Bootstrapping to $50M ARR in Vertical SaaS | Vantaca's HOA Software Playbook

How do you build a vertical SaaS company to ~$50M ARR serving 6M homes — after bootstrapping to $5–10M without outside capital — and then 10x with a minority PE round instead of giving up control? Ben Currin is the CEO of Vantaca, a vertical SaaS platform powering community association management companies. Since launching in 2018, Vantaca has grown to ~500 customers managing 50,000 communities and 6M homes, scaling from low six figures in 2018 to ~$1M in 2019, $5–10M by 2022, and roughly 10x revenue since taking minority investment. This is not a trendy market. HOA management is fragmented, operationally complex, and historically under-served by modern software. Vantaca didn't win with viral PLG or heavy paid acquisition. They went top-down enterprise, priced per door, embedded payments and treasury, and built the general ledger system of record for an entire industry. You'll learn: — How to identify "sneaky big" vertical SaaS markets hiding in unsexy industries. — Why per-door pricing became the north star metric and expansion lever. — How to sell top-down into large management companies instead of bottom-up homeowners. — How Vantaca expanded from pure SaaS into payments, treasury, and vendor monetization. — What capital efficiency looked like in practice during the first five years. — The signal that shifted them from capital efficient to capital constrained. — How to structure a minority PE deal with primary and secondary capital. — Why retaining majority ownership mattered before a potential 5–10x growth phase. — How acquiring a YC-backed AI company accelerated product roadmap and attach rates. — How embedding agentic AI into billing, support, and operations increases platform stickiness. Ben joined Vantaca in 2018 alongside founder Dave Sawyer, who originally built the software inside his own HOA management business. Neither came from venture-backed SaaS. They bootstrapped for five years, reinvested profits, crossed $1M ARR in year two, reached high single-digit millions by 2022, and only then brought in JMI Equity for a minority investment to accelerate growth. A second minority recap followed, preserving control while funding expansion. If you're a founder building in vertical SaaS, considering minority growth capital, or thinking about embedding fintech and AI into your core product, this episode is a masterclass in disciplined scaling inside a niche market. Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckRiL_bFK_w Connect with Ben: https://www.vantaca.com/ Connect with Nathan: FounderPath.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What I saw as an opportunity, these kind of not sexy, vertical software markets that were sneaky big.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  What you bootstrapped in terms of revenue before you took out external capital in 2022?

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Call it high, single-digit millions.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so between 5 and 10 million?

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  If you were doing call it high, single-digit millions in 2022, let's do the worst-case 5 million. And you also said you 10xed since then. That would put you at around 50 million ARR this year. Am I in the right ballpark there?

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  How many customers are paying for the platform today?

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Right around 500 professional community association management companies. That has within it 50,000 communities in over 6 million homes.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Hey, folks. My guest today is Ben Kirin. His focus has been to build a successful company with a thriving culture that improves lives of businesses. Avantica's customers, if you haven't heard of Avantica before, they're really building software focused on HOAs, really hard market to sell into. We're going to jump into it today. Ben, you ready to take us to the top?

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  All right. So give us context first. JMI is involved in this business. It's a private equity play. Are you the original founder or you were placed in by PE?

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Neither of those things, which is fun. So I joined the team. My business partner's Dave Sawyer, who's the original founder of the business. I joined Dave and a couple of the founding kind of team members who were working in a services business that Dave owned. And kind of this is one of those stories of a vertical SaaS software company that was built out of the industry. So he owned a community association management company, I think HOA management company, started to work together with some folks in his team to build software for that company. They became the first kind of beta customer. And I joined kind of the next day, if you will. But there's lots of hard work and blood, sweat and tears that I did not participate in that first year of kind of beta testing and all

• 1:46Speaker 00

  that stuff. But I joined Dave and kind of the founding team right at the beginning.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  And what year was that?

• 1:52Speaker 00

  That was 20, late 2017, early 2018.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  And what's the archetype there? Were you like the engineering lead and he was the industry guy? Or what was the relationship?

• 2:01Speaker 00

  No, so they definitely the engineering guy, or sorry, the industry guy. And both of us are engineers, but not software engineers. So he's an electrical engineer by background. I'm a nuclear engineer by background. He spent years and years and years, a couple of decades in community association management, partnered with a couple of folks who had built SaaS applications in this space before and kind of wrote the initial code. I came in and grew the team, grew the strategy in the industry. So kind of a couple of technical, non-technical partners, I guess you could call us.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Wait, Ben, you have to connect these dots. How does a nuclear engineer end up running a HOA software company?

• 2:38Speaker 00

  It's a great question. I guess there's, there's no, I don't think there is any normal path to running an HOA software company because no one goes to school to, to kind of work in community association management or HOA management as it is. But my, my path, I was, I went to the United States Naval Academy for my undergrad education and ended up as a nuclear engineer and a submarine officer in the Navy. So spent time traveling all over the world, having big adventures, kind of doing that. That was really important to me to, to serve our country and to do something like that. And also to have a big adventure, kind of in my twenties, which, which I am glad and grateful to have done. But I, I always had kind of an entrepreneurial itch and knew I wanted to build something

• 3:22Speaker 00

  and loved technology, loved to tinker. I, you know, liked to build little projects and do different things. And what, what I saw as an opportunity, not HOA, I didn't know anything about the HOA market, but, but these kind of not sexy, vertical software, kind of markets that, that were sneaky big, either had a payments component or a financial services component or had a big ecosystem around it. Started looking at things in pest control and otherwise. And just through kind of networking and talking to people working in these industries, someone actually introduced Dave Sawyer, who was working of all things on an HOA management software platform for his HOA management company to me and said, you guys should get together, you're talking about all the same things. I don't know what this HOA market is, but let's get after it.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Interesting, interesting. This makes tons of sense. Okay, so he was in the industry running a management company, had so much pain, he started building his own code, got connected with you. You guys hit the ground running really hard in 2018. I want to fill in the story between 2018 and 2025, but I also don't want to lose the audience if they're going, "What the heck is an HOA?" Maybe they're a millennial, they're going, "I've never lived in a neighborhood before." Tell us what you sell here while I'm on your website. What's the product?

• 4:32Speaker 00

  So, we call the industry "Community Association Management" because it's more than just HOAs. But what the heck is an HOA? An HOA is a homeowner association. Even if you haven't lived in one, you've probably heard of a homeowner association or HOA or some kind of meme about it. These are typically neighborhoods or communities that have some sort of common area property. Think clubhouses, amenities, golf courses, restaurants, pickleball courts, just nice landscaped grass, anything like that. But it also encompasses condominium buildings. So if you live, if you buy a condo, there is a shared, common piece of real estate. It's the elevator, the lobby, the roof, the things like that.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  And there's a structure, a little kind of, almost like a little city, that has a little constitution that are the covenants that kind of manage how you have to live in those communities. You can not do certain things, like not paint your house pink, which preserves property values, but you also get benefits, like the use of these amenities and common area assets. So there's a whole industry of specialty property management that really focuses on serving just these community associations, serving owned real estate instead of things like multifamily rental. And those are our customers, those professional community association management companies.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  Interesting. And how many customers are paying for the platform today?

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Right around 500 professional community association management companies. That has within it 50,000 communities and over 6 million homes.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Interesting, interesting. You just sort of broke it down. And sorry, 50, sorry, 500 logos,

• 6:09Speaker 00

  500.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  50K communities and then 5 million homes?

• 6:13Speaker 00

  6 million homes.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  6 million homes, really? And, okay, so where are you selling into? Are you bottoms up selling to one homeowner, then you spread? Or you're top down selling to the logo?

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely top down. And we even started kind of far up market, large management companies. And we've gone kind of further and further kind of across that segment as we go. So our first customers had, you know, 50,000 plus doors or homes that they would manage at a time. But we sell to the community association management company. Those folks, we become the general ledger system of record for them and for all the communities that they manage, as well as the system of work for all the work that gets done within that community, coordinating with vendors, collecting dues, paying invoices, reporting, as well as the system of engagement for them to provide a technology kind of front door for all of the homeowners and residents in the communities that they manage.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Most smart software founders upsell against utility metric. Usually it's maybe number of seats. In your case, you could upsell, I'm curious what you upsell against? Number of homes, number of communities, number of pickleball courts that are moving around? What's the thing you upsell against?

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's kind of the ultimate North Star metric is number of doors. I mean, we care a lot about the number of, you know, primary users. Early on, we thought about that a lot. The number of professionals working in Vantaca every day as community association managers. But ultimately, that North Star metric is the number of doors that are engaging with their communities through Vantaca as the front door.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Okay, and that would be your 6 million homes?

• 7:34Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Interesting. Industry standards in this space are like between 50 cents and a dollar 50 a door. Are you sort of in that range?

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's like, that's ballpark the right, the right range to think about for SaaS. Obviously, this can really change depending on, are you managing, uh, single-family, low amenity HOAs in Lincoln, Nebraska? Where there are, it's very light what your HOA does for you as a homeowner? Or are you in South Florida with a highly amenitized condo building? Where you've got valets and onsite staff and restaurants and, you know, other amenities? Obviously, those, those dynamics change kind of sector by sector in the dynamics of the management company, as well as the range of products that you consume. Are you using other financial services products like payments? We now have Agentic AI kind of throughout the platform. That's really changed how our customers engage with us. But that's kind of the right banner way to think about the metrics.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at FounderPath.com, if you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at FounderPath.com. And when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube. And I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out FounderPath.com. I'm reading your body language and listening very carefully to how you're structuring your sentences and words. And what it's telling me is I think you're potentially beating $1.50 a door because you're doing some really creative things and adding value in other ways. Is my read right there?

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's generally right. Again, you're talking about price per month, per door. We have some of our products that are priced like that and others that are more consumption based and things like that.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Can we dig a bit deeper here on other business models? You already talked earlier, like, why just do SaaS? If you're already ingrained and a guy from the space like Dave knows the space well and you guys built this great code, why not do payments? Why not do loans to community centers? Why not do whatever? How are you thinking about sort of what spaces to go into now that you have a beachhead? A mousetrap's already in these 500 community manager relationships?

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great question. And so, to be clear, we started with just a SaaS solution. We started with that beachhead. That was the pure kind of single product for multiple years. Over time, it's really expanded. Everything from payments, we have a payments platform and a payments product that is used across our customer base. That's both inbound payments from homeowners to their HOAs, as well as outbound from HOAs to vendors. We provide a number of different treasury services for community association banks to connect them to the deposits that they are linked to through those associations, which is significant. It's a place where a lot of relatively low-cost deposits are kind of aggregated by community

• 10:24Speaker 00

  association banks, as well as other products around kind of the vendor management ecosystem that our folks doing work in these HOAs, whether that's landscapers, or electricians, or insurance companies, etc. So we've, over time, really stretched into a lot of the different components of this ecosystem. But to your point, the beachhead and the first and most important vital product for us has and will always be that SaaS product that is the general ledger system of record.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Okay, and that still today makes it more than, call it, 60% of your total annual revenue?

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Interesting. Okay. On the payments product, is that just a nice value add you do for free? Or do you sort of take a traditional 2% to 3% take rate on GMV going through the platform?

• 11:03Speaker 00

  No, it's less than that. I mean, it's certainly less than 2% to 3%, but we also, it is, I'd say it's a value add for our customers, but it's also a way for them to strip out a lot of the friction between them and their customers. If you think about living in an HOA, like, do you mail a check to your clubhouse every month? Do you drop it off? Or can you set recurring payments? Something like that that sounds so simple, but that's what we're walking into often in the way these HOA management companies have to manage things like their payments processes. So we're stripping out a lot of the friction as much as we can.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Interesting. Interesting business model, interesting use case, very specific niche, which we love. Tell me more about the private equity story. Again, you get going in 2018, you guys scaled 2019. When did you bootstrap up to? Like, when did you raise your first external capital?

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we didn't raise any real external capital until 2022. So it was the summer of 2022, which was great. I mean, that kind of run. And really, 2018, we had had a couple of paying customers. Late 2017 is where like, kind of, we got those first folks. 2018, first year in market. So we had had about five years of survival under our belt in terms of bootstrapping the business along. And growth was really good. It wasn't, this is, has never been a highly capital-intensive business, but we saw an opportunity in 2022 that we really had gone from just capital efficient to capital constrained and knew we wanted to invest more in product, knew we wanted to invest more in engineering, and really take a big swing

• 12:36Speaker 00

  at this industry. And so we partnered with JMI Equity in a minority investment in 2022, which was great. They've been fantastic partners to us. We've grown the business more than 10x since then. So that's been a great kind of growth story since 2022.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Based off homes or revenue?

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Revenue. And home's not far off either, but certainly revenue. And then, and then this past year, in terms of funding, we did a minority recap, brought in another minority investor in Cove Hill, Cove Hill Partners, that was fantastic. We closed that investment and announced it this fall, which again has just further added fuel to the fire for us and allows us to keep taking a big swing at this industry.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Let me try and unpack a little bit of that in case someone else is listening and they're your version of 2018, thinking, man, maybe in three or four years, I want to go this sort of minority route. 2018, 2017, you had a couple of customers. Are you comfortable sharing sort of first year where you two are working together, 2018? What was total revenue that year?

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, very little. Think 2018 and the low hundred thousands of revenue.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Okay. And then do you remember the year you passed your first million?

• 13:48Speaker 00

  It would have been the following year.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Okay, that's pretty good growth.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  It happened relatively quickly and I think you gave, you're giving us or me a little too much credit that we had this plan to bootstrap it along and then do a minority round. We didn't, neither Dave nor myself are in kind of the VC or PE kind of world from our background. So we didn't know what we didn't know. We just knew that we saw an industry, we saw a problem set, we knew this could be a really big opportunity. We knew if we just continued to do the work, we would be able to find these opportunities as they presented themselves. And so we really, we really didn't have that perfect plan to do that. It ended up being the right thing to do, but we just continued to try to reinvest everything

• 14:34Speaker 00

  that the business could give us back into the business and go find our potential for growth and go find more customers. And we were lucky enough to develop a really outstanding reputation very quickly in the industry because we won some large influential and very successful customers who were able to post extremely great results on their side by using our software and we were able to continue to kind of reinvest in the business that way.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  That's obviously a great story. Did, were most of those earlier customers, the reason you could close those enterprise accounts early on was because Dave came from the industry? So he had connections there? Or was it you cold calling, knocking on doors, hustling?

• 15:09Speaker 00

  I'd say it's all of, all of those things. You know, it's not, it's not just one thing. I think we, we did have some really good connections in the industry, but that, that certainly wasn't it. We were quickly selling to strangers. But what we were able to do is really show the results of our early customers, even Dave's management company, who is experiencing tremendous growth by utilizing a much newer and best-in-class technology platform. And really do kind of show and tell with all of our customers, who, really all of our early customers were willing to be great advocates for us and open their kind of doors and, and show new prospective customers the success that they were having. And so our customer success is really what fueled us.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  And then before we get into the external capital story, I want to give you guys like complete credit for what you bootstrapped to. Are you comfortable sharing what you bootstrapped to in terms of revenue before you took out external capital in 2022?

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Call it high, single-digit millions.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so between five and 10 million?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Okay, very cool. So at that point, you said you knew you were capital constrained at that point. Why? Did you know you could spend money on ads and you didn't have profits through that? Or you wanted to go buy a company? Like what made you guys look at each other one morning and go, man, we, we are capital constrained?

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I don't think it was a single thing. What, what we found is that we were able to consistently, as we reinvest more in the business, continue to, you know, open up the constraints of our capacity. Things like onboarding and implementation, things like delivering on a product roadmap that would continue to open up new markets, things like just continuing to invest ahead of sales and marketing to open up capacity. We had really, really light sales and marketing investment for the first several years of the business. And so all of those things together, we just realized every additional dollar we were able to put in the business, you know, five or 10 more dollars come out within a pretty short period of time. But it's just, what is that time delay? And how much, you know, can we short circuit that time delay? And so all of those things together

• 17:02Speaker 00

  kind of had us look at each other and say, hey, this is the moment where we know this is working. We have the playbook. Now we need to scale and it's worth investing ahead.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  And then can we fast forward to today and then I want to wrap up with your take on AI and product roadmap you guys have for next year. But if you were doing high single-digit millions in 2022, let's do the worst case, 5 million. And you also said you 10xed since then. That would put you at around 50 million ARR this year. Am I in the right ballpark there?

• 17:27Speaker 00

  I won't give you an exact number, but you're not orders of magnitude off.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Okay, fair. I mean, I'm just using your, to be fair, I'm just using your numbers. You said 10x since 2022 and you said 2022 was high single digits, so. Okay, fair enough. So, take me through the minority sort of negotiation there. For somebody else listening, negotiating their own minority, I mean, why did you guys do minority instead of majority? How did you decide on the amount of capital? Was it all primary capital or was some of it secondary? How'd you think about that?

• 17:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, great, great question. So, it was a mix of primary and secondary capital. We had some folks, we were solving for two things. Primarily, we were solving for cash into business, right? So, starting from that chunk and saying, okay, we know we want to capitalize the business, put some, what can we forecast over the next three or four years on kind of an aggressive front, which was still relatively, relatively capital efficient at the time. And, and then also, we had a couple of folks who had been working in the business for several years at that point, who really had, the business had grown and exceeded their expectations. We wanted to provide some liquidity to some early kind of members of the company, which we were able to do, and that was great. And so, that's kind of, you know, what, like, how we thought about the mix. In terms of why minority versus majority, I mean, it was

• 18:37Speaker 00

  clear to us that that was a checkpoint that would accelerate growth. You know, I don't know if we perfectly saw over the next, you know, three or four years, 10x, you know, over that period of time, but we saw that as a possibility. We saw a minimum of 5 plus x. So, why would we want to sell more of the business at the time than we had to? And so, that's been great. And really, we approached this most recent investment similarly. We want to capitalize the business first, provide some liquidity to some earlier investors. You know, we did a friends and family round right alongside JMI, really small dollars, but truly friends and family, return some capital to them, amazing. But, and then, you know, retain majority, you know, control and kind of the ownership of the business to go and to take a big swing at this.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  So, is JMI and early family still on the cap table? Or is that why Cobill came in? They took out JMI and early family?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  JMI rolled, is still on the cap table, as is, as is most of the friends and family. We just provided some liquidity to those parties.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Very cool. All right, as we wrap up here, we got to talk about like AI briefly, right? How are you think you're deep into it? You see a lot of data, you're touched, connected to a lot of doors. How are you thinking about like AI in your product roadmap on a go-forward basis?

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great question. It's been the single biggest, biggest game changer for us, certainly in the last two or three years. So we've, we've been building internally with, with AI for several years and putting products in front of our customers as well. And then kind of the, the big bang moment for us was late 2024. We acquired a, a small kind of business, really almost acquihired a couple of, of really talented partners out of Y Combinator, a company called HOAI that joined Vantaca. We still operate that, that product as an independent product brand, but within Vantaca, closed that kind of late

• 20:25Speaker 00

  2024 and very quickly has become a really meaningful part of our business. Almost all of our new logos onboard both Vantaca and HOAI together. And what HOAI is, is really an agent that lives within the Vantaca instance that relentlessly pursues all the tasks that humans would have otherwise used Vantaca to do. So executing customer billings, answering homeowner questions about bills, paying invoices, creating reports, solving complex problems. It's quickly grown to touch really every bit of Vantaca and every bit of the homeowner experience. We have an HOAI voice agent that replaces or supplements a call center for management companies to answer homeowner calls and solve billing questions and create

• 21:10Speaker 00

  follow-ups all through kind of our customer base. So that's been really transformational in terms of how we engage with our customers.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Well, Dave, if people want to want to, if people, sorry, Ben, if people want to watch you got you and Dave execute this strategy over the next 12 months or so, where's the best place they can follow you guys online?

• 21:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so, so that's a, that's a good question. Our marketing team would hate my answer. I'm not wildly active. Neither are, neither is Dave, neither is how you, the, the founder of HOAI, who, who is now my partner. But, but Vantaca is. So I would like, the Vantaca website's good. We have multiple channels. You know, there's a Vantaca podcast, Guilty by Association, you know, to play on association management. There's tons of good stuff out there. So I'd keep up with that. And certainly if we're, if you're within our industry, you'll, you'll see us in all those channels.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Guys, Ben's partner Dave had an HWA management company in 2017. He said, "I gotta fix all the inefficiencies. Let me build software." Ben said, "Let me join you in 2018." They hit the ground running, break about 300,000 bucks of revenue in 2018. Way more than double in 2019, up to about a million bucks of revenue. Hit call it 5 to 10 million of revenue in 2022. Totally bootshot. Before they go, let's pour fuel on this fire. And they did with a minority investment from JNI, an aqua hire of a YC company in 2024. Now investing in growth. Call it north of 40, 50 million bucks of AR, somewhere in that range, right? But 500 community managers, 50,000 communities, 6 million homes, helping these communities run more efficiently with both software products, payment products, project management products. You name it, they're vertically integrated. Ben, thanks for taking us to the top.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Thanks, Nathan. Appreciate it.

• 22:42Speaker 01

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