Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast, From the Ground Up, where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their successes, challenges, and lessons learned. We hope you be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and here with us today we have Dana Dunford, the founder and CEO of Hemlane, a VC-backed company that's raised $12 million in funding and changing how we manage rental properties. It's a fascinating story. Dana, welcome to the show.
Dana Dunford: Thanks so much for having me, Jake.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well, a little bit about Dana. She is the CEO of Hemlane, a venture-backed property management platform with over 24,000 rentals. She's a top 20 leader of leaders and influencers in commercial real estate tech who also worked at Apple, then Nest, the home technology company acquired by Google for $3.2 billion. Uh, and she received her MBA from Harvard. So Dana, I guess before we dive in, give us a little background of where your life started. Where are you from originally?
Dana Dunford: I was born in Boston. Uh, my mom is a professor, or was a professor, now she does more administrative stuff. Um so I was born in Boston, but we basically moved anywhere where her job took us. And so that led us to New York, to Tahiti, all the way to Monterey Bay, um California traveling around.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love it. Um you're not just an entrepreneur, but you're a little bit of a risk taker. You're an equestrian, you've paraglided, you ski. Who is the role model in your life that kind of shaped you to be a risk taker?
Dana Dunford: Um this I, I know probably a lot of people um say their, their parents, um but it definitely was uh my mother. Um from the perspective, she always said that you only get given what you can handle. And I saw personally her constantly taking risks in her own life and almost doing the impossible. And so for me there was never a question of "should I do it," it was more of a question of "how do I do it." Um in finding uh problems and, and looking for solutions for them.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, we think a lot alike because my mom influenced me in a big way as, as well and she uh has been in real estate for 40 years, working at Coldwell Banker. So this episode is actually very personal to me because you're kind of in the line of work and have built a platform that really I think could help our comp-, family really to not just operate differently but also maybe more with a freedom of uh a peace of mind when you decide to move on from a different location where you might have rental property. So we'll, we'll kind of dive into that. Um before we do, you're well schooled. You've been to multiple, you've got multiple degrees from Santa Clara. Uh you went on to Harvard. When you look at your experience from school and maybe let's think specifically about Harvard... so many big people with big ideas come out of that school. What was the influence there for you to start your own company someday, if at all?
Dana Dunford: Yeah, so um, before uh before going to business school... it's a huge decision to go to business school, right. In part because um you're not only having to pay a lot to go to school, but also you're losing a lot in opportunity of making money. Um and so before going to business school, I had made the decision that I was going to step out and actually build something. So I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I was always, it's um the quote that uh Benjamin Franklin has of, you know, "people who ask how to do something always have a job and people who ask like why things are done are always the boss, they're the one who actually build, build things." It was very similar for me, and so I knew that going to business school was going to help me step out of the day-to-day.
But I think the biggest thing that I learned, and the biggest takeaway from it, is it's not as easy as you think it is. And there's a couple of um, one courses and then just also um how the learning was structured that really helped me understand that. The first was you do case studies every day. And so you analyze businesses. You have three a day and you're analyzing anything. And it's things like, you know, you get your Amazon packages and you have like the bubble wrap in there. We like analyzed that company and you know what it took for them to build it. So that helped me realize how difficult it is to build these businesses because a lot of these stories are actually about failures, they're not about the successes, which is what the news likes to talk about a lot of the successes without knowing the failures. That was the first thing um from, um from stepping out of you know a job and going back to, to university.
The second one was there was a class called Founders' Dilemmas and it's the Noam Wasserman book. And that actually was incredibly life-changing for me of setting myself up for knowing this is going to be a really hard journey. And the reason is, is you know most startups fail, and it takes, takes all the data and says, "okay, you are you know um I think it's like 87% more likely to succeed if you have a co-founder rather than doing it solo." Um you know, "this is what the strain is going to be on your family and the divorce rates after you know starting a company." So it was a really good book to kind of let you know... it was a book followed by also the course with that, the, the author. And it was a really good way for me to understand what I was getting into. Because then once you build something, you go through the highest highs and the lowest lows. But what's good is you've set yourself up mentally for that because you knew before you started it that that was going to happen. And um so I found that to be incredibly impactful and helpful for me.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So we're going to dive a little bit into what you just said. You talked about co-founders make you more successful in a startup. How did you find your... do you first of all, do you have a co-founder and, and if you do, how did you find your co-founder?
Dana Dunford: Yeah, um I do have a co, co-founder, um and he's highly technical. So Frank is our Chief Technology Officer, um which is, is great because for me, while I, I have a data background and a math background, the actual coding and stuff like that um is not my expertise, mine is much more on the, the real estate side. And so we found each other actually through a mutual um a, a mutual who started our first company with us. So the three of us had started a um basically background and credit check um company for landlords. It was very much more of a cash flow company, not like a venture-backed "create a new industry" uh type company. But it really helped one, me to understand "who do I want to work with and who is going to be my partner through the entrepreneurship journey?" And then two, "what works and what doesn't by starting a company?" and realizing in going through the process how much is involved and where focus needs to be. Um so we learned a lot through our first company. So that first company was with Frank and then Thomas Hopkins, who introduced the two of us.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I always think it's good to have almost your kind of your starter startup that gives you all the, the, the benefits of what to do right and things not to do again. And then you get into your real startup where you maybe then you go raise capital and you have a different perspective of the problem you're solving. Um what inspired you to build your company today, Hemlane, Hemlane rather?
Dana Dunford: Good question. Um you know if you had asked me when we started about the vision uh was really interesting. It was there while we were building Tenantopia, the first company. Um the vision was there, um but we weren't ready, I don't think we were ready to jump into it and go that big. Because to your point, your first startup you make a lot of fa-, you have quite a few failures so you almost don't have the confidence to go big and say like, "I'm going to create the Amazon of this industry" or "the Salesforce of this industry." And um so with kind of the idea, it started with the need. We knew that 72% of rental properties across the US are self-managed. We also knew that that every landlord complains about having to manage their properties and every tenant complains about their landlords. So very similar to like the taxi industry pre-Uber. No one was like "oh my gosh, I love getting in a taxi and not knowing how much I'm going to pay or what route they're going to take me." It's very similar in the, the industry of, of real estate. But then when you talk to anyone out there, like Jake you or anyone listening to this podcast, think about it: you have all lived in a rental property before. This is a massive industry, all of us have experienced this pain point. But nothing has changed, everyone just looks at the buy/sell side. So we knew there was a problem to solve and the problem was providing a better experience for rental properties. How to do it, we weren't quite sure at that time. What we needed to do was listen to customers, understand the pain points and then say, "okay we're not going to build what they want us to build, we're going to build something better."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So what's the problem you solve for someone who has say a portfolio of rentals that they typically now can do it differently and their user experience is going to be different?
Dana Dunford: Yeah. I think at kind of a high level in a vision, it's um, and then I'll get into the details of what we do in the day-to-day. At a higher level the problem that we solve is that people don't want to invest in physical real estate or rental properties because they don't want to have to do the work of, "great I purchased this property, but now I have to deal with tenant communications and rent collection and oh my goodness what happens if there's an eviction or there's a water leak?" All that kind of stuff, of mentally saying, "I don't want to invest in real estate, it's easier for me to put it into the S&P 500 and you know earn interest off of um uh stocks um, or sorry interest off of bonds and then stocks obviously based off the stock price and where that goes." Um so I think the bigger problem that we're solving is, "hey, you can control your own financial destiny and where you're going by investing in real estate and having that control."
But at like a more tactical level of what we solve is we provide an alternative solution to manage your rental properties. So instead of, if you think about pre-Hemlane, there was do-it-yourself property management where you do everything yourself or you hire a traditional property manager. Most of the industry you'll find fall somewhere in the middle. They say, "yes, I do want someone licensed to do these certain tasks. I do want to control other parts of it. Like I want the rent to go directly to me. I don't want it held in a trust account for 20 days not earning interest. I want that money to go directly to my bank account on day one." So by basically unbundling all of the tasks associated with property management, redistributing them and saying "great, we're going to provide an alternative solution," it helps with that larger vision of saying "hey, you can be more passive, passive with your rentals. You can buy a rental anywhere in the US. You press a button, it goes onto Hemlane and it gets managed with the um, with mitigating the risk." So really reducing any sort of risk associated with having a physical asset but still providing you that control and transparency where you control your, the end destiny of um your investment. And an example of like not being able to do that today is like if I go and invest in the S&P 500 or I put my money into a mutual fund, I'm not the CEO of those companies. I can't control how well they're going to perform. And so I'm almost gambling my money, but using historical benchmarks and um returns to predict it. But now you can actually have all of that control yourself.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, wow, it sounds amazing. Um I told you this before and I'll tell you it again, we're going to be a client of yours because that's one of the pain points of just you know, not, it's not just about the having to worry about managing the properties, it's also you're kind of tied to the location of your property sometimes. And you feel like you can't leave, unless something goes wrong, who's going to fix it? So uh I think there's a peace of mind to what you've created too that is a byproduct of your platform, which is priceless from my perspective.
There's a journey in every startup. It's not just the idea that you bring a product to market, it's also about people you can influence to join your company, and also the investors that believe in your vision to invest in your company. What was your journey like in raising capital?
Dana Dunford: Great question. I would have done it completely differently um had I had, had I been able to do it all over again. Um so there's, there's a couple of things there. Um first, being a second-time founder from Tenantopia to Hemlane, to your point, really helped. Because actually I think a lot of founders don't want to talk about their failures and because they're worried that an investor um will think that as a negative. That failure with Tenantopia was actually a positive because one, I said we never raised any capital for Tenantopia. That company had no capital. We bootstrapped it and figured out this was not going to be, this was like a cash flow business but was not going to change an industry. It was just building background and credit checks for landlords and tenants, you know an application and background and credit checks. And yeah, it makes money, but is it going to change an industry? No. But we learned how to build something from the ground up with zero capital. But we realized it failed from like a VC-backed "bigger mission" model. Um and I think actually investors really liked that.
Okay Jake, so we're talking about raising capital here, and um so there were things I wish I would have done totally differently, and let me tell you what that was. So first of all, our first investor for our Series Seed round, they actually approached us. And so we basically preempted our first round of funding. We had angels, which I never actually asked anyone for money ever. There was always people coming to me and saying, "Hey can I put $25,000 into your company? Can I put $50,000 into your company?" I had one customer who after two days using the product said, "Can I give you a $100,000 check?" So part of angel investing was really easy. Um what I had wish I would have done slightly differently was in the seed round... um so in the seed round, as I, I mentioned we got preempted with a um uh with a term sheet. And that actually happened by just going out to lunch with an investor, and I never actually talked about our product once at all. I spent the, the entire time talking about the industry and what was wrong with it and why it was broken and what needed to be changed. And then after that, I think it was in the last 10 minutes, was in New York, he had asked me, "Okay, well how many customers do you have on your platform? How much revenue are you making?" And by that point, because we had, I wouldn't say bootstrapped it, because we had our angel checks to help us you know afford top talent and all of that as we were building it. But because um we had already had customers on the platform and enough for Series A at that time, or sorry, Series Seed at that time (I think we had about a thousand rental units). That was more than enough for that investor to say "Great, um I'm interested. I write checks over a million dollars. Let's go ahead and talk about terms. Here is what I wish I would have done slightly differently."
When you get preempted like that with a um term sheet, you need to bring other investors into the round because I hadn't, I didn't have a rolodex of other investors to basically come into the round. And it was also December, so it's like very close to the time now that you and I are talking. All the investors are on holiday. And so trying to get that round closed and bring it together to get other investors in um, it, it was more challenging than I had expected because I was going out and meeting investors for the first time during the holidays saying, "Great, do you want to come into our round as well?" And a lot of them would be like, "Great, come and you know talk to me in two months or three months." Um so that was like lesson number one that I learned was I should have already had that um rolodex of investors.
The second thing that I learned with it is um you actually need to um change your mindset. Instead of pitching your company, you need to actually um uh do your own um uh kind of like background um on the investors, and you need to have them sell you as much as you sell them. And so what ended up happening was after getting that term sheet, I would jump into every meeting with an investor and the moment I would, I would just start sharing the deck. I, I almost forgot what I did in that first round because it was preempted and I wasn't trying to raise capital. I forgot about that. And I went into everything with an investor saying, "Here's our company and here's what we do and here's what's so great about it." And I forgot that that's actually not how sales works. I should have, in every single investor that I met with, I should have asked them, "You know Jake, you run such and such uh venture fund. Great, how big's your fund? How many deals do you do? Do you, are you invested in proptech? You know what's your average check size? Do you have minimum requirements for the seed round?" Because then what I found was um, that by me pitching the investor I had no idea what they were looking for or what their background was.
And so that was a huge kind of mind shift for me that really helped with the Series A, where I actually chan- changed it. And instead of me pitching the investors, I reversed it and had them pitch me. And then I could go through an entire list after that first 15-minute call and say "Great, these people are totally out, they have like unreasonable expectations on revenue at this stage. These people are totally out because they do one deal a year and like I'm not going to be their one deal a year because I know they're going to be a huge nightmare for me." And, and so you can kind of go down that list and then say "Okay great, now these are the investors who I'm going to have a second round with, now I'm going to talk, talk about their, about our company to them etc." So I wish I'd done it slightly differently from that perspective, um because you know, when I wasn't raising capital I did it the right way, but the moment I was like, "Oh I'm raising capital, I need a deck, I need to explain to them what we do," I failed in the sense of I forgot selling is as much about understanding their needs and their pain points and what their goals are, not what I'm trying to sell them of a new alternative way to manage real estate.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I think that's great. Yeah, it's absolutely part of any sales transaction which is: qualify the buyer and then understand what it is that they want and need. And if you have that solution then you've got something to sell. So I, yeah I understand where you're coming from. Um what was the reason though? I, I just want to go back to: you wish you would have had more investors in that seed round. Was it to have... what was the reasoning behind needing more than just one? I mean, if somebody cuts one big check that might be enough for a lot of people. Was it to have more investors so it was more of a collaboration with your board or your investors or what was the...?
Dana Dunford: Yeah good question. I think it was just more networking upfront before that. Because there were a lot of people I didn't get into that round and I wish I would have. Examples of it would be like influencers, other CEOs of really large startups. Some additional validation there rather than just investor. Like really ex- expanding my network. I think being a founder, 50% of your time at least needs to be outward facing rather than just internal, and that was something I had to learn over time.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, makes total sense. So you went out and you raised your seed, Series A. How, how much have you raised to date so far?
Dana Dunford: We've raised 12 million to date.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. And you've got 55 employees.
Dana Dunford: Uh yes.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So you've grown well. It sounds really good. 24,000 homes on the platform, it might be more than that now since we last spoke. What's been the one marketing tactic that you didn't think about that's been your most successful strategy so far that you know others can learn from?
Dana Dunford: Marketing tactics is a really interesting one and go-to-market because it is highly dependent on what phase you're in and what stage you're in. Um I would say, and this is not a tactic but I can give some examples, I think the biggest thing that I have learned is if you are not making numbers it is not a problem with marketing, it is not a problem with sales, it's a problem with budgeting, forecasting and strategy. And actually being able to do that in almost like... if you think of Amazon, they have like such good supply operations that they get something to you in two days. You have no idea how they do it, but they do it. You need to do the same and have that planning and that kind of very rigorous um operational process and finance process internally. And so I've learned that if you start there and have that as your marketing tactic, the numbers will tell you exactly what to do.
Um Marco Zappacosta over at um Thumbtack who founded Thumbtack um said something to me in person that um I always will remember. He goes, "You don't need a hundred channels, all you need to do is find one channel that gives you gold, and when you get gold, keep digging." And so for us that gold has changed over time, but the second that we find that gold we keep digging. And those numbers will tell us that. Because if you're tracking the numbers every day you'll be able to predict the future you have no idea like a year out, two years out by just having that really regimented forecast process. And so it hasn't only been one channel but at any given point it's one channel that we're really d- digging into. And then gold may dry up there and then we go to the next one. But if you're tracking that and constantly opening new channels that you're experimenting with, you will never run out of that gold is basically what I found.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's amazing. I love that, I love that story. Um let's switch gears here a little bit. Um as a company, you've done an amazing job of bringing innovation into the market. Um when you first started with your initial thesis, was there any big pivot that you had to rethink and, and, and make changes to become what you are today?
Dana Dunford: Good question. Um so we, our, our vision has never changed. We've said "you can buy, sell, and operate a rental property from your phone," like that has never changed. We've always said "you can be anywhere in the world, I don't care if you are in Vietnam or in England, anywhere in the world you'll be able to manage your, your property. And you can do that through Hemlane." That part has never changed. What has been really interesting has changed is the actual strategy about on how to provide that to customers. And the, the good thing about that is it's pretty easy to do as long as you talk to your customers every day. So like for example, repair coordination: should it be centralized or decentralized? Should you have someone local in every single market picking up the phone, troubleshooting, running out to the property, or should you have a centralized hub that does all of that and just dispatches local service professionals? All of that was like at the time almost a, a blur of like "I don't know, it could go one way or the other." But by talking to customers and just A/B testing everything, it was very... we were very quick because we looked at the numbers, we looked at the satisfaction rates to know how we should do it. So I think it was more of like, we knew what the vision was, we had all these puzzle pieces, but then having to put them together it just gets easier over time because more of these unknowns become known.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Makes sense. Yeah, well it's more than just a platform from what I'm hearing. It's also an ability to find service providers within the platform that can help you know, fix the toilet or understand you know why the water isn't running, you know and when you're getting calls at 3 in the morning from your rentals. Um so there's a lot to really look at in the platform. Um what's one impactful lesson from one founder to another that you can share that for you has been priceless?
Dana Dunford: Um from another founder to me... there's, there have been a lot. Um I think the biggest one for me, and this is a couple of founders in the early days... um the hardest thing to know with a startup is in the early days... so this is like pre-Series A, so before you have a lot of numbers. The hardest thing to understand is, is when to give up and when to keep going. Because no one has product-market fit at an early stage. Like if you do, you probably got very lucky. But you know you hear all these stories of Slack, what it was before and what it is now, you have to iterate. And so what the best advice I got from that, because there was in the early days trying to figure out "hey, will we find product-market fit or not? Should we give up or should we keep going?" and every founder has to try to tackle that. And so for me it was very much of taking that anxiety and ambiguity and writing it down. And what I mean by that is saying, "do I have the right team? Like do my co-founder and I get along? Do I think that we have the technical expertise as well as the industry expertise to get there? Do I believe any of the competitors have something that we don't have that would give a competitive advantage?" And by writing all of that stuff out, it made it a lot easier for us to say "we should keep going. We don't have everything figured out, but we know that we have enough that we're going to look back on this and we won't regret giving up."
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. I love that. So many times you have those thoughts, you know as you're building anything, of you know, "am I in the, am I going the right way?" There's a lot of decisions that have to be made, you're leading people, "are they believing in the direction you're taking them?" There's a lot that goes into "should I keep going or not?" And the ones that keep going sometimes end up finding what they, they, they want to find. That's great. Um I want to move to what we call "three questions." It's nothing more than just three questions, one simple answer. Um where do you go to think big or to brainstorm?
Dana Dunford: So typically to think big or to brainstorm you need to first get all of the distractions out of your head. And so what I mean by that is I'm the type of person that every email is answered by the end of the night, I don't go to sleep unless they are. I use Boomerang to make sure it's like, "oh this doesn't have to be done till next week. Jake, I'll follow up with you next week, Boomerang until next week." All of this stuff so I get all of the noise out of me. Because the moment that you have noise of "oh shoot I forgot that I needed to review that contract," "oh shoot, you know a OVS needs approval on the finance side for this," like the second you have that, you can't think big because you have all of these little distractions. And so first what I try to do is clear my mind. That's like number one. I have nothing, and I've blocked my calendar for this entire day.
Then as far as thinking big and, and strategy, I found that um, and some people can do this and think big on their own. For me it comes with taking everyone's ideas into account and coming up with something totally different. And so we have more often than other companies strategy sessions. And I always thought strategy sessions were, I always thought it was like a very silly term. It's like "what do you talk about during a strategy session? It sounds so inefficient and ineffective, like why don't you just get stuff done? Like why are you strategizing?" But it's a good time to reflect and think big. And so by analyzing where you are and taking a step back and then saying "okay here's where we want to go," and then writing out all of the options, I am always shocked in those strategy sessions that we have at Hemlane where we start versus where we go. Like the solution is totally different than any of us thought possible, but by having everyone together, requiring everyone off their computers, locking ourselves into a room with a whiteboard, it is shocking to see how that comes out. And by, when I say like "locking yourself into a, a room with a whiteboard," it doesn't have to be like a, a setting, like an office setting. It can be a spot that's a retreat where you're there for a weekend, you know you're going to get fewer interruptions from anything else, and you just figure out during that retreat through a whiteboard what are we doing and where we're going. And so I found thinking of those big ideas and coming up with them for me it's always had to be a team exercise versus a Dana exercise.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Makes sense. You know Steve Jobs used to walk around the campus when he wanted to solve a problem, he would take someone with him. And Larry Ellison or anybody else that worked for him. What activity helps you best solve problems?
Dana Dunford: Um as far as activities um to solve problems, so it's kind of two things. One, I do believe fitness is super important, my mind is a lot clearer. So like I'll go on a bike ride and start thinking about these things um constantly as I'm, as I'm doing that. Um but then I, I think the other one um which is probably like more tangible and more important, is writing everything out. I don't think people write stuff out enough. And when they write it out it's usually on a computer, which for some reason sort of like cursive and creativity, it helps you a lot more if you're not writing it on a computer but you're completely disconnected from technology. And so I usually try to write anything out that's a big problem or something that's giving me anxiety. Write out the pros, the cons. I'm very structured because I have an applied mathematics background where everything is very much of like "let's put it into tables and do this and that." And then from there I can step away from it and think more clearly about where we need to go, if that makes sense.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really good. I like how you think. Uh last question here on this, how do you stay mentally positive when going through challenging times with your company?
Dana Dunford: Um that's a great question, and uh it is true that when you are the founder of a company, if you walk in and you're upset or people see that you're anxious or you haven't slept, that is actually going to be a direct reflection of how the company's doing and change their morale and how positive they are on things. And so you know, at the beginning it was really hard. But the fortunate thing was it was just Frank and me so we could be honest about like, "hey this isn't working, this is working." Um but as time goes on and the second, and the moment you hire people, it's interesting, you get much thicker skin I'd say than any other occupation. Um from the perspective of every time you hear "no" from a VC, or every time you hear a customer say "I don't want that" or they're upset, you get thicker skin where none of that actually impacts you. All you think about is "how do I solve this or make this better and make sure this doesn't happen to me again." And so I'm, no matter what is going on, if there's a fire drill in the background I can jump into a meeting and be totally focused on that knowing that I'm going, going to be able to solve that because our heart's in the right place, the company's in the right place, and um there's a problem but we can always come up with a solution. So I think mentally every founder needs to do that. They always need to go into everything with a positive attitude. And even if it's honest it can still be positive. Like let's just say your company's not doing well and um you don't think you're going to be able to raise the next round of funding. It's okay to be positive about "hey guys, here's what we've built, here's what we've done, but like here's where we are." But you still need to yourself be positive and say "here's how we're solving it, here's how things are moving forward." And so I think from that perspective it's all about attitude. Um and I've seen that with us that our attitude is always positive even though there may be some sort of roadblock in the way.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that makes total sense. I saw something online, forget who it was exactly, but it was holding up uh a board that said "Hire the attitude, not the resume" which is really about trying to find the people that really work and stay focused. But also in the ups and downs you know, can still solve problems, get things done. It's, it's the attitude at the end of the day that sometimes makes the difference between winning and losing. Having the right team, having the wrong team, having the right leader, the wrong leader. So I think it's uh, it makes a lot of sense. In terms of looking at 2024, what's next on the roadmap for Hemlane?
Dana Dunford: Yeah, that's a great question. Um there's a couple things on the roadmap. Um the ones I'm most excited about is um, first, data. Um so we have more data on the backend from those 24,000 rental properties than any um like traditional manager would have about how rentals are operating. And so we're taking that data one step further. We're going to be able to help owners analyze a lot more with their properties and use AI and machine learning to help them be able to solve these problems. Everything from tenant communications to "how much should I charge additional in rent?" Um and we're doing that by using our data and then obviously we have a ton of data partners we use that we buy data from. So by leveraging the two together we can provide a much um more comprehensive and seamless um solution for them that's never existed in the market. So that's the first. The second one is I've noticed that most times when you sell something new that's never existed in the market, a lot of people [have] questions on it, a lot of people are like "Well should I use this? Why should I use this?" And so we will be launching a, a free version of something totally new on Hemlane where every landlord can experience a part of Hemlane without having to opt in and pay after 14 days free.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Really cool. Well count me in on that. Um where do people find out about you? If they want to find Hemlane or connect with you?
Dana Dunford: Yeah, you can go to www.hemlane h-e-m-l-a-n-e.com. You can also find me on Twitter, I don't know if there's any other Dana Dunfords up on there, but you can search Dana Dunford um Twitter or LinkedIn. Um would love to connect.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. Well Dana, amazing story. Thanks so much for jumping on our show here and uh having the courage to really talk about the good and the bad and everything in between. Um want to thank you for also just uh communicating effectively to the point in a way that I think is uh going to be great for our listeners. And I also want to thank the listeners for listening. Thanks for joining us today, it means the world to me. And uh again, my name is Jake Aaron Villarreal, I'm your host, and look forward to catching up with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care and enjoy the weekend.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners, listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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