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About The Episode

After growing up in an entrepreneurial family, Carter Malloy had no plans to work for anyone but himself. However, in a twist of events, Carter spent seven years working for somebody else's company. Although it's not the career path he initially wanted, Carter credits his time there as the reason he felt prepared to ultimately launch his own investment company.

“Being fortunate enough to be engaged with management of much larger companies at a fairly young age, I quickly learned what type of manager I would like to be and the type I would not like to be. There’s a spectrum of individuals in the way they run businesses, and it’s not necessarily that one is incorrect or the other is correct, it’s stylistic.” - Carter Malloy, (5:02)

After growing up in an entrepreneurial family, Carter Malloy had no plans to work for anyone but himself. However, in a twist of events, Carter spent seven years working for somebody else's company. Although it's not the career path he initially wanted, Carter credits his time there as the reason he felt prepared to ultimately launch his own investment company.

“Being fortunate enough to be engaged with management of much larger companies at a fairly young age, I quickly learned what type of manager I would like to be and the type I would not like to be. There’s a spectrum of individuals in the way they run businesses, and it’s not necessarily that one is incorrect or the other is correct, it’s stylistic.” - Carter Malloy, (5:02)

 

Working Towards the End Goal

With two business-minded parents, a mother who works in the candy industry and a father who owns farmland, Carter had every intention of starting his own company. With the resolve that he would always be his own boss, Carter attended college with the objective of studying whatever he wanted and having a good time. However, upon graduating with a degree in physics, Carter entered the finance world, working for Stephens Inc. This position presented him with the opportunity to research big businesses and understand the mechanics of running a company. 

During his time at Stephens, Carter was continuously creating business plans as well as buying and selling farmland. He was also learning the importance of developing information infrastructures within companies. It was this knowledge that helped Carter eventually establish his business with a unique value proposition people were eager to invest in.  

“I was pretty lucky to be a student of failures and to understand what can hurt businesses, and inversely I definitely learned that businesses that own information are more valuable. They’re more enduring.” - Carter Malloy, (5:43)

Although Carter had people whispering in his ear to continue his career trajectory in the investment world, his wife enthusiastically encouraged him to swing for the fences. As a result, with his wife’s support and his purchasing and selling of property, Carter and his inner circle started bouncing around ideas for how to allow others to invest in fractionalized land. This concept derived from a conversation with his dad about what the possibilities would be if individuals could purchase land investments in the same way they purchased cryptocurrency. 

 

Putting an Idea on the Line

Carter received the green light from attorneys to pursue his idea. So, as all good business founders do, Carter presented his business plan to his cynical friends for their critical feedback. His friends found his idea interesting and encouraged him to go after it. It took three months for Carter to transition to working part-time and commit to furthering his idea. However, once he did, Carter settled on AcreTrader for the name and had a logo created along with purchasing a domain name. 

“It’s a non-starter for people you and I have never met. Here was this interesting investment product in a world with information asymmetry that’s favorable to the educated investor. And here’s this real market need. People want alternatives in their portfolio. They want to invest in things other than cryptocurrencies and stocks and bonds.” - Carter Malloy, (11:19)

 

Remaining Ambitious after Success

Carter’s initial funding was out-of-pocket from his savings, and his first step was to conduct a number of surveys and interviews to narrow down a target audience. He then left his part-time position and quickly worked to build a minimum viable product to place online in an effort to determine if consumer demand was present. 

In time, a product lead, their current COO, and a marketing position were hired, and as a group, they focused their efforts on obtaining funding. It took a couple of nerve-wracking months to procure their first third-party investor, but eventually, they received a call from an individual wanting to invest in a farm listed on their website. This was the moment Carter and his team realized there was a real demand for their product, and they were off and running. Subsequently, they ended up raising about two million dollars for the business itself, and their farms started to sell out in six minutes.

“...we immediately start looking forward. Where is this the next five years? What can we do to influence that? I think we as a company view it the same way as this is still day one, right? We have scars and gray hair from being here and we’ve learned a lot, but we’re really just getting started.” - Carter Malloy, (26:21)

Currently, AcreTrader is sitting comfortably at one hundred employees and has continued to develop great products in the worlds of fintech and property technology. One of those is Acres, a tool that allows for the purchasing and selling of land to be easier. Their goal is to become the default platform for land transactions in order to help those selling land, farmers that want to grow their businesses, and individuals that want to invest in land. 

From Carter’s story, we learn that building a business based on conclusive research will undoubtedly increase its chance of success. And all it takes is one credible idea out of hundreds to create something exceptional.

Show Notes

(0:30) Introducing Carter Malloy

(5:01) A Lightbulb Moment

(8:54) The Story behind AcreTrader

(14:43) Deciding to Move Forward

(0:30) Introducing Carter Malloy

(5:01) A Lightbulb Moment

(8:54) The Story behind AcreTrader

(14:43) Deciding to Move Forward

(17:26) Looking For Funding

(21:19) Getting the First Customer

(27:18) AcreTrader Today

(29:43) What’s Next

(30:49) Closing Questions

Links

Rick West 

Carter Malloy

AcreTrader

“I was pretty lucky to be a student of failures and to understand what can hurt businesses, and inversely I definitely learned that businesses that own information are more valuable. They’re more enduring.” 

Carter Malloy, (5:43)

Episode Transcription

Carter Malloy:

I was a partner with some folks and so walked in to go tell them, "Hey, I want to go pursue this other thing and I want fulfill some duties." So I actually stayed part-time with them for a number of months after that. But yeah, that was one of the most nervous days of my life. My hands were physically shaking, just like all right I have to commit to this. I've committed, I have to do it.

Carter Malloy:

I was a partner with some folks and so walked in to go tell them, "Hey, I want to go pursue this other thing and I want fulfill some duties." So I actually stayed part-time with them for a number of months after that. But yeah, that was one of the most nervous days of my life. My hands were physically shaking, just like all right I have to commit to this. I've committed, I have to do it.

Rick West:

Welcome to Push Go, a podcast presented by Plum. Where we highlight the defining moments that impact how we live and work. Today I'm joined by Carter Malloy, he's the founder and CEO of AcreTrader. Now Carter grew up in an Arkansas farming family and he's had a lifelong passion for agriculture and investing. Today you're going to hear how our conversation about cryptocurrency with his dad led to combining those passions to build AcreTrader. Carter, welcome to the podcast.

Carter Malloy:

Thanks, Rick.

Rick West:

Man, glad to have you. I think you might be the very first physics grad I've had on the podcast. A lot of financial guys, econ, but physics, what took you down the path of physics?

Carter Malloy:

I liked it, I don't know how to say that better. I was in school and it was actually... It hopped around from biology to, I wanted to be pre-med to the business school. Which I hated accounting, and I got a bad grade and just enjoyed the subject matter, enjoyed the problem-solving.

Rick West:

Wow. So when I think of people's backgrounds getting in, obviously there's a lot of relationships, engagement, but you started out a couple of jobs out of school. But you pretty quickly went into the financial world. So kind of bridge for us, especially people that are thinking about I've got a degree in this, I guess I've got to go back to school and get another degree before I enter into the world of finance. That wasn't the case for you, so talk to a little bit about how you got into it. Was Stevens your first foray into the financial world?

Carter Malloy:

It was my first I guess real job. I worked in high school and college and then post-school had some businesses. So yeah, for better or worse I grew up in an entrepreneurial family and so that's one of the reasons I did my degree. I was like, well, I'll never work for anyone. I'm always only going to work for myself so I'll study whatever I want and have a good time. So after school I basically had a couple small businesses, and then you're right got an interview and I even then thought now there's no way they're going to want me and ended up strapping on a necktie and working there for seven years. Loved it.

Rick West:

So you said your parents were entrepreneurs, your father, but they were entrepreneurs in the agricultural world. Speak to that a little bit, what that really meant to you growing up and when you looked at that what it really, really played out for you.

Carter Malloy:

My dad was a farmland owner and also entrepreneur and 10 other things, as was my mom and my mom's actually in the candy business. So there was definitely booms and bust associated with both being an entrepreneur and being in ag.

Rick West:

Yeah. Did they let you play around in that? Were you forced to do work for them or did they encourage you? Because you said, okay I dabbled in a few things in elementary, high school. Were you also the serial entrepreneur with them or did you work with them on their businesses?

Carter Malloy:

Oh yeah, they got plenty of child labor out of me. I think that's why I took the other job so I wouldn't have to work for them.

Rick West:

That's so good. So for many people that are listening here, we always look back at our parents and there's pluses or minuses in there. So it sounds like, and again we've talked a little bit about this before. That upbringing really did kind of drive you to be the person you are today, looking at the entrepreneurial piece, how they worked, the engagement there. So let's speak to that a little bit because you said you kind of went into the Stevens world, but you knew you had this bug. So were you kind of setting that aside for a while, while you went into the job with a tie? Or is this one of those that you were still on the side still trying to figure out what that entrepreneurial thing was going to be?

Carter Malloy:

I was absolutely setting it aside, I was like I'll be right back. I'll be an entrepreneur here in a year, two years, whatever. I always wanted to build a business or businesses. So my thinking at the time of going into research and into equities was the ability to get paid to study big businesses was really appealing to me. To understand the mechanics of companies as I didn't have that formal education to begin with. So I really enjoyed, and it's been a dozen years ultimately in inequities both sell side and buy side and really, really loved that research process. But yeah, the whole time was making crappy business plans, but lots of them right? And planning all along to hopefully someday build something.

Rick West:

Yeah. I had friends of mine that were kind of went down a similar route and they talked about the more they did the research and the more they engaged other companies. The better prepare they felt for that eventual launch on their own, because they were learning vicariously through these other entities in front of them. Can you think of any of those that kind of was a light bulb for you or one of those my goodness I'm glad I saw this happen, I'll never make that mistake. Did you have any of those kind of instances you could bring up to us?

Carter Malloy:

Certainly both. One is being fortunate enough to be engaged with management teams of much larger companies at a fairly young age. I quickly learned the type of manager I would like to be and the type of manager I would not like to be and there's a whole spectrum of folks and the way they run businesses. It's not necessarily that one is entirely incorrect or the entire other way is very correct, it's stylistic. But I learned a lot in dealing with a lot of public company CEOs, you learn a lot about hubris. You learn a lot about some folks have a little too much swagger and a little too much confidence. So as part of my career I would invest in businesses going either direction up or down. So I was actually pretty lucky to be a student of failures and to understand what can hurt businesses. Inversely definitely learned that businesses that own information are more valuable, they're more enduring and I think for us as a company we invest in that early.

Most early stage companies are it's all about growth and that's it and if anything invested too heavily so far in building the things that make us an enduring company. I think the information underneath our business to build a moat and a competitive barrier around us.

Rick West:

I love that. For the entrepreneur out there saying, "Okay I've got to hit ARR, I've got to hit MRR, I've got to grow, grow, grow, grow, grow." But I love that concept of information, infrastructure, kind of your own unique IP that makes you enduring. I can see where in the craziness of growth you can completely forget about that and to your point, in many cases it is the reason why people are investing in you. Because of the unique IP and piece there that they really want to invest in, that's really interesting. Yeah.

Carter Malloy:

Thanks. We're pretty excited about it. We're still early, but we're building as fast as we can.

Rick West:

Yeah. But like many people that are talking about the entrepreneurial world here, you obviously are a overnight success happened in probably two or three months and just boom, it hit. You had this idea you just launched and you're done, right? It was so easy to go down this path. But in the investment world, both locally here on the coast, as you start looking at that growth machine in your career. You had to have a ton of folks whispering in your ear saying, "Stay this track, stay the partner track. This is what you could do. This is really where your skillset is, you're a great researcher, we love what you're doing." So as you began to think about doing something different, did you have anyone come alongside encouraging you to step outside of the career path? Or were most of the folks saying, stay here, stay here, this is where you should be?

Carter Malloy:

Most everyone said that. The exception would be my wife who's wildly supportive and for both of my major career changes, one is moving to the West Coast and joining a startup fund that had not yet launched and then coming here back to Fayetteville to start a company. In both cases I took monster pay cuts, right? And the second time we had children. But I am supported by and partnered with the most amazing woman in the world, and she didn't care. She's like, "Look, this is what you want to do. You're going to be happy, you're risk on, so am I. We're have a good time no matter what, so let's go for it and swing for the fences."

Rick West:

Well, so having a life partner like that, that really comes alongside you that says we really can swing for the fence, obvious tremendous support that's there. But let's talk about the idea because we'll talk about AcreTrader here in a second. But it didn't just show up as AcreTrader overnight obviously, but your family had a background in agricultural and farming. You obviously had seen all from the investment side, you knew what worked, what didn't work. How did you begin to mill those two together? I'd love to hear the story of the seed that was planted that then became AcreTrader and I've heard the story before. But I'd love to hear that story again on the trip where you were kind of how it came about.

Carter Malloy:

In the background of being a professional equity investor, I was a entirely non-professional land investor. So I'd been buying and selling farmland and doing some of that with my dad and my best friend. We talked most days on the phone.

Rick West:

You're blessed man, that's great.

Carter Malloy:

Yeah, I'm very lucky. We've kicked around a lot of bad business ideas over the years, a lot of them and we were just really excited about land. I just really wanted to do more of it, and we started exploring the idea of do you go launch another fund? Then it's like, yeah it's not as scalable and not that impactful and I'm already in a great fund right? I want to go do this again. So we started playing around with the idea of how we could allow other people to invest in land and start talking about the securities world and securitization, and my dad who's 89 today was whatever, 84 at the time. He was pushing me, he's like, "We should really look at tokenization." And I was like, "No, man. That is a dumb trend." Mind you if I'd tokenized it I'd probably be on a yacht somewhere.

Rick West:

But hold on now, remember this is your 84-year-old father talking to the 30 something year old son telling you, you should lean in. That's big.

Carter Malloy:

That's correct, and actually to back up a little bit. The initial suggestion, actually the genesis of the conversation around land is he was saying, "Hey, I want to buy some Bitcoin." Again, this is like 2017 right?

Rick West:

You're like, dad-

Carter Malloy:

No, I told him he was an idiot. I was like, "You moron, it's like $800 for [inaudible 00:10:31], I can't believe you would think about this. I'm disappointed in you." And of course like, oh my gosh how incredibly wrong I... Do not take cryptocurrency investment advice from me. So he started pushing this theme of man, I wish we could do the same thing with a hard asset like land and I remember where I was the time. I was driving, pulled over, it's like, hang on this is actually something. This idea of fractionalizing land and allowing individual investors, I had friends all over the place that were like, "Hey, I want to invest in land. I'd like to put in some money. I don't want to go out and buy a multimillion dollar parcel, but I'm really fascinated by this." To that point, if you wanted to buy land, you had to go out to a county you've never been to probably plop down a million dollars. Hire a farmer and congratulations now you get to manage a farm.

Rick West:

Right.

Carter Malloy:

It's just a non-starter for most people you and I have never met. So this was really a, all right there's this interesting investment product in the world with information asymmetry that's pretty wild, so favorable to the educated investor and here's this real market need. People want alternatives in their portfolio, they want to invest in things other than cryptocurrencies... Thank goodness, and stocks and bonds.

Rick West:

So I love that. I remember one of the very first investment books I read back in the day with, I think it was One Up On Wall Street by Peter Lynch, that's one of those classic, classic and the whole nuance, every chapter seemed like every other page was invest in what you know. Invest in what you know, invest in what you know and you guys have this perfect storm. You grew up understood farming, you understood that, you're coming in from a fund standpoint, you understood that and you've got a business partner, a life partner and your dad saying, "Hey, here's what we could go do." So you really are mixing the best of both worlds of technology understanding what you needed to do with this thing you understood over here and now you're sitting on the side of the road. Are you a moleskin guy? Did you pull that out or did you just say, stop we need to talk about this? I mean, are you writing things down as fast as you can? I mean, tell me about that moment.

Carter Malloy:

Probably notes on an iPhone is what... I usually email myself.

Rick West:

Okay.

Carter Malloy:

I've gotten a little better on Google Docs, but that's a general way to time that I was keeping notes. So it's just take some notes on an iPhone and then I'm a very visual person. I love PowerPoints and this is a gross thing to say out loud, but I really... I need concepts to be able to... You need to be able to break them down, explain them with crayons and for me PowerPoint is an incredible way to do that. So I spent the next weeks, right? Of real late nights working on this and we had our second young baby at home and I had an intense day job. So it was the most exciting that I felt in a long time and mind you, I've made a bunch of these business plans in my career and I would take them to friends and challenge them and try to think of the downsides and every time ultimately put a bullet in those plans.

This time I put it together and then I spoke with some attorneys like can we do this? They gave me the green lights and started putting it in front of friends that I knew were highly cynical and same thing. Everybody's like, this is really interesting, you should pursue it.

Rick West:

Yeah. So I love that concept as well as I tell a lot of entrepreneurs that or at least want to be entrepreneurs. That just because your mom, your brother, your best friend and the guy that you play basketball with tells you it's a great idea, those are the wrong people to talk to. You've got to go find people that are not afraid to hurt your feelings. They can really tell, kind of roll their eyes and say, yeah this doesn't make sense. That's fantastic. But at that point you've got this career, you're going this path, you've got a bunch of naysayers saying, "Really Carter. I mean this is what you're thinking about doing." You're working the crayon magic and again, I'm a PowerPoint guy, don't apologize for it. I'm a visual learner, I'm a whiteboard guy. If I can whiteboard it, put it on a PowerPoint, it's great. So you start doing the nights and weekends while you're staying up with the baby to make all this thing work. At what point in time did you push go, hence the podcast Push Go. Did it take a month? Was it six months?

At what point in time did you say I'm ready? Because it sounds like in your heart and your gut and your wife and your dad, they're like, this is such a big idea and you knew it. But when did you really decide to move forward on it? How long did it take and what was that process like?

Carter Malloy:

Probably three months, if I'm recalling correctly. Three months from, hey this is really interesting to walking in and quitting or walking in... I was a partner with some folks and so walked in, I go tell them, "Hey, I want to go pursue this other thing and I wanted to fulfill some duties." So I actually stayed part-time with them for a number of months after that. But yeah, that was one of the most nervous days of my life. My hands were physically shaking, just like I have to commit to this. I've committed, I have to do it.

Rick West:

Because prior to that, you are looking at these individuals and you committed to be a partner and to go drive something. So it's not really quitting to your point, you really have to undo, you have to really kind of back away and hopefully if the relationship's right people get it. They may not be happy, but they get where you're going. So you're feeling pretty confident there. So now that you've made that decision, you're helping them out, you've got this thing in front of you. Did you go spend the next three weeks coming up with a great logo? Call it AcreTrader, or is this one of those that came to you instantly and you're ready to go? So how did the name come to be?

Carter Malloy:

I created an Excel sheet and I started going through Google Domains and just looking for every potentially available domain name and I really liked the name AcreTrade or AcreTrader, and I had about 50 other names and I've since shared that sheet with one person and internally and they still make fun of me to this day. So I'm not sharing with anybody else.

Rick West:

No, but because you have to right?

Carter Malloy:

It had some terrible names in it. Ultimately... And I'm sort of a spin thrift in probably the wrong places sometimes. So as an example I got our logo design, the one we used today that's on my jacket right here for 15 or $18 on Fiverr, but the domain name was like 1200 bucks. I mean I was so close to going with one of the cheap domain names that was kind of a bad name for the business and ultimately decided I'm going to pony up and buy the domain name and I'm very, very glad that I did.

Rick West:

Yeah. Well, I'm sure you've read the book Shoe Dog and what did he pay for the Nike Swoosh? Was it like 40 bucks? I mean it was just one of those, got a friend to design, put it together and it's this iconic image. So yeah, it doesn't require X to do that. So now you're making that decision, you've got it, you've got the cool logo, you're ready to make things happen. How did you begin to build the team? Because this wasn't... Obviously you knew because you had been around enough companies, this wasn't going to be you as an individual figuring this out. You had to build infrastructure around and I want you to take that conversation along with the angel funding or how funding began for you. So how did you begin the infrastructure or the nucleus of a team and when did you start looking for funding?

Carter Malloy:

So I initially funded it out of pocket, so I was fortunate enough to have built some savings. So the first thing that I had to do was go get an MVP. So prior to actually pursuing the business I was telling you I had friends challenge me and always asked for critical feedback. I also ran a number of surveys. So Google surveys, SurveyMonkey, just trying to find the target audience that would use this product and asking them some pointed questions around where they're familiar with farmland, whether they'd be interested investing in it, will they let me contact them to ask them more questions. So just did a number of user interviews that way and formally trying to actually gather statistics to make sure that... I wanted to build the MVP.

Rick West:

This is still you on your own? This is just Carter in a room?

Carter Malloy:

That's correct. That's actually prior to leaving my job, right? That was like I got to make sure there's product market fit here to the best that I can. So then post leaving, went to go hire a technologist, wanted to start actually to build an MVP very quickly. A minimum viable product to get that online and actually really vet that, that consumer demand was there. So similar to the domain names, like all right how can I be methodical? Went to 50 FinTech companies and investment technology companies and put them in a spreadsheet and then went through was like, all right, what are my favorite 10 or 20 of these? Contacted all of their CTOs had a product development to which the majority of them rightfully scoffed or laughed or did not respond at all.

Rick West:

Yeah. Do you know how busy I am?

Carter Malloy:

Yeah.

Rick West:

Yeah.

Carter Malloy:

And one guy named Vlad... I did end up interviewing several of them. One of them is a guy named Vlad, a Ukrainian fellow who's an awesome human being and we got along very well and we still work together to this day. So Vlad became our product lead and begin to build all the technology. After that we got the MVP live and there was real interest people, at least they... We'll get to the difference between saying, I'm interested in giving you money in a little bit but at least we're very interested upfront. So I went ahead and made another key hire too, and that included our current COO Garrett McClintock, who is I would call him a best friend and certainly a partner in the business. If anything, a co-founder in the business and then a marketing person named Harrison Hollingsworth. So those two guys here in Fayetteville, Arkansas, those two folks joined and then we went out to go try to raise money and that's probably another podcast. But it took a lot longer and we thought it would.

Rick West:

Right. When we were raising, I remember one person telling me is that you always want to raise money when you don't need it.

Carter Malloy:

That's right.

Rick West:

Because when you need it then the pressure and the timing, so that's good. But to your point, another podcast for another day. So you get this nucleus of a team, you're kind of building that, again self-funding is fantastic. When we started our company we had the opportunity to take a package from a company. So it was myself, two other P&G guys, Henry Ho, also my wife and we all had packages and we used P&G Procter and Gamble money as our angel money because it had no strings attached. So people were like, "How'd you get started? Did you have 20 people give you money?" It's like, "No, no, we took this package. We didn't go spend six months traveling in the world. We took that and invested." So it's great, you have some cash to make that happen. So now you're feeling it and I remember it was Dr. Steven Grays, Steve Grays that told me this, is that the best advice he would ever give an entrepreneur...

Which is what I want to segue in for you is that, "You may think you've got a great idea but you are only as good as you invoice and collect." Just because someone says they think the idea is good, if someone says they're going to buy it from you and they do the free trial and they play around with it you're only as good as you invoice and collect. So let's talk about those first few customers outside of some friends and cousins and people that bought in and kind of ran some water to the system. When did you realize that you had what you needed for people to actually say yes to go buy something? What did it take to get to that truly that first customer?

Carter Malloy:

So that was a pretty monstrous moment for us, right? So we went out and first we were raising capital for the business and that was actually by this point call it early 19, trending pretty positively. So we had raised a decent amount of capital like, all right we're in business for the next year, even if it's just this tiny team we can actually go try this out and go do some marketing. All these folks that love the idea that signed up in surveys or in the MVP or that were friends, whatever, people I knew. Everyone loved the idea. Not a single one of them invested-

Rick West:

Crickets.

Carter Malloy:

Actually buying farmland, and the call always went something like this, "Oh, I love it. This is absolutely awesome..." And we are a big ticket, right? "So this is absolutely awesome, I really want to be involved in this. At the time the investment minimum was a $1000, say, "Okay, great, you can start with 1000 or 10,000." And then the next thing was, "Remind me again, how long have you been in business?" We were like three months and folks I think naturally got very nervous. So it took actually a couple of months to get our first real outside third party investor to come in and invest in farmland and it was a pretty nerve-wracking couple of months. Again, incredibly encouraging conversations and we knew if we can get this flywheel to start moving, if we can just get it from zero to something that the people will become comfortable.

Because trust is the huge barrier, right? So a guy calls us and I answer and he's like, "Oh, I know this is a small company when the customer service rep is the CEO. But hey from up north and I really like this farm you have on the website and I want to invest." And it was a farm that I personally own and was invested in. He's like, "Yeah, it looks like there's like $100,000 left to invest in this farm. I'll just take all of it." And it was just-

Rick West:

And you paused. You're like, "What?"

Carter Malloy:

I almost threw up on my desk. Had it on speaker phone, the other folks in the office could hear it and hung up the phone. That was the moment of, oh my gosh there's real demand out there and we're off and running.

Rick West:

That's fantastic, I love that moment. It's one of those where you put them on mute and you're all just dancing fast and you take them back off. Well, I'll see if it's still 100, it might be less than that but I'll let you know right? You got to play a little bit coy. That's fantastic. So that's 2019, in the entrepreneurial world that's not decades ago, I mean that's not that long ago. So that was that first real significant customer that you started to feel like I had some fit? That classic problem market fit, you have the product market fit but you're not scaling yet. So let's kind of jump into the scaling part of it. What decision did you make or what happened that you started to see a little bit of scaling? Because it happened pretty quick after that.

Carter Malloy:

It did. So well, it's the hurry-up and wait right? So after that farm it took us... We raised more money for the business itself. So we ended up raising about $2 million seed round or a million and a half call it about outside capital in a seed round. So all right, now we're comfortable, we can probably go hire one more person, maybe two and maybe even run some more ads and continue building tech and then we sold this farm. We're like, all right great we're off to the races and then it took us another... Our next farm was on the site for six months and the one after that was on the site for three months and then it became somewhat exponential from there to where it got to a point where we had farms that would sell in six minutes.

Rick West:

Six minutes?

Carter Malloy:

Yeah, actually it's actually a bad customer experience. The problem that's too fast, we want farms to be on there for days or weeks so that people have choice and ability to come on. So we actually try to govern the demand a little bit certainly on the smaller investments that are on the site.

Rick West:

Okay.

Carter Malloy:

But yeah, it still took a long time to get that real comfort and mojo underneath this of like, hey this is actually... We've moved it from the idea phase. This actually generates real revenue and we continue to hire and bring on more folks and bring on more dollars.

Rick West:

So now we're at that stage it's kind of moving along. So give me a little 30-second clip on the conversation with your dad, when you said dad this is actually going to work. When did you finally say, kind of look side to side and said, "Dad, it's working man." So what was that like?

Carter Malloy:

I'm not sure that I have said that yet.

Rick West:

Come on Carter. Carter, you're moving, it's every six minutes. Well, you're moving along so maybe you haven't said that yet. But it has to be kind of cool now to look back at your dad say, dad, is it hard to believe that three years ago, really four years ago we had this idea and head's are growing and this is actually going to work. It's got to be fulfilling.

Carter Malloy:

It's incredibly fulfilling and it's a fun conversation, and in typical fashion of him and maybe me is we immediately start looking forward. Right? Where is this the next five years, and what can we do to influence that? I think we as a company viewed the same way. This is still day one, right? We've got scars and gray hair from being here and we've learned a lot, but again we're really just getting started.

Rick West:

Love that. Let's kind of fast forward to where we are today. I'd love folks to hear, because if they want to buy into farmland we're going to talk about that in a second. But you're no longer a five 10 person organization that's running on a couple of million dollars. You've had a very successful Series B, right? Series B was your last raise?

Carter Malloy:

That's correct.

Rick West:

Successful Series B, you're up well over 100 people today. So you now are running a significant organization with significant investment dollars coming in. Obviously that's a different world that you live in, it's only happened in the last year. So let's speak a little bit about where the company is today, what it looks like today and then we'll jump into explaining truly how the model works a little bit and what AcreTrader looks like.

Carter Malloy:

So you hit the nail on the company today, well over 100 employees and yes, it is far more complex and difficult than it once was at least from a management standpoint. We have built a number of really great products, all those being really inside of the worlds of FinTech and property technology.

Rick West:

Okay.

Carter Malloy:

So financial technology for investing, property technology to do analytics and understand the land itself to try to make sure that we're making good investments or that the investors on the website have access to the best information out there.

Rick West:

Okay. So you're broadening to say, we're more than just a place to look at real estate for... [inaudible 00:27:56] a realtor.com. It's more than just realtor.com, you look around and find something you like, click and buy. It's more than that, so I love the financial side of it that comes along. So if someone's coming in, who is your ICP? Who's the type of person? Is it really just anyone that wants to invest in farmland or is this someone pretty specific? Who are you guys looking for in the ICP?

Carter Malloy:

Today it's an accredited investor. So that's a person that makes two or $300,000 a year or meets a net worth threshold. That's an SEC established guideline, you can also take tests there. There's a number of ways to be an accredited investor in the US, so it's US based accredited investors today. We would hope to open it up to all US-based investors at some point in the future.

Rick West:

Okay. So that's kind of the focus there, and so give us some scale here. Are you selling 10 properties a month, 1000 properties a month? Because farmland is finite, but it's still there. So what does that look like today as we think about just the volume of people that are coming in and the farmland and what that looks like?

Carter Malloy:

It's much closer to tens of properties, but hundreds and thousands of people coming through the platform each month. So smaller numbers, but it's big dollars right? Rather than being a $200,000 home, it's a two to $5 million property each time.

Rick West:

Okay. That was really the original thesis of that's what it was going to look like. How do you get everyday... Not everyday, but investors to be able to come in to own a piece of farmland that has the right financial viability and etc coming in. Okay, great.

Carter Malloy:

That's correct.

Rick West:

Great. So as you look at it today, give me a quick projection of the future. Because you said hey in five years you're already dreaming, is something you can tease us with a little bit? Kind of whether it's a financial tool or something different that you've got coming out over the next year or so? Kind of what's next?

Carter Malloy:

Yeah. We needed information to buy and sell land smarter, so we built a tool with a pretty large engineering and data science crew and it's called Acres. It lives today at acres.co. So acres.co, and we give that away to the market. There's a free version of it that's better than anything out there by perhaps an order of magnitude and it's free, and for us the rationale is pretty simple. Our goal in that five years as a business is we want to become the default platform for land transactions. So right now we help people that are selling land, farmers that want to grow their business and investors that want to invest in land. We see a very wide opportunity with all those groups of folks to be the place people go to transact.

Rick West:

Fantastic. So that's the conversation I want to have in another six months to a year, that's the next podcast for us. But man we are running out of time now, but that's the next podcast. But if folks wanted to have that cup of coffee with you and they really wanted to understand more about AcreTrader, kind of where things are going. How do they get ahold of you, how do they engage? What does that look like?

Carter Malloy:

So we are all over the internet, is the great news. So acretrader.com is our website, there's just a load of information there to learn from. Certainly I'm reachable as is our company on LinkedIn and email us anytime, there's contact information there, etc. But we'd love to hear from you.

Rick West:

That's fantastic. So listen Carter, I love a success story that includes your life partner over here, your wife and your dad. Those things don't happen that often, it's a fantastic story. So good luck to the future, can't wait to talk again soon and thanks for coming on today.

Carter Malloy:

Thank you so much Rick.

Rick West:

Thanks for listening to Push Go podcast highlighting the defining moments that impact how we live and work. It was great to have Carter on the show today. If you like what you heard, you can find more stories just like this on listen.plumshop.com, and hey we wouldn't be mad if you left us review wherever you listen to podcast. Now we have new episodes that drop every Wednesday, and if you're watching on YouTube feel free to like and subscribe. Quick PS, the weekly segment where I give you a brief update on something happening at Plum and if you want to make the 2023 retail season as strong as Michael Jordan's career, we've got your starting lineup on the Plum blog. Execution strategy, omnichannel marketing, data analytics, literally everything you need to dominate your Jordan year. Check it out on blog.plumshop.com and you can use the code Push Go. That's P-U-S-H, G-O to get $100 off any project on Plum.

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