How Kukun Prices White-Label Home Data for Banks at $10K-$50K a Month

Pretty cushy job you quit.

Yes. Correct. It was a difficult choice to make, but for me, I never looked back and I never regret it.

What revenue or what salary you gave up to go all in on the startup?

Close to a million dollar a year, but lots of other perks.

If you have 20 paying customers, right, paying $20,000 per month, that would put your monthly recurring revenue around 400,000 per month. Is that a fair calculation?

Yes. Correct.

How much time do you need? Is it at twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven? When do you think you can break 5,000,000 of ARR?

I think we're poised to do that next year.

If somebody's listening to this podcast and comes to you today and offers you $10,000,000 all cash to buy a 100% of the business, do you sell? Alright, folks. My guest today is Raf Howery. He's the CEO and founder of Kukun founded back in 2014 after a career at Capgemini. He's now scaling in the space of we're just gonna call it property data as we dive in. So, Raf, are you ready to take us to the top?

Yes. I am.

Alright. So tell us what you do in like one or two sentences. The homepage says the PICO score, get credit for upgrades. What does this mean?

Well, we are about in sort of improving the value of every single home. It is the largest single investment that most of us make. And what we do is we help everyone maintain it, figure out how to increase its value, how to optimize its value. And then we help those businesses that want to serve those consumers, helping that customer doing that. So think of a wealth manager, think of a bank, think of an insurance company that

wants you to invest in your home, can maintain it, improve its value. That's what we do. We build the data, the analytics and the software to enable that.

Okay. So like if I just put in if I put in like a random address, Mansell, yeah, let's just do Austin, Texas here. What's happening on the... Okay. So why doesn't you... So is this all... Are you only in certain states?

No. We are national, but sometimes certain properties, if they're either new constructions or maybe there is no public data available, we can do that. Okay. Maybe try a different address. I can give you a different address if you like.

Oh, let's just look at one of these. Right? So Elgin Miller Resort, Port Richey, Florida. So price $2.85. So I guess just to be clear before we jump in deeper here, you have four homeowners and four businesses. How is your revenue made up? Are homeowners paying you or are banks paying you?

It's mostly business. So banks, insurance companies, brokerages. What we do on the homeowner side is we help homeowners, but we also use that to enhance the user experience to understand better what people want, and that allows us to enhance the software for our enterprise customer. But most of our revenue is in the enterprise space as a side.

So to be clear, a company like a bank or a mortgage broker, right, is wanting to work with a homeowner. If PNC Banks wants to do more mortgages, they will then... You will sell directly to them, and then they will help get Kukun used by the homeowners they're looking to do loans to.

Exactly. Yes. We white label the software. They insert it on their web pages or on their app, and then they enhance it with other things they have. So it becomes like it's their own experience, but it's really... Most of it or part of it is light labeled by us.

I see. Okay. So how many b to b customers, those white label customers, are you serving today? Are we talking five big enterprises or 5,000?

No. It's not in the 5,000. It's definitely not in the five either. We are in the back, the 20 to 25.

Okay. So, pretty high touch then sales cycle if there's 20 to 25?

Yes, I would say that.

Okay. And which of these sort of use cases are the are the biggest? Or is it 20 realtors or is it more mortgage brokers or banks or real estate investors? Which one's the biggest use case?

I would say banks and lenders are the biggest use case because there's a very clear ROI driven from generating more loans when you use this service. So there's a direct correlation between increase in loan apps and what they... What those applications that we offer. Other businesses see a different... So for example, if you think of an insurance company, they're mostly to maintain assets, make sure that there's no risk. And yeah,

maybe they partner with a lender and generate more business. So it's a very different ROI and a very different use case, but the banks are the cores of it, followed then of course, by the real estate

Okay, and so for a hypothetical bank that's using you, let's just stick to that for a second. How do you price? You don't have pricing on your website, have a contact form. So is it a one off negotiation each time? How do you structure this?

So, because it's a suite of products, we basically depends on how many of the products they want a white label. So the price shows with that, but basically think of it as the number of addresses that they want to engage with within the band per month. So let's just say a bank says, I want to hit this kind of volume. I wanna engage a 100,000 customers, a million customers a month. We price it by those bands.

And then as they increase, they go to the next band.

Okay. Is that fairly... I mean, if I asked you for the average number of customers per month that a bank wants to, you know, use you on, is a 100,000 the right number there or is it smaller?

A single bank, I would I mean, I can't share numbers just obviously because of the contract terms.

Oh, no. I said I'm not asking you to share your actual. I'm saying on average. Yeah.

I would say your look... It depends on the bank and the size of the bank. So that's very hard. A large bank will see probably hundreds of thousands. It depends also on their marketing where they put it. If they put it within a signed in experience, that's a lower number, but a much higher engagement. If you put it on the public side, that may be a higher number, but then it becomes a function of how well

they do the marketing and the closing after that. So there's an engagement with, you know, integration with Salesforce, Adobe Audience Manager. So what we've seen is that every bank is different and some banks are better at certain things while others are better at other things. So it's really not a very specific formula, but yes. Well, let's just say a large bank or, let's say, a regional bank will see hundreds of thousands.

Okay. Okay. I guess maybe a better way to ask this might just be across your whole system, how many of these are you processing on a monthly basis?

That's a very good question. I think because it's a suite of products, if I have to aggregate all of those, I'm gonna say per month, but I'll talk about a year or per month. I am gonna have to guess around maybe somewhere between 400,000 to 500,000 between the big and small clients.

Yeah. Yeah. So 400,000 across 20 banks. Right? So you get to the average. The average bank on your platform is doing something like 20,000 per month.

No, it's five banks. The rest are other. We sell to the fintechs, we sell to the prop tech, we sell to insurance companies, held to brokerages, so in any business. So, would not say that 20 is all It's all... Sorry. What I'm trying...

Raf, what I'm trying to get to is just your usage metric. This is more complicated than what I was trying to get to. Let me just put it differently. Your average customer, whether it's a bank or somebody else, your average business customer is processing about 20,000 applications or uses of your platform per month. Is that a fair statement?

That's a fair statement.

Okay, and it's across a bunch of different product suites depending on what their use case is?

That's correct.

Okay, got it. For that hypothetical average customer at 20,000 right a month, generally, will you price for that? Is that a thousand dollar a month contract, a million dollar a month contract, something different?

No. No. It's a... It just ranges between... It depends on the bells and whistles, but it ranges between 10,000 a month to about, let's say 50,000 a month.

Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 into five fifty software companies so far, again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. Sign So up at founderpath.com. And when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through

YouTube, and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. Okay. And how do you how do you decide what pricing ax to price against? Because again, you have use it. You have a bunch of different products, more than 10 that I see listed on the site in terms of the things they can get from you. And then you can price each of those differently. Plus you can price for product upsells. How do you decide the... I mean, it feels like a very complex pricing structure.

No. Actually, it's a pretty standard. Think about it this way. I have a band that's say a zero to a 100,000 address. Think of that as your basic, and then you have a product. A product map. So those... Each product has a price. And then when you bundle multiple products, you get a discount. So let's say the price for their cost estimator, the renovation cost estimator, which is one of our most popular products, it can range

between 5 to 25,000 based on also like there are certain, for example, banks require a lot of InfoSec services. So that changes the price structure. But let's say it's 10,000 a month, very simplistically. If you add two more products, each one of them is gonna, let's say 5,000, 5,000, and then you get a discount on the 20,000 that we've just added up. So it's really a very simple matrix. It's pretty straightforward. It's by bands of addresses,

by product. And then once you have that price, you add them all up and you apply the discounts.

Yeah. Well, I mean, so I mean, we can kind of reverse engineer, right? If you have 20 paying customers, right? Paying 20,000 per month, that would put your monthly recurring revenue around 400,000 per month. Is that a fair calculation?

With some caveat.

Okay. What would those

I'm right now in the middle of something. I cannot share too much about that, if that's okay with you. But I would say the caveat is often it's it cycles between volumes between summer and and winter, and also between what the the bank or let's say the fintech wants to do. So I would say that that is even though it's relatively consistent, it does fluctuate a little bit.

Okay. So maybe you're lower than that today, but do you think there's a path over the next year or two to breaking $400,000 per month in revenue?

Yes. Very clear right now. We're seeing it actually very clearly in the pipeline. And also there's a trend right now in the industry where I think a lot of the large institutions are focusing a lot more on retaining that customer post transaction. As you probably know, when you give somebody a mortgage, you're only gonna interact with them when you send them the invoice. And right now there's a whole sort of a more focus on trying to

stay close to that customer that they capture the next transaction and they capture more share of wallet, more HELOCs, more car loans, and that's not gonna happen by dropping them after the transaction. So this is where we, the value proposition that's becoming more of the business case that most of the industry is looking at today.

Mhmm. And you mentioned you're in the middle of something. Are you exiting the company or raising right now? Are you bootstrapped? Give me more of the backstory there.

No, we are mostly bootstrapped. So we have only taken private money. That's been the case, including some of mine. And we lived within our means most of the time. We try to be always near profitable, meaning that we try to stay profitable, but we reinvest. We don't try to be very profitable. So that's just... But we can switch to that. We are in the middle of two transactions that may change the way that looks. And so

I... That's what I I need to be careful. I'm not sharing more than that. I'm not... We're not exiting right now. Let's just say that we're not exiting. We may be raising, but right now, it's sort of like being evaluated. Let's just put it this way.

Fair enough. When you say you're mostly bootstrapped today, you put in your own money plus some you said, quote, private money. How much total money have you plus other private investors put in the business life to date?

If you exclude me, about 7,000,000.

Okay. Well, I mean, your money is the most important money. Right? You're putting your money where your mouth is. Your baby. Are you comfortable sharing how much you've put in? And was it... Are you swinging for the fences? Is, you're a 100% your life savings and passed to work, or or is it, a drop in the bucket for you?

Let's say we... I put in a little... North of a million dollar in... Into that business. It's not a drop in the pocket, but it's also not gonna kill me if it... But it's something that I really preserve very carefully, and I've built a very careful strategic plan to build what I wanted to do, to build, and that I knew would take some time to get there. And that's why we stay with my own money and

private money so that we can control that growth. Right now, we're at a very different stage. Right now, we we got what we wanted. We built what we wanted. So going into a large transaction, we'll we'll be in a in a better position. Basically, we're at the point where we can explode sales, and we are seeing it right now with a very small sales team. So we wanna grow that.

What's the team today? All all in?

About 55 people.

55. Okay. And how many are sales with a quota quota carrying reps?

Just two.

Two. Okay. Interesting. What are the rest? How many engineers?

Mostly engineers and data engineers. I would say 40 to 42. There are some... Of course, then there's all the rest of the management, and then you have a bit of marketing.

Okay. How do you get this business to a more efficient spot? Right? Because you said it earlier, you're under $400,000 a month in revenue, which means you're under about a $44,000,000 run rate with 55 people. That's very low revenue per employee. It's like $70 of revenue per employee. That's not generally seen as an efficient operation.

Yeah. That's because we have not really put a lot of energy into sales. We've only put energy in sales in the last year because as I said, we wanted to build and control and build that moat around it. Now this is where the transactions are going is to build the sales function. Today, I can tell you that our sales funnel is extremely healthy with just two sales guys. So what we're we're saying is that we're gonna

change that. Again, that's part of why we invested more in engineering all along, and now it's time to invest in sales and marketing. We do a little bit, but that's where that's gonna change. And that was by design. It looks that way. I'll also say that the cost per employee is very different. We have a large team sort of overseas where the I rate is very would say 85% of the company is between India and Colombia.

Okay. So 40 are between India and Colombia?

Yeah.

Okay. So, I mean, that helps a little bit with burn, but but still, if you're under 4,000,000 then, right, with yeah, I mean, right, if you're if you're if you're under 4,000,000 of revenue with 7,000,000 from private investors, a million from you, that's 8,000,000. And today, you're at 72 k of revenue per employee. I mean, do you have enough cash in the bank to continue exiting your plan or do you have to go raise money today to extend runway?

No. We can still definitely live with enough cash that we have, but it will not allow us to explode. Right? This is where we will need to raise money to to go big and big and far. So... And that was, again, by design where we tried... Because, again, part of the business is to collect all the data and refine the data to get to a point to build a user experience that works for everybody, and that

was time consuming. And so this is... We are past that point, and now we're just gonna invest all of our energy in sales and marketing.

How many months of runway do you currently have left?

We have about a year at least. Okay.

And does that make you... Every founder's different. Are you comfortable with that? Does it make you nervous?

I'm never comfortable. I'm always nervous. What what makes me feel better is that the pipeline is the healthiest I've ever seen. So we are... We're in a good position to end q one on a really positive note looking at it today. So I think that's what gets me less nervous, but of course, I'll always be nervous. No founder is ever gonna remain... I'm not nervous unless they're

Fair enough. Okay. Let's go back real quick. We've got about four or five more minutes left here. I wanna get the the launch story. So you launched in 2014. Obviously, zero revenue there. It looks like you quit a pretty good... I mean, you were at Capgemini for many years. It's pretty cushy job you quit. Yes.

Correct. That's correct. It was a choice. It was it was a big choice, a difficult choice to make, but it... For me, I never looked back, and I never regret it.

I want others in your same shoes. They're listening around a comfy corporate job. They're looking for motivation here to quit and do their own thing. I want you to inspire them a bit if you're comfortable. Can you share what revenue or what salary you gave up to go all in on the startup?

Let's say in close to a million dollar a year, and let's say lots of other perks. I was in management consulting. My client list was some of the most powerful people in the world. I was an adviser to a lot of key folks in the in the market. There's a lot of perks, a lot of, they just say, ego involved. Let's put it this way. But I gave up all of that because one of the things

I wanted to do is to build something that I can finish. In the world of management consulting, you build for others and you move on. So that is one of the things. And, yeah, there's another reason for this. I was on a plane very often, and I think I was missing my kids. I... My kids were growing up without me, so I needed to stay. And, of course, when you're a global leader, the only people that

wanna hire you are the people who wanna put you in another global role. So I really kind of that was another, you know, I would say motivation, or should we say influence, or maybe I was pushed into that direction. So there's a little bit of, you know, not... If not only.

That makes sense, Raf. How old are you today, and how many kids do you have?

I am 16 and have two.

Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. And you can see here again, you put in your time. I mean, this is well over a decade at at Capgemini. So, yeah, quite the history here. Okay. So you bet on yourself in 2014. You get going. Do you remember your first million dollar revenue year?

Yeah. I think it... Hold on. 2018, I would say.

There's people listening going, well, I wanna be like Raf and go from zero to a million dollars in my first three and a half, four years. You know, that bank didn't just call you because out of randomness, you did things to create your luck. What did you do those first three years?

Well, first of all, I think I solved a problem that no one has solved before. And I think that's an important thing. You're actually creating a solution for a problem that people have either thought it can't be solved or never bothered to notice it.

For our focus on distribution, because there's a lot of founders that they had world class products and they never take off because no one knows about them. So focus on distribution.

Yes. I think the distribution was to actually want, like, in the beginning, there was not a whole lot because I said we were building. The idea was I worked... When I built the first tools, my first clients, I distributed to realtors, and I distributed it for free. So I would go literally from one brokerage to another, and I will pitch one by one. It was a small use case, but that was... For me, was validation more

than an actual revenue. So for me, that's where it started. And then from there, realtors tend to have a lot of... Let's just say, they use a lot of word-of-mouth. So that has helped. We incentivize them to do that. And from there, it got over to other other clients. The other thing that I think this was really important for distribution that I think nobody has figured out yet, and this is what we've done. You see a

b to c experience. You're going through it right now on screen with me. Yep. That is my best marketing tool. Because when when companies look for solutions, they are gonna see an enterprise ad or they're gonna see a very business page, but they have to call you to find out. Here, they're playing with it as they're themselves, as actual users, And they're basically kind of... That's when they reach out to me. So one of the best

things that we've done in terms of distribution, in terms of marketing, is to make the customer as an individual use our tools. Every time I pitch anything, I say, you have a home, go play with it. And that actually made a big difference.

This is a distribution around was was you hustling, giving away for free, and then it was product led growth, individual agents using it. And if an individual agent, if five people at Keller Williams start using it, then eventually the CTO at Keller Williams says, gotta buy a company license.

That's correct. That's how it started. Cool.

Very cool. Okay. So, that was going forward to, to 2018 when you broke a million of revenue. You you know, it sounds like you're flirting with around 4,000,000 today. How much time do you need? Is it at 2026, 2027? When do you think you can break 5,000,000 of ARR?

I think we're poised to do that next year. Very early, actually. Looking at the pipeline right now, we should be in good shape. But again, you don't know what the market does. We are sensitive a little bit to mortgage rates. Things look... Are looking really positive in the last, I would say, twelve months that we've seen this.

Good point. People are buying less houses because mortgage rates are still in the six to sort of 8% range. How do you hedge that? What other products do you offer that are not directly correlated to mortgage rates?

Actually, this is where it actually helped because we focus on investing your own home and because people don't wanna sell their home because they have a great mortgage rate, we're seeing a lot more people saying, I'm staying and I'm building and I'm improving.

These these products, remodel costs, maintenance plans, etcetera.

That's correct. And so we've seen a lot more. Let's face it. The market is short about 5,000,000. So there are fewer homes on the market. People are not buying because everybody's still betting that they want to go back to the 3% mortgage date, which probably never gonna happen in in our lifetime. And so a lot of folks are saying, I'm not gonna give up my 3% mortgage. I am just gonna invest in it and maybe borrow against it and buy something new. And that played really well for our use case.

Yep. Yep. Makes a ton of sense. Okay. Are there any other growth channels besides product led growth that you're using today that are working really well for you that you wanna teach our audience?

Personal reach out has been my best thing. I personally been involved in the sales cycle has really helped a lot. The second thing is you need to become a consultant in your distribution story. So you would need to constantly explain the ROI. You can't just sell a product like it's a SKU. So it's a slightly different sales cycle, but it's really easy once you master it.

And, Raf, as we look into the future and where you're going, obviously, you've raised some capital here. How much of the company do you still own personally today or or the team, like not investors?

Over 50%. Definitely over 50%. Yeah.

Okay. So you've been able to raise and also sort of manage dilution. Are you comfortable sharing the last value... The last priced valuation of the business, what year that was?

We never did a price valuation. We did convertible notes. So beyond that, I have not really pulled any money in the last four years. Three years.

Okay. Okay.

So all those 7,000,000

of convertible notes were all raised before 2022.

That's correct. We decided to live within our means when we saw the market. As you'll recall, about two years ago, the venture capital space was quite tough. So we decided, made our own, you know, kind of decision to stay in control and not to need money that that help... That really hurt us a little bit in terms of growth, but at the same time, it allowed us to control the the the game a little bit. And now we're seeing that pay off.

Raf, if somebody's listening to this podcast and comes to you today and offers you $10,000,000 all cash to buy a 100% of the business, do you sell? Nope. That was quick.

Well, you gave me an exact number, so it's easy to give a quick answer.

What's the number?

I'm not gonna talk about that right now. Unfortunately.

Fair enough, Raf. Well, hey, this has been a lot of fun. If people wanna learn more about you and the business online, where can they follow you?

So I'm on LinkedIn. That's the best way to get ahold of me. I am on... Basically, that's pretty much the only social media platform that I'm engaged with on a regular basis. Of course, you can always go to our company, mykukun.com.

Actually, you say contact us, I see every phone that comes. That's just make it something a decision I made long ago that I... At the end of the day, I look at every contact as they came in and I and I actually don't always handle them, but I make sure that if I need to step in. So if you send us any contact, I... We sure that I will know about it.

Guys, there you have it. Mykukun.com was launched in 2014 after Raf quit a consulting gig where he was making over a million dollars per year. He bet on himself and broke a million dollars of revenue in his first three and a half, four years. He went on to raise about $7,000,000 in addition to putting a million dollars himself into the business. That was all before 2022. MAMMEON convertible notes, they continued to scale by empowering real estate

agents early on to use tools they built for homeowners. Eventually that product led growth led to word-of-mouth where they sold directly B2B, directly to the brokerages and now to banks and now to FinTechs that wanna use their tools for things like lead gen or helping the homeowners that they might lend money to. Today, they've got 20 businesses or enterprises paying them. They're a little under $400,000 a month in revenue and they're getting a lot of consumption.

On average, their B2B customers are processing 20,000 addresses, that's home addresses per month through all of their different product suites. There are 55 people on the team with a little headcount arbitrage, about 40 of those folks are in India and Colombia as Raf continues to scale the business. Raf, thank you so much for taking us to the top.

Thank you, Nathan, for the opportunity. Appreciate it.

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