Think about the times you’ve purchased a home. What was going on in your life at the time?
Had you landed your first job? Gotten married? Finished graduate school? Had your first or second child? Moved to a new town?
Moving, it seems, is inherently tied to these life events. And most of those events leave behind some paper trail that, to date, no Realtor has been able to easily track.
At least not before a pair of Durham entrepreneurs started collecting the data and then building a software to analyze and make sense of it, locate the people along the trail and target them with the right message when they’re most likely to buy a home. Their company called First (formerly First Leads) doesn’t yet have a product on the market. But a working prototype has already delivered Realtors around the nation bunches of solid leads by sending targeted emails to people who just completed graduate programs at one of 101 colleges in 53 U.S. cities. First has even made some money—a 25 percent commission on any sale that comes through a lead has brought in $50,000 in early revenue.
Idea Fund Partners was pretty sold on the idea and first-time founders Mike Schneider (left) and Jess Martin (right)—the early stage capital fund provided the final $250,000 to close a $750,000 round in May, investing alongside Sovereign’s Capital, run by former Bandwidth co-founder Henry Kaestner, and a dozen angel investors.
Read more about the startup at:
http://exitevent.com/article/durham-startup-first-snags-750k-150625
