 and thank you to Adventures in Commercialization. I mean, if you're new to the show, we're here to talk about money. We're here to talk about how to turn your passion into your career. I know that COVID really put a wrench in a lot of people's plans for sustainability with their jobs and with making money and funding for their projects. We really wanna take this and look at the glass half full. So look at ways that we can pivot ourselves and really turn those little passion projects while we had a little bit of extra time staying at home and then turn them into our careers. When is the right time to start raising money? When is the right time to turn your day job, get away from that and just start, turning your absolute passion into a real time full time job. So we've brought a lot of people on this show. We've brought investors, we've brought entrepreneurs, we've brought little businesses, large businesses. We've talked about funding today. We're bringing an amazing woman entrepreneur onto the show, woman CEO. Thank you, we have Erica Moore. Hi, thanks for having me here Zoey. Thanks for being here. So we're gonna drop into real estate here. We're gonna talk a little bit about what you've been doing. So can you tell us a little bit about your background? Yeah, so I actually got my real estate license 21 years ago when I was 18 years old. I dropped out of my first semester of college and I knew it wasn't for me, got licensed. And within a year I was working on commercial real estate deals that kind of blow my mind to think about doing those when I was 19, but it happened fast. I think real estate is great. When I was working with entrepreneurs or investors, I would ask them when I was younger, like what do you think is the most stable investment? Like where would you put your money? If you could invest in anything from like kitty litter to cancer research, what would you invest in? And they were always telling me real estate. They said real estate was the best deal. I personally just bought my first home last Thursday. So I'm also getting into the realm of real estate investing myself. So what changed from just being a real estate agent to what you're doing right now? Yeah, so I did a lot in my time selling real estate and I got lucky enough to stumble upon vacation rentals in around 2008 before Airbnb was really, I think they just launched and short-term rentals were not a big thing yet, but it was during the economic collapse, everything was falling apart and there was really no money to be made in real estate as an agent. Luckily I discovered these short-term rentals that investors from all over the country or all over the world were dumping money into here in the States at a time when you couldn't sell a house if you tried. So I jumped into that niche. I turned it into my thing. I got really good at it. I built some really complex financial models around that investment model. I had already been investing myself for a long time. So I understood investments, numbers, financial models and I kind of created the structure around this new asset class for investing in it. And the model I built was working so good with my investors. I mean, I was working with hundreds of investors from all over the world. I think by 2011 or 2012, I had already used my financial models to analyze hundreds of short-term rental deals for people and the numbers were coming in right on par with my models. So I realized that, you know, there's something here because it was an asset class that was growing so fast and but people didn't understand it. So I was like, I need to scale this out and the only way I can do that is to build tech. And I mean, I was a real estate agent and an investor. I knew how to do like marketing stuff but I didn't know technology. So I jumped into tech and started losing some money learning how to build it and eventually hit the nail on the head after about a year of working with multiple developers and some failed projects and was able to get my first marketplace website brought to market, which is the beta we actually have built everything off of today. And so we're talking about Rolio now. Yeah, which is Rolio, yeah. Yeah, so we launched it in 2019. Yeah, or actually the end of 2018, December. Wonderful. And so these rentals are, you're saying short-term rentals I know right now my partner and I, we do traveling nurse rental. So those are anywhere from a month to say a year. But then we look at other things that are like Airbnb that are from like a week's stay. What is Rolio's model here? Yeah, so we cover all that. We cover anything that's one night or more and under six months. And that's considered a short-term rental. Every market is completely different. But if it's not in the long-term rental category it's a short-term rental whether it's in a destination market or it's near a hospital or near a college doesn't matter, it's a short-term rental. So we look at that whole asset class together as one investment asset class in our marketplace specializes in selling those two investors. So we have hundreds of homes on there that are off-market inventory that are existing short-term rentals with rental history doing really well that people are looking to sell to other investors. And of course we're evolving and building lots of new cool tools like technology and data stuff. But that's the basis of what we do is the entry point and the exit point of short-term rental investments. That's wonderful. And so, okay, so Rolio we have you pivoted. I think that sounds fantastic. You had the skill set and you obviously had a great Rolodex of people who are gonna be able to hop onto this. And so you said you had to invest a little bit of your time and money into doing technology. Did you bring other people on for that? When did you know was the right time to bring other people on for that? And who makes up Rolio currently? Yeah, so in the early stages it was just me going to different development teams telling them about this idea that I had trying to help them understand it. A lot of people just couldn't wrap their head around it because again, real short-term rentals were not a thing back then. So I hired one team overseas out of Estonia and he actually did a really great job but he couldn't continue the project. Something had happened and he had to take a full-time job and couldn't be a contractor. So there was nobody that could work off the code he built. So that one just had to get completely wiped out. And I think I spent $30,000 of my own capital trying to build it. So that was awful. Then I had a friend that I knew really well who was a developer, a coder. And I took this to him and I was like, look, here's my first go, I lost a bunch of money. You think you can work on this with me on the technology side and you can have some equity in the company. So he came on as my early stage CTO to kind of help me oversee the project but I had to work on it alongside him the whole way because he had a full-time job. So he threw me into this development environment with me, a bunch of developers learning the different coding styles, things like that and he would come in for the calls but I had to run a lot of that, learn how to build out the sprints, plan everything, write the requirements. And so that was my early stage team. We ended up getting that project which cost me around $200,000. It was supposed to cost 20,000 but I had no idea and neither did they the scale at which we would need to build this for. So in the end, it was $200,000. I think I was about to lose my mind because I didn't have that kind of capital just sitting around to blow on tech projects. So I was like, this has to work. This is crazy. We got it to market at the end of 2018 when we went live and at that time it was me, it was that and the tech team, there was no other team, we didn't have anybody. We turned the lights on and we launched it to my existing database of, I think I had six or 8,000 investors in my database at the time and we immediately got traction. I think we got our first thousand users within a couple months and we're like, oh, wow, this is really going well. I need to raise capital because I can't even afford to sustain this project but because we weren't monetizing it yet, it was a concept. So at that stage again, it was just me, I had brought on another employee that I was paying out of my pocket because I didn't raise money yet but he was gonna be the new CTO because the other one couldn't continue on. And then I went out to raise capital. It was really hard at that time. But fast forward through that and I'll come back to it. The size team we have now after that capital raise two years of generating revenue, we're now at a team of I think six people exactly but we just are closing on a round and we have to make about 18 new hires. So that's where we're at right now. That's fantastic. And for our audience, let's just say Erika is definitely, she sells herself a little bit short for being able to raise capital. She's raised over $2 million for this company which is absolutely fantastic. So in that sense, how did you raise capital? I know that we've talked to some of our other entrepreneurs that COVID really was difficult or like having to do this digitally. Some other entrepreneurs said it was even easier for them because they didn't have to spend more money on hotels and touring and seeing people in person and doing investment dinners. So that actually like saved them some money. What were your strategies for raising capital? It was really hard. I mean, it was really, really hard. I wanna start by saying that. I think it was, I don't know why it was so hard for me if it was because I'm a woman and the statistics were not, you know, stuck to my favor or if it's just the timing but I started my raise right before COVID. So I actually closed my angel round which I raised $150,000 at that time in I think it was September of 2019. And the way I raised, I mean, I was going at first I was going to all these like events where there was, you know, like charity events, people that were investors, VCs, nobody even wanted to talk to me. They didn't even care. They had no interest. They didn't really understand the vision because again, I was trying to sell a concept that was so early on at the time, short-term rentals that people thought it was some weird fringe thing. So why would they invest in some place that sells these vacation rentals? So I was like, well, I need to hit the people that understand this because everyone else doesn't get how big this is. So I went to my own database which I should have just done from the start and I sent out a mass email to everybody and I was like, who wants to invest in this emerging technology company? We have 1,000 users, we're gaining traction. It's the first to market. And I had this whole pitch, but together I started a webinar, put a whole webinar together invited a bunch of people to it from my database and I got my first three investors from that. And one of them was already an existing client of mine that had bought three vacation rentals with me. Another one was a real estate broker out of Missouri and the third one was a vacation rental owner who had owned his own properties. So they were all strategic people that understood this. And I think that very, I learned that very early on you have to go to the people that understand your product if you have something that's really far ahead of its time because that's just what happens. If you're too far ahead of your time trying to get people to understand it it's gonna be very difficult. So that was my first round. From that, I was able to get $50 million in sales volume in going in my company over the course of 2019 to 2022. 2020, it didn't really affect us because I wasn't raising capital during that time but we did have to pull back on tech because the tech build out was not coming along the way it was supposed to, the evolution of it. So we had a, right after COVID we had to let our whole tech team go. So we were working off of the beta still and we were freaking out because we're like is anyone gonna keep buying vacation homes because nobody's traveling anymore? What's gonna happen? How are we gonna keep the lights on? We're running out of money. It was very scary. But then right, I think like two or three months after COVID, something just happened and everybody decided I'm sick of staying home. We wanna travel again and all these people started just driving to their vacations and staying in properties again. So it started picking back up and we got crazy busy in 2022. We actually had our best year and it led us to, you know our first year of like strong sales volume which continued to allow us to keep the company going without raising more money. Now we couldn't grow because we didn't have enough capital to start hiring on the tech team again but we were paying the bills and keeping the lights on every single month and there were months where I'm like where is the next round of money gonna come from? Cause I don't see the sales on the books and then they would just happen. It was like always they would just like be there the money. So anyways, so 2020 actually wasn't bad for me. It was a scary year in tech but it was good for us in sales. Well, we all got stuck at home for a little while and I think after a couple I think after a little bit people were like, okay this is not nobody knew what was gonna happen, right? So we're all sitting at home realizing, okay well it's just gonna be a few months we'll go back to work but then people had to realize I don't think we're going back and we need to figure out a way to make ourselves comfortable. And again, taking COVID as the glass half full is a lot of people needed to start to learn how to make their work-life balance work for them and how to really be comfortable in their own space and was that gonna be where they are if they're working from home can they go? I mean, I know people who just dipped off to Hawaii and worked from Hawaii the whole time. So just really learning if you're gonna work from home how to be comfortable in it and how to create just a safe space for yourself and if that was going to your vacation rental I think that sounds great to me. Quarantine at the beach sounds fantastic. I think what happened was is one, it was the birth of the digital nomad like explosion, right? Like I'm done, I'm going to work from wherever I want because working from home is a thing I can do now. So that was driving a lot of these new long stays where people were renting houses for 30 days or more whereas before it was like one or two weeks so that exploded. The second thing was that people wanted to get away and they didn't feel safe staying at hotels after COVID because of germs. So they sell vacation rentals as a really clean option because there's nobody else there except for you. You're not passing other people or anything like that. So vacation rentals became the accommodation of choice after COVID because of the safety reasons. I think we can add a third one to that Erica which was traveling nurses. So I do know that the census within the hospitals was going up and down so much that people were not getting paid. They were working full time at a hospital and then we're not getting paid for full time because the census would go down. And so all of a sudden they were overstaffed and didn't need the nursing. So you would have maybe three shifts a week. I do my partner's cousin actually owns a traveling nurse agency which actually boomed very greatly during this time as well which was because these nurses could actually get contracts for three months which they knew that they were gonna have a full time pay for three months to go to a specific place. So they dropped out from being a full time nurse at a hospital and turned into this traveling. And so these short-term rentals were really booming because they were able to have a full time job and know how much money they'd be making during this time. So adding just a third layer to that I think that the traveling nurse agencies really turned the short-term rentals into a very viable business as in keeping them full and knowing for the side of the renter that they were gonna be getting somebody in there that was qualified and that was beginning to be taken care of their home not just for a fun vacation but they would actually be there as a young professional to stay in their homes. So just adding that little layer there. I know we see there's a lot of influencers actually in the short-term rental community that specifically specialize in teaching people how to invest in properties in your hospitals because the short-term because the traveling nurse niche is so huge. Yes, yep, great. Yeah, so just what other strategies did you have during COVID? So you went from trying to go in-person from raising money that seemed like it was taking a lot of your energy then you switched over you started doing webinars. And so do you do kind of like a monthly webinar or do you just kind of go down your Rolodex with some of those with some of the people that you have or how do you branch out to new people currently? Yeah, well, from an investment capital standpoint to raise money for the company I mean, it's very specific. It's after I raised that 150 and then I started generating enough revenue to stay in business I really didn't know if I was going to raise more money and everything changed after COVID. There wasn't a lot of these events happening but it was the end of 2021 where I was like I just can't keep doing this by myself. The company's growing so fast that I don't have the revenue to hire people but I don't have the mental resources or even the business resources to continue running this. So I actually put my company up for sale and I was gonna sell it and I, cause I didn't know how else I was gonna go out and raise money when nobody was going to events or anything. And I didn't have a Rolodex of larger and check writing investors. They were all angel investors. So I put it up for sale and a woman came along named Ruth and she was like, I was thinking about building this exact concept and she's like, you've already done it and I can't believe you already did it and it's already so far along. She's like, let's just team up, don't sell it, let's team up and let's raise money and let's grow this because I told her what my struggles were. And so we put a strategy together. She's been amazing to work with and we went out to different fundraising events because in 2022 a lot of things kind of opened up. And so we went to all these different fundraising events looking to raise money and then our capital came from an investor who actually found me online and wanted to buy my company. And it wasn't from any of these events. It was just, honestly, I mean, we did raise capital again from within my database, but and we did have a lot of investors that wanted to come in after this from these events, like these fundraising events, but this one came from, you know, found us, saw what we had and was like, I wanna do something like this, I wanna buy it and we're like, it's not for sale, but you should invest. And that was our lead investor who took almost the whole round. So even though, you know, you can go out and do the whole fundraising thing, sometimes again, strategic capital because this person's in the real estate industry and I was going to all these events with VCs and people like that, strategic capital came through again. So yeah, so I would say if you're gonna go fundraise, do it in an industry or an event where people know about the type of industry that you're in and what you're doing. So as you speak about Ruth coming into the picture, it sounds like, you know, women stick together and I humbly believe that, especially when we come into entrepreneurial expertise and really trying to, you know, forget you selling your company and let's team up and let's make this happen. What kind of hurdles have you faced as a woman entrepreneur? Oh, so many. And you know, I'm not gonna play that card like, oh, I'm a woman, what was me? But like it is hard. Statistically, the ads are stacked against you. You have less than, I think a 3% chance of getting funding from anyone. And you know, there's a company called the Masters Fund and they only fund women founders. They actually did invest in this company. She's the co-founder of Moz SEO, Jillian. She's amazing. But she has a lot of data to support, you know, the cognitive bias that there just is in the industry of fundraising about when a woman is presenting an opportunity versus a man, it's just a totally different bias. And so a lot of the challenges were, I think we were getting just denied by so many people that because they didn't, we didn't know them. It was kind of a thing where we didn't come from a friend. I didn't go to Harvard. I didn't know the boys club, all that stuff. It was like, okay, yeah, well, you're too early for us. That's always what they would say is, oh, you're just too early for us. Then they would turn around and invest in their friend's company that's not even as far, or that's like way further along than us or way later, whatever it was that they said, they wouldn't invest in us, but they'd invest in a friend. So it was a lot of like, we found out that the world of fundraising in VC especially is it's a, one, there's a boys club. There's no denying that, but you have to learn how to play that game and you just have to understand what you're up against. And two, it's not always the right people making the decisions. So I pitched people that, you know, they were really, really new at these firms and they were like, there's nothing wrong with being young, but they were like fresh out of college. They didn't know anything about buying a house or real estate or even what we were even doing. And so we're like trying to pitch them this really complex data model about, you know, financial stuff and everything. And they're just like, we don't really think this is a fit for us. And they would like just kind of dismiss it because they didn't understand it. And I'm like, well, who do I have to get in front of at your firm that really understands real estate? And so it was just a lot of getting in front of people that shouldn't probably be making those kinds of decisions yet, not to be rude, but they need more time behind them. And then also, you know, trying to break into the boys club and get that funding. By the way, the guy who came in and funded us is a guy. So we ended up getting funded by a male entrepreneur, which I thought was so awesome of him to choose us to invest that capital into. Yeah, I think that's fantastic. Let's take a look a little bit about your website really quick before we run out of time here. I think that this looks really great. You have a little map, so I can see very clearly like where these rentals are. Some great photos on the left with some great information. Looks very similar to some of the other platforms that we've seen, but working in a very different way. And so we have, so some of these rentals are just from some of each of the people who are apart. They're like members of your group of Rolio. So basically these are all individual homeowners that own vacation rentals. They wanna sell them. And these properties have rental history. They've been acting as a short-term rental for either six months longer. Some of them might be brand new, but they're all people that own them, uploading them themselves. We are getting ready to plug into national MLS data and our tool can filter out all the properties from the MLS that are not a short-term rental. So you can search only the ones that are. But right now what we're dealing with on this version of Rolio, as we begin the new build with this new fundraise, we still are working with off-market inventory only. And investors like that, because once something goes to MLS, a lot of people feel like it's not really a great opportunity anymore. So pretty much everything on here is off-market short-term rental. Okay, that's fantastic. That's great. So we're not just looking down the list of like, if you have a real estate agent, that they're just looking down a list of things that 50 other million people are also looking at. This is gonna be your short list of exclusive rentals for sale that you can grasp on, potentially make money off of. They have history of this. So I just think this is fantastic. I wish I would have known about this months ago when I was looking at some of my rentals, but definitely gonna look into it for the future. Cool. I think this is a fantastic model. I don't think there's anybody else out there doing it. I think it's a very exclusive place to look again for these rentals instead of like, yeah, where the masses or 50 other million people are looking at. So I think that that's first grab some good content to be able to grasp onto and look at. And some of those rentals look fantastic and all over the United States. So wherever you guys are looking, this is a great place to start your real estate investing journey right here. So if you had just in our last few minutes we have here, this has been such a fantastic conversation. Thank you, Erica. And I think what you've said so far if we can take anything away from it is jumping out there and spending a bunch of money to go and put yourself in front of a lot of VCs and things like that might not be the right place. Go down strategic planning, looking through your Rolodex of people, people who've already looked at your company before, people who already know what you're doing, people who are already in that space who understand this business. Those are the people you wanna get in front of. You don't wanna just jump in front of an angel investor that's invests in whatever technology in general because they might not just understand this state. I know that there has been in the past while working with angel investors. I had a facial company come through and I knew that there was an investor that I wanted to connect with them cause I know he has three daughters and a wife and a lot of women in his family. And I knew it was something he probably wouldn't be looking at, but I really wanted him to look at it because I knew that if he showed it to the girls at home that they would say that this was a great deal. And I think he did end up investing into it because he did take it home and took it to the people who know the realm and understood the realm. So really just pushing that fact alone. But if you had any other advice, I know we talk for women entrepreneurs specifically, but if you had any other advice for entrepreneurs in general, what would you have for them? Work your butt off, work your butt off, that's it. I mean, there is no, this is not an easy path. It's not comfortable and it's not gonna be easy. So if you're looking for, if you're thinking it's gonna happen fast, if you're thinking it's gonna be easy, you need to just call it in now and go get a job at a Fortune 500 company because this is not that lifestyle. Startups are a lot of work. There are a lot of stress and you have to be very creative, be willing to pivot, be in front of, especially when you're a small company that's underfunded, you have to be smarter and faster than your competition that has millions of dollars behind them. And you have to constantly be on top of what's happening in your industry. So that would be my main advice is don't quit, keep going, work your butt off, it does pay off and strategic capital is the way to go when raising capital. I think that's fantastic advice. And I can see that you are taking that advice and you are being extremely successful with what you're doing. Your site looks great. I'm happy to have you on this show. I wish you so much success here in the future. I hope that everybody here sees about this. If you're looking at getting into real estate investing which I have heard is the most stable investing, I know the market will go up, it will go down, but over a long-term, owning real estate is always gonna be in your best interest. It's a lot less volatile than a lot of the other investments crypto we've had on here. We've had a lot of different investments on here. And I just think that over the long-term, real estate is definitely the most solid thing that you can do and that's the advice that I've received. So if you guys are looking to get into this realm, you know where to look, Rolio and Erica Miller will definitely help you out. Thank you so much for being on the show and I look forward to seeing your successes here in the future. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.