CEO of Homie Johnny Hanna

**Austin Craig** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to episode one of the Techbuzz News Podcast, where we interview founders, investors, individual contributors, and everyone else in the Utah tech and startup scene. I'm your host, Austin Craig, and in this episode, we sat down with Johnny Hanna, CEO of Homie, to talk about the real estate industry in Utah, the founding of Homie, mental fitness at work, and the future of home ownership. Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy the show. Johnny, thanks for joining us.

**Johnny Hanna** (0:24)
Thanks for having me.

**Austin Craig** (0:26)
So, I wanted to discuss a bit about Homie's founding and your entrepreneurial journey. This is not your first rodeo. Tell me a bit about your own background. Was entrepreneurship part of your upbringing?

**Johnny Hanna** (0:39)
Yeah, I don't think I've ever considered myself an entrepreneur. I think things have just kind of happened along the way. I definitely had to find lunch money and come up with little business ideas. Back in the day, I would buy and sell baseball cards and make enough to pay for lunch here and there. So, I would say that may be the beginnings of an entrepreneurial journey, but I believe naturally we're all creators. We all want to build. We all want to keep growing and learning, and I feel like that's just part of who I am.

**Austin Craig** (1:13)
Where are you from?

**Johnny Hanna** (1:14)
I grew up in Pueblo, Colorado, and my dad moved me to Billings, Montana when I was six. My parents split, so I moved back to Colorado, and then just visited my dad every summer in Montana. So I claim both Colorado and Montana.

**Austin Craig** (1:28)
And you went to university?

**Johnny Hanna** (1:30)
I went to BYU-Idaho, Ricks College initially, and I was the last graduating class of Ricks College and the first graduating class of BYU-Idaho.

**Austin Craig** (1:39)
What were you studying?

**Johnny Hanna** (1:41)
I didn't have really a clue what I wanted to do. Initially, it was agriculture. My family comes from a big farming ranching community, and my sister said I could get accepted easier if I would have that as my degree. I wasn't a great student in high school, so I wasn't quite sure I would even get accepted. But yeah, I started out with agriculture, ended up changing to criminal justice. Just saw a lot of movies, thought being an FBI agent would be pretty cool. But switched to general business when I just still wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do.
So I ended up graduating in general business.

**Austin Craig** (2:20)
We're about two minutes into this, and you're already surprising me quite a lot. You didn't consider yourself an entrepreneur, and you studied criminal justice. Now, you're in the technology space disrupting residential real estate. This is not your first play at technology in real estate. Tell me about your prior venture. Where did you go after university?

**Johnny Hanna** (2:40)
Well, I think the criminal justice play is that there's some criminal activity going on within the real estate industry that needs to be changed. So I think that's part of why we started Homie. But yeah, going back a little bit, as soon as I graduated at BYU-Idaho, my senior year, my project was a business plan competition that BYU was putting on, and one of my friends was down here, and it was for property management software. And there was a lot of DOS-based systems out there that managed these big portfolios of apartment communities, of commercial properties, strip malls. And so we thought we could build a web-based platform. So we did a lot of research and found out that these companies were moving from DOS-based to Windows-based instead of going to web-based. So we knew that if we jumped into a web-based platform, we could have a kind of a first mover advantage. And so we wrote a business plan competition. We won the BYU event there, and it won about $50,000. So that helped give us some cash to start the business. We then entered the University of Utah's business plan competition. We entered Fortune Magazine out of New York. They had their first ever MBA showdown as what they called it. And we ended up winning that. And that was for MBAs all around the nation. And because we won BYU's business plan and beat the MBAs, they allowed us to go ahead and enter into that national competition. And we landed on the cover of Fortune Small Business Magazine. And it just kind of continued from there. So we really funded the company. And Trada is what it's called now. It used to be called Property Solutions. And we just grew it off of business plan earnings. So it was kind of fun.