Zoe Oz — Bilt

0:00 Our friends are never going to buy a home. Rent feels like letting money on fire. All the stuff that our parents could afford, the six children they have at the time, they were 25, and the house that they had, and the stable job, all of it's just not a reality for our generation. So we wanted to build services that address those things.

0:15 Zoe Oz is the CMO of Built, a FinTech company transforming housing payments into rewards. I don't think the way to grow a really big business these days is going to be ads anymore. All those things are important, but you really do have to find smart creative ways to distribute your product, to make it almost inevitable

0:30 that people are going to adopt it. For us, when the very early days, the most important part was our property management relationships. We wanted to be a product that was like the default to pay your rent. - A lot of how you guys are building and iterating in the business is based on customer feedback. What are you listening to, what are you not listening to?

0:46 I mean, as you scale, it just becomes harder and harder. How are you dealing with that? - There are some customers who are super loud who don't really engage with your product. And you want to find ways to tune that out because oftentimes those are the types of people who are just going to give you a negative. They're not going to give you a lot of constructive feedback.

1:01 What we want is to take our most engaged members and build a program for those people. Make sure those people are evangelists for the brand and love us and want to continue to double down and engage in all parts of our ecosystem. - How you kind of see the business five, even 10 years from now, and also just curious

1:17 how much do you think that like future vision of built aligns back to the initial vision? - I think that Welcome to CMO Uncovered, which is proudly sponsored by CleverTap, the all-in-one engagement platform

1:33 helping brands turn customer moments into measurable growth. If you're serious about retention, life cycle marketing, and using AI to drive smarter engagement, CleverTap is the partner you want in your corner. Welcome back to CMO Uncovered, so excited to welcome Zoe Oz,

1:48 the CMO and co-founder of Built on the call. Zoe, thank you so much for joining. Just to kick things off, I'd love for you to just share a little bit more about yourself built in what you're currently working on, and we'll just roll right into the discussion. - Yeah, absolutely.

2:03 Thank you guys so much for having me. It's great to be here, so excited to dive into things. For those that don't know, built is what we call a membership for where you live. At the basics, it's a rewards program for your home and neighborhood. So think about earning rewards and benefits

2:18 on your rent or now your mortgage, but also all the things that are around your home, the things you spend all your money on already. So your restaurants, your fitness studios, your pharmacies, your gyms, all of that makes up your home and your neighborhood and don't really as a membership to help get the most out of that.

2:33 Yeah, it's already where you're spending all of your money, it's where you're spending all of your time. And we really fundamentally believe that those things should give you more back. And that's what this is designed to do. So whether it's simple things like comps, maybe at a Barry's Bookend class, or points that you can then earn on rent and use towards a down payment on a future home,

2:49 we're really building a membership that anyone can get value out of. And hopefully building something that everyone loves to get something out of. Fantastic. I've been a huge fan of built since day one. I've seen your meteoric rise both as a business itself, but also just in the venture space,

3:04 which I think is just also really fascinating as well. You guys are a direct to consumer business, but you're very much rooted in also just building a partnership infrastructure and making it so as a marketer, you don't necessarily have to go spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Google

3:19 and Meta to scale your business, but you get to have really incredible partners that basically distribute your product for you. But because of that, you also have to build this really rich community and this internal flywheel. I'd love for you to just dive into a little bit more about the unique nature of how a company built scales

3:37 from the eyes of a marketer. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a lot here. This is a very meaty topic. I think it might be worth taking a bit of a step back to where the company started and how we got here. Very, very early days of built. So much of where we came from was our roots

3:52 in really essential services. So think about housing, healthcare, child's care, education. We wanted to make those things more affordable early days. So we started the startup studio and wanted to incubate businesses that were addressing real world problems that we believed our generation was facing.

4:08 So we looked around us. We were like, our friends are never gonna buy a home. Rent feels like letting my own fire. All the stuff that our parents could afford, like the six children they have at the time they were 25 and the house they had and the stable job, all of it's just not a reality for our generation.

4:24 So we wanted to build services that address those things. And so built was one of those companies we spun out of that because it was such a clear business that was addressing some of the issues we were seeing and the pain points that we were uncovering. And from the very early days of built,

4:39 something that was very important to us is we need to find unique distribution. This is not going to be a business that scales and grows because we're better at running ads. By this point, it was 2019, 2020. We were not gonna find cost efficiencies in Google Ads. That was, we're gonna do them, table stakes,

4:54 of course they should exist. But ultimately, if you're trying to build what we would call a generation defining business, something that everyone says is automatic go to, you have to get this when you move to a new city or you're renting your first place out of college or looking to buy your first home.

5:09 You have to find a unique way to reach people and get them bought into your business. So for us from the very early days, the most important part was our property management relationships. We wanted to be a product that you had, it was like the default to pay your rent. It wasn't, you know, oh, maybe I'll get this ad on

5:25 if I want to, to maybe earn points, but then I have to convince somebody, what is a built point? Why is that worth getting? And I mean, now I think it feels so obvious to earn points on things like rent, but you have to remember back then, which I didn't even that long ago, back then, that was a weird education problem.

5:40 People didn't really get it. They got, okay, miles on airlines, credit card points. What the hell is this? What are you talking about? So there was a big, pretty large education problem we had to address upfront. And the only way we felt like we could do that

5:56 was partnering with real estate partners to get that done. So that was table stakes early days, the first thing we had to do. And I think that's the main advice at the overarching conversation of this will be is, I don't think the way to grow a really big business

6:11 these days is going to be ads anymore. You have to have those things, you have to do them for marketing, all those things are important, but you really do have to find smart creative ways to distribute your product, to make it almost inevitable that people are going to adopt it. So now, we power rent in over six million apartments

6:26 across the country, it's one in four units across the country. And that scale was only achieved because in the early days we said, let's get the top 10. And then let's get the top 20. And then let's get the top 100 and just build brick by brick by brick, get all these partners into the ecosystem,

6:41 prove that there's value, prove that we reduce vacancies, prove that we're keeping people in for longer, prove that we're actually creating a loyal resident base for these partners. And once you get them on board, it is so much easier for us to say, hey, now we power your rent payments and everyone who comes into that ecosystem

6:58 has to become a built number. So without that in the early days, I think it would have been an impossible business to scale. And we've employed that now across the rest of the ecosystem. And again, I'll close my rent by saying, where we ended up about two years ago was,

7:13 okay, we have the apartment, but what makes someone feel at home, what we call a membership for where you live is not just those four walls. It's all these ecosystems and vendors and merchants around your home. And we've had to employ and figured out

7:28 how to employ the same distribution strategy across these different types of merchants. So when we think about the dining and restaurant ecosystem, when you think about where you go to work out, where you pick up your medications, where you do the things that you do in your everyday, we have to figure out how to uniquely distribute

7:43 in those spaces as well, because again, these are fragmented industries, they are not going to be an easy thing to sell through ads and we still have that same education problem that we're currently solving, that we had to solve for housing back in the day. - So the way you describe the journey of built,

7:59 you got your members on and then after a while, you had to start delivering value to those members, right? And a key part of that was, you know, getting the right partners in their neighborhood. So what was your process in identifying

8:14 what partners actually add value to your members, right? Because you're almost building an ecosystem, if I may, and I don't necessarily want you to lead you into specific topics because I want you to say it, but how did you choose these partners

8:30 and what went into that process? - Yeah, so I think it depends on the category, but it was in two primary ways. And obviously, this is the crux of the business, the entire business is built on a partner ecosystem. So the selection of these partners and the ability to negotiate partnerships that provide win-win wins across the ecosystem

8:47 are what's going to make this business thrive and succeed. So the number one, obviously, is feedback from our members. I think when you have enough members that can tell you, this is what I'm looking for, why don't you have benefits in this space? You know, I spend a lot of time on this,

9:02 I really want benefits in this category, things like parking, like gas, like groceries. There's all these categories, even today, we still get members constantly running in and say, hey, how about this space? How about this space? And in the early days, especially with owning rent,

9:18 people came with a lot of ideas. I think they really wanted as much benefit as possible from the ecosystem they were starting to dive into. And that has been a North Star for us from the very beginning and will continue to be North Star for us as we figure out where the business should go. I will also say so much of it from the beginning

9:35 was also just industry standards. There are so many wildly successful loyalty programs that we had to look to who could provide good insights for what people wanted, what actually makes a great value point, for example. There are massive industries just focused

9:50 on how valuable points are across all these different ecosystems. And we wanted to make sure our point was really valued and that people valued it highly. And we got, you know, ranked the most valuable point by Ben Gray in the early days and that helped rocket ship the business because we had to prove that ecosystem value.

10:06 So ultimately, we were never looking at competitors. We don't really view ourselves as having competitors. Anyone could be a potential partner of ours. It was more that what types of programs are people finding value in and what's ones are most popular, whether it's hotel programs or airline programs

10:22 or, you know, existing fitness programs. There are a lot of reward systems out there. And for us, it was a job of detective work to figure out which ones were actually worth it, which ones regarding the engagement that we wanted to be getting and which ones did we think our members would see on our website and say, oh, I want to be able to use that.

10:39 I want to be able to use my points to book that. I want to be able to, you know, go to that partner and get that type of benefit. I would say in categories like dining, which are much more fragmented, you don't have the same, you know, top five to 10 who own 80% of the markets, not like that in the restaurant or space.

10:54 That is much more of a scale question. We know the category matters a lot. It's one of the top categories of our members spend and people want dining benefits. And it's obviously, especially in major cities where most of our members are. That's how they spend a lot of their time. And so that one is just like, let's get scale.

11:10 Let's make sure that we are picking restaurants that are on brand obviously. I don't think we're necessarily going to McDonald's tomorrow, but I think that it comes down to, we know the category is important and now it's about how do we get as many of those restaurants in our ecosystem as possible because for the built membership to be valuable in dining,

11:27 you just have to have as many restaurants as possible. If you're living in, you know, LA and you don't have restaurants near you, you're never going to use that part of our program. So we have to make sure we have something available that all of our members can find valuable regardless of where they live. And they may not have every benefit where they live,

11:43 but at least they have enough. You know, anyone can use any of the airlines that we work with. Anyone can use any of the hotels that we work with. And then also hopefully we scale our dining program to the point where everyone can also find restaurants within on their block. - Right. And have there been any specific categories

11:58 that you were surprised your members were looking for? And, you know, something that you have to drop because they didn't like it at all. - We definitely haven't dropped things. I think we've always been surprised when we launched something new and the engagement is just, it's amazing.

12:13 It's amazing to see because people really are paying attention to what we're launching. And the early days, it was even more surprising. We were like, what, this is incredible, how closely you pay attention to every one of our emails. - I think that the categories that surprised us, I think came from almost,

12:31 I don't know, I'm biased to living in a city. One of the categories we hear a lot is about gas. And I would never have thought of gas. I lived in New York for a decade. I don't have a car. I don't think about gas. That's not a category that I imagine

12:46 as part of my neighborhood spent. But it is such a major category of neighborhood spent for people who don't live in really like a New York city type area where there's great public transportation. And that's again, one of those areas where you just have to respond to what people are asking for and work on partnerships in the space

13:01 because that's a big one. I think that we haven't deprecated partners because they weren't working. That's never really been something that we've done or members have not used it. And therefore we said, this isn't worth it. I think it's more that we've continued to refine

13:17 the exact way that partnership works and exactly what people are looking from that category that we've refined it from there. - A lot of how you guys are building and iterating and scaling the business is based on customer feedback. I think that's a really valuable way

13:32 to build out the rewards and the ecosystem. But also one of the risks is you overbuild because you just keep taking the feedback. And so I'm curious, can you just talk us through like, what are you listening to? What are you not listening to? Are there certain amounts?

13:48 Do you literally need like 10,000 pieces of feedback on something to be like, okay, this idea is greenlit or this thing is greenlit? But I mean, as you scale, it just becomes harder and harder. How are you dealing with that? - Totally, totally. No, I think that's a crux of the question. I wish I had the perfect answer,

14:03 but the honest truth is that we operate like a startup and we still are a startup. And so many of the decisions you make are based on gut. And I wish it was more data-driven than that. Sometimes marketing can be super data-driven and sometimes when you're trying to build a monster brand, you're really asking your gut,

14:18 what do we think is the best move here? - Over and over and over again. And honestly, part of that, I think is what keeps us alive and what keeps the business going is that we're able to operate like a early stage startup all the time, because we're willing to take risk, we're willing to try new things, we're willing to fail, we're willing to say, hey, that didn't work, let's pivot and go a different direction.

14:34 And I think that when business is stopping, being able to do that and everything has to have, get over the threshold. It has to have this number of people. It has to have this number of metrics to be able to make a decision. You really are, I think, hamstrung by that requirement.

14:49 - Yeah. - The one thing we have done that I think has been instrumental in decision making, like you said, there are some customers who are super loud who don't really engage with your product. And you want to find ways to tune that out because oftentimes, more often than not,

15:05 those are the types of people who are just going to give you negative, they're not going to give you a lot of constructive feedback. What we want is to take our most engaged members and build a program for those people. Make sure those people are evangelists for the brand and love us and want to continue to double down and engage in all parts of our ecosystem.

15:20 Because ultimately, what's going to make us the most money as a business is our customers engage with as many different pieces of the ecosystem as they can and continuing to stay engaged over a long period of time. So what we did was we created almost like a mini,

15:35 I wouldn't even call it ambassador program, but let's call it ambassador ribbon for the sake of conversation. And it's called close friends who are super engaged. They have to apply to be part of it. And they have to have a few other metrics out of engagement to be able to be part of it. And they get exclusive access to content

15:51 and the access to a dedicated email line and all that stuff, but they're also actually testing our product early. So we're able to have them as beta testers for all these features that we're about to launch, for partnerships we're thinking of going live, for new products we want to launch in the future.

16:06 We're literally having them test it for us and give us feedback and they love it. We love it because we're actually getting real time responses from tens of thousands of people who are really passionate and want the company to win. And that's key, like they want the company to survive

16:21 because they love what they're able to get from it. And it feels like a very reciprocal relationship because they're getting an inside peak to a product that they know and love and they're seeing where the business is going and they feel like they have their hand in where we are developing the product.

16:36 We have unique experiences for them. They get unique access to our, you know, a lot of our team members are at these events and so they actually swarm them to ask questions and provide feedback. And that I find to be the richest, most actionable feedback because they understand the ecosystem. And when they're confused, that means everyone's confused.

16:53 Like we have to address that problem if there's an education issue. When they love a product, that means everyone's going to love it. So they really are our first barometer and temperature check before things go out to the broader public almost every single time now. That's a major stepping stone for us to launch.

17:08 Something is for our close friends to see at first. And that's a huge driver of how we've been able to gather feedback and what we believe to be high quality feedback. - And this makes me curious, Zoe, because what you're really describing is that for you to really test out your new products,

17:24 you have a set of customers, your most loyal set of customers, most engaged set of customers and you test out with them and then you sort of roll this out to the larger, you know, membership audience. This makes you curious,

17:39 what does your life cycle marketing really look like, right? Because what does it really take for you to actually get someone to that most engaged set, right? Like to be a part of this ambassador set, right? Because that's such a pivotal part of your product launches

17:55 that if you don't have a robust number of people here, then you don't know whether your products are going to work. But there is still the journey that someone needs to take to get to that loyal base. So I'm just wondering what is your life cycle marketing really look like? How do you push people to get to that most engaged base?

18:12 - Yeah, that is the question we're trying to answer as a business. Like that is you increase engagement from, you know, by five percentage points and we're significantly bigger business than we even are now. The short answer is we're still figuring it out. What we're doing is working well enough

18:28 and we're going to continue to refine it. Obviously so much of the crux of our life cycle happens early in a member's journey. We're trying to make sure they get educated on the most important pieces. So here's how you pay your rent or mortgage through bill. You know, here are all the benefits you get around your neighborhood. Here's an experience you should go to.

18:44 If we can get someone in person with bill, whether it's at a restaurant that, you know, bill has partnered with or a fitness class we've partnered with or an actual built owned experience like a comedy show, that's going to significantly increase their engagement with the program overall. So we're still figuring out that piece.

19:00 I will say a lot of our life cycle later stage in a customer's journey has way more to do with building brand love than with activation. And this may change again, over time, but so much of what we send out to members is really about how do we forge a stronger connection with them at a higher level as a brand

19:17 and really build an association and affiliation as opposed to always trying to get them to do something immediately. And sometimes it's actually been more worthwhile for us because you're building that emotional connection. They're going to have an association with what built is there for and what part of their life that we're supposed

19:33 to be involved in and when do they come to build to make a decision? Because ultimately what we're trying to do is influence their behavior. From, hey, it's date night on a Thursday. I want to pick a restaurant when they go to built to select one or, hey, I'm looking for a place to go out with my friend. Like we should look up at the comedy show that built us hosting.

19:49 That type of immediate change and how built works into their everyday decision making is not going to happen because we hammer them over and over and over and over again, hammering them with the same message. I think oftentimes doesn't necessarily get them to do it. It might actually mean that they start ignoring

20:04 a lot of our comms. So I would say for us a lot of it is about finding the right contextual placement to market to them around activation and a lot of the time it's about building much more of a brand connection and a higher level association from what brand is meant to be in their everyday life.

20:21 Yeah. I think it's really important, right? Because one thing amazing about your business model is, we talked about it earlier, is the acquisition comes through partnerships where a lot of people would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire those users. You get to spend a lot of budget

20:36 to make it so once someone's in the front door it becomes as sticky as possible. And then you're walking the tightrope of being that, the crazy act that just keeps texting. Like, dude, we're already friends, like we're already together, like you just keep texting, but like you have to decide what's too much,

20:52 what's too little. I mean, maybe you have the guarantee that like they will look at it once a month, like when they're paying their rent. But beyond that, like I'm curious, are you trying to optimize for like X amount

21:07 of additional touches versus the guaranteed one? No, not necessarily, but you're right. This is a double-edged sword because normally the onus is on the business to convince someone to sign up. The onus is on us much later on after they've already signed up because they have to come in to build to pay their rent.

21:22 So it's not somewhere necessarily optimizing for a certain number of touch points, but we are trying to make sure that when someone moves into a built building, they're not just thinking of us as a payment processor. So as much as we can, we're doing events in their buildings.

21:38 We're trying to make sure that built becomes a platform where they can actually, in our concierge product, you literally can go there for maintenance requests. You can say, my sink broke. Tell someone to come fix it for me. You can say, hey, do I have a package? Like what time you need to arrive? All of the things that make, again,

21:55 what makes you love where you live, that is what built product is meant to do. So we're trying to actually recontextualize built not just as, oh, that's the thing I pay my rent through. It's actually, oh, I walked down to lobby today to go to work and there was a table of Brecky by built there

22:10 and I grabbed a croissant on my way to work. That was a nice touch point. Okay, this sink broke in my apartment. I have to make sure that maintenance knows about it. I'm gonna let built known. Or I'm up for a renewal lease. I've ever known of my lease in two months. Am I gonna get an incentive for that?

22:25 Oh, I get a bunch of built points for that. We're trying again to work in as contextually as possible without hitting them over the head with things they don't wanna hear about in order to guide them into the ecosystem as it gets broader and broader and broader. I imagine if we tried to have someone move

22:40 into a built building and then immediately the first thing you said was go to Walgreens, they'd be like, what is going on? Why are we talking about this? I just moved in. So a lot of it really has to do with what does the journey look like? What is the right drip campaign of information for someone to learn and in what places?

22:56 And sometimes it's in their building physically. Sometimes it's about the parts of the renter experience that built has to take over. Sometimes it is a retargeting ad on TikTok. And that is the best way to meet them in that time. But the content is way more about living

23:12 in a certain neighborhood or renting in a certain neighborhood or what it's like to live in a certain building or whatever it is that it would be about something they should learn about way down the line because it's just gonna confuse them. So I think it's less about a number of touch points and more how do we get as thoughtful as possible

23:28 in when they're learning a piece of information and how they can activate that? When do they have the brain space to activate on that thing? And what is the right time for them to start thinking about that thing? And I wish I could say that we figured it out. It's not perfect. I think that we know high level what we hope happens and we're hoping we're doing it the right way.

23:44 Ultimately our biggest problem is still that we have numbers who are like, oh, I didn't know you guys worked with them. Or I have siblings and best friends who are still confused about all the things that we offer. And in some ways, it's an amazing things. It does mean we built such real best partnership ecosystem and in some ways, it's like, okay,

23:59 we have our work cut out for us. We have a lot of education to do because there's too much here for someone to learn at once. - Can we quickly just talk about, 'cause you guys have been around long enough to start just seeing some of the trends that are going on from renters. And so I'm curious how your ideal customer profile

24:15 has shifted and evolved over time with how people are engaging with actually like renting property. - Yeah, so I would say that our, I wish that things were becoming more affordable. And that was, you know, we were figuring out how

24:31 to change our business as a result rent. The rent is too damn high. It's still the rent is too damn high. That is always a problem and it's continued to be a problem over the last eight years. And I think that that has meant that just more people are hearing about the fact that they came more out of the rent that they're already paying. And that's become

24:48 an even more appealing option. I think that our customer base and our ideal customer has maybe evolved over time as we've launched mortgage because obviously mortgage holders are often older. They often don't live in major cities. They're in Albuquerque. And there's, you

25:04 know, a much broader set of types of people that we can engage through the ecosystem. And that's forced us really to adapt the types of partners we're bringing on and the breadth of the partnership ecosystem because we need to make sure again, like we were talking about, we're offering something to everyone who can find value in it. So I would say it's less than

25:22 our, the renter base has changed or even what they want has changed. I think that's, I think that's actually stayed pretty consistent and now actually for us about scale and more how do we continue to offer value to all of our members without trying to be the everything app or without

25:37 trying to be everything to everyone because I think we'll end up in a place where no one really knows how to get value out of us. So we're trying to figure out how to stay in our lane and make sure we still are the brand for your home and the brand for your rent and mortgage and slowly expanded to neighborhood and local commerce in the

25:55 right way without losing ourselves along the way and trying to do so much at once that we're, you know, dying from indigestion of starvation as a business. As you were describing how it's not really about the number of touch points, it 's always

26:10 been about what's more relevant to you. It almost feels like it's an, it's like learning an open world game, right? I walk into like GTA or Red Dead Redemption and at the first

26:25 instance, I'm just, I'm just learning, hey, this is how I can talk to my horse. This is how I can potentially get an arrow or something like that. I'm not jumping into a hunt immediately. All right. So is this intentional in the way you're sort of building your

26:44 entire ecosystem where, you know, it almost feels game like, right? Like it almost falls like it feels like an open world game. Yeah. It's, it's the right way to think about it. And it's, it's funny. We saw a lot about, you know, what is a built game? How, how do games get involved in this,

27:00 um, business overall, because points inherently is kind of a gamer thing. And especially when we started when we were all rewards, that's, it was really for gamers. Um, and it's a huge part of the community. I will say what's similar about that. There are some, you know, there is some

27:16 gamification. There's a little bit of, of that we're trying to get involved in the product, but I would say what's more similar is this whole concept of world building. I think we are trying to be a neighborhood brand. And if you're thinking about how people conceptualize

27:31 their own neighborhood, it is their world. It's all the things that make up their version of their game. And so for bill, that means we do have to paint a picture and tell a story about what is the neighborhood look like? What is the block? You know, what types of merchants are around you? What types of communities are you building? How do you connect

27:48 with each other in this game that is built? And so for us, that means we're, we have to do a lot of things that help paint that picture, whether that's showing how all of these merchants connect to each other. So I'll give a random example. A lot of our partner restaurants after you check out, you pay your bill for bill, it'll prompt you to, in some

28:06 places, have a comp to lift ride back home. And that is not something people are used to, but you are showing how all of these different parts of this game and ecosystem are connected to each other to build up this neighborhood concept. And then we can, we do things like that that are embedded in the product. And then we do things like create a, you know,

28:24 viral short form sitcom on TikTok and Instagram. They're designed to show what it looks like when built as ubiquitous. They're designed to show the product without having to show the actual product because, oh, life is just that much easier when you use built for everything. You don't have to, you know, spend time researching restaurants. You don't have

28:41 to think about which, you know, rides your app to use. You don't have to think about when is my next prescription up. You don't have to think about, did I pay my rent this month and get value for it? You're not, you're not thinking about, you know, how do I have to game the system to be able to buy a home in the future? Like it's designed to be a world

28:56 where built has figured all those things out for you. And you feel like you're living a more elevated, easier, simpler life because built doing the work for you. So I think so much of what we do is very like a game because we're trying to build this world and it's a

29:12 world where all of these things are just a little bit better. And is the end state of that game getting that really nice cool card, right? Because I love your card. It's heavy. It feels very premium. And honestly, I'll always

29:27 know whether it's in the wallet or not, right? Because I just need to wait and just see whether how heavy my wallet is at that point in time. So that is the card really fit in in all of this, right? Because and what percentage of your members are actually on the card right

29:42 now? Yeah, I think it's funny because we obviously started as a card business early, early days. So so many people still think of us that way. But it actually makes up like 10 to 15% of our customer base. And what I always like to say about the card, I obviously have the card. I'm obsessed with the card. It's almost a plus up to the program. It is

29:58 you're going to get the best of the best across the program. You're going to get, you know, more points for your spend. You're going to get, you know, access to some certain events. Like there, it feels like it's a premium version of the membership in general. So I always recommend getting it, but you absolutely don't need it to get the benefits that are part

30:14 of our membership. But I think that's oftentimes what people maybe don't know. And even my friends are like, Hey, you don't you don't need to apply for a credit card. This is a membership you can get for just literally living. It's that simple. But I always say, if you want as much as possible out of this program, and I think it is literally the best

30:29 marked card in the market, it's worth getting the card. But it does make up a really small percentage of our user base. Because again, so many of our members actually come in through our buildings. They're not going to be far too yet a credit card. They're just literally using their their buildings, loyalty systems. Yeah, I was introduced to the card because so I just moved to the United States

30:47 about 600 months ago. And a friend of mine was like, Hey, you pay rent every month. Get the built card. Right. And you will start, you know, building your credit score quickly. Right. So that was an interesting entry for me, right, into the built ecosystem

31:03 , into the built world, because I was like, Oh, here's a card. Now I can, I'm paying rent anywhere. Now I can build my credit score. And that was my entry into built it. Because initially, I thought it was like a discover card or something like that, which is, you know, meant for credit scores. And then you enter the world and then you're

31:21 like, hold on, there's a lot more value than just that card and just that credit score that I was running into. And that was an interesting experience for me and my entry into a build. Totally. I mean, that's, I think that's, that's the major differentiator for their card, of course, is the housing benefits. And that will continue to be. That's

31:39 our secret sauce. We didn't, you know, we weren't going to launch a credit card that was just another version of a credit card. It's a highly competitive space and a very expensive space to market in. But we do, I think ultimately, people are talking about why the card is so great. They talk about the points on rent. Yeah. They're like, this is crazy that you

31:56 're not putting your rent on this card. And then I think our, our primary objective around the card was let's make sure all the other benefits also stack up, that you're not just getting this card, putting rent on it, but there's another card out there that's better for everything else. This really should be the everyday card because it has such great

32:11 benefits across the entire ecosystem and all spend. And so that's, that's what we came out with . And that's what we're proud of. And I think people will still say, Hey, you have to get this card because you're renting or you pay your mortgage, but then you think about it, everyone's either having a mortgage. So ultimately it really is an everyday card for

32:29 anyone who wants to get the most value out of their spend as possible. So you've been there since day one and I'm curious how you kind of see the business five, even 10 years from now, you know, and also just curious how much do you think

32:44 that like future vision of built aligns back to the initial vision? Yeah, this is, this is my favorite question because I think we could never have imagined where we were going when we started. It just, it's like you just can't, you can 't picture it at all. It's like trying to imagine where you are at the end of your life

33:00 when you're being born. It's so different. I think that there is a few things that will always stay true because so much of this company is mission driven. It really came from a desire to fix what we believe was a massive pain point. And ultimately that, you know, this

33:16 is a public sector problem with a hopefully private sector solution. Like we talked about rent is really expensive and people aren't getting enough back for it. And the path of home ownership is really, really challenging for young people. And so I think that those missions will still ring true for 10 years from now as day one. That was always our mission. How do

33:35 we help essential services become more accessible and better value for our generation? That was always what it's about. It would continue to be about that. And I think we never want to lose our core of housing because that's ultimately, you know, that's our mission and it's also what it differentiates as a business. That's going to be our moat

33:52 long term. I would say our hope, you know, the vision for the future is really this extremely robust win-win-win symbiotic ecosystem where, you know, you have local businesses and even large businesses

34:07 who are looking for engagement from local residents, they're looking to be discovered, looking for exposure, they're looking for ways to get local residents into their places of business. Then you have local residents who are looking for ways to engage more broadly in their neighborhoods and get more value out of their neighborhood and they're

34:23 looking for those places to go and they need a way to find it. So built really becoming this marketplace and ecosystem or all of these features that make up a neighborhood and make up a life really are able to feed into each other and get exactly what they're looking for and where the layer that sits across all of it and enables it to happen.

34:42 And, you know, as we're building out our B2B business and we're thinking about the types of partners we're looking to work with, we really do see ourselves as a platform that sits across the entire neighborhood, lets everybody plug in to get the value they're looking for. And we've talked about this before, but built also becoming a marketing platform

34:57 for partners because we have this really engaged base of, I said, over 6 million people across the country who are looking for more value and looking for things to do around their home. And built has become this marketing channel for whether it's, you know, local restaurants

35:12 or the airlines that we work with or even big celebrities who want to promote a show that they 're working on or a book that they're launching or musicians who have a new vinyl coming out. A lot of our partnerships are driven because people see the marketing value in the platform itself and want to reach the local residents and the local residents want to reach

35:29 unique access and benefits on the other end of the spectrum. So we're starting to see it happen now. And it's been incredible because this is not, these are not partnerships that built is paying for it. These are partnerships genuinely because everyone's trying to find ways to get the value they're looking for, but they didn't have connected tissue before. We like to

35:45 talk a lot about how, you know, AI is an incredible enabler of so many things, but it 's also something that inherently disconnects. That's just part of the product. It's just what it's able to do. And you can either have your whole life in your phone, and that's what AI is going

36:00 to pull you into, or you can use AI to actually reconnect the neighborhood in a much more powerful way where you're enabling local businesses to act like big businesses in the way that they're able to reach people in the scale that they have. You're enabling residents to find ways to go out of their home and find local experiences that they actually want to get

36:16 engaged in. So I think there's an opportunity for built to be this enabler, for built to be this, you know, again, layer that sits across all of it that everyone can be involved in and hopefully transform and rebuild what a neighborhood actually looks like in the future.

36:31 One more thought on that is like, and this is going to be a horrible analogy here, but you guys are almost like a dating app in a way of like, first and foremost, any business loves built because they know at the very least, someone's doing something with

36:46 their life enough to be able to pay for rent on a month over month basis, which means they can underwrite that customer as it pertains to the type of customer they want. And then you can do the same for all your renters saying, hey, like, I have an understanding of how you live

37:03 your life. Therefore, I know the types of businesses I want to get you in front of. Totally. And so it becomes this really great like matching software almost where like bringing these people together, you've curated in a way to know there is a high likelihood that you guys are going to connect. And at scale, that becomes like a really, really special ecosystem.

37:22 Just to reiterate what you're saying, like, I think that's that that vision is is is really special. And sorry, Bernal, I know you had a question. That wasn't a question, but I'm sure you have one. Yeah, no, so I'm just curious, right? Because what you just said through, right

37:37 ? Like, it's almost like you're curating. And there's almost like a matchmaking happening between businesses and people and the requirement. But this and to a large extent, there's a discovery problem, right? Like, I need to discover the right solution services, businesses around

37:56 me for my needs. And especially when it comes to, well, you know, with how AI has just imploded and you know, people using GEO and GPT, Claude or Gemini to discover local businesses, right? How does this

38:11 impact built, right? Because built sort of is a layer behind that discovery process for most of us right now, right? But what would really work for built if built was the first touchpoint of discovery? Yeah. So how are you reconciling these, these, you know, the

38:29 trend of people now just discovering local businesses on Google, on Gemini, on AI, and ensuring that the businesses that you support are, you know, are also surface there, or people come to build and find

38:46 them. So how are you really solving for this problem? Yeah, I think this is ultimately a trust question. How do you start to build a relationship with for your brand with your members such that they come to you first? And what's really interesting about the product that we've built is that it can

39:03 take action for you. So you can tell, book my flight. These are the dates, transfer my points and figure it out. You can tell it to book you a lift. You can tell it to, you know, all the actions you can take within our ecosystem are concierge can take for you. And what's so powerful about that

39:19 is it actually, because of the of the robust partnerships we've built, people start to want to go to built first because they want built to be the curator. They want built to help make the decisions. They want built to be the question and the answer to what they're going to do tomorrow, today, tomorrow,

39:35 and, you know, in six weeks from now and in six months from now. And so much of that decision-making can be trusted and built if we built our brand the right way. And so when we talk about what our marketing strategy is, so much of it like we've talked about is that relationship building. How do we create as much brand love as humanly possible? And a key point of

39:53 that is also at the right time. So we created this whole campaign called Rent Day really around the first of the month, because we knew, especially in the early days, that was the most engaged part of our life cycle. People were coming in to pay their rent. They were engaging with the app at

40:09 that time. They were looking for our emails. They were making sure the rent went through. All of that was happening around the first of the month. And we said, okay, this is a pretty time in someone's daily life. They're seeing thousands of dollars, you know, go down the drain. And how do we make that fun?

40:24 How do we create, as we talked about, how do we gamify a rent day and make it feel like there's some joy in it, whether it's a transfer bonus to a major airline or really cool local experiences or an exclusive ASAP rocky vinyl or whatever rent day has become? That's the point. How do we create fun and these joyful moments that make someone say, oh, I remember Bill,

40:43 I want to think about Bill. I want to talk about Bill at my dinner table. I want to engage with Bill more than I already am because I like the way they make me feel. That is always what it's going to come down to when you're saying choose me over someone else. I think a lot of people, they often think that the better product wins. I think that the better brand wins. Nine times out of

41:01 10, I think that's ultimately what people are making decisions on. They want to feel like they can trust you. They want to feel like you are, that you know them, you understand them. And again, when we're talking about where Bill's going, that's what we're trying to be. We're trying to create as much brand love and connection as possible, make moments that previously sucked and

41:18 make them fun and say, hey, we know you and your neighborhood. We know how to help you get the most out of those spaces come to build every time. So we're not really necessarily trying to replace anything else out there. We're trying to work with everyone we possibly can to have Bill be the

41:34 curator and the trusted guidance when you're figuring out how to love where you live.

41:55 Exactly. Exactly. There you go. You've gotten it. Awesome. We're going to start wrapping up here. And what we like to end it with Zoe typically is just a couple speed round questions where you just answer as quickly as possible. One word, two words, three words, one

42:10 sentence, whatever it is. And then we will just close this out. But this has been incredible so far. You ready? First question? Yes. Okay. I'm ready. All right. What is the best reward ever delivered from built to a customer today in your mind? Some special activations? Yeah. I said a one time thing or

42:30 one that's ongoing. Choose. It's up to you. Okay. I think it's pretty incredibly pay up to 20 people's rent per month. I think that's sick. And all you have to do is play a fun game. That is very cool. Yeah, I love it. That's a great one. 20 people's rent per month. All you do is basically sign in

42:48 and play the game. See if they choose you. That's really cool. What's the best AI hack you have right now? Ooh, that's a really good question. Personal life or professional? You choose. I mean, I would say built concierge. I literally don't have to book

43:04 anything anymore. I don't plan anything. I just go in the concierge, it books me reservations, it books my flights, it books my hotels, it transfers points, it does everything for me. It's the greatest AI hack ever. Done. Done. And then final question, if you had to leave built today and you had to become the CMO of a Fortune 1000 company, what company are you the CMO of?

43:24 Well, that's such a good question. Ooh. Okay. This is a bit of a cop I'd answer , but I probably, and this is more my mindset, I probably wouldn't go to a large company. I'd start something now. Okay. That says a lot. That says a lot. All right.

43:39 Good. Come to me when you're ready for the next thing. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Idea stage. I got you. Pre-season investment. I love it. I love it. I love it. Zoe, thank you so much. It was so incredible to have you. Thank you for going deep with us on built. Thank you guys. So much fun.