Vanessa Martin asked to walk instead of run because it’ll be easier to have a conversation.
She kissed her husband Scott, who had to prep for another investor meeting, goodbye. Vanessa told me their status as married founders had been brought up in meetings as we set off from under the shaded portico of The Venetian into the torrid, awakening glare of late summer in the concrete-covered Mojave Desert that grips Las Vegas.
I got to know the Martins only a few days before at the NAR REACH Global Portfolio Summit, an annual networking event for founders backed by the well-known incubator. This year it was held in September in Nashville, only days before Blueprint Vegas, the Inman-owned commercial real estate conference with a proptech bent, essentially making the events back-to-back.
And so, bleary-eyed and funding-hungry, the proverbial band of proptech minstrels migrated west, from Music City to Sin City to attend yet another industry gathering. Many didn’t bother to go home, opting for the hotel’s laundry services and pool recliners to recharge before another week of pitches and panels.
Inman’s influence on the newly acquired commercial industry event led to an infusion of residential technology upstarts, each hoping to justify their business models and uncover pathways to widespread industry adoption. Like the hotel’s inspiration, though, a single route doesn’t exist. What feels like confidence one minute becomes outright confusion the next.
The Strip was pockmarked with evidence of things that stopped happening only a couple of hours before. Late parties. Benders and heaters. A man prone in a patch of damp, brown-water-soaked grass was stirred to consciousness by a diligent bike cop. We tried not to gawk, but the policeman’s presence opened a window to chat about what it’s like to launch an agent safety app.
Vanessa and Scott Martin
The Martins sold their house to help fund Tether RE, an application that helps agents stay in touch with first responders and loved ones when showing homes. They bootstrapped well over $300,000 of it, selling custom off-road vehicles (a hobby that led to the app’s ability to track users), rental properties and even a plane.
The Martins want the industry to know the real risks of showing homes to strangers but have trouble balancing those realities with marketing and outreach, affecting how they position the product. They don’t want a person’s trauma — whether they know them or not — to become a sales channel. They wrestle with the industry’s overall negligence in promoting personal safety to its practitioners.
The risk agents face when meeting new leads, showing homes alone and working open houses is so overt that it defies discussion, a threat to which every agent who shows homes becomes subject. Yet, the Martins were advised by industry insiders not to “sell fear,” which subsequently takes away from how they make an argument for the problem they solve.
Potential financial partners want to see passionate owners and, yes, a lot of data. Still, the Martins have managed to land a number of meetings, few of which were fruitful.
“We found that most of the companies that reached out to us were actually Series A funders, and we are in a seed round,” Vanessa told me as we stepped around a figure shifting into the shrinking shade of a municipal utility box. “They’re looking to invest minimum checks from $5 million to $20 million, and we are seeking less than three million. They basically told us to come back when we need more money.”
To take funding or not to take funding?
Funding is always on the mind of folks like the Martins, but not every startup needs venture capital, according to four-time founder Heather Harmon, co-founder of RedDoor, which was sold to OpenDoor in 2021. She’s now an active investor and advises proptechs on when — and if — to pursue funding.
She spoke to me from outside her California foothills home, swaddled in an oversized sweater and sipping on tea with both hands wrapped around a misshapen ceramic mug she’d made.
“I’m really proud of it, but nobody wants the things I make in clay. It’s simply for me.”
Heather Harmon
Harmon’s expertise at the pottery wheel isn’t her industry draw; it’s her proven eye for proptech. It’s clear she enjoys helping other people make things.
Startups, like her wonky cup, have imperfections, evidence of being shaped by humans. But Harmon says that’s every company’s most investable asset. She says money won’t come if the “who” is an issue.
“Is this person humble? Are they realistic? Are they willing to tear down their own idea? Are they willing to pivot?” Harmon said. “Is their ego so big that they are going to haul this across the finish line because of just their hubris. And if it’s that kind of mentality, it’s not investable.”
Even if the personality hurdle can be cleared, it doesn’t mean funding is the best route, according to Harmon. RedDoor landed a $5 million seed round at the start, and as it scaled, the founders arrived at a precarious junction, having to consider whether to entertain incoming acquisition pitches or take a Series A round of $25 million. They chose the former.
“One of the prevailing reasons I didn’t want to take the $25 million is because the pressure to perform and make decisions inside of the product based on what we were supposed to be reporting out to our investors was influencing what we could and couldn’t do inside of the product,” she told me. “And that was only with $5 million. So imagine taking $25 million and now you have this stepped-up, pressure cooker situation.”
I met with the Martins again in October over Zoom, catching them this time in the midst of another relatable scene for most founders — focusing on work-life balance. Scott was dropping off snacks to their son’s football team, and Vanessa was watching their infant grandson.
“I watch him every Thursday, so [our daughter] doesn’t even have to ask me,” Vanessa said.
I asked them about having any run-ins with their egos while getting Tether RE off the ground. Scott admitted that starting and exiting multiple companies did give him a lot of confidence, but only enough to know what he didn’t know.
“At first, our go-to-market was just going out to meet with Realtors and tell the story, and we thought everybody would sign up,” Scott said. “Because when you look at the [crime] statistics, you think … ‘The statistics are crazy.’ Why wouldn’t everybody just sign up? But we very quickly learned that going direct to agents was a very difficult model. So we started going directly to associations, MLSs and brokerages.”
“Plus,” Vanessa said, “The app fatigue in real estate is real.”
It’s about compromise and listening to your users, Scott said. They added non-core features solely to drive adoption, for example.
The Martins’ biggest learning experience stemmed from not fully understanding how business goals overlap with software development.
“I was extremely naive,” he said.
“We spent a year on development and walked away with nothing,” Scott continued. That’s where the $300,000+ of personal funds went. “We finally got some really good advice to hire a CTO. We needed to control the development and not outsource to companies that get paid to fix the bugs they create. If I had to do it over, we could do it for so much less.”
Scott believes their development snafu likely could’ve festered into a winnable lawsuit. “The decision to scrap a year of work was extremely painful,” he said. “But we chose to put those resources toward continuing the development. Timing is everything, and it gave us a new, more clear starting point.”
The Martins said it was around then when they began connecting with like-minded resources in the real estate space through events like Inman Connect and organizations such as REACH and Geek Estate Mastermind (GEM), a networking and resources collective run by industry advocate Drew Meyers.
Another such group that’s in it for the people of proptech is Equity Angels, a business incubator that advocates for fair access to business resources. It’s run by Kenya Burrell-VanWormer and Katherine Winston, who brought their latest cohort of innovators to Blueprint, as well, including Terrence Nickelson, founder of Goby Homes.
Knowing what you don’t know
Nickelson’s company exists in that awkward growth stage between bona fide traction and the founder’s realization that suddenly, they’re a CEO.
“Business is a different language, right? To a lot of people who don’t know business terminology, it’s a whole new language that you have to learn,” he said. “And you talk about cap tables and churn and burn and all these different things that you’re like, ‘What does that mean?’ ICP and all these different acronyms that you have to kind of get and familiarize yourself with.”
Terrence Nickelson
He’s clearly a fast learner, as NAR named him a 2025 iOi Innovator of the Year, an accolade many proptech founders would love, but something he’s not mentioned once to me over several meetings. Nickelson knows the road ahead won’t clear itself of obstacles because of a few accolades.
“So I went through these programs and, you know, connected with a lot of different mentors to just understand business, understand how to approach and build a scalable business,” he said. “So all these are just challenges. And again, the time it takes to embed yourself into the lifestyle of becoming a founder and breaking away from a nine-to-five. It’s a huge risk.”
Malte Kramer, founder and CEO of software company Luxury Presence, was set on earning the attention of venture capitalists from the get-go. He knew that the impact he wanted to create on the industry was going to require it.
He bootstrapped the company its first few years, building websites and lead-generation tools for high-end agents. Asked why he turned his focus on a much smaller subset of the agent ecosystem, Kramer said it was because that’s what his business plan required: a customer base that won’t be as subject to the dynamic nature of the market.
“To build a subscription business, obviously, you need customers that stay with you for a long time,” he said. “And so I figured if we focus initially on the top 5 percent, and it’s probably the top like 25 percent, those are the serious agents, the full timers that are going to be around for 10 years. If we serve them well, they will stay with us for a long time.”
A seed round of $2.13 million came in 2018. Two years later, Luxury Presence closed a Series A for $5.4 million and in 2021, a Series B of $25.9 million.
“Sometimes I look with some envy at the startups that are raising at these crazy multiples of like a 200x revenue, and we never did that. We always raised at what I, you know, felt were good multiples, but nothing outrageous,” he said. “And we didn’t raise crazy high rounds either. We raised enough to keep building and keep growing.”
Luxury Presence now builds advanced marketing and business automation products that power the complete sales funnel. This year, the company released a series of AI agents to address lead nurture, SEO, blog writing and display advertising. That’s not a cheap development lift.
Malte Kramer
Kramer said funding also helps attract talent. He recognizes that, as a software company, he’s competing with companies much, much bigger than his.
“It is so hard to compete with venture-backed companies because they attract the best talent; the very best engineers, product people, designers want to go work for companies backed by tier-one investors. That’s a signal for them that they’re real,” he said.
Still, Kramer doesn’t want funding to be equated with success.
“The best thing a founder can do is spend as much time as possible with their customers,” he said.
Slow and steady wins the race
Sheila Reddy is not afraid to trust her instincts.
A healthcare professional before entering proptech, Reddy founded Mosaik to solve her own problems. If she’s gone through the pain of buying and selling, others certainly have as well.
“I think a lot of founders and companies, whether proptech or otherwise, they do a lot of consumer research and they try to ship really fast and iterate on the fly, which we’ve done some of. I don’t know, I took a different path to it, which was like, I’m solving my own problems. I kind of validated my own thesis just through years of experiencing it.”
Sheila Reddy
Mosaik is best described as a client experience solution. It’s designed to eliminate the idea of a “past client” and instead treat every transaction as a collective, ever-growing portfolio that agents service over time. In a market that prioritizes leads and shrinking transaction time, Mosaik isn’t an easy sell. But Reddy is okay with that; she admits her product isn’t for everyone.
“We kind of took a slow and steady approach. We’ve got to build the foundation and then we’ll iterate the details,” she said. “But we’re going to build the foundation out of conviction, more so than market research. Because I think if I had taken it to market too early, everyone would have just told me to build another CRM.”
Reddy and her team use agent feedback to fine-tune the product instead of defining it, never letting the pressure of market demand and industry trends sway them into something that will tilt the foundation. That’s not easy for a first-time founder, but Reddy won’t be swayed from the concept that the bulk of a real estate agent’s business should come from people with whom they’ve already done business.
“It seems like a no-brainer to me that the bulk of your time should be spent there, that you should be growing your business from them,” she said. “I didn’t realize how much of the tech, of the training, of the coaching in the industry … focuses on leads.”
Reddy had to sell against the idea that only new business matters — not an easy value proposition in real estate. Nevertheless, she leaned on the roots of the company: a belief in the mission that technology can better the way agents address consumer needs.
“I never didn’t think it wouldn’t work,” Reddy said about her product, citing familiar statistics about consumers not using their agent for their next transaction. “I don’t mean that the way it sounds, but there was never any doubt in my mind that it wasn’t going to work or that we weren’t solving for the right things. It was always just the execution. Like, how do you tinker with things to get adoption? How do you tinker with things to make a process smoother? How do you tinker with things to balance that value between the client and the agent?”
Founders still have to be prepared to evolve, according to Reddy, echoing Harmon’s take that true success comes from confidence and flexibility. As the company tilts and sways, so should its leadership.
“I think as a founder, what I have found through this journey is almost every couple of months I have to be a different CEO,” Reddy said. “Like I have to be a completely different person because what was needed from me for the company a few months ago isn’t what we need today because we’re inherently shifting, evolving, scaling as the industry goes.”
All in
The Martins reached out a week after we last spoke to tell me they’re buying a house. They moved in days before Halloween. A video they sent showed a home office with company signage as a backdrop, and a dog resting on a throw rug. They’ll now have a bit of stability amidst the cyclone of marketing a mobile application, accompanying kids to concerts and caring for family members.
It’s funny how being a proptech founder can make moving the least stressful thing in one’s life. Ironic, given that’s the problem so many founders I meet want to solve for.
The Martins also shared that a large name in the industry has initiated partnership talks. Nothing is certain, but it’s momentum, personally and professionally.
“You know, we sold our dream home. Twin Falls, Idaho, high desert. And we had an unbelievably unique property, three acres and fully secluded,” Scott said. “Because we believe in it, we’re all in.”
November is Proptech Month at Inman. We’ll dive deep into the world of proptech and the state of the startups that are building the future now. In addition, our coveted set of awards, Proptech All-Stars — celebrating the entrepreneurs, VCs and visionaries in the world of proptech — returns.
