How SaaS is Automating Real Estate Closings!

Ori Ohayon, the visionary force behind Titl.co, joins us to share his transformative journey from the banking industry to the realms of crypto and blockchain, ultimately leading to the creation of a pioneering SaaS product for the real estate title industry. Ori's innovative use of large language models automates the cumbersome title transfer process, generating reports in mere minutes. By integrating blockchain technology, Titl is redefining real estate transactions, starting in Florida with a dynamic, on-chain land registry system that updates property data daily.

Chapters

• 0:00 Blockchain and Real Estate Innovation
• 12:11 Strategic Approach to Fundraising
• 24:39 Building a Successful Executive Team
• 30:47 Entrepreneurship Challenges and Motivation
• 34:59 Entrepreneurship
• 41:25 Rebranding and Growth Strategy in PropTech
• 50:56 Future of Real Estate Automation

Transcript

00:00 - Hope (Announcement)
From banking to Bitcoin to NFTs. His wild ride through crypto led him to fix one of real estate's most outdated systems. In this episode of The REAL SaaS podcast, host Jesse Burrell sits down with Ori Ohayon, founder of Titl, to talk about how his blockchain background inspired a SaaS built specifically for Title companies. They dive into his journey from Web3 to real estate ops, what Title companies really need from tech and how speed and simplicity are the future of this industry. Welcome to the Real SaaS Podcast. Real talk with the builders behind the most innovative SaaS companies in prop tech and beyond. We dig into product market fit, team building, funding, failures and the playbooks driving growth. No fluff, just raw insights on strategy execution and what's coming next. Now here are your hosts. 

00:51 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
What is going on, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Real SaaS Podcast. I'm your host, Jesse Burrell. I have done over $150 million in software sales in the last six years and I'm bringing on other founders in the real estate, prop tech space and beyond to talk about how everything from just getting started to scaling we're really going to dive in today with Ori. I'm excited to have him on. He has built a really innovative product for the title space. Ori, thanks for coming on today. Thank you for having me Appreciate it. So before we get started, we're really going to dive into kind of how we tick, how we think I have some curated questions for us, but tell us a little bit about yourself, maybe two to four minutes of kind of your background and what titl.co looks like today and what it's going to look like in the future. 

01:43 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Sure, yeah. So for background, I was born in France, grew up in England, then moved to Canada and now living in Miami, so it will explain my weird accent. But in terms of a professional background, I started off in banking. So I was a sales trader at Goldman. I worked on like the early Bitcoin desk there and then, after a stint in banking, I essentially quit and started building my own startups. 

02:07
All of them were Web3, SaaS kind of fintech products I would call them. The first one was an NFT market focused on physical assets, built it up, it was specialized on art, sports, memorabilia, and that kind of opened my eyes to blockchain as a fintech product. I met my now co-founder, tory, as I was starting that business and he essentially came up to me and said why didn't you build this on real estate? Why didn't you find a way to streamline the real estate transaction? I had no idea how to tackle that, so Tory and I basically partnered up. We started working on it, consulting on a couple companies to do it, and we eventually went off on our own and built out Titl. And the real concept was how do we automate Title transfer on a house? In order to do that, I need to digitize real estate titles, put them all in a place that's secure and streamlined, and then be able to create a fintech product out of that, and that got us to where we stand today. 

03:08 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Okay, and let's talk about if you're watching this. You're not necessarily in real estate, but let's talk about how the title process works today and how it hasn't been innovated. And let's talk about how it's a little bit different with what you guys are doing. 

03:26 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Yeah for sure. Well, so the way it's done now it's it's it's extremely manual. There. There seems to be no one who has found a way to digitize land registry data. So if I want to go and find who owns my or where I got my loan on my house or I'm buying a house and I want to find out who the lender is, I have to go to a government database, I have to go and download PDF documents and read them and basically find which document actually connects to my property. 

03:56
So getting a title report takes hours, if not days, to do the fastest we've seen that pulls together a totally prepped title report. It takes five days. They charge you hundreds of dollars and it's literally a clerk who pulls this information together and analyzes it and presents it. So that was the first hurdle Like you can't transact something digitally if those documents are literally drafted manually, if those documents are literally drafted manually. So we built an AI bot that uses multiple LLMs to essentially automate that process. It scrapes a massive amount of public data and produces a fully consolidated title report in less than four minutes. 

04:38
That was our first product. It's like our closest competitor is five days. We're doing it in four minutes. So that was like the first product we wanted to build out, um, and then the second thing we built is is an on-chain storage, so we use the blockchain as a database. No one really interacts with a blockchain through us um, but what we've done is created a land registry that stores properties and all the affiliated documents using a folio number, which right now you can't do Like if I wanted to so parcels. 

05:06 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
so you're using parcels. Basically, yes, Exactly Okay. 

05:11 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
And it just we're using dynamic NFTs. These are data blocks that update every day, but yeah, for on a real asset. 

05:22 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
there's no, obviously there's no like JPEG associated with it so are you going in like daily with with the entire country? This is normally. I don't go into businesses as much, but this one's a little bit more interesting. Um, not saying the other people I interview are not interesting, um, they all very much so are, but I haven't heard of anyone do anything like this. So, uh, with like the llms and the machine learning that you're doing, are you guys going and and scraping like each county to see if any changes are being made, like daily to update you know, each individual parcel or property? I'm assuming that's what you're doing yeah. 

05:55 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
So right now we're focused on Florida, so we built the product to service, obviously, Florida. But because it was, it was relatively similar for the majority of the states to get this to work. But basically we are going into all these public databases, Literally. For Miami data alone, you have like six different databases that I have to access in order to make this happen. So what we've started designing and we're building is a bot that will build out the next municipalities without us actually giving it the instructions We've given it the framework, we've shown it the product we wanted to produce and you get whatever you tell me. I want to get a title report in Atlanta. Our bots will actually figure out how to do Atlanta on its own. 

06:39 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Okay, that's interesting. And so you're just in Florida currently, right now. Yeah, because I was like dang, because you know I own, you know, a real estate data company and software. So we have nationwide data sets and we're going and scraping and updating daily reports from the MLS. We're doing it from counties, we're doing it from you know multiple vendors and cross-checking to make sure all that's working. You know multiple vendors and cross-checking to make sure all that's working. So I was like damn, like that has to be expensive, because I know how expensive it is us to store stuff in um and you know AWS and google and stuff like that, um, so I mean we'll get into funding. And so I was like damn. 

07:15
Yeah, that's. That's a lot of storage.

07:17
I understand why you're kind of rolling it out, but have you guys considered um I know, if you're actually doing this and having a bot? I believe you know different states curate data in different ways, so you're going to have to. I think the challenge you may have and I don't know if you've already thought about this, as of how each state has their different processes and then you're going to have to. Obviously, the bots have a pretty good idea, but it sounds like you're going to have to train on where to send them and some don't update stuff daily, some are weekly. 

07:47
It's, it's, it's. Each state is kind of different and that's something we've had to teach our clients. It's like well, why do I get this faster than this? And I'm like or why did update here and not there? 

07:55 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
And and you're just like well, you know, not all States you know title stuff are published stuff publicly the same way. Yeah, well, that well, a that's why we wanted to build this is we want to create a universal standard for reporting land registry data. So, um, yeah, so the the data sets, and and where we're getting it totally inconsistent. There's literally no uniformity between, I mean, even from Miami to Broward. It's completely inconsistent. Our goal is to pull it all together in a way that is one size fits all. Essentially, the way we're training the bot, it's actually maneuvering different layouts on its own. So, because we're using multiple LLMs, we're actually doing a massive cross-reference. So, because we're using multiple LLMs, we're actually doing a massive cross-reference and we're spitting out data at 99.5% accuracy Because some models are better at bigger documents, some models are better at handwritten scripts. 

09:02 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
So we're testing and cross-referencing the different products and then getting the most accurate result from that. This is pretty cool actually. We'll talk. We'll talk about this more um, offline, um, for sure after we're done here. But I do want to dive into in some of the curated questions. Um, you know that I've had, and then I guess, um, since you're, this sounds a little bit newer and you've only started once. How long have you long have you guys been around for? And do you feel like you've got product market fit with testing in Florida yet? Or where are you guys at in your journey? Because I kind of want to curate some of the questions, I'm going to ask around where you guys are at and you don't have to tell me exactly how many customers. But have you guys, was it more like a MVP, just for Florida? And then you're going to scale out where exactly are you guys at and how has Florida reacted to how you're doing this? 

09:49 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Yeah, so, yeah, so a little bit of the company's backstory. We started working on this, I would say, like three years ago. Okay, we, we had a different name. We started off as a company called on chain listings. The concept was we verify listings um directly and we store those listings on the blockchain. Okay, um, so essentially we wanted to do an accurate MLS, but it was a redundant kind of product. So we've actually redesigned the company, uh, rebranded, rebuilt the product and created what is titl.co. So that's that whole. 

10:22
Since we started developing, we've been we've been really in operations for about two years, a year and a half Um. We brought the product to market in December of 24. Um, and with that we had like a massive amount of adoption. So it turns out a lot of people suffer with the same issues we've been describing. Yes, um, so we actually, instead of trying to cut out all these in-betweeners that sit in the real estate transaction, we're servicing all of them. We're using similar tech but to do slightly different things. So, for example, title agents need title reports in order to process closings and in order to advise their clients if it's even wise to go into a closing. So we sell them subscriptions giving them access to this data. Real estate brokers need to know if a property even has an open permit on it before they can process the closing. Agents never mess with this kind of information. They don't want to call lawyers to do it. So we offer them that product. So we found a whole bunch of different fits. We're selling data to even data providers in the space. 

11:28
I might be interested, yeah, so we. We started like we. We found a very good product, market fit, and it's really now a matter of scaling into it and fulfilling the orders we have, which is why we went out for a seed round, because we have more demand than our tech and our team can handle. So now we're like we're early stage for sure, but we're we're on a good ramp, I would say so you're, you've been, bootstrapped, um, that's actually gonna segue perfectly into my next question. 

11:58 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
So you know, um, I am, or me and my founders are completely bootstrapped. We have been since the beginning. You're bootstrapped thus far, but you kind of alluded to you're going to start doing your first round. What made you decide to go that way of, you know, raising money versus being bootstrapped? Or is it because it's going to be? I could? I guess I'm well informed of what it costs to roll out something like this nationwide, with how much you're going to have to do, especially with exactly how you guys are doing it. I'm assuming it's going to be very expensive and you probably want to blitz the market is my assumption, but I'll let you go into it. 

12:38 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
No well, you totally understand what bootstrapping means. We built a product of basically no money. It was just a lot of grunt work, a lot of attempted designs and even redesigning the code base entirely from scratch a couple of times. Being bootstrapped is tough, but once we got a product that people were impressed by, we realized very quickly A we need a sales force to get us in front of the right guys. That you can't do with just two founders and two. You also need developers who can keep up with the customer feedback. So, because we're dealing with enterprise accounts, there's a lot of maintenance that goes into it, a lot of database scaling that has to go into it, making sure you have the server access that can keep up with the demand you're getting in. There's a lot of things that need daily maintenance that you can't do as a bootstrap startup. When some people are part-time, some people are full-time, that was like the biggest hurdle is getting resources and because we're a relatively small team, we punch pretty heavy. But once you get to that point, you need full time. 

13:47 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Yeah, and that makes a ton of sense because I know how expensive it is. We at Batch Service honestly me and Ivo, who are the founders we already were real estate investors and we're all full time, so we're making each a million, plus a year that we're taking home. And then we kind of started to solve some of our own problems so we were actually able to just reinvest all of our money back into the business and scale the sales team and do that. But we were truly at the right place at the right time, to where we started making six figures of profit, like month three, like Like it was just. It was a perfect like storm of finding a product, finding a niche, finding people that wanted it went viral, like organically. It was just really lucky. To be honest with you, everybody's like how'd you guys do that? And I'm like a lot of it was luck. But what we did with that luck was we really just put fuel on the fires. We spent all that profit because we're making all this money on this other side. At the time we didn't need that money. We were making $100,000 plus each take home, so we just dumped, dumped, dumped and then, before we knew it, we built something that was making millions of dollars a month and we actually stopped the real estate investing side of the business because we knew that we had something that would be sellable in the future. Flipping homes and wholesaling that's great active income. But if you want an eight or nine figure exit, you're not going to get that with that and we made the decision to. We're also competing against our own customers, so we're like all right, let's service the space. This is where we're going to live in the real estate and prop tech community. But honestly, if I were to have to try and start my business today of what it looks like, we would definitely have to raise money because it'd be just way too expensive. We're at the right place at the right time Because people are like oh, why did you or didn't you? 

15:43
We didn't need to. We got lucky and started being profitable quickly, and this was six years ago in the PropTech space. There wasn't much out there, so us building anything was impressive to what was out there. We just live in such a different world. It's expensive to pay to play or to really get to scale. Now, like you need the money, let's talk about, um, some of the advantages of, because I think the biggest disadvantage us, um, for let's say, we go to sell in the next couple years, or or see what that looks like with all the success that we've had, the, the, the disadvantage, believe, and you know being in your investment banking, you said right at Goldman yeah, I was a trader, but yeah similar. 

16:30
Okay, so you're a trader but not having people and relationships behind you, it could be harder to sell a company down the road for top dollar because I may not have those relationships with those strategics that they may be able to tell a story already being invested with us versus us hiring an investment banker and them having to tell the story on our behalf. So I think that's always going to be a disadvantage to us to some degree, our behalf. So I think that's always going to be a disadvantage to us to some degree. And then I guess my question for you is when you are going to raise, are you just raising from whoever? Are you going to be very strategic with where you take your money from? 

17:05 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Yeah, you reminded me of a quote. It's if I've seen further. It's for I stood on the shoulders of giants, like when we were building this and Tori and I have good networks but we didn't know the people we needed to interact with at all. We didn't know title companies, we didn't know who the underwriters were, we knew nothing. We had to surround ourselves with people who knew the stuff we didn't, and there's a lot of stuff we don't know. So we had to surround ourselves with really good people. So that's a really big deal to us. 

17:36
So when, when you talk even advisors, like we found incredible advisors, but we, as we're doing our raise right now, every person we're bringing into our raise is very, very strategic. We have, like, data specialists, we have business specialists and then real estate specialists. We've actually managed to find, like, the pillars we need. We yeah, we went out to raise in January and we've had really good traction with it. So, thank God, that's been moving well. But very, very picky with who we're bringing in, because a business like this scales you know you're in the data space like it's exponentially going to grow, because data, like whatever data, has a million different uses and you can sell the same piece of information to 10 different clients very quickly. Yeah, and that's what we found when we came to market is we have totally different clients that are buying this data from us. So, yeah, so very strategic on the investor side, and we've made a big emphasis on making sure we're surrounded by the right guys. 

18:41 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Yeah, and that was how I was hoping you'd answer this, because I think when people let's say they are starting some software as a service and I think people are too eager to just raise from anyone or raise from friends and family to your point is like, if you have a really good idea, or your MVP has went really well, or um, you know you're, you're, you have this big dream to innovate, you know a certain space. 

19:07
I think finding the right people is so much more important because they're going to guide you in the right way. They have a vested interest. Um, friends and family are just going to bug you. Um, when they're going to guide you in the right way, they have a vested interest. Friends and family are just going to bug you when they're going to get their money back, because that money means a lot more to them than someone that actually does this for their business. And I hope, if anyone's listening to this and you're in that, starting to want to raise phase, if you bootstrap something in the beginning just to get off the ground, I would say spend extra time and do what Ori did and you know find the right people and make sure that you have the right advisory board around you, cause I think you know you don't know what you don't know, and people that have already done it, they're going to help you get there faster. 

19:49 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Totally and they're going to pump you up when, when you're a startup and you've got no money, you're literally eating cans of tuna every day and and you all you're hearing for days is no, like this isn't possible. I'm not going to believe in this. I'm not investing, I'm not using it. It's absolutely brutal. But if you have people around you who believe in the mission as much as you do, that's going to give you the full fuel you need to keep moving. Being an entrepreneur is absolutely brutal. I don't recommend it to anyone. But if you're motivated enough and you have something that you truly think. Actually you know what my dad told me. This he's like if you quit on this company, would you be pissed off if someone else builds it? And I was like, yeah, because I know it will become a unicorn. So that's what that? That's the field that kind of kept me going. If I quit, who's going to do this? And then that that bugged me enough to keep doing it. 

20:41 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Yeah because you said this reminds me of, I guess, what was it? Was it Instagram? Had you know they had a different product, like you did at the beginning, and then you kind of re-shifted, kind of the technology and what you were thinking. Instead of doing MLS stuff, you decided to disrupt the title space, which I actually think is MLS has so many rules and regulations, and if you ended up figuring out a way, they'd sue you or shut your business down. 

21:12
So I think that going this route because I mean title companies, that it's a commodity now, like who's going to give the best service is is how title companies have been since, because I've I I don't this is our first time meeting um and very impressive but I've also flipped about 500 homes done, own a bunch of rentals, so I've had to go through this problem and it's like the title company I picked was just who did I have the best relationship with? You're basically getting the same service from everyone, or who will give me the most amount of free shit, um, or the most amount of discounts? They, they have nothing. So if you pull this off, like you keep saying the word unicorn, um, I don't believe that often, but if, if this does work um, this could definitely be a billion dollar company, like definitely could well, look when, when the the company that reminds me the most of our our strategy is, honestly it's is uber. 

22:02 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Not saying we're going to be uber, but when they came to market, taxi drivers had such a fixed business, they had such a great way of making money. They made a lot of cash. Uber came in and said we're going to standardize this whole process and put everyone through the same medium. And then suddenly your transaction with your driver is going to be controlled, pricing is going to be fixed and you're going to get a much more streamlined experience. That's what I think we're going to end up creating. If land registry data is all in one uniform environment and the process of buying a house becomes like a one-click purchase, then the title fees, the title insurance, getting your mortgage all these things will be significantly more standardized. You won't have all these in-betweeners taking their fees. 

22:50 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
So from spending whatever it could be $2,000 to $5,000 on closing and settlement fees to sub fees to sub a thousand, you're saving people a significant amount of money yeah and um, I have a question what's your, is your go-to market to supply all the big title companies with this technology, or do you want to go direct to the consumer and really make them panic? 

23:14 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
We don't want to make anyone panic. 

23:19 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
No, like, make the title companies panic is what I'm saying. 

23:22 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
No, we sell to the title companies. 

23:23
Because, at the end, of the day, I don't have the relationship and the trust that these title companies have with their clients. I can't ever replace that. But I can make the title company, I can make the broker, I can make the lender significantly faster at doing their existing business Faster, more accurate, cheaper, the whole thing and that's my goal. If I can make the business practice for these guys better, then when we come out to this bigger product which is the transfer, then they're going to trust us. But I have to develop that brand reputation. I have to show that this tech actually works and it works at scale before I can even consider doing that. 

24:01 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
So are you going to any? Actually, I don't want to get into too much strategic stuff. I was just going to ask if you're going like for Florida, are you having some, I guess, conversations with some of the title companies for them to start testing it, or are you having some, I guess, conversations with some of the title companies for them to start testing it? Are you more testing it on your own? Do you have Fidelity or Stewart or some type of title company that's testing this right now? 

24:31 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
We have paying clients in that space. 

24:33 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Nice, that's interesting. Yeah, this is pretty interesting stuff. Thank you, I'm glad Steph connected us. And then I guess, how big is your team today? And one of the questions I ask is how did you build out your executive team? So, if you haven't fully built it out, I would love to hear your thought process of how you're going to um and what you're looking for in those people. 

24:58 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Yeah, so okay, so you, tori and I are the guys who founded it. Tori has 20 some years of real estate experience on the development and construction side, so he understands the transactional piece really well. Um, we brought in a title attorney to actually be to be a team member member, and then we're about seven people. Basically, we have a head of marketing, we have two incredible developers, two advisors and then a couple interns. Okay, but really, when it's bootstrapped, it was a lot of interns helping us build out the product and we brought in interns all the time, a lot of interns helping us build out the product and we brought in interns all the time and they were reporting to me and Tori directly, which wasn't the most efficient way to do it. So now we brought, we have a fantastic team and that's why we want to scale, because what they're producing is so much better than anything we've ever had. And, yeah, we were going to just basically, we're just going to double down resources on product and brand reputation. 

25:59 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Are you going to focus on this being more product led or sales led? It sounds more product and marketing led from what you're saying to me. 

26:11 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Yeah, it's 100% product. When this is the real estate is the most important asset you invest in your life, right? When a family buys their first home, it's a massive deal. That's something that gets passed down by generations. We don't want to screw up in that space. We want to make sure that when you say I need a title, you're coming to title to get it done Right and that we're we're really the trusted name in that space. And when we say we're spitting out data at 99.5%, like that's those are accurate numbers we're doing it way more accurately than anyone else in our area. So product user experience, like brand trust, all of that that's. That's the priority. 

26:55 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Yeah, that that makes sense because yeah, I was just curious on so you're going to really be plowing that money into um, the product and having it be that much better and it's different. Nothing else has been made like that, so I'm assuming you don't need a bunch of sales people when you have the best thing that no one's, that that's completely disrupted the space. So that's a great marketing person and just getting people to get their hands on it and see how much more efficient it can make. You know these title companies or these property managers, or even yeah, because I could see someone that has a portfolio of properties they just want to make sure all this is monitored, that there's no funny business going on with title fraud or someone trying to sell their house as they pretend to be them. 

27:43
I see that happening all the time in our space and it's getting more and more prevalent, so that actually might be like another, I guess, micro vertical that you could get a bunch of people to pay for that. Have you know these? I would say anything above, you know, probably 2030 property, I'd say even above, like 10 properties, depending on the price point. I guess it would be. I guess you would just have different. You know costs for how big portfolios are, I'm sure because you're having to monitor all those properties. 

28:12 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Yeah, of course, but it's's for us. The cost is nominal, right, so for the user it's really it's when you look at like a mortgage lender. There there's very few ways of doing what's called like a mark to market or like a re-evaluation of your product every day. Right, when you're a lender, you give the loan, you check every few years if everything's okay, and that's kind of it. With a product like this, where you get a daily update, it's like having the stock market open, but on your properties that you're lending against. 

28:44
So if the homeowner is taking an additional loan that takes your whatever it takes to the property from a triple A to a double A, like it's dropped in quality because there's more debt on it, or if there's code violations and like the roof is falling apart, the lender should know because now the value of that property is going down again. There's all these different metrics people should be looking at, but it's been impossible to get that information. Like, think about like 2008,. Like data was super, like inconsistent and it was illiquid is what we call it but like you couldn't find this information. If someone knew that these properties were falling apart or defaulting or the homeowners had just walked away, the lenders would have been flagged a long time before the market crashed. 

29:28 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
True. I think more people probably knew than not. They just didn't want to tell anyone. 

29:33 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
They turned a blind eye. But real estate is a lot of turning a blind eye because it's easier just to not know. 

29:41 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Yeah, I agree. Can you share a moment it doesn't necessarily have to be in title, but share a moment in your entrepreneur journey when you felt like a failure but ultimately it actually pushed you in a better direction and led you to where you are today in some degree. It was countless. 

30:00 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
There's so many. Oh, that's such a good question. There's a lot. I so look, my first company, my first startup, had a massive amount of success and it fell apart just as quickly as it built, because it was in crypto space and funky players and funky market and so on, going from like the highs of highs, where I was at the top of the crypto boom, to okay, I just lost everything. Now what do I do? That was brutal. And then building a bootstrap startup that was basically we had almost no funding very little, and all the money was coming in from grants and little bits and bobs we could get. That was like that was probably the hardest two years of my life. 

30:47
And you're building this business. You're building a company and a brand and all you're hearing every day is it's not possible to do what you're doing. You're going after the biggest market. Um, that makes you question what you're doing every single day. Um, as an entrepreneur, like the best thing you can do is surround yourself with a good support system because, like no, no human is capable of standing up against that every single day and continue to go forward. It's brutal. Um, you need to have a fantastic support system and people who actually believe in you, whether they're part of your company or not. You need to hear that positive reinforcement. 

31:24 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
If not, no one, no one's going to get through it goals and aspirations are um, typically, the smaller your circle gets because you, I, I really started cutting people out of my life that one didn't believe in me, or two. All I heard them talk about was like victimhood or negativity and like that just it messes even them being negative, not necessarily to you, but it's just like that energy. 

31:53
I was just like I want none of that like I want to hear like you know, my wife's very positive but, like my favorite thing about her is when I come home she's telling me about all the great things that happened today, not about all the shitty things, and I never give her, even if I had a hard day, how was work, I'm blessed to be there. Like this cool stuff happened. That cool stuff happened. Um, we, we sold this great new product to a client. 

32:17
I don't want to focus on what wasn't good. I want my energy to always stay positive and I want the people that are my life to either be there to support me or be there to push me or be there to excite me. I don't want any of the other stuff and the people that think that way. I don't want them. Like if, I just don't want any of that in my life. And once I learned that it simplified my life and it also made it more enjoyable and it made it, when it's hard, um, to have different people to lean on for different things. 

32:50
You know I I love reaching out to people that you know outwork me and make me, you know, like listening to. I probably do it a few times a year. I'll just go listen to David Goggin's. So I feel like a loser. You know what I mean. I'm like, ok, I just never do enough. Like this guy, his discipline, he is a maniac, how he thinks, like that's what excites me, like I want to be around people. You know, like the biggest, the biggest thing I got from Goggin's was like, okay, you know how, how am I? How? What was it? I've said this a million times. It was um, how do I be uncommon among the uncommon? 

33:28
So I already know me and you are both uncommon. We're both entrepreneurs, we both have been successful. But, like, how do you be uncommon among those people? Like, how, how far do you have to dig? And it sounds like that's something that you want to be, because you had to go start all over again and go eat shit for two years to just get to where you're at now, to go try and build a unicorn and something that that's disrupted. Like how are you able to pick yourself up and want to go do that again, Because that sounds brutal. 

33:57 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
It's horrible. I think it's. It's. It's. It's tough, like, like you said, like being an entrepreneur is an extremely lonely career path, like I don't think many people fully understand what it takes to be an entrepreneur, how lonely it is, how no one's going to really understand what you're going through it takes to be an entrepreneur, how lonely it is, how no one's going to really understand what you're going through, because and that's what kind of makes your circle smaller and smaller, right. So it's the thing that motivated me is I you know, my dad always says this but a man with any how or with any why can withstand any how, something like it's something on those lines. 

34:33
But if you have your purpose and you have your mission and you know what your end goal is, you'll get there. If it's monetary, you should have stayed in your nine to five, stay, get a good job and like, save up and be smart. If you want to do something where you're going to change the world, you have to gamble. That's the only way you're going to do it. You have to. You put all, put all your chips on yourself and say I'm going all in and I believe in this At the end of the day, if it was easy, everyone else would do it. 

34:59
There's a reason there's so few entrepreneurs out there and there's a reason there's even fewer of those who actually succeed. Yeah, the amount of times I've been told to give up or sell the company and move on, or it's like it's too big of a lift. You're just going to mentally drain yourself a million times. I have bald patches in my hair and my beard all over the place. When this becomes a unicorn like, it'll be worth it and I'll laugh about it. But I think you have to go through the suck to get to that point. 

35:26 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Yeah, and to wrap this question up, I would say there's two types of pain. There's the pain of sacrifice or the pain of regret. Which one do you want to have? Like that's it Like. 

35:37
If you really boil it down to it, there's a lot of sacrificing to be uber successful and to be an entrepreneur, or you could regret it and that's anything in life. You know, I use that for my health, I use that for my health, I use that for my family, I use it for everything. It's like you don't always, it's not always easy. Um, sometimes you got to dig deep and the people that truly dig deep, um, and the other thing, the other great advice I got with, uh, entrepreneurial success is who's willing to do the boring shit. For two years, just do the suck. Yeah, just go do it. It's like it's not always fun. It's not always. 

36:14
I'm on a podcast and, um, we're socializing like your head's down, especially when you're getting started. Those first two, three years, oh my gosh. I mean I gained like 50 pounds. I've lost it back off, but I got huge, like I've just was. So unbalanced um, in my life is like this is this is my vision, this is my passion and I wouldn't tell anyone to do that like, take care of yourself, don't get super fat, um. But that was the level of dedication and focus that I had on on trying to build something that I was that passionate about. Um, and sometimes you just get in that mode. 

36:49 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Yeah, you have to. You have to be somewhat extremist in your mentality. I feel you'll never get there. You're doing something no one else has ever done. No one's laying a path for you, no one's telling you how to do it correctly. You have to screw up. You have to recover really quick. You have to do. You have to do things no one else would be willing to do. Yeah, there's. I didn't leave my apartment for two years. I literally, like, sat between my screens. I was getting a suntan from the, from the lights coming off my computers, um, and then eventually you like you come out and then things are great and everyone's like oh, it's so fun to be an entrepreneur, it's not well, the thing is is, you know we have I have over 140 employees. 

37:34 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Um, it's like the problems go from you having to do everything to you really having to make sure everyone's working well together and it's honestly it's more people problems than it is like work problems or it's very capable people. 

37:49
But you know, when you have that many employees, um, and it it sucks. Like you know, last year we had a couple people's parents die, as a sister die, um, um, you know, just life happens pregnancies, being a new father, um, trying to help them actually, especially when it's leadership, helping them navigate through some of those things and making sure that they can balance both that out. It really turns into making sure. I think once you get to a place, it's more people than process and having a good product problem is making sure that people are continuing to as life happens, because you want those incredible people to stay and be focused and sometimes you have to let them know it's okay that family takes a front seat, but just make sure that you're able to do what you need to do to an degree and if you can't, let us know and I can pick up some slack for you short term and just letting them know that we're a team and we can be there for each other. 

38:46 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Totally Well. Being an entrepreneur is a massive balance of IQ and EQ. You can have a brilliant business idea, you can have a great product, you can have all these things, but if you don't know how to relate it to people, it's going to be pointless. If you don't know how to motivate your team, you're going to be working on your own forever. That's not going to be sustainable. If you can't go into a meeting and find a way to connect what you're capable of doing with what someone needs of you, you're never going to get a sale. So it's it's it. Be being an entrepreneur requires you to be a master of both those traits, and it's really tough. And every entrepreneur I know is obsessed with books, whether they be super technical or super eq and like psychology based. Everyone I know has one obsession. 

39:36 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Reading and learning and being curious is definitely probably the trait that I see more than anything else. And luckily, um, let's say I have, okay, IQ. IQ is my strength, but my superpower is my partner's IQs and our leadership's IQs is. I know where to lean into. Where I'm at, I'm not the most articulate person. I I need stuff put in front of me and then I can make it brilliant and then I could put my spin on it, but I'm definitely not IQ the smartest person in the room most time. 

40:11
But, um, I I've really leaned into, you know, my EQ, um, how to get successful people to buy into a vision, um, and how to get them to work together, um, in a harmonious way, which isn't always the case. But that's where I I, me and my partners have the self-awareness to know, like, where our strengths are, where our weaknesses are. They don't like to do the people things. They like to go. They're definitely the integrators. 

40:39
I'm definitely the visionary and the people person, and they sometimes have to remind them that you know they're, they're not just someone working for us, they're, they're someone that matters more than just getting tasks done and accomplishing this next thing. And and they also have to remind me that it's not always just that side and get your ass to work on some projects too, and I'm like, okay, I'm on it. So it's, it's finding that balance, you know of of all of it which is interesting, which leads us to our next question? Is you know of of all of it which is interesting which leads us to our next question? Um, is you know, let's say, in title? You know what's the toughest decision you've had to make in title so far, and how did you navigate it? 

41:21 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Well, it was. That's another very good question. Um, I think it's when we eventually decided to rebrand it. So the original name of the company was OCL we basically we always told ourselves we'll stick with it until we we find, like, the right name, and it was just a placeholder until we built our product. But we spent months redesigning our brand, thinking of, like, what our brand language is going to be, how we're going to tell people this works. Do we talk about our tech, do we not? All of these things? We ended up getting really lucky with how we redesigned the company and even the URL we got. I think T-I-T-L is pretty sick. 

42:06 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
I like it. I thought it was cool. I got it instantly. 

42:10 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Well, not everyone does. We get called Tittle a lot. 

42:17 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
I instantly got it. I was like, all right, Tittle, we'll play on it. Obviously, getting T-I-T-L-E would be millions of dollars, probably to get. No, I thought your website was super sleek. You know, Stephanie introed us on on Friday Um, we booked something, or Thursday or Friday book something to talk today. So I went and did some research on you know your IG, on you know your company and your website. You could tell you guys were intentional with, with what you're trying to do, um, how you're trying to do it, and it was pretty straightforward. It's just, it's so revolutionary it's. I feel like you have to educate people because it's such an archaic industry of like. Well, why is it on blockchain? What does it mean? Being on blockchain like? 

42:59
how does that? 

43:00
make it better. Um, I understand that because I own a data company to some degree. I'm like, oh, this is really interesting. Um, we're going to talk more after um, but yeah, I guess let's get back to you talking about you know having to shift from MLS to you know, focusing in in the title space, you know what made you make that decision, like, and I guess, how did the pivot come and why exactly did it come? 

43:28 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
so basically we wanted to the. The original concept was how do we get title transfer to happen on chain or property transfer on chain? Okay, we didn't, we could. At first we didn't even know the difference between the MLS and what was like a title report. We thought the MLS did provide the accurate information turns out it's not fully like. 

43:47
It's not the information you would use to transfer the house. It's more brokerage and opinion information. So our first hurdle was okay. So if we're not going to be doing listings, then we need to find out what is required to transfer a house. So it's not just a deed, it's not just a legal description, it's an entire title. So then we're like all right, cool, now we need to build a product that actually generates titles, because no one seems to get them in an automated way. Everyone seems to get it manually or through some kind of API, but the APIs take a while to pull together and it's not accurate. 

44:24
So we've redesigned our product to literally become a title amalgamator or a title generator more accurately. And once we did that and we saw like everyone we're talking to is a title agent, a title lawyer, a lender or someone on those lines, and all they cared about is how do I get my title? So we literally found a way to rebrand to title and we just cut a letter out because we're a more efficient techie version of the title. Um, and and I we wanted the name to say what the, the business does. And literally we do title, we generate it, we store it, we monitor and we transfer. 

45:03 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
That's it I love it. So, now that you're going to be raising money and you've been bootstrapped, before I get to my last question, this is actually something I did want to talk about is you know, for these next couple of years with you doing a raise, I guess, what is? I don't want to ask all of them at once, but let's just kind of get into it. How do you balance growth versus profitability? Um and you know, because I'm assuming you're trying to disrupt something so like, are you just focusing on being on a burn? Um, do you need to be profitable? Are you just going to continue to raise rounds? Is there, I guess? What's? What's your thought process on doing making this huge bet on the technology that you built? 

45:52 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
So we don't plan on burning a crazy amount With this kind of product. We only need a tiny, tiny percentage of the available markets to work with us in order to even break even. Our burn rate is going to remain super low because we've just learned how to operate like that and we're just going to hire quality over quantity pretty much any day. That's how we're going to work. So like literally our main expense is going to be the rent and the salaries, but we're going to hire maybe one or two salespeople, we're going to have two or three developers and we're going to stay super lean. 

46:32
The goal is to scale through the markets we're specialists in and really just have deep relationships with the bigger guys versus shallow relationships with everyone, and that will open most of the doors for us, because if we can even service like all the medium-sized wall firms in Florida, we're helping a ton of people. And that's a really easy sell, because title companies are already dealing with two or three intermediaries to get this information. It saves them a ton of money and time. So the sell isn't all super hard. It's just we need the resources to target the market um and make sure the product is perfect enough that they're going to keep using it. 

47:16 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
And then did you, do you think you wanting to be, you know, having to be so bootstrapp these last couple of years? 

47:24
Do you think that's um, cause a lot of people just don't mind burning up money like crazy? Um, do you think I've always been, because every dollar that I've spent my business it's a dollar of mine and my partners, so we've never been just reckless with money and I feel like you, doing this and having other startups kind of similar to this I've always been the one of. If you get too much money and it's not yours, you spend it recklessly. I just feel like I've seen and talked to people that have done it both ways and I think you're not as disciplined with your hires and your business and it's thoughtful. So do you think kind of because of that's how those last two, three years have been, is like you're like I don't need to be at a crazy burn because I know effective way for us to go scale without having to burn up a bunch of money, and I'm sure investors probably love hearing you talk that way too yeah, well, yeah, also I think, where my where I come from, also in terms of where my first company was. 

48:26 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
I built a business that was generating close to a million in revenue, with like two people on salary and one developer. It was like bare minimum. That business worked super, super well. The issue was that when you're working in crypto, everyone's burning money on marketing and I watched people sink because of that. That's not our intent. 

48:48
Tori and I built this business with the intent of creating something that we can pass down by generation, like we. This is truly a business we plan on lasting forever. Um, and we've we've sunk our hearts into it, so we do not plan on any penny that comes into this business is only going towards building it up. I'd rather be a billionaire in 10 years than a millionaire in two, um, and that I'd rather be a billionaire in 10 years than a millionaire in two, and that's how we're looking at this. It's a very long-term strategy. We've given up a lot to make this happen. So, another year or two where we're just being smarter, not necessarily like eating two cans of tuna every day, but like we're going to be a bit more intelligent with the way we spend money. I think we'll go a long way, and I think that's why the investors are with us is they've seen how far we got with so little, and it gives them a level of trust. 

49:40 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Yeah, and I think really leaning into you know, getting on more things like this, because after we we get off this podcast, I have some relationships that I have that I think that could help you guys and I don't expect anything in return. I just think you're building something that is better than what's out there and, you know, maybe I could open up a couple doors for you. So I appreciate that. I'm excited to talk to you about that off camera. But our last question this is, I know where you're going to go with this one, but this is normally my favorite topic is what tech trends do you think are going to disrupt the prop tech space in the next three to five years? And it sounds like you're building one. 

50:22
So let's leave Titl, let's say, let's leave title and blockchain out. What other you know disruptions do you think that could be happening in? You know, this real estate prop tech space, minus what you're already doing, because obviously now, on some future episodes, I could talk about some cool stuff that you're doing that I think is going to really disrupt and be innovative. But what are a couple like innovations, you know? And if you're going to say AI, be much more specific. Ai is not very specific. So what do you got for me? 

50:56 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
I think there's a couple of cool things. I think one is how the work of a real estate agent is actually going to is changing, and it's changing drastically all the time, even with the onsets of databases like Zillow and Redfin. People are literally becoming their own real estate agents. So I'm able to organize my own viewings, I'm able to scout my own properties. I'm almost able to put in my own bids without anyone's help. I'm almost able to put in my own bids without anyone's help. I'm really interested to see how brokerage sites and real estate brokers remain relevant as so many more things become digital. Home appraisals are getting done by drones. It's becoming a process where there's less and less physical touch affiliated with it, and I think that's a good thing and a bad thing, um. So I'm curious to see what happens with brokerages, um, especially the super low touch, like digital ones, um, how they scale? Does the labor force dwindle and then the majority of the resources go into marketing or what? I'm curious to see how that plays out. 

52:08 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Yeah, I think for I would call it the sub million dollar home there could be a lot of automation around that. I think, for, you know, expensive luxury homes, they'll still need to be marketed properly. Like, I don't think a luxury agent, I think they're needed and you know you're negotiating millions of dollars. I feel like you know when you're okay let's use this as an alternative example when you know when you're going to sell your company, you know you want to hire an investment banker, like, even if you're a great negotiator and great at all these things, like that is not your expertise. And when you're talking millions or hundreds of millions or billions of dollars for what you're trying to accomplish, you know you're going to get emotional because it's you know your house or it's your business, to where? Um, I also think that for the you know cause I, I bought and sold, as I said, hundreds of homes and I I went direct to seller, so there's no agents involved. As an investor, I give them a cash offer and I don't know. 

53:12
I think there's a need for agents because I think people could be overly emotional to one. They give their house away for too cheaply because they're not properly educated on it or they think it's worth more than what it is and the market's going to tell you what the market's going to tell you. But having that, that buffer in between to some degree, now you know the the value, it's tough. I don't know Cause I see the art in real estate but I also see the data, owning a data company in real estate and the tech and the automation you could build around it. I don't like between me and you I don't have a clear answer of like what that's going to go, because I know the consumer and that homeowner still needs to be protected in some way a lot of the time but at the same time I don't think they need an agent, like they once did, at least, for you know, the million dollar property. 

53:59
so like I'm curious who and how that or how this, whatever business model is going to solve that problem, cause I haven't put enough thought into it yet, but there is a huge disruption to happen somehow some way. I just there was two main kinds of trading. 

54:24 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
It was like high touch and low touch. That's how we were trained. High touch is I call you, I explain my position to you and there's a whole negotiation process of the trade. Low touch is I send an electronic order you want to buy my shares, yes or no, and that's it, and there's no interaction, it's just electric. I see real estate becoming more and more like low touch. So what's going to happen, I think, is that you're going to get a polarization of the real estate market. You're going to have super luxury that's going to require an agent to hold your hand through the process and, like you said, on the below $1 million mark, you can probably automate most of that work. Maybe you want someone to represent you on the contract or whatever, but if title is automating contracts, what do you need Someone to? 

55:14 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
negotiate kind of the legal terms. I think an agent could be there for the negotiation side of things. But there's still some storytelling and making someone feel a certain way. So, like you can't cause everyone talks about how you can automate everything. I, just you, just you got to make someone feel a certain way and be in the house with them and sell them, or the other agent or the other family. As for listing in for, for buying, I don't know, I'm so torn on this topic. 

55:45 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
It's a big deal because even even if it's a sub a million dollar home, that's a that's a significant spend. It could be like a family getting their first house or whatever. People are going to spend the time to pay attention to that. So it's not going to be like a one click purchase. But I don't know. I more and more tech is flooding into the real estate market Like something's going to happen. Maybe like fix and flips will be faster, or cash buyers will be able to automate it, or something. I think there will reach a point where real estate will transact automatically and I think, like those digital brokerages are going to be leading that, and I think those digital brokerages are going to be leading that. 

56:24 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Yeah, I could agree to some point. And then I think of a pretty big innovation in the space because I work a lot with agents, investors, that side of the business going to come um from simply use um APIs to integrate into their CRMs um and into workflows to work more efficiently. As you're saying, there's still an art to it. So, like I always know there's going to be some art to it and you need people there to do certain things and to make calls and close deals. But I think, uh, simple APIs. 

56:59
And then like, where batch is really focusing on is, um, the derivative product side of things is like using our big data sets and creating derivative products. So, like one, we've created um, some machine learning and some um really sophisticated algorithms to where what homes are most likely to sell um in certain states. And then we have like nationwide algorithms and we're continuing to machine learn that and we have LLM models and all the cool stuff there and we're better than anyone else because we've been testing it. Some of our competitors on you know what that looks like is like hey, we're saying this is most likely to sell and that it doesn't mean it's, you know, an ugly house or a and flip, or it doesn't mean it's on the market. It just means here are the attributes that it's most likely to sell. 

57:46
And then but like, how can we create this algorithm, this derivative product, and then make it simple API use to maybe go into everyone that's getting a lead inside Google, all their leads that are coming in? We're scoring it for them so they know the urgency of, or the, or how you want to contact those person and create flows around that. And then on the other side is when, um, let's say, um, you, you're wholesaling, right, you know what wholesalers are, I'm assuming. 

58:13
Um, yeah so you're, you're, you're looking for that cash buyer. We're building, we built out a huge model on that side. We're not done with it, we're still like learning it and teaching it. But someone gets a house in a specific area and then we have that data to know the bed, bath count, square footage. We're building a model on how I guess who's the first person, who's the first 10 people that you should call that are most likely to buy this house as an investor or as a cash buyer, so with buyer, so title. 

58:43 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
We're doing the opposite of that. We're helping the, the buyers, find the strategic opportunities they like. So, um, for we helped a guy find a property that had like two years of unpaid taxes on it and he went in to try to make a cash offer, um, or who's an over levered homeowner, and we just flag properties with three or more liens on them, stuff like that. So we're tackling it from the property valuation side. 

59:10 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Interesting. Yeah, we're doing it from like the wholesaler side of saying who wants to buy it. There might be some some collaboration we could. 

59:17
We could do because because we it was a huge task too, because we had to marry parent and child LLCs like there's a lot of crazy stuff that people way smarter me and my company are like building. I'm like, hey, this sounds really smart, and then they took it to like a whole another level. I threw out a crazy idea and then they kind of told me how difficult and and how fun it's been. So we call it like the property pulse report, um, and then we're able to parent, really marry those, those child and parent LLCs, cause there's, you know, someone could have a parent LLC and have all these properties, but we want to know who that person is, because you know that that's important, and then I think we could potentially there's more of a B2B play to where I think our, our small customers could use it, but like I also think that the big buyers and the big REITs, they'd have an interest in this as well. So I just really believe, you know, like data sets are becoming more and more of a commodity and big data, and we have big data and we offer that, and so do our competitors, but who creates the most? 

01:00:22
You know, use, use out of derivative products that could help with people's workflows and just be like this is what I want. Score it it better, be really accurate and make my life simpler. To well I could build stuff around it and be more efficient with my business and my employees. I think those are the people in in our space that are going to win. You're doing the same thing just in a different way for different. That's something I want to talk to you about. Outside of this is we're looking at things the same way. We're just building for different customers. 

01:00:56 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
Yeah, but that's all we're doing is like as a SaaS or a tech company, whatever, we're taking either complicated data or complicated tech and trying to make it palatable for a specific user base. Right, yeah, so that that's our job in general is just how do I take this information and turn it into something you would want, like, but that's all sass in general, yeah, but most sass products aren't that sophisticated or think that way I. 

01:01:23 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
I think that's where we're going towards and I think you could like for real estate data and for, you know, lead generation. It used to just be here all the property records and here all the filters. Go, figure out what you want. Now I have to tell them what they want. Yeah, if you don't do that, or they could give a parameter of what they want, right, but it's my job now to tell them and serve them up in the most efficient way with APIs and with ways to where they could integrate it into their workflows and the functions of their CRM or where they're curating data, simply because not everyone is technically savvy. So it's my job to figure out how to solve that problem for the non-technical people. And that's where we're really going to lean into and try and separate ourselves from our current competitors, because it's became more of a commodity, with there's three, four, five, six, ten companies that offer the same data sets. 

01:02:23
Well, how does Batch stand out from the others? And I'm happy to. I hope they know what I'm doing because we got a great team. We're going to go do it better than you and we're going to do it faster than you and we're going to blitz the market quicker. So good luck, yep, okay, so that basically wraps up the Real Saas podcast. But before we go, or how, how would someone get a hold of you that's interested in your product? Hopefully there'll be executives of title companies listening to this podcast and you could get all the business. Um, what's the best way to get a hold of you? 

01:02:58 - Ori Ohayon (Guest)
um, we're very active on LinkedIn, so just titlI-T-L. Our website is T-I-T-Lco. C-o. Yeah, those are the best ways LinkedIn and our website. 

01:03:10 - Jesse Burrell (Guest)
Awesome. I appreciate you so much for coming on today and for everyone that tuned in to the Real SaaS Podcast today. We greatly appreciate it and until next time let's get it. 

01:03:23 - Hope (Announcement)
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