: That’s an interesting question. And I’m going to answer that in a little bit backwards. There are any number of people who can make up those cost benefit analysis spreadsheets, you know. And really none of them of have credibility. You save x number of hours, x number of pieces of paper, x dollars of pieces of paper, you know, there are all sorts of ways of doing that. And at the end of the day you say OK, so I’m saving x amount of man hours, well which specific person am I going to be firing? Well nobody.

So, we never spent a whole lot of time making up those analyses because they’re, people don’t trust numbers so much. But what we’ve tried to do is we’ve tried to make it easy for people to say that we’re willing to try it and see for themselves. And when they see for themselves the little, they discover benefit’s that we don’t even know they need. We solve problems that they don’t even know exist. And what our goal is to just get people to try it.

And we try very innovative things to do this. It’s a very interesting, it’s a very interesting thing. You know, we feel that we’ve always tried, because this is an industry that’s very cynical, we’ve tried to [default] over the cynicism. The trying thing by saying we’re going to put our money where our mouth is. You know, and sometimes when I’m giving a sales talk to somebody, I say to them, don’t believe me, I’m a sleazy sales person, I’ll say anything to get this sale. Do me a favor, forget everything that I told you and walk across the street and talk to anyone of these five customers and find out the truth and come back to me if I’m telling the truth.

But beyond that we’ve tried some innovative ways to get people to say, we believe enough in our product and in the value that it’s going to give you that we’re going to risk our own money. So one of these interesting things, and you really have to be like a little bit creative for these things. Because the pricing world is such a boring unimaginative world. One of the things we did because we wanted to get demos of people as I instituted a no wasted time guarantee.

Andrew: That’s what I mentioned early on.

Jerry: Ah, OK. People say, you what I don’t have time, I got to show you, we have it already, we don’t need it. And I say, look, I am sure that if you see this you are going to love it even if you don’t buy the product. I’m going to offer you a no wasted time guarantee. And how does that work? You give one of my sales people twenty minutes to show you this product. If at the end of that twenty minutes you say this was a waste of my time. I’m going to give you a hundred dollars because I’ve wasted your time. Your time is valuable. I can’t say your time is not valuable just because my sales people are good talkers.

And if you turn around and you say this was a complete waste of my time then I’m going to give you two hundred dollars for your time. And so if I’m willing to take that risk, you know, it means I’m not gambling with your time I’m gambling with my money.

And there’s a fair amount of people that are either like that proposition or they’re just amused and they say, you know, form follows function. If this company is creative enough to use that, maybe their software is creative too.

Andrew: That’s got to work.

Jerry: And I would say there’s another issue. These days you get the lines that say, oh the economy’s bad, I can’t do that right now. In the real estate market the joblessness rate is very important. People that don’t have jobs can’t rent apartments. So it’s very related to the revenue.

So we’ve had customers where we’ve said, I’ll make you a deal, I want to be your long term partner. You like the software but you can’t pay it now because the economy is bad and you’re not going to be able to see the value of our product till you use it. So we have a catch 22. So there have been a couple of customers where I’ve said, here’s the deal, I’m going to be your partner, you use the software for free now. And when the jobless rate drops below 8.5 percent, that’s when you’ll start paying me.

You know, and it’s really, I wouldn’t say anyone’s taking me up on that. But it really, it makes the point. That we’re not in it for the quick buck we’re in it for the value proposition. So these are all, I mean the original question was, is how do you convey to people that your product is worth something to them, that is worth paying for. These are all ways of doing it along the lines of, I can only show that I’m willing to bet money that you’ll discover it’s worth it.

Andrew: That’s showing. What I’m also curious about is how do you know what it takes to make the product valuable? Is it interviewing customers and saying where are you losing money? Is it creating a bunch of little versions of the bigger ideas and seeing which ones catch fire? Is it something else?

Jerry: You know, there’s a very interesting duality in the quote ‘literature of the pundit world’. Some say listen to your customers, that’s what people used to say. Some say, your customers don’t know what they want. Or some say listen to the right customers. There’s only 3 percent of your customers that know what they want and those are the ones to listen to. So there’s lots of different seriousness of [?] of how you know. I mean, both are true. You know again it goes back to you asking your customers to pay you for things they give you that feedback, but also there is two things I would say. I’ve learned over time to listen to my most annoying customers.

Every once in awhile there’s a certain number of customers that come up with these suggestions that seem off the wall to you and they just want give up, and you try to get rid of them any which way you can because you’re sure no one else is going to want it and so you give up. You say, ‘OK, I’ve got to either give up on the customer, I’ve got to bite the bullet,’ and you know what, I found sometimes I was blind, that I saw it as an awful request because of my own blinders and everyone else had the same blinder a lot of times.

Andrew: For example?

Jerry: For example, it was one client who said when we close packages, sometimes the staff members, they forget to, there’s a signature. You can made a signature mandatory when you deliver packages, or make it optional, so in some buildings, it’s optional because they don’t want them to be unable to close packages, but they say our staff, they move so fast that they forget. They click close and save before the signature is captured, and we don’t want to prevent them from doing that, but we need to stop them, and he said, ‘can’t you just have a pop up that says did you mean to close this before you…,’ and I said these are adults, they’re doing this all day. Why do they need a reminder? You develop a pattern to do it. When you decide to log off on your ATM machine, it doesn’t say do you really want to log off, you log off.

Finally I gave in and you know, I got so much feedback from people about what a useful feature that is because I was forcing them to not have corrupt data. I assumed everybody would learn to do it the way it was obviously meant to work, and people were telling me that’s very nice, but human beings don’t work that way, so it’s just a funny thing and to this day, whenever that person calls, I say, ‘you know Tony, what annoying requests have you gotten now that we’re going to listen to your annoying requests?’ That’s a [??] version of listen to your customers, that’s like listening to your absolutely most annoying customers. Some of them might actually be telling you something you just don’t want to hear.

Andrew: [??] just being around a long time helps you get customers. You were talking about a story of a customer in New York. Well, actually, do you want to tell this story or should I just quickly read it? Let me read it. You tried to get him as a customer, it looks like for years, he said no, and then a family member of his said he’d been using Building Link for seven years. He finally decided he wanted to give it a shot. Does that sound right?

Jerry: Yeah, that’s right. His daughter, this was a director of property management of a really longstanding New York real estate family and we had been trying for years and finally his daughter, who graduated from college moved into a rental building, and said, ‘Hey Dad, this is great,’ and he calls us up after 10 years and he says, ‘you know what, I think I’m willing to try it.’ So this is a scary thing and we said to him, ‘well, what changed,’ and he says, ‘well, you know, all these years I’ve been telling myself if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and then I said to myself just because it ain’t broke doesn’t mean I can’t make it better,’ and what do you say to somebody like that?

That took you 10 years to realize, but it’s a very good lesson in trying to understand that in certain types of industries, you can’t underestimate people’s hang-ups and resistance to change. You really have to try to understand where people’s hot buttons are in certain types of industries. The beauty of those industries is that in those industries, people are not fickle. We have a 98 percent retention rate, so I like industries like that where they’re really hard to get into, but other than that one customer with the 17 buildings.

Andrew: I know what you mean, the consumer market is very fickle, willing to try everything but one day they’re using this app, the next day that app [??].

Jerry: It’s funny you mention that because I have so many friends. Actually I’m like a grandfather almost. I have so many friends’ children who come to me. They’re out of college, they’re in grad school, with all their start-up ideas, and they’re all B to C. Nobody B to B market sexy and people don’t understand, these are companies that are used to paying for solutions. You don’t have to trick them into thinking maybe you should pay for things, and it’s such a great market.

Andrew: They have a budget. I love that we now are at a place, thank you Mixergy premium members for doing this. We now are at a place where we have a producer who talked to you and helped find the key stories that would work for our audience. We have a research director here who looked into your business and identified some things that I should be asking you about, makes the interview so much better, so much more useful for the audience. Don’t you think guys, let me know. If I’m wrong, that’s fine. If you like the spontaneous sometimes things go great, sometimes they don’t attitude let me know in the comments, but I love this when I’m on this side of the conversation. So a researcher says that you’re in Tokyo and then I need to ask you about Tokyo and in other parts of the world, but how did you get out of the U.S.

Jerry: Right. So, it’s the B2B version of viral. The property manager of Ritz Carlton in Tokyo, they were opening up a new property there was visiting the property manager at Ritz Carlton in Boston who saw our software and he decided to use it there. So that’s kind of exciting and then we have the W Hotel in Singapore, the W residences and that fellow saw W condominium residences in Manhattan what they’re doing and then have a building in Australia that saw something here in a building. It’s really funny. We have somebody in Germany that saw it in Ireland. We almost don’t do any international marketing. Little by little it spreads. We just keep doing what we love and let it spread.

Andrew: How did you get the name Building Link? How did you come up with that?

Jerry: We spent a long time thinking about names and I love that name because really it’s very all-encompassing. You’re linking things in a building that would normally be working disparately or where things would fall through the links. I was very committed to that need. I ended up buying a domain name from a fellow in the Netherlands, Erik The Doctor. I remember his name even today, 12 or 13 years later.

I don’t really remember what he was using it for, for $1000 and then I discovered that there was a company in South Carolina that had a trademark on the name. They were using it for supplies that they were selling to links for builders. It took me over a year of back and forth, trying to not look too desperate, trying to not look like I had any money and we worked out an agreement where he sold me the trademark and I re-licensed the use of the name for him to use in his business. It’s really funny when I see these things . . .

Andrew: Let’s see, did we just lose you? I’m sorry, you’re saying it’s really funny when you see and then we lost you for a moment.

Jerry: It’s really funny when I see these days how easy it is to come up with the names you want. You just take a vowel, a noun, you leave out consonant, you leave out vowels and you’ve got a name. Back then it was like you were guaranteed that nobody would ever click on your name and also it’s a little youthful to me for a business-to-business application. You don’t really want to be cute. You want to be responsible. You want to be mainline. You want to convey that you made a commitment to exactly the space that the customer is selling, so you need a name.

Andrew: How did you hide that you had the ability to pay for the name when you were going back and forth with the trademark holder?

Jerry: I guess that’s URL negotiating 101.

Andrew: I want a little 101 or even 1-0-10.

Jerry: My daughter graduated from college and she’s thinking of starting a business that lets people build these necklaces out of links and she thought it would be really cool to have a name like that. I’m a really lousy negotiator, but this one is really kind of a no-brainer. You’ve got to go to market with a non-compelling use of the name right? I will tell you something else, because I’ve given people advice from time to time.

A lot of people play coy with names. Well how much do you want? I kind of feel like you really want a name you’ve got to start with a number, because otherwise you have no credibility. I’ve seen a lot of people try to negotiate names and the cat and the mouse game never gets started and I kind of found that if you really want a name say, I think I can offer you $1000 or $2000 or $2500.

Put something on the table, maybe a little more, because if you’re afraid to mention the first number I just found that a lot of people just don’t want to play the game and you don’t get anywhere.

Andrew: Especially with domains and I’ll tell you why. There are a lot of people who just randomly email me about some of my domains and I think they’re fishing around to see if there’s a $9.99 deal they could strike with me or maybe they could just take it off my hands, or maybe they could take it off my hands and link back to something, there are a lot of nudniks who aren’t really [?]

Jerry: Right. Or if you’re going to sell they’ll already start looking for a buyer then.

Andrew: Right, right. And so I see why.

Jerry: If you look at any of the public sites that sell domain names you know someplace between $800 and $3000 is a respectable beginning for names, not for sex.com, but you know. So that’s at least a number that indicates that you’re serious about it.

Andrew: You know something. Years ago I bought grab.com, G-R-A-B, 4-letter domain name, costs me over $100,000 to buy that name. I forget what the exact number was, but it was in the six figures. You got lucky with what you paid for Building Link.

Jerry: Well, you know what? In 2002, 2003, 2004, after the bust. Or was it in 2008? I don’t know, prices dropped tremendously, you know. I have about 180 domain names and the reason I get domain names is when I have an idea and I want to remember what the idea is I try to come up with a domain name that captures it. I use my domain names as a way of remembering ideas.

Andrew: And locking them in. You had a competitor, Epitipus [SP] Rex. How much money did they raise?

Jerry: They raised 20 million dollars.

Andrew: OK.

Jerry: You know, in the year 2000, that was what you did. You could raise 20 million. There wasn’t a seed A, there wasn’t an infrastructure for Angel seed, A, B, C. You raised money and tried to get something going. And typically it was 20 million dollars or more. Some of the commercial real estate companies launched ventures that raised that amount. There’s a bunch of people that did that. Anyway they burned through it, in about a year and a half. And the, it was based on advertising, It was based on. I wouldn’t even say advertising, It was based on, once I have your eyeballs I’ll figure out how to sell you stuff. I’ll sell you.

Andrew: That’s what their model was?

Jerry: Yeah. A lot of people were trying that then. The commercial landlords were creating portals for their building, saying once I got people going on here to ask for extra heat or air conditioning. They’ll already buy copy paper from me, they’ll select cost s-[??]. But, what they overlooked, and this is really where the Steve Blanks, stuff comes in really useful. Understand your customers. What they overlooked is that most tenants and buildings don’t really love their landlord. They’re not really interested in giving them any extra revenue. You know, and nobody did it. So, that model they burned through their head. The CEO of that company was a fellow named Andy Farkas. Head of Insignia. Now he’s going up a couple. We had a meeting with him to see whether if he bought our company to see if we could salvage their company. And they said, we’re based on different premises. You’re based on eyeballs and we’re after functionality. Yet, we love our company, but our 10,000 eyeballs are not going to be any good.

Andrew: I see.

Jerry: So, they went under, and we’re out.

Andrew: And, so the thing that I’m learning from your story is, these guys had a ton of money and came in. Ordinarily, entrepreneurs would see a competitor with 20 million dollars in his pocket come into a market. And investors who could potentially put in more money into the business say, oh, man I’m freaking out. I can’t compete with them. You were able to outlast them, because of the way you thought. Help me understand the way you thought versus them. Because I don’t want to put words in your mouth by expressing what my understanding of it.

Jerry: You know, I would say, and you know really Seth Godden is a very good reinforcer. You know, some people read Seth for insights. I say it’s great sometimes to read Seth’s blog just for reinforcement. So, that you don’t, it is so easy to get scared by other companies. Instead of just focusing on the value proposition that you want to do. There was a, the blog, that James Whitaker just wrote, you know how Google lost track. Because instead of providing search value, they started competing with Facebook and trying to kind of add. So, that’s what happens when their is a big competitor in the market. It’s not their size, it’s they make you start doubting, you know what your value proposition is. And what your customers are. So, I say our strategy is, just focus on who your customers are. Focus on meeting their needs.

Andrew: And knowing that you’ve met their needs, because they’re willing to pay for it

Jerry: That’s right.

Andrew: reinforces that you’re on the right track.

Jerry: That’s right.

Andrew: I see.

Jerry: And you know, what’s your metric of success. You know. If you’re metric, if you raise 20 million dollars, your metric of success is: Can you launch something big and you can figure out a way to go public and get it worth 100 million dollars. And that’s like a one in a gazillion shot, certainly back then. My metric of success is get two buildings today, get four buildings next month, get eight buildings the month after that. And if you could just keep reminding yourself what your metric of success is. And stop making somebody else’s metric, you could stay on target.

Andrew: So, one of the things I’m noticing about you, and I want to communicate this to the audience is, you seem to be a person who loves to learn. You keep mentioning people like Seth Gooden and specific articles. Steve Blank and specific writing and specific lessons that you learned from him. Well, were else do you learn, beyond making your own mistakes? When you want to get a shortcut, by learning from someone else, how do you do it?

Jerry: I’ll tell you. I have marathon meetings here. And, you know, these meetings don’t really follow the typical brainstorm approach. Everybody’s idea is good. I don’t, I’m not that way. They’re really totally self-indulgent. I keep telling people tell me your idea, if it’s a keeper I’ll keep it, if I’m wrong keep challenging me. We don’t walk out of this room until everyone’s thrown at us anything that we possibly can and we get as close to a decision. So it’s very interesting. Pricing decisions are the most complicated things.

What approach do you take that’s going to affect you this year, next year, and stuff like that? Very hard to thread the needle of what does your price say about your product? There’s a lot of different. So I just find it’s really good to just… Some topics just can’t be done in less than an hour and a half. Sometimes I’ve gotten people who come into my office and they walk out after an hour and a half and I say to them, “Guys, I really want to thank you. It may appear to you that we ended up almost near where we started, almost, but I don’t know any other way of having gotten there unless than an hour and a half so thanks for just thinking this thing out and all the different kinds of ways of doing it.”

[crosstalk]

Jerry: I mean there’s a moderator.

Andrew: Let me use this as an opportunity to formally invite people who aren’t part of Mixergy Premium to join Mixergy Premium because like you say, Jerry, there are some things that just can’t happen in less than an hour. On the internet there’s this assumption that if you have a problem you just go out there and find the perfect blog post that will give you the one paragraph or six paragraph solution that’s going to solve it all and it’s just not possible. We could have done that.

We have writers who could put together these quickie articles but instead what we do is we go directly to entrepreneurs who do something incredible and we say turn on your computer, spend an hour, invest an hour in my audience, and show us how you do it. Teach them so that they could do it too. If you go to MixergyPremium.com right now you’re going to see that Greg Roulette talks about how to create your first profitable information product and he walks you through step by step how he’s done it for his clients.

You’re going to see, who else is it that I’d like you guys to take a look at? Amit Kumar of Lexity who talks step by step about how to create a marketing plan. The last time that I mentioned it was with the chief platform officer of Shopify and when he heard Amit Kumar and Lexity he goes yes, they’re on our platform. You got him to do a course? And yes, we do, and that’s the caliber of people that we get to teach these courses. If you are a premium member, don’t forget to go to MixergyPremium.com and get all of those courses. If you’re not, I hope you join us. You just have to go to MixergyPremium.com today. We should actually be selling each one of these courses. I see competitors charging $500 for each one of their courses. We should probably do that but I’m happy knowing that I’m giving people a bargain. For every buck they spend I’m confident that they get at least $3 back in their wallet and if they’re not happy with that, of course, I’ve got a money back guarantee. I put my face on everything so people can ask for their money back.

So MixergyPremium.com and Jerry, I want to end it this way – we talked about the highs. We talked about the lows. We talked about the creative solutions, the problems that would have made so many people give up. I want to know about what are some of the good things that come from it and you’ve taken some interesting trips. Can we talk a little bit about that? Let’s get people inspired to know that it’s not just about being in the office crushing it every day. That’s a big part of it but it’s about some of the perks.

Jerry: Right. Before we get just to the perks portion I want to say there’s something that really relates to that. When I interview people and I want to find out what in your resume and what you do, do you really love and that turns you on, I usually ask one question which is what are the things that you have either done in your work ever or on your resume or in your life where you look down at your watch and you say, “Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s 5:00 already.” That’s what I want to know. What are the things that when you are doing them you lose track of time and you say and I find that to be a fantastic really way of trying to tap into what does somebody love to do that they’re just on automatic pilot they love it that much.

So, with that in mind I mean I will answer that question. I really love travel. I don’t do as much travel as I would like to. I love talking to people when I travel. I love seeing different perspectives it’s just broadening. Even in New York when there are four of us and we hop into a cab, I’m the one who jumps into the front seat next to the driver and I start talking. Where are you from, and what do you think about this cold weather? What’s your favorite taxi weather day? So I really love talking to people that are in different circumstances in life. I would love, for example, to spend a little bit of time, I know this sounds a little wacko but talking to people that are community in the South Pole where everything that we take for granted about seasons, time of day, school, future, ambition, not to mention startups and venture capital. Everything looks completely different, you know, and I would just love to just say, what is a different way of looking at life, at goals, at meaning, at time.

Andrew: And you have plans to go to Alaska, as I understand it. And you’re going to go, you’re thinking of going to both poles, South, North.

Jerry: You know, one thing at a time.

Andrew: One thing at a time. And Zach, who introduced us, is he going to end up running this business or does he have other ideas for himself?

Jerry: He loves it. He was at a finance job and he was doing all sorts of cool Excel macro algorithms on the side so that he could get like six hours of work done in like a half an hour. And he was afraid to tell his superiors because they were going to say, what are you doing all these macros you’re supposed to be doing these analyses. He was like so afraid they wouldn’t appreciate the creativity. I said, Zach, you are in the wrong spot. You’ve got to jump to someplace, where again like I say, where the things that you do which make you look at your watch and say I can’t believe this is five o’clock I got to finish, where you’re actually incentivized to do this.

He loves this business and I got to tell you, it’s a nice thing for a father. The thirty’s plus, thirty’s early forty’s generation grew up in a time when parents still believed there were safe professions. Lawyers, bankers, doctors, before the insurance companies screwed the doctors, the mergers screwed the lawyers. You know and so really to be able to go back in and get used to risk and say it’s good when you have kids that are willing to take risks and are willing to leave a banking job, that’s very exciting. Because that’s the really the world. The world is still with risk going forward. You know, it’s not possible to eliminate risk anymore. So I’m really thrilled to see that with all the right education, with all the right credentials, with all the right banking, all the stuff that would have made a perfect robot, you know, that is out there. [inaudible]

Andrew: They’ll take a risk instead of being a robot.

Jerry: Yeah.

Andrew: Well, I’m really glad that he came to that event and I got to meet him. As a fan of your site and what’s it’s done for my building, I was proud to have there. But more than that as someone who puts together Mixergy every day. I love knowing that the audience out there are people who are doers or people who are really in the space. Or people who aren’t just wannabe’s.

And as I went out to that event that we did a mixer in New York. And I saw the people who listen. I was just really proud of everyone of them being out there in the audience. And sometimes when I think, you know what I can fudge it a little bit here, we don’t have to do that much research there. No one will know it or we should go after the wannabe’s because they’re a bigger audience with maybe more money to spend. I’m really proud when I see that we don’t do it because of the audience that gets attracted to this.

Jerry: Well Zach, I just got to tell you, Zach vouched for you, you know. It’s like sometimes people say any publicity is good. I don’t really have time for that. I said, somebody wants to interview you, I said give me a break Zach, he wants to interview me and what does he want to sell me after the interview, you know? And he said, no, no, no, I spent some time with this guy,[?] I see what he does I see how he interviews, I see the people, I see the depth, this is quality. No, I think it would be worth your time. You know, so you got a fan in here, so.

Andrew: Well, I appreciate it and I know for many people who come and to do these interviews they do it because they want to connect with their investors or they want to connect with the entrepreneurs who they invest in and that’s why they do it. For you, there are very few people in my audience who have any real estate that could possibly be, in fact I can’t even think of any one, who’s going to say, hey you know what my building of a thousand apartments needs to be on a Building Link because I saw it on Mixergy. You’re not doing it for that. You’re doing it for the audience and I want them to be able to thank you. Is there a good way to thank you or should they be looking for Zach and thanking him? What’s a good way to show our appreciation for what we got out of this interview? Because I know we got a lot out of it. I know I did here in my notes.

Jerry: I guess I could send an email to Zach if they want to at, Zachs z-a-c-h at buildinglink dot com.

Andrew: I love that. Yes.

Jerry: And they can send him, hey Zach, thanks for getting your dad on video, please make sure that he doesn’t start think of himself as old, we’re counting on you not to let him get old.

Andrew: All right. Right on. Thank you for doing this interview.

Jerry: Yeah.

Andrew: Thank you all for watching.

Jerry: Bye-bye.

Andrew: Bye

Who should we feature on Mixergy? Let us know who you think would make a great interviewee.

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