Nate Baker, Qualia
How to Find Your First Customers by Living in Their Basement
Nate Baker is the co-founder and CEO of Qualia, a software platform for title companies that helps coordinate the complex process of buying a home. Today, Qualia generates over $100 million in ARR with a team of 600 and has raised more than $200 million. In 2015, Nate was 21 years old and decided to build software for the real estate industry. He had no experience in that space. He didn't talk to any customers. He just did some research and decided that was the thing he was going to do. Then he started building. Still without talking to anyone. Nate admits this was a mistake. He and his co-founders got key things wrong about how the business would work. They wasted months building things they eventually threw away. It wasn't until they found their first customer that they started making real progress. Their first customer was Barry Feingold, a state senator in Massachusetts who also ran a real estate law firm. Barry believed in the vision, taught them the industry, made introductions, and helped them understand what actually mattered. The relationship was unconventional: Nate and the first 25 employees rotated through living in Barry's basement. New hires would get a call Sunday night: "Your onboarding is in Andover. You're going to live in Barry's basement for two weeks. He's going to teach you title. You have to tutor his kids in math." But then Barry's existing software vendor found out he was working with Qualia and shut off his access overnight. Nate and his team didn't even have the core features built yet. They had to figure it out fast. It became the most productive month in company history. Barry didn't just become a customer—he introduced Qualia to his competitors. Those network-based relationships became the foundation for the first 10 customers. Nate learned that your first customers must come from your network, not cold outreach. In this episode, you'll learn: How to find your first customers through network-based selling instead of cold outreach The multi-year upfront contract strategy that brings cash forward and locks in commitment Why geographic focus beats national expansion in the early days How to embed yourself with customers to truly understand the problem When to hire your first sales leader and how fast to scale
