Today we’d like to introduce you to Shaan.
Shaan, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Out of college, I had no coding skills. I started working at a startup that grew really fast from 30 employees to 5000 in the six years I was there.
Was very close with the owners and I could have lived a happy and easy life forever.
Something in me was not happy. I was stagnant!
More than money, I have always wanted the freedom to do my own thing. I have a million interests I want to pursue
Long story short, I quit a $200k/year job to start my startup in healthcare. Joined Techstars and learned a lot from the mentors especially the power of talking about the business before even building the product. This helps to validate your idea before you waste unnecessary time and money!
Six months later, my co-founder who was the tech guy decided to quit on me.
Back to ground zero and here comes the flood of regret of leaving my job + other all accompanying negative emotions of fear, self-doubt, etc.
This was 2015 and I felt the lowest of lows!
This is when my life started pivoting. I got into morning routines, spirituality, discipline, which set the foundation of what was to unfold the next few years.
This also gave me the courage to decide I am not going to give up and started looking at the long game!
Now, I could go back to the corporate or use this as an opportunity to build some important skills – I decided to learn coding!
Of course, joined a coding Bootcamp and started working on a travel app for detail-oriented travel planners.
I hustled out for a year and a half and learned everything in the full stack + more.
Made terrible decisions along the way and also forgot about the lessons from the mentors at Techstars to validate and sell your idea before building it.
The arrogance to think I knew more than the users about their needs led me astray.
I folded finally because I failed in execution. I wanted to build everything for the launch but failed flat.
But every failure is a stepping stone – I learned the importance of feedback loops and building with the users with super fast releases.
Money had run out so I had to join the corporate world again and man, did I hate it!
A year into my first job back, Mckinsey reached out and I decided to give it a shot because I lacked the business and strategy knowledge and I could learn a lot!
After 13 or 14 grueling rounds, I got in. Immediately realized I was different in my attitude around problem-solving and solution-finding. I used the scrappy and lean approaches from the startup and indie hacking days and mixed them with big strategic thinking from the management consulting world to deliver successful outcomes.
Also started forming my own frameworks around critical thinking and problem-solving to move really fast with my decisions.
Meanwhile, met a friend who left his software engineering job and was flying planes, climbing mountains, spending time with the family, and whatnot with a lot of free time on his hands.
And he made his money through real estate investing on the side in around 5 or 6 years.
I got intrigued and the indie hacker started waking up again.
After a year of research, I found the Real Estate space to be archaic and slow and realized there was an opportunity for me to use my coding skills to gain a competitive advantage.
Also, one major insight for me was that unlike startups or some other side projects, the gratification wasn’t delayed. It was instant – What you put in is what you get out especially in terms of financial rewards and that mailbox money is instant motivation to keep going.
Not to mention the power of leverage and equity build-up from the principal paydown
I had saved up some money from my years of corporate gigs, so at the start of 2019, I looked at the census data and some other data sets and created a data product for myself to find submarkets with tremendous growth potential.
This was the first application of that hacker mentality but now armed as well with the skills from those coding years back in 2015.
Then I used my Mckinsey skills to define a strategy using business frameworks like 5C’s, SWOT, Porter’s forces, etc., and also created a risk mitigation framework.
After I found the market, I started looking for specific properties that fit my strategy and goals.
I was spending hours every week analyzing different properties and there was not a single tool I could find that would optimize my workflow so again, I used my indie hacking skills to create a chrome extension, which would scrap the data from the listing and tell me the return based on pre-defined calculations while I am checking out the listing.
That unlocked efficiency by 80%. I was spending 10 hrs a week and with the extension, it was only 2 hrs a week.
Also helped me move really quickly on my offers which sellers loved.
2nd application!
In Sept 2020, I bought 4 duplexes with those tools in place, then bought 20 more units in 2020, while the market was really hard and good deals were almost impossible to come by.
Along the way, I used more coding and integration tools to automate my workflows to spend less and less time in finding deals and turning them over.
In March of 2021, I started realizing the management of the units and tenants was sucking a lot of my time, especially the leasing of the units.
It would take weeks in coordination with prospects and being physically present for every showing.
Products on the market were not solving this unmet need and I had 22 units to manage at this point.
Decided to problem-solve again and use technology and ended up building a self-showing system where I didn’t have to be present for the showings.
System involved using Zapier + Google Sheets + Google Forms + Typeform + Calendly integration + smart lockbox APIs
Now my vacancies get filled in just a few days.
After infusing value at every step of the deal and management cycle through my hacks, I now only spend single-digit hours, and that too only towards acquiring more properties.
I have reached this inflection point on the S curve where I can accelerate exponentially from here on using my current systems to fill more gaps in the traditional mom/pop industry and heck, maybe just blow them out to be real products.
Though, I don’t know if I want to frankly even grow because I am loving every day. If I am making enough for my survival needs plus extra cushion then I just want to be able to have the freedom of time more than anything.
One big realization for me was that if I don’t have to have all the time and money to be able to give back at scale. I can do so with the ecosystem of information sharing we have around us.
So starting October 2021, I started sharing my playbooks at https://rehacks.io/ and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/rehacks_ to help folks who might have similar goals as me.
I wanted to share this story with everyone because I feel like success doesn’t mean one has to build that one thing and make it profitable and then grow it and success does not happen over night.
It’s the innate attitude to tackle everything life throws in front of us and that is what is going to get us to our goals.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about ReHacks?
I was making $0 in rental income in Sept’ 2020 while doing 50 hours in my job with a burning desire to get financially free.
This meant I had to somehow start building the passive income so I jumped in real estate investing.
In ~ 12 months, I acquired 30 properties making $35k per month in recurring revenue using strategy, productivity, and tactical frameworks to disrupt the space. Most of the real estate is your mom-and-pop investors so coming from the startup and management consulting world, I had a competitive advantage.
That’s one revenue stream.
I also started a Real Estate Private Equity firm working with investors to buy more assets.
Also built a chrome tool to analyze single-family homes quickly. Going to soon monetize it. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ostrich/aicgkflmidjkbcenllnnlbnfnmicpmgo
Finally launched a members-only community where I and other highly driven members share disruptive hacks to move fast in real estate investing world.
https://rehacks.io/
What was your favorite childhood memory?
Playing soccer with my friends in the rain for hours!
Contact Info:
Email: hi@rehacks.io
Website: https://rehacks.io
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rehacks_/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rehacks_
