After Selling For $580M, Here's What I Learned About SaaS During My 5 Years At Buildium

Last month I woke up to a Twitter update that Buildium, where I started my career, had been sold for $580M.

Five hundred and eighty million dollars, I mouthed out loud. Holy fuck.

I’m pretty jaded when it comes to the financial numbers that get thrown around in start-up land—I don’t care what TechCrunch says, I don’t care what your market cap is—I think it’s clear that the world of technology start-ups is pretty screwed up when it comes to financial valuations. Only in this world is whether or not your company is profitable so often seen as being of secondary importance. I digress.

But I have to admit that $580M number hit much closer to home this time given how intimately involved with Buildium I had been. What started as Dimitris (now my Co-founder at Outseta) writing a few lines of code to collect rent payments from tenants he had living in a duplex in Providence, Rhode Island, turned into something worth hundreds of millions of dollars 15 years later. How the hell does that happen?

In this post I’m going to share the most important lessons about growing a SaaS business that I learned at Buildium—collectively, these things had an awful lot to do with the company being valued so highly.

MY ROLE AT BUILDIUM

In late 2009 the economy had tanked and I had a newly minted MBA but no real job experience. I was offered a job as Buildium’s first full-time marketing hire, pulling in a cool $38,400 annually.

To be honest, I wasn’t enormously enthusiastic about this—I’m not techy, so working for a software company wasn’t particularly appealing to me. And working in the property management industry? Let’s just say that didn’t have a whole lot of allure.

But Buildium had found product market fit, and although I didn’t know it yet, I was stumbling into a great situation. I was one of the first 10 or so employees at the company, and over the next five years I was given a remarkable amount of freedom to try new growth strategies, to succeed, and to fail.

We mostly succeeded. When I left Buildium five years later we’d grown from a start-up to a business with more than 12,000 customers and $16M in revenue. I was managing a team of 15 and the company had grown to about 140 employees. I’m proud of all that.

More than anything, I’d fallen in love with the challenge of building a business and helping it grow into its potential. The start-up bug caught me, and it has yet to let go. Along the way I got a PhD in SaaS—I’ve told many people over the years that I benefited tremendously by starting my career in a place where I saw a SaaS start-up “done right.”

I learned a million lessons about SaaS, about start-ups, and about life along the way. In light of the sale of Buildium last month I figured now is as good of a time as any to reflect on the most important ones. What I love about this list is so many of these ideas fly in the face of what we often read about “successful” SaaS start-ups in the media. Without further adieu, let’s dig in.

You can read the full post here: https://www.outseta.com/posts/what-i-learned-at-buildium