taylorhou

APM Help | Full-time CTO | Fully Remote | www.apmhelp.com America's largest residential rental operations platform

We currently help manage 300k+ SFR in 49 States with all things back office but primarily property accounting and compliance.

We're effectively bootstrapped, $6M+ ARR, cash flow positive, growing 20%+ y-o-y

We have a crack team of engineers led by a fantastic architect/eng manager but I'm still looking for the technical co-founder mentality to solve problems with weekend sprints/mvp's (build 0-1) and then hand off to a team to stabilize and scale.

Comp will be competitive with equity (if valued) - we usually give 3 options. cash no options, cash + options, little cash more options.

Please email me directly: taylor at apmhelp dot com

I've been working from home since 2017. Had a brief (scary) ulna neuropathy (nerve issue in arm) where when you're arm is constantly pressed against the edge of your desk or laptop and causes the pinky and eventually more fingers to go numb.

was diagnosed and recommended surgery... said eff that i'm too young (was early thirties at the time) and landed on switching to a standing setup. within 2 weeks of giving my arm relief, the neuropathy disappeared and hasn't come back since. i've convinced many at my company to switch to a standing setup and miraculously the health problems started to dissipate.

eventually i had a similar thought as you. what if i could get steps in WHILE working?!? i bought 2 under desk treadmills to try, both were fine and with noise cancelling mics, no one could hear the subtle whirring.

since we're a fully remote company, i have some coworkers that would complain that THEY were getting motion sickness looking at me as i walked in our meetings. returned the treadmills after that. fwiw - i ended up training for an ironman and got an indoor bike setup for winter training - no one complained about motion sickness with that. =)

I think being forced to join an HOA when purchasing a property will be challenged one day. At least when it comes to SFR where most hoa's aren't actually doing anything with your specific property.

Sesame/orange chicken over rice food trucks that operate like vending machines. Can only order one thing and just indicate quantity to pay.

$10 each. Super hot, super fresh, super tasty, super filing, super consistent, super value, hmm maybe I'll call it super chicken.

i've standardized my whole company on X1 carbons and X1 nanos. plenty of refurb options and recently lenovo even sold x1 carbon g11 32gb ram for $800! (snagged as many as I could). and lenovo/thinkpad's warranty options are fantastic. we've sent 10+ with re-activated warranties and never had an issue getting them repaired. for context - we have 200+ staff with over 100 laptops deployed.

Unfortunately this is because they know there's a massive cost to moving and the operators are pushing the rent as much as they can for "convenience"... Regardless of external demand.

I met mine in 6th grade after summer school where we initially met and then during regular school she ended up sitting behind me due to ABC order. She hated my guts for 10+ years but I stuck around and now we have 3 kiddos, another on the way, and are relatively happy =).

You're 20 years too late for that option but I see most 28+ year olds who actually try to put themselves out there finding partners while doing in-person hobbies (rock climbing, biking, running, puzzles, board game nights), from work (where it starts off as work banter), solo travel (example: getting scuba diving certification forces you to "buddy" up and getting drinks with instructor and other students after)

ummm how do i get this? i've got a 5, 3, and 1 year old and would love this

I listed my Denver townhouse in prime golden triangle location 2 blocks from all of the happening bars & clubs off Broadway.

https://propbox.co/homes/100001/details

Your "how likely are you to recommend" prompt from helps out pops up on the first field of selling a home flow. Not relevant at all at that time.

agreed. if they fulfilled even 80% of their original order, maybe this would make sense.

I've founded multiple startups (that have failed or had moderate success) and currently am bootstrapping at $5M ARR+. burnout is real and I've found a racquetball group out of my local fitness connection that plays 3x a week consistently and many players will coordinate in a whatsapp group to play even more.

The consistency and challenge of personally getting better/more skilled while being able to yell at the top of my lungs when I miss a shot helps relieve almost all of my pent up stress from work, family, life.

when I exit one day, i'm going into food truck business.

I think what's interesting is when these LLM return responses that we agree with, it's nothing special. It's only when they respond with what humans deem "uhhhh" that we point and discuss.

don't discount your experience/knowledge of how NOT to build/run a business/startup

Many associations in America are managed by a third party. That association manager has a different incentive/goal versus the board which is to profit from the association. This is just the first level of disagreement.

Honestly, the biggest reason was interest rates. Secondarily - they haven't changed their appearance literally since they launched. I took delivery of my Rivian R1S in December instead of a Model X and I haven't been this excited about a new car since my first Model 3. This coming from an owner of a model 3 and 2 model Y's.

Sounds like you'd be better fit as a technical cofounder or first engineer hire. If you aren't thinking of ideas left and right to start, you likely aren't the business-y entrepreneur but that's perfectly fine. Ideas aren't what make a business/startup successful. It's all about the execution. YC's startup school (as others have mentioned) would probably be a great start and they do cofounder matching too.

Btw, seed & series A startups are still hyper risky. Seed is usually trying to figure out pmf (product market fit) and series A is trying to figure out marketing/CAC. These were distorted in the last few years too so just cus a startup raises a lot of money doesn't mean you can't compete and differentiate!

Last thing... If you're just trying to replace your bay area salary, that's a lifestyle business at best. You can literally mow lawns and be a multimillionaire these days.

Bun bo hue literally on the side of a road in the Hue region in Vietnam. Haven't found anything in America like what you find in SE Asia where there's no menu, just one item and one price and that's all they serve 18 hrs a day nonstop.

Same here. My first "startup" was dropshipping textbooks to fellow college students when I was a freshman 14 years ago. Learned a ton at a series B "startup" straight out of college in customer support and within 7 months, was fired. Spent 5 years as a founder at remarkhq where we couldn't figure out the business model to get paid while frame.io raised a massive amount of money to copy us and eventually led them to $1B acquisition with Adobe. Then went and joined a friend's stock market for real estate startup dynasty.com that pivoted and was subsequently acquired for $75M. Realized at said real estate startup that there was a massive industry wide problem that property managers suck so just started solo consulting to finally make real money for myself and future family I was told by my wife. I was 28 when I started my current startup (apmhelp.com) and never thought it would actually be something beyond a consulting business. Here I am 5 years later $5M ARR having just closed a $50M facility. It's still not all roses however as this year has been a rollercoaster. Literally today we layoff another 10% so that we can live to see another year. Startups are fucking hard and it takes everything to go at it again and again but I don't work a single day of my life. I wouldn't swap it for anything (long term). Best of luck! Don't give up either!!

I'd love responses to this! I've got a 4, 2, and another on the way myself.

I've been noodling on a toy idea as well since I haven't seen it in the market yet (there are close toys though) - would love to see an actual building set where there are big holes in standard distances in blocks and other shapes that can be "screwed" together with an electric driver (toy). Starting with basic blocks that represent a 2x4, literally anything can be built from there.

Speaking of finding, we still haven't found a significant trace of MH370. T_T

sorry, property managers are NOT the landlords. In the United States, a big portion of rentals are managed by a third party property manager who is hired by the landlord to manage on their behalf. I'm specifically talking about them who are mishandling/using tenant security deposits that they are holding. we call them "management held security deposits"

How is that remotely close to what I was pointing out? Property managers spend, borrow, steal tenant security deposits for their own personal gain. Consumers are harmed whether they like it or not and when it comes time to move out, they lose their security deposits to BS reasons and just give up because it's usually not "worth it" to hire an attorney to go after a company for the equivalent of one month's rent.

What self promotion? I mentioned my company simply to add context/credence. If anything I'm calling out my own industry when I otherwise should not be. I make money from dirty managers... When they are clean there's no money to be made.

Also, my target audience is not on HN.

United States. Australia and Canada seem to be much more serious in regulating rentals.

That's not what's happening unfortunately.

why not just kill the metaverse/in game user/account? it is just as impactful, possibly more impactful and you get the same finality without being deemed an illegal device?

i'm thinking back to my mmorpg days playing ragnarok on a private US server where i spent easily 2 years of my teenage life leveling a blacksmith to lvl 99 while also becoming the richest and most powerful guild leader on the server. if i had the consequence of losing that account due to in game death, i'd play completely differently too...

At 200+ full time, I found being 100% transparent extremely difficult when lacking context (especially around cash in bank) because some took it as company was in bad shape, start looking for another job.

However due to the recent downturn, I found being transparent about the company's cash position, why/how we were making cuts, and my (founder) decision to take on debt instead of attempt to fundraise (equity) in this environment a rallying force because most of my staff have significant stock options and being effectively bootstrapped while surviving (almost thriving) right now is really exciting.

It also tamped down the seemingly endless requests for comp increases from earlier in the year as everyone shifted their priority to job preservation while realizing they have solid wfh careers.

would love to connect as we're evaluating ledgers for rental properties. there are a gazillion management softwares with "accounting" ledgers but they were always an after thought. we're interested in building the defacto single source of truth ledger for real estate. taylor at apmhelp.com

super cool to see the maturity in knowing what you want. i realize now that i was wayyyyy more profitable (cash money in my pocket) when my startup was literally 10x smaller. for those aspiring to be the next big blow up, as you grow/scale, overhead and the need to manage your own people start taking over from building product and supporting/making your customers happy.

for context, i'm at ~$400k MRR/just shy of ~$5M ARR and i make way less (in cash) now than i did at $40k MRR. don't get me wrong, the enterprise value has supposedly gone up but that's a lottery ticket versus the consistent cash in your pocket.