LeaseBase

Five months ago I quit my job to build LeaseBase full-time. AI-powered property management for independent landlords who self-manage in California.

The honest numbers:

• $0 MRR (real external paying customers: 0)

• ~700 Google impressions/day (up from ~40 in June)

• 65+ BiggerPockets forum posts (got suspended once for being too promotional — lesson learned)

• 50+ state compliance pages live and indexed

• 18 microservices, mobile app on iOS + Android, AI advisor, compliance engine

• ~12 months of runway remaining

What's worked:

• Free ungated tools (rent cap calculator, compliance checker) as top-of-funnel. People searching "can I increase rent in California" find the tool, use it, and a percentage create accounts.

• Answering real questions in forums as a landlord (I self-manage 40+ units). Not pitching — just being helpful and mentioning LeaseBase when it's genuinely the answer.

• SEO content targeting landlord pain keywords, not product keywords. Nobody searches "AI property management software." They search "how much security deposit can I charge in California."

What hasn't worked:

• Paid ads ($43/day across 5 platforms for a week — 97% bounce rate, zero signups, killed it)

• Cold email campaigns

• Posting milestones on IH/Twitter expecting signups (Max from Flowly nailed this — your BIP audience ≠ your market)

What's next:

• Product Hunt launch August 1 (Friday)

• Screen redesign sprint this week (dashboard, pricing, key flows)

• BPCon in Orlando October 2–4 — that's the checkpoint. If there are paying customers by then, I go all-in. If not, VP Engineering job search starts in November.

Happy to share anything specific about the compliance-as-wedge strategy, forum marketing post-suspension, or building a vertical SaaS as a solo founder.

I quit my VP Engineering job to build property management software. 122 days later I have zero paying customers.

Here's what I've learned so far — and why I'm not panicking.

The origin story

I own rental property in Sacramento. I was paying a property manager 10% of rent — about $600/month — and still doing half the work. I'd get a text from my PM: "Tenant says the dishwasher is broken, what do you want to do?" That's not management. That's forwarding.

So I fired them and started self-managing. Within a month I realized the hard part isn't the work — it's keeping everything organized. Lease renewals, rent tracking, compliance deadlines, maintenance requests coming in via text at 10 p.m. I'm a software engineer. I built a system.

Then I realized every self-managing landlord has the same problem.

What I built

LeaseBase is a full property management platform — rent collection, leases, maintenance, tenant portal, the works. But the differentiator is AI that actually helps you run your properties:

• Compliance checking: "Can I increase rent on this unit?" → instant answer with the law citation

• Maintenance triage: "Is this an emergency?" → categorized with response timeline

• Decision support: not "here's your data," but "here's what you should do and why"

The tech is solid. Eleven microservices, AI agents, Stripe payments, mobile app. I'm a senior engineer — building software is the easy part.

The hard part: getting found

Here's what 122 days taught me:

1. Nobody searches for "AI property management." They search for "can I increase rent in California" and "how to handle a tenant who won't pay." I had to stop building features and start answering questions.

2. Cold outreach at $29/month doesn't work. I sent hundreds of cold emails. The math doesn't math — CAC for cold outreach on a sub-$100 SaaS product is brutal. I pivoted to intent interception: show up where landlords already have questions.

3. Free tools are better distribution than blog posts. I built public compliance calculators and landlord tools — no login required. They solve a real problem, they rank in search, and they naturally lead to "want to track this across all your properties?"

4. The product isn't the bottleneck. Discoverability is. My platform has better AI than anything on the market. Doesn't matter if nobody knows it exists.

Where I am now

• One organic signup this week (they found us through Google)

• One warm lead from a Sacramento broker

• Five public compliance tools live and indexed

• Email campaigns running with 36% open rates on compliance content

• Daily content syndication to four platforms for backlinks

• Walking into affordable housing organizations with flyers

Deadline: BPCon (BiggerPockets Conference) October 2. If I have 3–5 real user stories by then, I go all-in. If not, I start a VP Engineering job search in November.

What I'd tell other founders building for a niche market

Stop building. Seriously. If your product works, the next feature isn't what's going to get you customers. The answer is probably in a Reddit thread right now — someone asking the exact question your product solves — and you're not there answering it.

Happy to answer questions about the tech, the market, the AI architecture, or the emotional rollercoaster of going from "my product is amazing" to "why won't anyone use it."

After posting, click "Add revenue data" from the checklist and enter $0 MRR — IH loves transparent revenue tracking. That'll check off 4 of 5 items.