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In the latest episode of the Power House podcast, Zebulon Lowe, director of HousingWire‘s Content Studio, sits down with Ryan Young, co-founder and CEO of marketing automation platform Fello. During the conversation, Lowe and Young cover Fello’s expansion goals, its technology usage and its upcoming 30-day listing challenge.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. The conversation begins by exploring Young’s transition from the traditional side of real estate to the technology industry.
Young: When I joined my parents, I said the one thing that’s really important to me is, if I join you, we are going to build something special. And I am very committed to building something. We very quickly became one of the top teams in the state of Ohio.
One of the things I started doing within my real estate team was this cash-offer, guaranteed sale program. We saw so much demand that I said, this is like a business itself. So, I started a company called FlashHouse, which was purely built to acquire homes.
Young also noticed that clients with the Young Team were requesting cash offers from FlashHouse, without knowing that he owned both companies. This made him realize the impact of FlashHouse’s marketing on past clients.
Young: It made me realize that I needed to protect and invest in my database. So, that’s kind of where this idea of the technology came about.
Lowe: What differentiates Fello from the rest of the competition?
Young: The first thing is the introduction of the data. This is so important. We take the database and enrich it with all this information that was never there. And then, we have all this data that becomes so granular and customizable … that allows us to see significantly better engagement and significantly better results.
Lowe: What did you do to go from one thing that doesn’t naturally tie into the next thing, to then get good at it or or succeed?
Young: My biggest strength is knowing and accepting my weaknesses. I grew up playing team sports. I grew up in the kitchen, which is kind of a team thing. It wouldn’t be possible without surrounding myself with other people.
Lowe: You have a really big initiative that’s going on right now as well, right? Or about to about to begin?
Young: I’ve always been really passionate on the real estate side of things. Last year, in March, I went out on social media, posted on Instagram, and said, “My name’s Ryan Young and I’m going to set 30 listing appointments in the next 30 days out of my database.” So, all of a sudden, we had all the support in the community, and I started getting a lot of people saying, “Hey, if you ever do that again, I’ll do it with you.”
So, last year, we did like a small mini-pilot. We had about 500 participants. This year, I’ve reached out to other leaders within our industry to say I’d love to do like a daily webinar. We launched it seven days ago. There’s already 5,000 participants, and today we just announced all the speakers.
