How a Solo Founder Built SaaS Selling to Commercial Landlords

**Fexingo** (0:01)
So we've spent a lot of episodes looking at founders selling to small businesses, bakeries, yoga studios, home inspectors. But there's one vertical that's enormous, deeply analog, and almost completely ignored by software companies.
Commercial landlords who own small retail strips. Think the person who owns 5-20 storefronts in a suburban shopping center.

**Luna** (0:24)
Right? Not the big institutional players with REITs and dedicated property managers. The mom and pop landlord with a dozen tenants.

**Fexingo** (0:33)
Exactly. And that's exactly where this week's founder, Jenna Tran, built her SaaS.
She launched a product called Lease Loop, handles rent collection, maintenance tickets, lease renewals, even triple net expense tracking. She's completely bootstrapped, solo, and hit $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue 18 months in.

**Luna** (0:57)
That's impressive. What made her pick commercial over residential?
I feel like residential landlord software is pretty crowded, cozy, a veil. TurboTenant.

**Fexingo** (1:08)
Jenna actually started with a generic property management tool aimed at residential landlords, and she almost immediately hit a wall. There are dozens of decent options for residential, many of them free or freemium, but commercial is different.
The workflows are fundamentally different, triple net leases, CAM, common area maintenance, reconciliation, percentage rent clauses.
No residential tool handles that.

**Luna** (1:35)
And the competitors are either enterprise beasts like Yardi and AppFolio, which cost thousands a month or spreadsheets.

**Fexingo** (1:43)
Exactly. She saw a gap in the middle.
Landlords with 5 to 20 units are too small for Yardi. They can't justify $500 a month per property. But they're also too big to manage everything on sticky notes. So she built Lease Loop at $99 a month, flat fee, unlimited units.

**Luna** (2:04)
That's a pretty aggressive price. How does she make money on larger portfolios if it's flat?

**Fexingo** (2:10)
She told me the average customer has about 12 units, so the math works. Her gross margin is around 80% because it's a standard SaaS stack, AWS, Stripe, SendGrid.
Her biggest cost is actually customer acquisition, which she solved in a pretty clever way.

**Luna** (2:29)
What did she do? Cold email? Facebook ads?

**Fexingo** (2:33)
Neither. She went to local commercial real estate meetups.
Not the big investor conferences, just the monthly breakfasts hosted by the local realtor association in her city, Columbus, Ohio. She'd bring a laptop and offer to do a free 30-minute audit of how the landlord was currently tracking leases.

**Luna** (2:53)
And that worked because she was solving an actual pain point live in person.

**Fexingo** (2:57)
Right. She'd find a landlord using a mess of spreadsheets and sticky notes, show them how Lease Loop could automate CAM reconciliation in one click, and usually close them on the spot.
Her demo to trial conversion was something like 40 percent. And because those meetups are small, maybe 20 people, she could build real relationships.

**Luna** (3:19)
That's a slow but very defensible acquisition channel. No one else is doing that for commercial landlords.

**Fexingo** (3:26)
And it's a network effect too.
Once she had a few landlords in a city, they started referring each other. Today, she has customers in 37 states, all from word of mouth and those meetups. She's never spent a dollar on ads.

**Luna** (3:42)
Let's talk about the product itself. What are the killer features that made Landlord Switch?

**Fexingo** (3:48)
The biggest one is CAM reconciliation. If you're a commercial landlord, you charge tenants a share of common area costs.
Snow removal, landscaping, parking lot maintenance. At the end of the year, you have to calculate each tenant's share based on their square footage, then send them a bill or a refund. Doing that by hand for 10 tenants is a nightmare.

**Luna** (4:12)
And if you mess it up, tenants get angry. I've heard stories of small landlords losing tenants over bad CEM calculations.

**Fexingo** (4:21)
Exactly. Lease loop automates that whole process. You enter the invoices, it splits them by the lease terms, generates the bills and tracks payments.
Jenna told me that one landlord saved about 15 hours per year per property on CEM alone. That's huge for someone managing 10 properties.

**Luna** (4:41)
What about rent collection? Is that built-in?

**Fexingo** (4:44)
Yeah, it handles ACH and credit card payments, with automatic late fees and reminders. But she said the really sticky feature is lease renewal workflows. Commercial leases are typically three to five years, so the renewal timing is critical. If you forget to negotiate a renewal six months out, you might end up with a vacancy.
Lease loop sends alerts and even generates the renewal document with updated terms based on CPI adjustments. Which is common in commercial leases.

**Luna** (5:15)
So, it's not just a billing tool, it's a relationship management system for commercial tenancy.