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Show Summary
In this episode of the Real Estate Pros podcast, host Michelle Kesil interviews Alex Shartsis, the creator of Skyp Platform, which leverages AI to enhance email outreach and sales processes. Alex discusses the challenges of email outreach in today’s digital landscape, the unique functionalities of Skyp, and its applications in real estate and other industries. He emphasizes the importance of personalization in communication and the potential of AI to improve productivity without replacing the human element in sales. The conversation also touches on Skyp’s global reach and growth strategy, as well as the diverse range of users benefiting from the platform.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Alex Shartsis (00:00)
⁓ We threw an event together and there are 450 people signed up for it. Afterwards, they used Skyp to send an email to those people and they had a meeting booked within two hours of sending those emails.Are you going to take the time to send 450 emails and follow up three times? So what is that? Can I do the math? 13, 1400 emails. Like nobody’s going to write that many emails. But with Skyp, can just, you know, you can upload your list. You can say, Hey, this was an event. I want to reach out to these people and see if they’re interested in office space. ⁓ and that’s it. Right. And then it just doesn’t work for you. So, ⁓ you know, we, we do both, I guess, is the answer. Like you can really set it and forget it, or you can give it a bunch of thought. But, ⁓
The idea is you’re going to do a lot more follow up. if you’re, if you’re using it for follow up, you’re to do just a lot more thorough of a job and a better job than you would if you tried to do it by hand. And I mean, I hate to admit this, but like it’s emails are better. I’ve been doing sales for 20 years. It writes better emails than I do at this point. Like it’s, it’s kind of sad, but it’s like, I like, I’ll go in and like, you know, go look at the campaign and try and make it better. And it’s like, no, this is, this is perfect. Like I’m good. I’m going to go, go back to doing something else now.
Michelle Kesil (02:40)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Alex Shartsis who created Skyp Platform, helping people work on email outreach with the support of AI. So, excited to have you here today, Alex.Alex Shartsis (03:01)
Thanks for having me. Super excited to be here.Michelle Kesil (03:02)
Yeah, of course. So for those not familiar with you and your work, can you share what your main focus is?Alex Shartsis (03:08)
Yeah. So, so my main focus has always been sales and business development. ⁓ So I did spend a little bit of time in corporate development at Opendoor, buying a bunch of companies, not houses, but companies in that case. Although Opendoor bought quite a few houses while I was there as well. But my, my current focus is a company called Skyp, where we’re applying AI to sales motion. So for those of you who are still, you know, still looking for clients or still prospecting for places to buy, it might be an interesting thing.Talk about.
Michelle Kesil (03:38)
Yeah, definitely. Can you expand on how the software works and what it looks like for people?Alex Shartsis (03:42)
Yeah. So, sowhat I’ve been working with startups and, and, and sales teams for the last 25 years. And over the last five years, I’ve seen a real shift where it’s gotten a lot harder to do outreach. And so it’s just harder to get your emails delivered. At first, it was hard to write a good email and people would struggle with, you know, just talking about themselves and not actually talking about what the customer wanted. Today, it’s just hard to get in the inbox. Google and Microsoft have made it really hard.
⁓ to get in the inbox and then on top of that, there’s a lot of AI slop as we call it ⁓ that everybody ignores. And so if you don’t write a really good email or use really good personalization, you’re not going to get a response. And so I’m sure if you’re on the agent side, you probably experience this. If you’re on the investor side, you probably experience it too, because people, you’re getting all these emails, people selling you stuff that you’re not interested in. And so what Skyp does is we’ve applied AI in a unique way.
to do really, really good personalization and write really good emails. But we do it in what we call micro campaigns. So we’re not trying to email like every multifamily in the country, right? We’re trying to email. We try and set it up so you’re doing a very targeted outreach. And when you put some thought into who you reach out to, it’s more effective just because you’ve given it some thought, right? You know, you’re talking about Kansas City. You’re not talking about every multifamily that’s four units or more, right? It’s a more.
It’s just resonates more with who you’re reaching out to. so we started pretty recently. It’s been about a year, almost coming up on a year here. But it’s a lot of fun because we get to work with salespeople all over the place doing a lot of different interesting things. And one of the things that’s really exciting about this time is all the different ways that AI is touching on sales and touching on real estate for that matter as well. But you can just do so much more, so much more quickly these days with AI.
Michelle Kesil (05:29)
Yeah, definitely. So the main tool would be like the outreach and the personalization. Does it kind of just have an automated flow for that?Alex Shartsis (06:26)
Yeah, so there are a couple different ways to use it. We really believe in humans still. So we’re maybe the odd AI company that thinks that humans still be a little bit involved. And so our, our take is a little different. anybody who works with us can either use it on their own. And in that case, there’s a flow, like you said, that can be totally automated. Most people work on a cadence. So they’re like, I have an idea. I want to reach out to, I don’t know, biotechs in South San Francisco to see if they need office space or something like that. Right. And so they’llThey’ll set it up, they’ll do the research, they’ll upload the leads and then they’ll run the campaign. And that campaign might go for a month or a couple of months, but it’s more like a set up and then let it go thing. Other people will set it up and say, hey, want any biotech that raises money, I want to reach out to their CEO. And that’ll just run. They don’t have to come back and look at it. It’ll constantly mine the data, find those people and then launch it. ⁓
I think the other thing that’s been really interesting to see is the pre and post event follow-up. We have a commercial real estate partner that we work with.
⁓ We threw an event together and there are 450 people signed up for it. Afterwards, they used Skyp to send an email to those people and they had a meeting booked within two hours of sending those emails.
Are you going to take the time to send 450 emails and follow up three times? So what is that? Can I do the math? 13, 1400 emails. Like nobody’s going to write that many emails. But with Skyp, can just, you know, you can upload your list. You can say, Hey, this was an event. I want to reach out to these people and see if they’re interested in office space. ⁓ and that’s it. Right. And then it just doesn’t work for you. So, ⁓ you know, we, we do both, I guess, is the answer. Like you can really set it and forget it, or you can give it a bunch of thought. But, ⁓
The idea is you’re going to do a lot more follow up. if you’re, if you’re using it for follow up, you’re to do just a lot more thorough of a job and a better job than you would if you tried to do it by hand. And I mean, I hate to admit this, but like it’s emails are better. I’ve been doing sales for 20 years. It writes better emails than I do at this point. Like it’s, it’s kind of sad, but it’s like, I like, I’ll go in and like, you know, go look at the campaign and try and make it better. And it’s like, no, this is, this is perfect. Like I’m good. I’m going to go, go back to doing something else now.
Michelle Kesil (08:43)
Yeah, that’s awesome that it’s able to have that such high level of success and yeah, content. Yeah, so how do like real estate professionals use this?Alex Shartsis (08:55)
Well,so, I mean, it’s interesting. We talked in the pre-show brief about your audience being mostly investors. so, I mean, I think there’s a whole conversation around what is AI doing to real estate and real estate investing that’s kind of aside from focusing on what Skyp does. I think Skyp’s use case is really for the agents and the people that are still in sales in the program, listening to the program, because it can really just dramatically improve your
your productivity, right? And I’m sure people, I would hope people are using some other tools. We’ve talked to them about at least Bay Area real estate brokerages, and they still use some legacy tools. They’re still using their CRM to send emails. If you’re doing that, you’re not doing yourself a service. Those tools don’t get delivered. Like people are not seeing your emails. They’ll see your listings. They’ll see your, you know, your weekly like, here’s the new listings that we’ve got. That email will probably get through. But any one-to-one sequence is not reaching most of your
targets. And so, ⁓ you know, for those people that are still in a sales mode, I think it’s great. think if you’re, ⁓ what gets interesting is if you’re a real estate professional, ⁓ I mean, if you’re raising a fund, people do use it to reach out to investors. So if you have LPs, and you are doing a fundraise, and you’ve grown to the point where your friends and family aren’t enough to fill your fund, and you need to go reach out to some family offices and other organizations, then it’s a really effective tool because
⁓ What it does is it writes every email uniquely. So there’s no template. Every email is different. And so ⁓ if, you know, in some case, two people at the same family office compared the emails I got from you, they would be different. And then they can be highly personalized, right? Like not every family office is very unique. And so if you’re able to reach out to each of those offices with a very unique value prop that really speaks to what their purpose is, et cetera, it’s going to be more effective. And so
⁓ So that’s, know, I think the other thing, I don’t see as much of, I think we had somebody do it on the platform, but I can’t remember if they’re still doing it is, you know, it’s reaching out to perspective ⁓ properties to acquire. ⁓ think with AI, like you could go get a data set that is owners of buildings, enrich that with, you know, their emails and go reach out to them. If you were like, Hey, I really want this kind of property in the city.
I’m not seeing it on the market. want to go prospect and find somebody who’s willing to sell. That doesn’t really happen as much, at least not in commercial real estate. Maybe it happens a little bit in residential real estate. But the use case is really more on that sales side.
Michelle Kesil (11:30)
Yeah, that makes sense. And so how are you, like are you looking to like scale this? Is this something that’s nationwide? What’s kind of like the plan for it?Alex Shartsis (12:13)
Yeah, I mean, it’s for better or for worse, it’s global. We have companies from Australia to the UK, ⁓ US, Canada, mostly English speaking at this point, although we’ve had people in Europe use it. You can tell it to read in a different language if you want it to write in Spanish or emails will be in Spanish. But so we’re global. You know, we’re always growing. I think that’s kind of the name of the game. Just like your real estate portfolio, you’re trying to lever up and grow it more. ⁓ You know, for us,We want the right customers. We want people who ⁓ are really good fit for the software, who get AI, who aren’t trying to do, they’re not trying to send the same email a thousand times the way they would have in a legacy tool. They understand the power of personalization. For us, it’s ⁓ about growth, but it’s about smart growth. ⁓ Then we are a couple of people who have founded several companies. Our goal with this was essentially to
you know, what’s called bootstrap it right where we’re not going to go raise venture capital. There are a bunch of companies in our space that have raised, you know, tens of tens, not hundreds of millions of venture capital. But, you know, our view is it’s such a valuable tool. We’re already generating plenty of revenue. You know, can we, can we do this without raising and just have, you know, just spend all of our time with customers. And so, so I’m doing the podcast circuit because we just want to find more people to work with, um, find out what, you know, what their challenges are.
⁓ And I mean, at the end, I you’ll share contact info, but I’d love to hear what are the challenges that your listeners have that AI might solve or that, hey, it’s not sales, it’s this other thing. It’s tenant communications or it’s something completely else. we’re entrepreneurs just trying to find those problems. And so that’s what our goals are right now.
Michelle Kesil (13:55)
Awesome, so it sounds like you’re open to expanding some different solutions based off of people’s needs.Alex Shartsis (14:02)
Absolutely.Michelle Kesil (14:02)
Awesome. And so what are some of the opportunities that you’re excited about in anything that you’re creating or envisioning for your projects?Alex Shartsis (14:13)
That’s really good question. mean, so there are two things that kind of don’t go together, but I think they maybe do. I think one is I’m really excited about what AI does to productivity. I mean, we’re recording this in an app that has a bunch of AI that’ll clean it up and take out the likes and the ums that my dad has been harassing me for for 30 or 40 years.It’s just, makes you so much more productive. Before that would have been send it to a producer, wait a couple of days, pay him hundreds of dollars or her hundreds of dollars. Right. It’s, it’s, it’s really interesting. I think, so I’m excited for that, for just the higher productivity. I think it makes it, if you’re a real estate investor, you can manage a smaller portfolio and not pay your accountants as much and not, it just reduces the friction, right. Things that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even just like the tenant, you know, the tenant agreements, your
your leases, your real estate ⁓ agreements. I have a good friend who’s a real estate lawyer who’s a very well-known, well-respected real estate lawyer, and I’m worried because if you’re doing leases for franchises, why wouldn’t you do that with AI if that franchise has 1,000 other franchises? Why do we need to pay lawyers 10 or 20 grand to do a lease? I’m excited about the productivity aspects of AI. think the other thing I’m excited about is the human side.
where it enables you to get so much more done. And I think a lot of people look at AI and look at tools like Skyp in particular as a way to get rid of people. And I think the real estate industry is an example of how, of an issue where it’s extremely people driven and you know, your commercial real estate broker isn’t going to get rid of himself, right? Or your, you know, your, your residential real estate broker, a big part of the value they add is that human connection and being part of the community and you know, having the relationships and knowing what’s going on.
Right. And AI just enhances that. And so the thing that I’m excited about and how we, what we did with Skyp was really focused on making those people much more productive, give them that productivity, not just, not just like get rid of them and take it over, but make them much better at what they do, make it take much less time, enable them to go do the things that, you know, that are also important, right? Whether that’s negotiating a lease face to face, whether that’s going to the kids soccer game and meeting more local parents, whatever that is.
know, Skyp frees you up to do that. And ⁓ I think that that’s, that’s what I’m excited about is this, is this combination of much more efficiency, but like giving humans more time to be human.
Michelle Kesil (17:19)
Yeah, amazing. I think that’s important because AI is so versatile, so it’s nice that it’s able to have that distinct offering of taking that time off of people’s hands.Awesome. And so what other type of people would you say that this serves? Is it kind of like for anyone in a typical like marketing or service based industry?
Alex Shartsis (17:47)
It’s a good question. Actually, this is the question that I’m personally wrestling with because we, I’d like to, what we call niche down and like really focus on the people that get the most value out of it. We have a lot of people getting value out of it. So it’s hard to, it’s hard to say no to some people and focus on others. We have, I mean, it really runs a spectrum, everything from, from healthcare sales teams, you know, people selling stuff into doctor’s offices all the way through to commercial real estate agents, residential real estate agents.A software sales team selling into enterprise, software sales team selling to small and mid-sized business. ⁓ have one, like financial advisors that are selling services to potential clients ⁓ or reaching out to their clients. I mean, it’s a pretty broad spectrum. ⁓ We even have people that use it just personally to look for jobs that are subscribing and they’re reaching out through their network to find work.
So, that doesn’t answer your question because I don’t have a good answer to your question. Like it’s sort of too many people. I really liked the commercial real estate angle. and residential to a certain extent, residential is a little bit harder because it’s a little bit harder to find people’s contact information, but it can, like we can do it. can absolutely be done. That’s one that I was thinking about in prep for this podcast. Like would there, and if anybody has thoughts on it, like, there a, is there a need there for a specific use case where we find the
Michelle Kesil (18:45)
That’s okay.Alex Shartsis (19:10)
Ownership of houses we find their emails. We let you automatically email them And if we can do more than that like other kids graduated from high school or whatever like that to me that could be really interesting and it’s Solvable with AI like I know my team can solve it But do people want it solved like is that is that useful or people happy just mailing letters? You know at random to houses that might be for sale ⁓ but I but so to me, I think that the theThe thing that I care most about is finding those use cases where it’s really valuable. And what I like about commercial real estate is if you’re a commercial real estate broker, you have a big network, you’re going to events, you’re doing a lot of the things, and you do not have time to send emails. You send a couple, you’re sending emails. If you go into your email account, you will have sent emails. But you’re not sending anywhere near the number you should, just to really squeeze the most out of the other activities you’re doing.
To me, the commercial real estate use case, we’ve seen people have such success so quickly, seems like a really good one that makes sense. I think the other thing there is that some of the brokerages we’ve talked to, they have what we call in the Valley a revenue ops person, somebody whose job it is to buy software and set it up for people, nobody uses it. They’re not a broker. They don’t really know what’s going on. They don’t really know the use case.
Skyp gives you as a broker, the ability to just make it the way you want it to be and, ⁓ and use it yourself and not need support from your staff. And I think for, for the brokers that we work with, they really liked that because they can, you know, they can jump on, can, ⁓ you know, in literally five minutes, do all the followup from their last week’s walkthroughs or meetings or whatever. and I mean, what’s crucially different about our software is you can edit the emails. So, you know, if you did, you know, if you did a site visit or walkthrough or whatever,
You can mention that by hand. You don’t have to have perfect notes. You can mention that by hand as you send the emails. But all the follow-up and everything is done for you. All the follow-up takes that into account. So it’ll remind people of that event or what they thought or what the next steps were. So it gives you that productivity boost so that you can do what you like, which is probably networking with these people, showing them sites, consulting them on their property needs.
And I think, again, I’m not sure from an owner’s standpoint necessarily how helpful it would be, but definitely if you’re anywhere on the brokerage side, it’s super helpful.
Michelle Kesil (21:46)
Awesome. Yeah, thank you for sharing all of that. I think that’s helpful information.Alex Shartsis (21:50)
Awesome.Michelle Kesil (21:52)
Yeah, so before we wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more, where can people find you and connect with you?Alex Shartsis (21:59)
Yeah, I’d love it if you do. ⁓ can find me. The company is at skyp skyp.ai. I’m just alex at skyp.ai. So email me. I’ll read and respond to every email. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I’m the only Alex Shartsis on LinkedIn, so I’m pretty easy to find. I’ve, you know, I post a lot about ⁓ entrepreneurship, sales, marketing, AI. ⁓ And so if you’re interested in those subjects, I would love to, you know, take a look andand connect.
Michelle Kesil (22:28)
Perfect, we’ll appreciate your time and your story. Thank you for being here.Alex Shartsis (22:32)
Thank you, this has been great.Michelle Kesil (22:33)
You’re welcome. And for the listeners tuning into the show, if you got value, make sure you have subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Alex, who are building real businesses and we will see you on the next episode.
