734: Ex Finance Dad of 3 Wants to Own Your Home

Tye Schlegelmilch to the show. Tye is the founder of Hinged following a 16-year career in finance, and most recently as co-CIO for Fortress Investment Group which has about 70B assets in their management. Prior to that, Tye was with a variety of different finance firms including Goldman Sachs.

Famous Five:

• Favorite Book? – The Snowball
• What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos
• Favorite online tool? — Skype and GoToMeeting
• How many hours of sleep do you get?— 5 to 6 hours
• If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “I wish I’ve been more measured with certain things in my life”

 

Time Stamped Show Notes:

• 01:08 – Nathan introduces Tye to the show
• 01:48 – Tye has a lot of friends who entered the entrepreneurial space
• 01:58 – As an engineer, he’s always been curious about how he can make things work better
• 02:13 – He moved out to Connecticut and bought a house
• 02:17 – Tye saw an opportunity in being able to get things done, understanding what needed to be done, and when it needed to be done in a home
• 02:37 – Diving into entrepreneurship was just a result of his curiosity
• 02:55 – Hinged is a holistic online platform for homeowners to better understand, manage, and control all aspects of home ownership
• 03:43 – Hinged’s business model is providing a full software solution for the service providers
• 04:05 – Hinged is highly selective with who they want (service providers) on their platform
• 04:20 – They take 5% of the revenue that goes through the platform to the provider that’s providing the maintenance or repair
• 04:39 – Hinged is a marketplace
• 05:23 – They have several hundred homeowners on the platform
• 05:43 – Across Fairfield and Westchester Country, they have a few hundred service providers in 50 different categories
• 06:57 – On an average user basis, there are 20%-40% who have spent money on the platform
• 07:31 – Hinged launched in Feb 2017
• 08:32 – Appliance repairs are the hottest category on their platform
• 09:40 – The average price of services done on Hinged is about $1500
• 10:19 – Tye funded everything on Hinged
• 10:54 – Internally, they just discussed capital-raising
• 11:13 – The industry Hinged is in is a “land-grab” so they’re looking into raising capital to expand
• 11:47 – Today there are 5 full-time employees and a development team from Cogniance
• 12:48 – They started with a sales team for service providers
• 13:02 – Teams are continuing to ramp on Hinged
• 13:35 – Hinged was very well thought out before Tye put money into it
• 14:05 – Tye’s salary in finance ranged from back office administration to major league baseball players
• 16:06 – The Famous Five

 

3 Key Points:

1. There will always be better ways to do things—keep on brainstorming.
2. Don’t hold yourself back from your own curiosity.
3. Be selective with who you work with; this will affect the quality of your product.

 

Resources Mentioned:

• The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
• Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
• Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
• Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
• Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
• Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives