In this interview, founder and real‑estate SaaS expert Mau Lamas discusses the rapid, real‑estate‑driven growth of Mexico’s property market, especially in major cities like Mexico City, Monterrey, and Guadalajara. He explains how housing prices have surged, creating a fertile environment for prop‑tech solutions. Lamas highlights the challenges of raising capital in Mexico, noting that local investors often demand immediate profitability and lack the Silicon Valley mindset of backing growth‑oriented startups. He describes his unconventional hiring philosophy, prioritising personality, drive, and willingness to learn over formal credentials, and notes the diversity and ambition of talent in Mexico City. The conversation then shifts to international expansion, where Lamas outlines the need to adapt to varying regulations, tax regimes, and cultural expectations across cities and countries (e.g., Colombia), while maintaining a core product that serves property managers. He confirms that KeeperFi (also referred to as Kiprify) uses a flat‑rate pricing model of $5 per unit for its premium tier. Regarding product development, Lamas reveals seven new revenue‑stream ideas generated during the pandemic, ranging from analytics services to commercial offerings, and states that the company is seeking roughly $1.5 million in funding to execute these plans. Finally, he offers advice for aspiring founders entering the LATAM real‑estate SaaS space, emphasizing the importance of understanding local market dynamics, building adaptable solutions, and fostering a growth‑focused investor ecosystem.
Chapters
What would you say is the difference you've seen, like, in terms of the growth, you know, of the industry, say, LATAM, or say specifically Mexico versus North America or even Europe or other places you guys are?
Well, Mexico is very concentrated in real estate. It's one of the founding growth powers for our economy. So you can see just residential construction in the main cities around you. You're in Guadalajara, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Ciudad de México, the 3 main cities that just keep on growing. And there's a lot of investment And even though, you see, as a country, we are a developing country, there's a lot of money and a lot of investment in real estate, and that will continue to grow. I grew up in Monterrey, and when I was little, you could buy a house maybe for 1 or 2 million pesos. Right now, no way. You need at least 7 or 8. So it's continuing, continuing, and you see a lot of development, well, especially in Monterrey where it's really north to the US. There's a lot of tendencies as the city grows, very similar to the US, very similar to Texas.
So obviously, LATAM, Mexico, we understand it's a developing country, a lot more opportunity for bringing nice solutions in. On the other side, what are some constraints you have faced when building a growing SaaS in Mexico? You decided to move to Mexico City, and obviously for a reason, but, you know, from building it compared to other cities, as you know, a lot of startup founders are now building remote companies, I think maybe it doesn't need to be in those hotspot cities for specifically talent and capital, right? You see that in Silicon Valley, you see that in New York, people are moving to wherever to build their company because it's no longer needed. Do you still agree with that? And what are the constraints you're seeing now?
Yeah, one of the biggest constraints I see with my little experience in venture capital is We don't have that same mentality yet as in Silicon Valley where you can see the potential in a product, the potential in growth in users, and investors in the US maybe say, this is gonna be a gold mine, let's invest right away. And here in Mexico, I have revenue, I have users, and they say, no, how much is your revenue? How much is your—
Mm-hmm.
your costs, that you have to be a very profitable company. It's like, what? I'm a startup, I don't have to be profitable right now. I'm profitable, but I don't have to be. And there's just that thing of the old-school mentality, the old-school financial system, where it's too much risk for them right now. I think it's gonna evolve, but eventually I can see I can see us growing to other countries and probably going to the US to try to meet some of our investors.
So from the investor side, I agree with you, right? I've seen that here in Guadalajara, you know, talking to some family offices or some folks who they actually got into tech and they invested, but you're right, they're looking for profitability. They don't understand the mindset of how startups work, and then they'll go back, they'll invest a little, lose some money, or they don't know how to invest, what to look for in the founder. and then they go back to real estate and more traditional. So the way of thinking is a lot more old school, maybe they don't understand it. So I think it's just an educational thing, which is a challenge a little bit with older folks.
And it's inevitable. It depends on the growth, the mentality growth. And as we say here in Mexico, we're about 7 years behind the US. So just give it a couple of years and it will grow into that.
Yeah, generally what you'll see is that kind of recycle as, you know, some of the younger entrepreneurs who exit have some of their capital and then they'll reinvest into the ecosystem, you know, like yourself trying to develop that in Mexico. What about constraints on talent? So have you seen anything, you know, does being in Mexico City give you any advantage or disadvantage and would you still do it again in terms of hiring teams and talent?
I'm a very unusual CEO. I don't hire specifically on on talent, I hire on personality and productivity, and a lot of people, a lot of our team is based on people that are trying to be better than their family, are trying to pay their tuition, are trying— I had a scholarship all my life, and I know the struggles of not having money. and just being— trying to grind it out and see, looking for opportunities, even if you don't have the diploma or you don't have the skills right now, you can develop them. So, I try to look for that type of people, people that are willing to do anything, anything to grow and learn, and then position themselves to get more value and, of course, more income. Here in Mexico, there's an advantage that we have a lot of diversity, and you can see people from all over Mexico here trying to better themselves and better their opportunities. So, yeah, we continually are looking for talent or people that want to grow, and if we see an opportunity, you can join our team. And we— well, of course, we have an internship of 3 months and everything like that to see if it works, But yeah, our team is right now about 20 people and we plan to continue to grow it.
Very cool. And then you also, you know, international solution provider. You decided, you know, you could have focused only on Mexico, but you decided to go into other countries who have different regulations, laws, tax rates, et cetera, different cultures. What have you seen in terms of like the process every time you launch into another city or country, you know, building that SaaS solution for those, you know, many different markets? What's the scope or what are points that you look at to enter and get into those different countries?
Yeah. Well, not only different countries. Here in Mexico, there's a great difference between a provincia, a small city, or a big city. There's a lot of difference between the property manager using the technology. So you see, for example, people that want something specific, like we want to Print reports. We want to print financial statements. Like what printing? You can use it on your app, and they they don't understand yet that they don't have to print it out like the the old times, you know. And and in other countries, for example, in in Colombia, they are very used to well depending on on the city, but in Bogotá, we have a couple of projects there. They're very used to apps. They're very used to technology. Rappi is from Colombia, and and you can see that they are very willing to use and adapt. A mobile phone, and maybe they want some kind of language that is expressed for their regional users. And that's very easy for us. We— you, you can register in KeeperFi and just select your country, and you have specific words and specific, uh, modules that you can use in your country. But the main, main goal of property management is the same, so you can— you have the same solution For example, one of our greatest boundaries in other countries are the charging with a credit card and paying your rent through a bank in another country. There's a regulation there, as you said, and you have to pay some taxes, but we solve it as the community grows. So when we start a new country, It depends on how many users, how many properties, and then I travel there and then do everything around it so we can charge and just keep it going.
So does your pricing change depending on every time you move to a different city, or do you have a flat kind of pricing model?
Well, we have a flat rate. It's $5 for our premium version, $5 per unit. We call it the unit because it can be an office, it can be an apartment, a house, It can be any type of building.
Got it. And in terms of your product roadmap, can you speak a little bit, you know, what is, you know, some other product solutions or other integrations that you're looking to implement in the next year? Because I know you mentioned you're looking to raise, you were looking to raise, you know, before the pandemic. Well, what are you kind of, you know, from your perspective, what's on your pitch deck that you're looking to raise money for and build out?
Oh yeah, there are a lot of opportunities. around our solution. I went into— when the pandemic started like heavily, when everything started to shut down, I tried to channel myself into the great minds of the last pandemic that they created. Like Isaac Newton created the formulas for physics in a pandemic. And it was like, I have all this time, I can— I can get myself into one thing I want to study, and I came up with 7 new revenue streams around KeeperFi, and all of them could be profitable in one time, even analytics around our users, commercial services around our users. There are a lot of opportunities, but everything takes time, everything takes money. So it depends on how much capital we want. I also created a pitch deck and I have more or less about $1.5 million where we would be looking in the next year.
Okay. So that's for Kiprify. I want to talk about more generally. If you were, say, starting over again today and you're looking to get into this real estate space, maybe in LATAM or not, what are some maybe other opportunities in the real estate industry that you see for a SaaS solution that can also be improved and maybe a founder wants to tackle who's listening in today?
Oof, I think there are a lot. The whole rent industry around Airbnb, around renting for a minimum space or a minimum time or a visit, it's So much opportunity here in Mexico. You can create a service around it very easily, I think. Another one around construction, around proptech. Every process, even financial control around the building process, it's very antiquated. It's almost written by hand. And you don't believe it living in 2021 that constructions, like millions of dollars of constructions, They still use these methods. So there's a lot of opportunity around properties, around proptech, and not even in Mexico, all Latin America. For example, I was in Peru and everybody in Peru said they wanted to come to Mexico. It's like Mexico is the greatest, is the best technology. I was like, what? We look at the US as being one of the leaders, but everybody down our country wants to come to Mexico. So there's, There's a lot of opportunity, and I think it's only gonna get faster, smaller. There's always gonna be a new solution. That's not gonna— that's not gonna stop.
