When it rains, it pours…
TechCrunch just broke the news of our investment in Estately alongside 500 Startups, Founders Fund, Jeff Clavier and AngelList’s Naval Ravikant. We’ve been tracking CEO Galen Ward’s progress for a while and just love how he thinks about building an online business. He’s now raised slightly more than $1MM in total to pursue an opportunity – online Real Estate search and lead generation – that other firms are tackling with orders of magnitude more capital.
With this lean approach, Galen has quietly built a top 10,000 website and a growing network of real estate agents who can help turn that traffic into closed home sales. His secret: understand the customer problem, hire great people and be insanely focused about where to allocate both time and money to deliver results. Real Estate is a huge business and there’s room for more than one firm to build value – we like Estately’s approach and love the team Galen has pulled together to make it so.