Perch Update: How We Grew To $1M/Year And Recently Raised $4M In Series A Funding
This is a follow up story for Perch. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hi again! My name is Alex Leduc and I’m the Founder and CEO of Perch. You can check out our original starter story here. We’re a mortgage tech company based in Toronto, Canada and we offer our service to all provinces across the country. At Perch, our mission is to empower Canadians on their homeownership journey to build wealth through real estate. We love helping buyers become homeowners, and helping homeowners optimize their finances and grow their wealth.
Our mortgage platform combines customized insights with educational content to enable our users to truly understand the optimal path to becoming a homeowner or ways they can leverage existing home equity. For home buyers, Perch provides an optimized path to home ownership and a holistic solution where users can get pre-approved for a mortgage, get a real estate agent, pick the right mortgage, get a lawyer, and close their deal.
Homeowners can maximize wealth through proactive analytics that focuses on minimizing the cost of debt by switching mortgages or maximizing their equity by leveraging their home equity. Ultimately, customers can easily save time and money and do their comparisons of mortgages all at their convenience.
The average Perch user saves $3,000 per year in mortgage interest. Perch recently raised $4 million in Series A funding from investors including Second Century Ventures, the strategic venture arm of the National Association of REALTORS®.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
To date, we have funded $100M+ in mortgages, have 160+ real estate brokerages in our network, a 215% client referral rate, and only 5% of users acquired through paid ads.
The revenue grew from $27k in 2018 to $780k in 2021 and 1M in 2022. Our funding rate is 6x more efficient than the industry average. Perch joined the Canadian Lenders Association and the 2022 REACH Canada program.
Perch also released the Pathfinder tool and is the first in Canada to release a tool that provides users with real-time mortgage rate quotes through predictive modeling. We’ve gained a few new partnerships in the last year including Onlia Insurance, HomeStars and RentPanda.
It’s best to find your current most important metric and focus solely on things that drive that.
In our most recent fundraising round, we raised $4 million in Series A funding from investors including Second Century Ventures.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
Most challenges revolve around the current economic climate and mortgage rate increases from the Bank of Canada. The real estate market slowed as sellers took listings off the market and buyers gravitated to the sidelines with a “wait and see” approach due to the volatility.
Refinance volume has also evaporated. However, the slowing market allowed us to rebuild and make improvements to our core functionality so we can be ready once the market recovers and picks back up again.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
One of the lessons learned in the last year is to not underestimate how quickly the landscape can change for capital raising, things are constantly changing and you have to be aware of that.
Another lesson I learned is that everything can impact your business growth in some way, but you have to ruthlessly prioritize the ones that will have the highest impact. It’s best to find your current most important metric and focus solely on the things that drive that.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
In the next year, we have a few product developments planned. Our client dashboard updates will make it even easier for customers to start the pre-approval process, select a mortgage and submit a mortgage application independently, or with on-demand advisor support.
This will lead to higher customer satisfaction and will help us scale. More tools and calculators will make it easier for potential customers to view real estate and mortgage insights and make data-driven decisions. Lastly, our broker portal updates will increase efficiency and streamline operations for our mortgage advisors.
In regards to our long-term vision, everything we do is ultimately around building a real estate ecosystem that empowers users to make better decisions. This is via a combination of advanced analytics, vetted professionals, and complementary product verticals.
The ideal state of our platform involves a user going through Perch for every real estate transaction knowing that they’ll save the most time and money, get the best advice, and be guided fairly from start to finish with their best interests in mind. They would go through this journey not relying on blind faith, but by being educated along the way to improve their knowledge and ultimately understand why we make each recommendation and feel comfortable about each decision they make.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
For entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their businesses, don’t be afraid to ask for help. You can’t do everything yourself and you don’t always know everything. You’d be surprised how willing people are to support you on your journey.
Another piece of advice is to continuously re-evaluate your business model. Whenever things get stuck (ex: can’t get new clients, can’t get partnerships, etc.) spend the time to get feedback and find out why. While hard work and grit are required, it won’t transform a bad idea into a good one just by repetition.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We are looking for a full-time Lead Product Designer. In addition to being the strongest product designer on the team, the successful candidate will also lead and grow the design team all while maturing, documenting, and evangelizing design best practices across the business. Your efforts will enable effective scaling in our approach to design and contribute to conquering our business objectives.
What you’ll be doing:
- Bring creativity to the conversation as we ideate and define product requirements, and solutions to our user’s challenges and inevitably define new products and add features to improve existing ones.
- Expand on and mature an extensible, developer-friendly design system that leads to improved cohesiveness and velocity across the product design discipline at Perch.
- Collaborate with our marketing team and brand designers on design experiments to continuously improve conversion and user satisfaction.
- Identify and lead user research initiatives that help Perch further extend its lead as the best home ownership management platform in the market.
- Enforce and maintain consistent brand identity across the company, our products, and our overall web presence.
- Lead and foster a team of designers and external resources such as agencies and contractors.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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