Our Origin Story

A short yarn on how we started out on our journey to give every property owner and leasing agent AI-enabled fraud prevention superpowers (in a convenient cloud software delivery system.)

Chapter 1

A really bad idea

There are startups that, from Day 1, have this brilliant idea, and the company becomes successful and takes off. This, is not one of those stories. Ours starts with an ex-professional baseball player (Dan) and his longtime friend who never gives him a break (Noah.) “Dan,” says Noah, “We own some properties, and all of the property management software sucks. We should create our own!”

Chapter 2

An unwanted product

So they hired Evan, Jess, Katie, and reached out to the only tech person they knew, Hugh, and they built it. And… ta-da! it was unsellable. Wait? What?!

You see, the market was already saturated with entrenched players who had built their own terrible solutions. “Guys, I’m willing to assume this is 10x better than what we’re currently doing, but it replaces multiple tools we spent time and money implementing. We’d get fired if we adopted your platform.” We would have known that if we’d simply asked before we built it. So now we had an unsellable solution, disappointed investors, and felt dumb.

Everyone at Snappt had the sadness.

Chapter 3

A ‘hail mary’

So in a last-ditch effort, Dan & Noah asked one of the largest companies willing to give us a meeting if there was anything valuable worth salvaging. They looked it over… “Nope, not this. Hmmm we already built that. Not that, either. This is kind of dumb over here, so not that one. Wait! That document verification thing. That’s interesting. Can we get that?” Dan thought for a second “Sure!” he replied.

Chapter 4

An unexpected twist

The problem? “That document verification thing” didn’t exist. Hugh just threw it in the presentation when thinking of what features would be cool. So after the meeting Dan and Noah asked Hugh, “Can you build that?” And he replied, “Um, I think so.” And that is where a really bad idea turned into a great one. Granted, this was 5 years after starting the company, and several “uh, are we going to get paid this week?” moments later. But we built it. And then people bought it. And then it worked, like, really amazingly well, and then it caught the eye of some investor nerd at Insight Partners who kept hearing about Snappt from people in the industry, and he wanted to know what was up. So fast forward to today – two years after that moment, with 10% of the total MDU market captured and $100 Million invested in something that was a side idea to round out a presentation.

Chapter 5

To the moon

And if that journey seems odd or unique, it is not. There is a long line of tech startups that have pivoted from their original vision. Slack was an flash game developer. Youtube was a dating site. Twitter was a way to find podcasts. Netflix was mail-order DVD rentals. Shopify was a way to sell snowboarding equipment. You get the idea. They all began as something else. They didn’t quit, even when it made sense to. They adapted. And so did we. Welcome to the future.

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