About
Skeptical
by
default
Warm
once
introduced
The manifesto
I’m from a small town in Ohio, and I was gone the day I graduated.
I ran bars through college. I bought one at 25 with money I’d saved, and I lost it, because we had no plan and I didn’t know yet that the boring parts are the business.
I went to work in multifamily. I ran a leasing office and nearly got fired doing it. I ran marketing for nine thousand units and found out the industry runs on whatever it heard at the last conference.
So I stopped taking anyone’s word for it.
Popups, when everyone said they were annoying. Landing pages, when everyone sent traffic to the homepage. A platform of our own, after four years of paying other people to build one.
Every time, I ran it first. Every time, the numbers came back.
I started Repli in 2018 with a year of revenue signed, clean books, and one rule: do it right. Eight years later it runs. Not on me. On people who own their lanes and a product we own outright.
I still don’t believe anything I haven’t run.
I still can’t stop building.
I’m still better once someone introduces me.
Consider
this
the
introduction
The path
The
whole
story
Nine beats, in the order the manifesto tells them. The short version is on the front page.
01
Chillicothe
I grew up in Chillicothe, Ohio, a small town about an hour south of Columbus. I loved it there, and I knew I was leaving the day I graduated. I turned down a couple of baseball scholarships to follow my high school girlfriend to Wright State, which went about how you’d expect. A year later I was in Columbus, at Ohio State, working in a bar.
02
The bars
I wasn’t much of a student. I was a good bartender, which is a different skill and, it turned out, the more useful one. The bar I worked at was the busiest on campus, and by 21 I was helping run it. That turned into opening a new place downtown, then running a few at once. A bar is a business with no room for excuses: the doors open at four, the line is out the door by ten, and everything has to work. It was the first thing I ever ran, and I’m still not sure anything since has taught me more.
03
The Clubhouse
At 25 I opened a bar of my own. I’d saved for it, and I was sure I knew what I was doing, because I’d run other people’s. I didn’t. There was no business plan and no forecast, and looking back it was a failure before it started. I lost it, and it cost me years of debt and a personal bankruptcy in 2016. It really hurt. What I took from it wasn’t be careful. It was do it right.
04
The leasing office
I went to work in multifamily. Cortland, 2015. I ran a 240-home community, and I nearly lost the job in the first six months. I kept it, and I turned it around, and I learned what the first of the month feels like from behind the desk. You don’t forget it.
05
The region
Atlanta, 2016. Regional marketing at Cortland, starting with the Georgia portfolio and ending up supporting nine thousand units across four states. A dozen logins, a spreadsheet for everything, and a lot of advice from people who’d heard it at a conference. That’s where I stopped taking anyone’s word for it and started running things myself. The popups I put on my properties in my last six months there turned out to be the first thing anyone ever paid Repli for.
06
Repli, 2018
I didn’t leave until I had a one-year contract signed, and Cortland kept me on until they’d backfilled my job. Then I did every boring thing the Clubhouse hadn’t: attorneys before customers, real books, taxes filed, people paid on time and with benefits. I didn’t have the product figured out. I had a year of revenue, which meant I could make mistakes without making every decision from the lens of being broke. The product I was sure about, a text and email tool, got one paying customer who never used it. Then a property manager at one of our first accounts told me, kindly, that he didn’t want it. He wanted a website, search and ads. So that’s what we did. Michael Estep joined three months in and has run the business with me ever since.
07
The by-hand years
Websites, search, ads and reporting for operators all over the country, done by the team, by hand, for six years. In 2020 I said out loud that I wished there was a Shopify for multifamily, and we gave the idea a name: MultiHub. Then we spent four years and two contractors trying to have it built for us, and got something almost working.
08
October 2024
Chris Vlessis reached out through the job application form on our website, as a joke. He’d owned a company we’d been a customer of, and he wanted to work together again. He came in to look at MultiHub and wrote the plan to bring engineering inside the building. I flew him to Atlanta. Day one was the plan. Day two I had his press release written, before he’d said yes. He had three conditions, one of them an office in Bend, Oregon, and I said yes to all of them. We built more in the first three months than in the four years before it.
09
Today
Eight years in, it runs. Michael runs the business. Chris runs the product and engineering from Bend. I set the direction, spend my time with customers and inside the product, and when the three of us are in a room I’m usually the one being told no. That’s how it should be.
Consistency
compounds
Founder + CEO
What I believe
Seven
things,
each
with
a
receipt
01
Run it before you believe it.
If nobody ran it, it’s a theory. Popups, landing pages, a product of our own: every one was a bad idea right up until the numbers came back.
02
Own the outcome. Especially the bad one.
My money in the bar. My name on the debt. The failure on this page, in my own words.
03
Do it right or don’t do it.
Attorneys before customers. Books that balance. Taxes filed. People paid on time, with benefits for the whole family. A year of revenue signed before I jumped.
04
Consistency compounds.
Four years of MultiHub going nowhere. Then the right person in the seat, and more built in three months than in four years. Eight years to a company that runs. There is no quick way, and I’m done pretending there is.
05
The detail is the product.
When it comes to product and how things look, I can’t let it ship wrong. I am my own harshest critic and, some days, my own roadblock.
06
Build for the people doing the work.
The on-site team is with residents all day. That is the job. Corporate hands them a list; I’d rather hand them a tool that takes something off it. Same at Repli: our team runs on tools we built, not dashboards we rent.
07
Make your own luck.
Rob Dyrdek said it first. A lot of it is luck. You still have to make it, and you still have to show up every day.
Off the clock
Atlanta. Elizabeth, Ella, Aubrey, Truett, and the dogs. Weekends are outside: a bike, a pool, whatever the kids are into that month. I’m not good at sitting still. I’ve made my peace with that.
Customer summit, Bend
The Repli team, on the road
The company
The company is Repli. The platform is MultiHub. Michael Estep and Chris Vlessis run them with me, and the numbers are on the front page.