Stephanie Betters was a practicing Nurse Practitioner in heart surgery and an active real estate investor when her frustration with disparate real estate CRM and marketing solutions hit a boiling point. Salesforce and a development partner proposed a project so expensive that Stephanie hung up and decided to build the solution herself. She learned to code and build a useful real estate CRM on Salesforce in three months.
Her business thrived with her comprehensive software. Other real estate investors heard about her software and encouraged her to launch the company in 2019 and start selling the software, now called Left Main REI. Word spread in the industry and hundreds of real estate investors signed up in the first year, transforming their businesses.
In just over three years, Left Main REI now has hundreds of customers, 20 employees, and nearly $3 million in annual recurring revenue. The company has been bootstrapped and profitable from the first day. Stephanie has a big vision for the company and loves her founder/CEO role; she will no longer be practicing as a Nurse Practitioner as of 2022.
Real Estate CRM Topics Discussed on this Podcast
- How Stephanie and her husband got into real estate investing to pay off their graduate school loans
- What frustration caused her to learn to code and build her own solution on the Salesforce platform
- How she sold over a hundred new customers in their first year and stayed profitable
- Why real estate investors love their software and tell their friends
- What her big vision is for her company and how she plans to achieve it
Quote from Stephanie Betters, CEO of Left Main REI
“I mostly created this software company out of pure rage, to be honest. In the middle of all this chaos of working full-time as a Nurse Practitioner, with kids, and our investment company, we kept running into data issues because our CRM was really unreliable. It would go down and then our phone couldn’t ring and then all our employees couldn’t work. It was madness.
“Then I went through a very arduous sales process with Salesforce to build us a solution, but I was not expecting on the eighth call to get a quote of $100,000 for the initial build and six-month build time—just to create a log in. And then we’ll go into phase two after that. It basically blew my mind.
“So I was just like, how hard can this be? I’ll just do it myself. I spent the next three months teaching myself Salesforce coding and flows and process builders and all this stuff, to learn how to build on the platform. And I built and launched it in three months. And it made an immediate impact on our real estate investment company.”
Links
- Stephanie Betters on LinkedIn
- Left Main REI on LinkedIn
- Left Main REI website
- Left Main on Salesforce Exchange
The Practical Founders Podcast
Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies—without big funding.
Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app.
Get weekly Practical Founders newsletter and podcast updates.
Links
The Practical Founders Podcast
Tune into the Practical Founders Podcast for weekly in-depth interviews with founders who have built valuable software companies—without big funding.
Subscribe to the Practical Founders Podcast using your favorite podcast app.