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RadPad Creative Director Tyler Galpin and founder Jonathon Eppers.
Even though the RadPad team just announced its $800,000 seed round led by Deep Fork Capital last week, closing “another million” by the end of 2013 isn’t out of the question for the rental marketplace app, founder and CEO Jonathon Eppers said. The real estate space is crowded - and the RadPad team is willing to move fast.
“I used to believe this is a space that multiple users can play in, but now I’m convinced that two or three will survive,” Eppers said.
Just this weekend, Eppers said he met with Paul Bricault of Amplify (which is RadPad’s current pad) to discuss next moves, one of which could very well be a Series A round in the next two months “because there is so much interest.”
Also included in Radpad’s game plan: bringing on another back-end engineer in 2013 and releasing two features that will actually bring in revenue (as the app is completely free for the 11,000 renters currently using it each week). One of those features will be an option for renters to get “pre-approved” through credit company Experian so that they can walk out of a property knowing that it’s theirs.
This feature will prove to be extremely important for RadPad because its users are young (85 percent are under the age of 34), on-the-go (81 percent are mobile users) and are looking to snatch the best properties in competitive real estate markets (LA, Chicago and San Diego are RadPad’s hottest spots).
Why is this young crowd of movers and shakers so attracted to RadPad? “We are building something that makes people excited and optimistic about finding a place to live,” Eppers said. Plus, he said RadPad gives renters the best mobile experience around by showing them Instagram-like pictures of nearby properties.
Although a small factor, RadPad’s “prettiness,” as Eppers put it, along with its new features might just be what the app needs to crowd out big name competitors like Craigslist, West Side Rentals and Trulia. But even other startups like Apartment List, LiveLovely and Zumper, Eppers said, are the competitors to really look out for: “The ones that keep me up at night are the other startups because I know they can move quickly.”
Eppers knows all too well how fast startups can move; after leaving an 18-month stint in product management at eHarmony (during which time Eppers worked under three different CEOs), he started building RadPad last July. Less than six months later, RadPad hit the app store and, by February, the four-person RadPad team had moved into Amplify.
Amplify ended up being the best choice that the RadPad team has ever made, although Eppers said the team wasn’t “gung-ho on an accelerator” at first. (But maybe if you ask engineer Tim Watson, who was sleeping on an air mattress in and working out of Eppers’s living room, he might have a different opinion?)
But after Bricault continuously reached out and offered feedback to the RadPad team, Eppers said he realized Bricault wasn’t “just trying to sell an accelerator; he’s really trying to help us.”
After setting up shop in Amplify, Eppers met Tim Komada of Deep Fork Capital in August and worked out a deal within six weeks. And the fact that DFC backed Trulia gave the RadPad team just one more “great vote of confidence.”
Eppers said the team’s strong relationships with people like Komada and Bricault will hopefully help propel RadPad to take its place among the consumer-facing startups like Snapchat that are bringing (much-deserved) attention to LA right now.
“We are really excited about LA,” Eppers said. “LA is going to be building some really big companies; we want to be along for that ride.”
