NY Launch Pod: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod, the New York Press Club, award-winning podcast highlighting the most interesting new startups, businesses and openings in the New York City area. I’m your host and New York attorney Hal Coopersmith, and in this episode, we are speaking about New York City property, but more specifically how they are managed. Our guest Lindsay Liu thought that Co-Ops and Condominiums were not being effectively managed, and she thought that because she was on the board of her co-op. The problem wasn’t the people, but that they didn’t have the right tool. Like any entrepreneur Lindsay set out to solve what started as a very New York Problem. Here’s Lindsay:
Lindsay Liu: But the overarching goal for us is the way that a lot of management is done today by our standards is broken and we want to improve that. So to me, the greatest indicator of success is that if somebody is looking at moving into or buying, let’s say a co-op unit and they see that it is on Super, that they know that there is a certain level of quality within that building.
NY Launch Pod: Listen to the episode to find out how Super helps buildings run better, the common problems for buildings, and a whole lot more! But before we go to the episode, we have a sponsor RezCue, New York State’s premier residential rental compliance platform for landlords. Rental laws in New York City are difficult to manage and, Rezcue helps you follow the law. If you are a landlord who wants to keep up with inflation, you need Rezcue. For example, you may not be able to increase your rent by the amount you thought you could, Rezcue helps solve that problem and a whole lot more. Go to Rezcueme.com and enter in some simple information and Rezcue will take care of the rest. That’s Rezcueme.com, and with that let’s go to the interview.
NY Launch Pod: So you wanted to start a property management software?
Lindsay Liu: That’s right.
NY Launch Pod: Why?
Lindsay Liu: Well, it goes back to personal experiences. I’ve been in two self-managed condos and on the board of one managed condo and every single experience; I just kept thinking to myself, there has to be a better way. We were doing everything by paper, manually in email, I even set up at one point for one building a Google drive and I forgot that if I set that up in my personal email inbox, it’s mine forever and I can’t delete it or else I delete it for the whole building. So I still have access to all of their documentation even though I’ve sold and moved out years ago. So there’s a lot of things that, that experience of having been a board member, having managed a building really taught me about the role technology can have in improving those experiences. And in my background, coming from a technology background, that’s definitely the lens on which I tend to solve problems with.
NY Launch Pod: But I have to imagine that you are not the first person to live in a self-managed building, not the first person to be on a board. What software are buildings and boards using right now?
Lindsay Liu: There are a few tools out there, but the reality is there’s actually not that many that are addressing and tackling the problems that we are. So we are focusing on actually bringing a suite of different tools, together we’re calling it, our operating core. Our vision is to be the operating system for buildings, right? So how do we bring together the set of tools that you need to solve problems from managing governance, communication, task management, and maintenance, and all of the financial planning that you need to do. The software that exists out there today tends to be a little bit more siloed. So you have tools that are really good at managing monthly payments, there’s tools that are just doing the building communication and community aspect, but no one is actually harnessing all of those things together in order to create a more powerful piece of software that is able to learn from each of those different experiences. So for instance, if your building has a ton of tickets around, let’s say leaks that different people are experiencing, theoretically, having insight into that helps you with your financial planning in the future But if those tools are all siloed and disparate,
NY Launch Pod: Because you need new pipes,
Lindsay Liu: You need a new roof, maybe you need a new façade, whatever or you need new pipes and plumbing, right? Whatever that problem is, could be more systemic and it could be a hundred thousand multimillion dollar project at the end of the day. And so when we bring that set of functionality together, we are actually able to then create deeper insights and help buildings with managing all of those different pieces from one centralized platform.
NY Launch Pod: And why are there these other platforms that just tackle one thing as opposed to everything?
Lindsay Liu: Can I imagine? I mean, you’re in real estate,
NY Launch Pod: That’s correct.
Lindsay Liu: So I’m sure you have seen just the breadth of challenges and opportunities there are in this industry and I think that’s actually been one of the most exciting things about getting to start something from scratch in what we’re calling, the prop tech industry. There are a lot of problems to solve and I actually really believe that having focus is one of the best ways to be very good at what you do, right? And so I can see how it’s very easy for you to build whole businesses that are at scale solving one sliver of the problem and to just own that vertical and category and to do it very well. What we’re seeing is the problem that when these things aren’t able to talk to each other, people are stitching together a bunch of tools. If you go to a property manager’s website, a lot of them will have a portal page or a technology page and it’s just a bunch of different links to different software that you can use. So one place to fill out a form to log a ticket, one place to make your payments, and maybe they even have three options for how you make a payment, one place to be able to call them in an emergency, another for the community aspect, another place just to get the information on who your super is. And, that’s the problem that we’re trying to solve and bring all together there.
NY Launch Pod: And what is your target? What is your actual focus?
Lindsay Liu: We are focusing on multi-family residential and specifically within that, the launch market that we’re looking at is condo’s, co-ops, and HOA’s. So we’re really looking at that owner occupied segment of buildings, because that feels like the segment of the market that has been the most underserved. And in some ways has the most unique set of needs, right? Boards are doing a lot of work, essentially as volunteers on the side, but they don’t have a lot of tools to help them be good effective boards. The other side of that is for property management companies, a lot of the work they do still lives in email. Email is great. We’re all going to be using it for a very long time, but it is a terrible project management tool. It is not a good place for you to think about how am I going to plan out my day and what is the most important thing for me to do first? And so that’s what we’re trying to focus on is creating the tools for the people that are responsible for governing and managing and, and the fiduciary responsibility for these buildings and giving them just the better tools to effectively manage.
NY Launch Pod: And what tools are boards missing?
Lindsay Liu: I mean, what do they have is maybe the bigger question to ask, because they’re missing so much in my opinion. So as a former board member, right, I think one big gap is a round documentation and having a really good history of what’s happened in a building. A lot of that changes hands, whenever a board member leaves, the building leaves the board. So that’s all in their email inbox. I know for myself, people after I left one of the boards of a building, I would be getting emails for maybe one or two years afterwards saying, “Hey, do you have a paper trail for what happened with this contractor or where this paperwork ended up”? I even, after moving, realized a few years later that I had a whole reserve study, all of the tax paperwork for a building that I was no longer on the board of and had to text someone that I knew that was still there to say, “Hey, do you want this information?” And they were like, yes, that would be so helpful, we’re doing our new reserve study right now. I would love to see the historical, right? So I think that’s one really big area is giving boards the information that they need to make better decisions and arming them with that. The other is really I think just some of the governance basics as well, right? Managing when you’re a volunteer, showing up to a board meeting, getting it scheduled, taking meeting minutes, saving those meeting minutes, making sure that they’re then conveyed to the larger set of owners. It’s a lot of work for boards to be taking on, that is really just extra. And so where can technology and working software help them alleviate them of that burden so that they can focus on actually making the decisions?
NY Launch Pod: Well, it sounds like a wonderful goal. One of the challenges I can imagine is what comes first, at least in terms of the property tech aspect, you design the platform first and then bring the boards on or get a building and then start building around them. How have you been able to tackle that issue?
Lindsay Liu: We have been trying to co-design with our potential customers as much as possible. So at every phase of product development, we’re going back, we’re getting feedback; we’re testing if these concepts are working. So in the very earliest stages we were doing just open research sessions, right. Talked to about a dozen board members, talked to a handful of property managers, talked to real estate developers, asset managers looked at the whole spectrum to understand what are the pain points that they’re having. We then would revisit those conversations when we had some more visual concepts. So actually going to them with a set of product designs and sharing a story for them about how they might use it, getting feedback at that point, we are now at that point where we’re doing live demos with bulk. So we have an actual product that we can test it with and we’re getting feedback on the current state of the product and the next phase for us is we’re rolling out our beta, which will be a live product that will be onboarding customers too and that is going to be again, another moment for us to continue to get insight and feedback.
NY Launch Pod: And so in terms of marketing your product, are you approaching buildings, themselves approaching, property managers? How are you trying to get people to be your co-designers?
Lindsay Liu: Yeah, so one really great early piece of validation that we got was my co-founder VECA and myself, we just put a LinkedIn post on our personal LinkedIn saying, we’re doing this thing, we are building software for property management, put a little splash page up and we had a ton of organic interest come in. So that told us pretty quickly, there’s problems here and people want to solve these problems. And so that was the earliest set of folks that we actually did have those conversations with those that had reached out to us and said, I am dying for a solution like this, or even folks that are in tech, themselves being like, I tried to even build something for myself, for my building, but I’d rather just buy something from you. And so we were really lucky to have people that were really passionate about the problem space that we were solving. We will be focusing moving forward on really making sure that we’re talking to property managers, those that are really managing a number of buildings at scale, and also continuing to talk to buildings and building boards themselves.
NY Launch Pod: And co-ops, condos, you talked about how they have unique problems that are underserved, but as groups they’re also unique and boards for co-ops and condos, even though there are a collection of individuals and everyone has their own mentality, they can take on their different personalities. And how are you planning to navigate the inevitable politics of a board?
Lindsay Liu: A healthy well-functioning board in my perspective, should have some disagreements and they should have really candid discussions with themselves, with the other owners as well, right? We want to enable those discussions and we want to really push to action and decision making so that you can’t have somebody that’s just sitting there being a blocker refusing to vote on something, for instance. I think that again, having that really clean paper trail, having a really clean good set of documentation around why you’re making a decision and then giving people the tools to then take action on that is a really nice sweet spot for technology, right? We can’t necessarily solve the human to human dynamics, but we can help them understand where the problems are and that they are holding up a decision to be made. So for instance, one of the features we’re building is just a virtual polling. So a board member can say, for instance, do we approve having this project done? Yes or no? And so it makes it as simple as hitting a button to say yes or no for the other folks to get consensus on what’s happening. And it’s very clear who has not yet hit that button. So you can go back to them and say, how can I help you to get to this decision, how do I bring you along upon this?
NY Launch Pod: And you talked about some of the features that you want, documentation, paper trail, what features for a property manager or co-op, or, or condo and their board can someone expect coming out of Super?
Lindsay Liu: So I mentioned we’re building what we’re calling the operating system. And so the core pillars that we’re thinking about from a feature and functionality perspective, that really are the foundation of the product, there’s three of them. So we are looking at tooling around communication and governance. So that is things like the documentation document storage, having a really clean set of files and history for all of that communication, giving boards and managers, those tools to be able to leave each other comments and feedback and have conversations on the decisions they’re making. The other component is that we are building a maintenance and task management component specific for the needs of buildings. So think about whether you have a problem in your apartment and how do you actually make that problem known? So it’s as easy for a resident or owner as to continue to email or text, they’ll get a dedicated building phone number, they’ll get a dedicated building email, they can continue to use that without ever having to download an app. And all of those requests come into one centralized system that the building management can see and manage from there. So it makes it much more actionable for them than having to do it in an email inbox, and then switching between their phone to understand what’s going on. They can then take that task, they can assign it, they can set a due date, they can categorize it, they can break it down into subtasks as well. The other component we’re really excited about is that we are building compliance and inspection tools. So New York City is a great city for us to launch in because it is one of the cities that has the deepest collections of data on buildings. So the DOB and different government services have incredible histories going back sometimes hundreds of years on the history of all of the filings that a building has had all of their violations, their complaints, whether they’ve been resolved, if they’re open. And so we are building tooling to allow buildings to know their status and when a next inspection’s coming up so we can help them forecast and plan for it, but also real time notifications if they do get a violation or a complaint.
NY Launch Pod: So I would say for someone who lives in a building right now, and they want to put in a repair request, they might do something that they’re already familiar with, like a building link where there, which documents their packages and repairs is system wide. I understand that there’ll be other features to your platform, but why is this better than Building Link, which is already there and what people may already be using?
Lindsay Liu: There is a lot of great work that Building Link has done. I think one of them, frankly, is really just teaching people, property managers, buildings, and residents about how valuable technology can be in supporting their building experience, right? I think that’s a great piece of it. There are a couple things that we are doing differently. So for instance, we are building out and integrating payments and financial planning into our platform, so you can actually have everything from reporting and dashboards on the health of your building from a financial perspective to collecting payments. So that is, distinct functionality that you typically would have to go to another company for, to get today, or you might be doing manually. So that’s one area. The other is I mentioned, we’re, you know, we’re trying to make it as simple as continuing to use email or text and the things that people are familiar with. And so we are building what we’re calling a no UI experience for those owners and residents where they don’t have to have a login. They don’t have to go and download an application. They don’t even have to go and visit a specific building webpage to be able to log a maintenance ticket or make a request. They simply just have to do the things that they’re used to doing, which is, email their property manager or text their property manager, if it’s something more urgent and it will be centralized into our platform to be managed on the management side, without the resident ever, having to feel like they had to go to a separate place to make that request.
NY Launch Pod: And you talked a little bit about this, what’s the benefit of starting your business in New York?
Lindsay Liu: New York is great, right? I mean, I’ve been living here for over a decade now, but if you think about the multi-family space, there’s obviously huge concentration and density of the types of buildings we’re talking about. So that’s the first advantage, right? If you think real estate, you think New York and you think condo, or co-op you think New York as well and so from a customer base perspective, we are really fortunate that our customers are literally at our backyard. The other thing I mentioned was the open data that New York City provides is a really great starting point for us to be able to build a ton of insights and to build automations on top of. And so it’s really allowing us to accelerate while we don’t have our own native data set quite yet.
NY Launch Pod: And what does success for Super look like?
Lindsay Liu: Success for Super is helping buildings and their managers have really healthy and functioning relationships. So I think that’s the overarching goal, right? We can go into the business goals and all of that as well but the overarching goal for us is the way that a lot of management is done today by our standards is broken and we want to improve that. So to me, the greatest indicator of success is that if somebody is looking at moving into or buying, let’s say a co-op unit and they see that it is on Super, that they know that there is a certain level of quality within that building and to them, it’s almost a heuristic, it’s a shortcut for this building is being managed well. That would be my ultimate measure of success for whether we are doing our jobs really well. Looking more broadly at success, I think we’re excited to continue to serve more than just the owner, occupied HOA type building, and really think about how we can continue to expand to other markets and to other types of real estate.
NY Launch Pod: Well, that is a wonderful note to end things on Lindsay Liu, thank you for stepping onto the New York Launch Pod and sharing our time with us.
Lindsay Liu: Thank you for having me.
NY Launch Pod: How do people find out more about you and Super?
Lindsay Liu: You can find us on the web, our url is hiresuper.com.
NY Launch Pod: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can follow us on social media @nylaunchpod or visit nyulaunchpod.com for transcripts of every episode, including this one. And if you are a super fan, Lindsay, are you a super fan of the New York Launch Pod?
Lindsay Liu: Obviously.
NY Launch Pod: If you are a super fan like Lindsay, please leave a review on Apple Podcast. It is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
