The Property Perspective
From hidden gems to billion-dollar deals, this is The Property Perspective - where seasoned real estate pros reveal how they spot value others miss, and industry disruptors share the unconventional strategies reshaping real estate.
The Property Perspective
Navigating Real Estate with Tech: Param Shah's Path to Innovation
Param Shah, CEO of GoforClose, opens up about his transformative journey from a real estate operator to a visionary tech entrepreneur, reshaping the industry with innovative data and marketing automation solutions. Growing up in Irvine, California, under the inspirational guidance of his hardworking immigrant father, Param shares how early entrepreneurial and nonprofit ventures set the stage for his success at GoforClose. His insights are a treasure trove for anyone keen on understanding the dynamic interplay between technology and real estate investing.
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00:00 - Hope (Announcement)
Spending all your time trying to find leads instead of actually talking to the people who want to sell. In this episode of the Property Perspective, host Preston Zeller speaks with GoForClose CEO, param Shah, about the evolution from operator to system builder through the integration of technology and understanding market dynamics dollar deals. This is the property perspective where seasoned real estate pros reveal how they spot value others miss and industry disruptors share the unconventional strategies reshaping real estate. Now here are your hosts
00:33 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Hey everyone, My name is Preston Zeller, I'm Chief Growth Officer at Batch Service and today I have Param Shah here from GoForClose as the CEO. Welcome, param. How are you, sir, doing? Great Thanks for having me. We met last week at a huge real estate mastermind and had some fantastic conversations, so I'm looking forward to continuing that today. You live in the Bay Area. Now what are you doing in the Bay? I mean GoForClose. Tell us about that briefly.
01:06 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah, so I grew up in Orange County, California, so I kind of need to stay near the beach. Getting landlocked makes me nervous. But I actually ended up going to college on the East Coast, went to basically school for medicine, to be a doctor, and very quickly realized that that was a lot of school for me. But at the same time I also started basically a college project which turned into a startup that eventually got me leaving college in a couple of years to focus on that and that eventually brought me back to California and staying in LA, then moving to San Francisco because, hey, it's the center of the tech world and you know I've been revolving around it for quite some time. So it was kind of inevitable that I landed up here, you know.
01:58 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Right, and then you and what. We're going to get deep into your background, for sure, but you bought GoForClose about a year ago, right, correct?
02:07 - Param Shah (Guest)
yeah.
02:08 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Nice. And so just tell us briefly, like what does GoForClose do?
02:13 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah. So GoForClose is essentially a data and marketing automation company for real estate investors to grow their business, so I started to call it the easy button for real estate investors. I was an investor myself. I went through the process of trying to pull data myself, trying to cold call, trying to send mail and it's terrible, frankly and I realized that I was spending all the hours in my day trying to get leads to talk to and I came to a quick realization where I'm like, wait, I should be spending all of my time and all those hours actually talking to leads.
02:50
Very simple, but that realization transformed my real estate investing business. I ended up using GoForClose as my vendor to automate our data pools, our marketing, our cold calling and direct mail, and we ended up scaling up our real estate business because of that and doing 70 transactions in the first year and then, from there, basically got to know the owners, josh and Nate, and coming into 2024, they were looking to transition out of the business and I said, hey, I think GoForClose is an amazing vehicle to build something for this awesome community that is real estate investors and basically find a way for more real estate investors to be successful. And I saw GoForClose as a vehicle to achieve that and build something that does that, and so I ended up taking it over in 2024 and just enjoying running it today.
03:46 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, and I I'm looking forward to digging more into that because you know, I think a lot of people listening are going to be, you know, or you know at least some of the people are just going to where do I start? Where do I start? And which is why we love digging into the stories. But you know, you kind of went this interesting route of um, you know, I guess, back, ending it to some degree, where you got into real estate and then, of course, acquired a business to like, uh, service real estate from a different angle, um and so and I resonate that that partially because you know I've been mostly in tech. I never got into real estate in the level that you were just talking about, but I've been in around it, as we kind of talked about in Florida last week, and mostly on the tech side. So I love it. I'm looking forward to learning more. So let's rewind the clock a bit. Like what was your family life like? You know, your parents, what did they do for a living, siblings, all that stuff.
04:47 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah, definitely. So just talking about family, like I said, I grew up in Irvine in Orange County, pretty much like a utopic, like best place in the world that a kid can be raised, and my dad, first generation immigrant, came here to study at Rutgers for structural engineering. Where was he from India?
05:09
And so he came over from India, went to Rutgers, studied engineering as soon as he could, saved up money and came to California because he was like this is the place to be, and so he came here to be. And so he came here. He famously commuted from Orange County to LA for like like five to six years every single day. To this day.
05:34 - Preston Zeller (Host)
he hates driving to Los Angeles, but in any case,
05:36 - Param Shah (Guest)
he saw.
05:37
he just you know, he's one of those guys where you know he set up our life to be, you know, as stable as good as it can. He saved up every life to be, you know, as stable as good as it can. He saved up every penny to put back into our education and our work. My mom ended up, you know, basketball at a very young age and so he was really the sole provider. But he inspired me, you know, to work extremely hard, inspired my sister as well to work extremely hard and, you know, to give back to the life that we were given. And so, just, you know, it's instilled that to me to date.
06:11
I got started in kind of building things and doing that stuff from a young age. So when I was in high school, I got really involved in nonprofit work, starting my own nonprofit that focuses on providing medical treatment to children in rural India, and that organization still exists today. We still treat about, you know, two to 300 people per year and that just kind of started the entrepreneurial journey. And, like I said, I went to school for medicine, but quickly that entrepreneurial bug kind of crept back in and started something.
06:50 - Preston Zeller (Host)
So anyways, that was a progression. You mean you didn't like the red tape of getting into the medicine world.
06:57 - Param Shah (Guest)
Well, funnily enough, I ended up going to Johns Hopkins, which is like first a research institute and two a medical school. I was like, growing up, I'm like I want to be a doctor, that's everything right. Uh, coming into college, I basically started this college project which was essentially developing technology to very easily scan limbs and turn that into machinable code that a machine can then print out a device like a prosthetic or an orthotic brace, right and so that was kind of the pain you were doing that in high school. I was doing so.
07:32 - Preston Zeller (Host)
That was freshman year of college oh okay, so yeah, and so yeah, very, very young to be doing that, um, yeah yeah and so, yeah, in any case, that kind of snowballed people.
07:43 - Param Shah (Guest)
We built this software, this product. People started paying us for it. It kind of turned into a company and then, by my second year, silicon Valley investors wanted to invest and so they basically pulled me into being a startup founder and go from there.
08:01 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Wow, I want to touch on it real quick, just because, uh, I don't know if we talked about it back in florida, but just like the the topic of loss, because like, yeah, and you're saying you're losing your mom at an early age, I mean, first of all, I can't you know, that's uh an incredible loss of sustain at a young age and I mean, how did that shape you growing up? I mean, cause it didn't. Obviously it seemed like it turned you in a more motor, into a more motivated person, but I think any loss throws you into an existential crisis, even at a young age. I mean, I've seen my kids just like question more things about life. Yeah, I mean, what, what was that like for you?
08:45 - Param Shah (Guest)
more things about life. Yeah, I mean what? What was that like for you? You know, I think, for me, what it really manifested in cause. I was lucky that I was young, you know, I was nine. Um, I didn't quite perceive it. My sister was older and you know, it was definitely tougher from her for her emotionally. Um, in the moment, right, like for me, I think, what it it gave me, I think, a really early appreciation for what my dad was doing for us. You know, um, he, he couldn't come to, like you know, all the soccer games, the school events, all this type of stuff, cause he was a single dad providing for two kids in Irvine, california, not the cheapest place in the world, right, and, and you know you, you live in Irvine and and you're not getting financial aid just because of your zip code.
09:30
And so my dad was working, was working extremely hard, and it made me really understand, you know, what it takes to not only provide for, you know, a loved one that's sick, but also provide for your family at the same time. And just seeing, even just looking back now, understanding, you know, being more mature, understanding like the poise and the effort and just what he must've been going through, but didn't show any of that to us it's, it's incredible. It was like a superpower. You know that he had, and so for me, I think, processing it was really a function of, just like you know, seeing my dad really go through it and then turning that into motivation to show my dad that, hey, you know, something's going to come out of all of this and I'm going to, I'm going to make that happen, you know.
10:17 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, that's, that's really good insight, cause I think you know, obviously we're all kind of shaped by our you know childhood in one way or another, and you know, but you, you use those things to to create motivation and it could be positive or destructive motivation, right, yeah, and we see that all the time. So I appreciate you sharing that um, so, um, and, and you know, for people who are kind of curious, I know this cause, you know we, we went to the same, you know same city. You know Irvine's. It's pretty interesting, it's a super old, it's utopic. For sure they actually designed it to be in that vein, right, so it's, it's studied by civil engineering classes, but's it's super multicultural.
11:05
And you don't really expect that going into the middle of orange county, because you go to, like, uh, say, newport beach and you don't really get that. It's obviously very touristy. But you go into irvine, there's like a lot of indian, a lot of persian, um, a lot of different asian cultures there. Um, you know european cultures, it's just it is, it is a trippy place and kind of, depending on where you are in Irvine, that sort of shifts too. It does, like I was next to UCI, which was like a lot more Asian, persian. You probably had a lot more kind of the white Euro vibe up in the north part of Irvine, but it is a very interesting place and very expensive.
11:48
As you said, guy, you look up a house, a guy I think a townhouse it's depressing I I the townhouse that I went to high school in is like 1.5 million dollars now and it's like I don't know, it's 2500's, 2,500 square feet no yard.
12:07 - Param Shah (Guest)
I remember when my dad was he talks about this all the time when, literally when, he bought the house, it like where our house was. It was like a dirt road. After that in Irvine, like it was like a paved road but a dirt road, and he bought it and he's just like I remember paying for this house and my knees were shaking, signing this lease and it was like every single dollar I had left in my bank account. But he's like I knew that it was an investment in the future and, man, trust me, it did return for him. But yeah, it's interesting. I mean, just talk about, you know, real estate as a whole and just these people would love to have that opportunity to get into a neighborhood that early today. But Irvine's a special place. It's just completely different from most places you'll ever go.
12:57 - Preston Zeller (Host)
you know, yeah, well, yeah, and like Central OC, has become this. It was kind of a real estate hub, particularly because the Irvine company, I think, but it had some like businesses, like spectrum is really big of course, that whole center, but then it's like you know, I haven't spent much time out there since I moved out of there a while ago, but I know it's attracted a lot more tech and stuff like that Core Logics out there, or Cality, as they are now Strange name, but so anyways, yeah, it's an interesting spot. So, okay, let's get back. Then you get out of high school. How did you get this nonprofit idea, by the way, in high school?
13:43 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah, so when I was in high school like I said we were we were in a high school that was public school but, being in Irvine, very well funded. It was an awesome school with like several different programs. One program that I got really involved in was the special education program at our school, and so we had special education and we had a club called Wolfpack. We were the Timberwolves, and basically what Wolfpack would do is we would hang out with a lot of the special education students at LUN, just to you know, get some intermingling with them, become friends, help with their kind of social development as well as well. And I started to see that, you know, students within special education were largely segmented away from general education students, you know, and in the same school but completely different programs, classes etc. And I ended up being the president of that club. We're going way back to like high school achievements.
14:40
But I became the president of that club and one of my missions was how do we essentially integrate the special education students with general education students a lot more? And so we actually lobbied the school district to say, hey, there's a lot of basically lower level electives, choir, pottery, like this type of stuff that special education students can be a part of and intermingle in a sort of level playing field with general education students, and so we ended up getting the school board to allow that and that kind of it was just an interest for me. But I ended up going on this service trip in my junior year of high school to the Himalayas, and it was through my temple. Frankly it was my excuse to go and take photographs in the Himalayas I wasn't really there for, like you know, building the sanitation systems and doing that and sort of the rural foothills of the himalayas yeah, you want to go see like like, are you like hindu?
15:41 - Preston Zeller (Host)
yes, yeah, so.
15:42 - Param Shah (Guest)
So, like it was, it was a service trip through and through, like it was coordinated through the temple, but that was my kind of excuse to go do that while I was there, yeah, I mean like, let's be honest, it was gorgeous, I gather a million times, but uh, but we, we, basically, when we were going through the villages there because we would drive into a village and we do a project there, whether that's, you know, building a new sanitation system or, you know, educating the villagers about, you know, nutrition, medicine, that sort of stuff I started to see and just notice that in a lot of these villages, a lot of them, there were children that had these neuromusculoskeletal diseases, so cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy and uh, like, basically, we would only be able to see these children if we went into these homes. They were essentially hidden, you know, from society in a big way and, uh, in talking to a lot of parents of these kids, they had no idea that these were treatable conditions, like in some cases it would be like this was you know, god did this to me, you know, and like that was it. And so I kind of just got this, this spark and and went to the nonprofit I was working with and said, hey, look, you have the resources and the infrastructure to be able to get people to these villages, speak to them. They have your trust. If I raise money, I can basically bring in money and I can bring in doctors from these local hospitals and we can actually provide medical treatment to these kids. And so they went for it.
17:15
I started raising money in the United States, I started coordinating with doctors and hospitals and what we would do is we'd do these missions where we would essentially go out to these villages in a car. We'd talk to the villagers to understand are there any kids in these villages that have this type of disease? We'd go there, we'd essentially provide them treatment as well as make these medical devices or orthotic braces, prosthetics to be able to help them with mobility. But we'd also do something called a community rehabilitation, so we'd teach their friends, family, neighbors on how to actually treat this child, how to work with them, how to develop them, and so that became, like you know, a huge fashion line. To date we still do this and and it's kind of one of those driving factors for me to, you know, build my own businesses, make more money and eventually give back. You know, that's a whole different story. I'll drop it out and why I did that, but ultimately that spark and that thing is what kind of started my entrepreneurial journey.
18:17 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, I think it's great to be tied back to something that is you know, beyond you. Yeah, for sure. And are you speaking the local language at this time? You have a translator? Because, okay, because okay, yeah, so.
18:30 - Param Shah (Guest)
so I grew up knowing gujarati, which is essentially a it's it's sort of like hindi, um, and there's a lot of similarities, um, but it's just it's like a different dialect, a different language really, but um. So I grew up speaking that. Uh, I grew up watching Bollywood movies and so I could understand Hindi really well, but when I got there, frankly, I just kind of spoke through broken Hindi until I got really good at it, just being immersed in it, and so, yeah, that's it was.
19:03 - Preston Zeller (Host)
it was quite the experience, you know the experience, you know, and I'm I'm sure that gave you a sense of maybe credibility or connection more with them, you know, than than having a translator for sure I mean, look all of it, believe it or not, and this sounds like kitschy, but like it's all sales, like even going into these villages and saying like, hey, we can treat your child.
19:27 - Param Shah (Guest)
It wasn't like, oh, thank you for coming to me and doing this. No, it was a. This needs to happen. Let me convince you that we can do it Right. And so it was a challenge at the beginning, but then, as words started to spread, you know, it became easier over time.
19:42 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah Well, I mean, you know there's the whole no like and trust thing right, which you know you're not generally approaching some random person to be like let's do business together.
19:53 - Param Shah (Guest)
Exactly Right, unless you're at a real estate mastermind. No, I'm kidding.
20:01 - Preston Zeller (Host)
You just assume there's a certain quality there. Yeah, that's funny. Okay, so you go into college 're at johns hopkins, and I'm sure you were. Just I'm actually curious because you mentioned the dropout story, which we're going to hear this. But um, at what point did the sort of glow of johns Johns Hopkins and being there start to fade?
20:29 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah, that's a great question. So just to take you into that journey, so like during the whole nonprofit kind of saga, like I ended up coming back after my junior year of high school continuing that work through senior year I was still 100% laser focused I want to be a doctor. This only promoted it, so right. So I ended up, you know, getting a scholarship to go to Johns Hopkins. I went there and you know it was incredible. You know I go into a school like that. You're on the East Coast, it's like a whole different vibe and Johns Hopkins was a very academic school. I fit, you know, right in there and and it was, it was interesting part of this program. So when I started going to sing part of the scholarship program, it was like a merit scholarship, so like a few students got this.
21:22
I met, you know who would become my co-founder very early on, like two weeks in and I started to talk about. He was two years older than me and I started to talk about this problem that I was having in my nonprofit work where we would essentially go out in a car to a village that's an hour away. We would take measurements of this child to get a device done to get a device done. We drive it back, you know, and then we would produce a device and a week later, or two weeks later sometimes, when we'd go back out to that village because we had to go to a lot of them the device wouldn't fit anymore, like the child's weight had fluctuated or something had changed. And so I was talking about this problem with you know, my friend and you know soon co-founder, and he had done, he was doing research and basically building this capability where people doing craniotomy surgeries meaning they would like cut a piece of the skull out and do a surgery he would scan the skull and basically 3D print an implant that's temporary there, you know, to come in school during surgery. And so he looked at me and was like, hey look, I think my search, my like research, can actually help you with that problem. Like we can scan the limb and produce a device like on the spot and have it go out there faster. So about two weeks into school I was already like, all right, this is a cool project, I want to do this.
22:47
And what's funny is, through high school I was a straight A student, like straight as an arrow, like really focused. I did a bunch of extracurriculars choir, newspaper, all that stuff but I really I was straightforward. College became an interesting thing where suddenly I felt that you know this real like the stuff that I actually enjoyed and I was a neuroscience and computer science double major. The neuroscience like I absolutely loved some of these classes. I would stoke it in, it would be easy. And then I would go to organic chemistry.
23:25
I absolutely hated it and I think it was because of the function of just being independent and like choosing my own life and that I started to just not care about some of these courses. Like I would just be like what is the reason for this? I would suffer in that course because I just genuinely didn't care about doing that. And on the side I had this super exciting idea that I was like working with every single night with you know, my co-founder, and that was coming to fruition. And I remember this moment where I was in an organic chemistry class and my, my co-founder texted me and said it's done, we'd been waiting like a day for like this, our device to print for the first time, the 3d printing.
24:04 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Nice, yeah, okay.
24:05 - Param Shah (Guest)
And I just ran out of that class Like I didn't care ran out of that class.
24:08 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Like I didn't care, ran out of that class I ran to my, my uh co-founder.
24:11 - Param Shah (Guest)
We got the device and we fit it on the person the model that we had and it fit perfectly. And that rush, I think, was the spark. That was just like, okay, there's something way more interesting about doing that and achieving this than doing research and like stuff like that. And so that that's kind of where it started to wear off. Okay, I didn't like the research, I didn't like half of my courses. I'm never going to get that type of rush like I did with this from that, and so that that's where it came from.
24:43 - Preston Zeller (Host)
No, I think that's a. That's a really good self-realization too. And it's funny the more I talk with people about college today, it's like, yes, unless you are going into some uber technical field where you do need that extended education, what so many people end up getting out of college is they meet someone or a network of people Definitely, or a network of people Definitely. It's less all the GE and even the other, maybe the degree oriented classes where they're like man, I just felt so fulfilled sitting in class all day.
25:16
I don't think there's a lot of people who are along those lines, especially if you have any entrepreneurial bent and you're like I need to go make stuff, I need to go see it be put to use, I want to get that feedback, because that feedback is ultimately the thing that makes you go, wow, now I can get better at it, versus a grade on a paper which you're like, okay, now what do I do in the next paper, the next test? Oh yeah, that kind of stuff. Okay, so you had that realization. So where did it go from there?
25:47 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah, realization. So where did it go from there? Yeah, so, um, I think it's good to say, just on that note, is this was the year that entrepreneurship like exploded on the scene.
25:59 - Preston Zeller (Host)
And what? What year sorry are we at at this point?
26:01 - Param Shah (Guest)
yeah, so this was 2016, ish, um, my sophomore year of college and 2016,. Yeah, and basically entrepreneurship became the buzzword, like now you go to any college, you go to any student program and they're just like oh yeah, we have an entrepreneurship center. Yeah, our kids study computer science and build startups and we fund them. That didn't exist before my year and in my year, all of a sudden, every single school was like entrepreneurship, we're building our center for entrepreneurship, and at that time, we had built this device. We built software to essentially take in those measurements and create this device. And we'd even started testing it, going to local medical device manufacturers and showing them how we'd been building this product. And basically these medical device manufacturers came back to us and said, hey, the software you're building is actually super valuable. Can we pay you for it? And so this little business starts brewing. I start to read and hear about these kind of entrepreneurship endeavors and that sort of stuff and I said, all right, why don't we try and make a little startup and see what happens? And so we started getting paid real money for this software that we've been building. And the snowball's turning, turning.
27:24
Like I get into my sophomore year, I'm still studying hard, but I'm running out of class every single day because I'm taking calls from clients and, like you know, stuff like that. Um, and there comes this moment at the end of my sophomore year where basically entrepreneurship is the buzzword. We were one of the only entrepreneurs on campus like like actually doing something. So I became like the poster child, like I was getting taken to donors, like the owner of the baltimore ravens and stuff, to like talk about, you know, building an entrepreneurship program, like all these things.
27:59
And so this big silicon valley investor, who's a hopkins alumni, came to campus and he was going to speak at this event and he came a bit early. He came about an hour early and he's like, you know, I have some time, like, do you have any student entrepreneurs? I want to talk to them. So I get pulled out of class by literally the dean of the school and say, hey, this investor wants to talk to you. So I sat down and I basically gave him my pitch and we started talking and at the end of that, you know, he's like, hey, this is really interesting. Like here's my number, call me and let's get dinner later. And you know, I thought he was, you know, blowing steam, whatever it is right, because you know what was my thing compared?
28:40
this guy invested in snapchat and slack and like all these things. I'm like what am I? In any case, we do get dinner that night and, uh, he not only pushes his flight to talk more with me, we have talked for like two, three hours. He then, at the end of the night, says I'm going to invest a million dollars in your business. I want you to turn this into the real deal. And that just floored me and that kind of changed the entire trajectory of my life because I realized, like all right, let me give this a shot.
29:09
I called my dad and I said hey, I'm going to take a year off to do this. And I thought that was going to be the hardest conversation. But my dad was an entrepreneur too. He started his own structural engineering firm. He still, to this day, runs his own business. And he said you know what, go for it If you like it, continue. I don his own business. And he said you know what, go for it if you like it, continue. I don't think he ever thought I'd be forever. It's still a sore part, sore subject, but um, but in general, he told me to go for it and I went for it, so I ended up dropping out. We ended up focusing on building that into a company and I could talk about you know what that company was.
29:46 - Preston Zeller (Host)
That was the software piece that you'd been developing, um, but the other, correct, started buying, started paying you for yes, so.
29:55 - Param Shah (Guest)
So basically, it started out as we built software to create these custom medical devices right, okay, okay, yeah, and it was software.
30:07 - Preston Zeller (Host)
that was was what helping make the, the mod, the sorry, the, the CAS or the 3d printed.
30:15 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah, for sure, so you can call it like I can look back and say, hey, it was glorified order taking software, but basically what it would do is the whole. The whole perspective was medical devices need to be custom manufactured and the intake systems for orders was like you're using like quickbooks sometimes, to like be like all right, here's the skew and the stuff. And we needed to know like millimeter accuracy for these limbs and stuff. So we essentially built software that was very customizable, that would allow us to take a capture of a limb and take all these measurements and turn it into like an actual order form that could go to a manufacturer to produce a custom device to spec uh, in a really easy way. And basically we started to show this device to all these medical manufacturers and they said forget the device, the software is actually interesting. Let me buy that because that helps me produce my custom devices much better, more accurately, etc.
31:16 - Preston Zeller (Host)
So that was the product, I think it.
31:18
I think it's interesting because you're I mean, even what you just said a moment ago is a glorified order taking software. But one of the things that's always stuck out to me is this whole notion that the things you know you take for granted but we have a tendency to underestimate how little someone may know compared to you but also the things that you do know, how value, truly valuable they may be, or something you've made that's really valuable, even though to you it might seem insignificant or very simple or very whatever, and like I think that's why you have to put things out there to go hey, what do others think of it? You know, and maybe it's just one tweak away from being the thing that solves a lot of problems, but like don't let it stop you by underestimating yourself.
32:14 - Param Shah (Guest)
I mean, it's all about solving problems and, like you'd be surprised, the smallest itch if you can scratch that for somebody, if it's a big enough company or problem on the other side, it can be incredibly valuable.
32:28
You know, and what ended up happening with this software is it started off with order taking for these custom medical devices, but what it evolved into was essentially understanding that you know, 70% of manufacturing out there today, whether it's semiconductors or furniture, it's done through custom manufacturing people making parts by hand and making parts based on specs.
32:56
And people always think, okay, I'm making water bottles or toothpaste and like, yeah, that's batch manufacturing, it's like you, that sort of thing. But there's a lot of custom manufacturing in the world and you just wouldn't know that. And so what that ended up snowballing into was a company called Factory 4 that essentially was building a manufacturing execution system, also known as an MES, for custom manufacturing. So basically, we get the order from the client, our system translates that into actual instruction steps and a workflow to manufacture a product, and then people on the floor, the machines, all that. They get the instructions from our system to manufacture each custom component and it tracks it through. So we ended up turning that software from servicing these small medical device manufacturers to working with huge us defense like contractors and other types of big enterprise businesses nice, well, so okay, at what point does real estate come into the picture?
34:03 - Preston Zeller (Host)
for you, then?
34:04 - Param Shah (Guest)
Definitely so. We ended up selling that business. So I, you know, dropped out of school. I focused on that. I ran that company for six years, raised a bunch of venture capital for it, and then we ended up selling the company in early 2020.
34:19 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, so, so, actually, before sorry, before you get to the real estate, I want, want to, I want to know, like the top you know, one, two, three things you learn from that six-year experience, because I don't want to gloss over that either.
34:30 - Param Shah (Guest)
Oh, oh man well, top three things. So I'll tell you what immediately comes to mind. Um, I think number one people is Like I think this gets glossed over, especially in real estate and these markets where you know there's like this idea of like virtual assistants and that sort of stuff. I'm going to bring it back to the real estate market where you focus on how do I arbitrage labor, how do I get you know the cheapest task done for that? I hate the word virtual assistant because ultimately, what you're doing, whether it's in the United States for your team or whether it's overseas, you're finding the top talent that you can, at whatever price point, to be able to come into your business, because the impact that people have over ideas, product execution, it's everything Like the people that you bring into your business will fundamentally change that and that's the one of the core kind of learnings I had during that whole process.
35:34
The second thing was, you know just this, this focus on owning my own outcome. You know, like that first company, we raised venture capital, we had a board, we had all these pieces right and and ultimately I learned big lessons where you know, being in that environment, having that accountability. But I think one of the biggest things I learned is, at the end of the day, I was an entrepreneur. I wanted to see my own fate, I wanted to be accountable and responsible to myself, and that pushed into my later career, where now I'm investing in my own businesses, owning them, and it's all my own capital. If I were to say one more thing is I had a great that investor, who eventually invested in us, came on our board. He taught me a good lesson.
36:24
It was our first board meeting and I came in and, look, I was 19. I didn't know anything. And so I come to this board meeting and for me, to be honest, it kind of felt like a report card. You got to come back to your parents and you're like, hey, here's my report card. I got A's, but there's a, one b and like this is what happened. You know, like the class was super hard, whatever.
36:50
So I come in here and I start presenting this like you know, hey, these are all the great things that's happening and yeah, these, you know, bad things are happening. Here's all the great stuff. We end that meeting and, uh, that stands up. He's like, look, parm, like I'll tell you one thing Like this is great, but going forward. I don't want good news, I don't want bad news, I just want the news and I'll determine if it's good or bad, and I think you need to operate that way too. It was kind of a it was a slap in the face at the time, but it was a super valuable lesson. Later on I realized like there's a discipline to understanding your business and how it operates and that kind of translated them to into the future.
37:33 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, no, that's, that's good stuff. Okay, now real estate. You sell this or you stop stop doing that business after about six years. How does real estate come about?
37:46 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah. So basically post Factory 4 and selling that business. I basically got into this motion of effectively realizing like all right, I want to invest in more businesses. Realizing like all right, I want to invest in more businesses. The part that I loved about the first entrepreneurial journey was like the first couple of years where you're figuring stuff out, you're building the fundamental product, you're talking to clients, you're doing discovery. Um, that was like the spark for me, the later years of enterprise sales day in and day out.
38:22
It was brutal, Just completely fairly. I didn't enjoy the job and I loved the team and that's what kept me going, but I yearned for that early days of fast product development, that sort of thing. So I started to tell myself, how do I put myself back into that position? Again and again, and again. And so I know we'll talk about this. But today I run a private equity firm that basically invests and acquires businesses and puts me back in that driver's seat for those first 90 days, that first year of the business, again and again. So I achieved that. But in any case, one of the businesses that we started after that period was I wanted to start investing in Denver and I'd heard about the wholesaling model. I was like, wow, that's a very interesting scalable model. Like zero money down, I can scale this into infinity and I think it's a great business to run.
39:24 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Definitely a naive look, as well as starting in Denver, about two years ago, like why are there so many homes in Denver?
39:35 - Param Shah (Guest)
This is crazy, I wish somebody warned me, but in any case. So basically, I had a business partner in Denver.
39:43
He was a previous investor in my company and we were both interested in this model and we said let's go for it. We understand. So we first hired a person who was part of a very well-known investing firm in Denver. We hired him away from that to essentially be our Sherpa through investing in real estate, doing that, and we hit the ground running. We essentially came in, we started to do that, we started to hold the data, do the cold calling, do the direct mail, et cetera, and it was tough. I mean out the gate. Denver's a bloodbath of a market. It is very intense, very competitive.
40:26
I still remember the top guy in Denver. I won't name him, but he deserves an award. This guy would basically sit in the back of his car all day. He had a driver and as soon as a property would hit the MLS or as soon as a lead would come in, they would start driving to that house and he would get on the phone with that lead and start negotiating right there. So by the time they got to the house he already had a contract in hand for them to sign and this guy would just crank.
40:59
And so I looked at that. I'm like, oh my God, like how do we beat something like that scale and so, in any case, we started to build up, build up a team. We ended up realizing, hey, cold calling, direct mail all on our own, is not producing the results that we need. So we started working with GoForclose to essentially provide us lead flow. So they took over pulling the data and they'd started doing direct mail, cold calling, and they were experts, Like they knew how to do these things in a way that we didn't. They ranked the data so that they were prioritizing marketing accordingly. They just started funding us leads.
41:43 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Sorry, there was a delay there. Go back to just starting about. You started working with GoForClose, yeah.
41:50 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, and so basically we'd been doing the cold call and the direct mail by ourselves. It wasn't really working. We were no longer. We were nowhere near hitting the volume we needed to do, and so I got introduced to GoForClose to Josh there, who's you know the owner and the founder at the time, and he basically was a wealth of knowledge. He'd been in this industry for six years sorry, longer than six years as a real estate investor and then he started GoForClose about six years ago and he started running our pulling the data, doing the direct mail, doing the cold calling and just sending us leads and we basically were just getting leads on autopilot, multiple a day. We ended up hiring four more agents, so we had like two acquisition agents, three disposition agents meaning you know people that acquired, people that you know sold those properties or flip them or whatever it was and we just built up a system around that very sophisticated, grew to 70 plus transactions in the first year and and we basically grew it on the back of go for closing the leads.
43:00 - Preston Zeller (Host)
That's awesome. And how was it?
43:02 - Param Shah (Guest)
Was 70 sort of the biggest year, I mean, or so, yeah, tell me that, tell me the ramp up period.
43:07 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, so yeah, tell me the, tell me the ramp up period.
43:13 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah, so. So basically 70 was the first year. In the second year we started the first quarter really strong like went in another like I think it was like 20, 25. And then at that time my partner basically started to weigh in a bit on whether he wanted to continue in the Denver market and that stuff. So we ended up we ended up folding that Denver investing corporation but we actually kind of I kind of kept on going where I would manage.
43:38
Like we started getting calls basically from other investors in Denver like big flippers that knew that we were winding down and they were calling me to say, hey, can you come and run our marketing, can you come and run our acquisition operations? And so it wasn't really my thing. I kind of did for a couple of months. But that's really when I started to think about what is the real estate community as a whole. And what was interesting to me is one real estate is like this uniquely American opportunity, like where anybody, no matter what your background is education, pedigree, whatever it is like you can work hard and be successful. And there's very little opportunities like that. And so I became kind of enamored with that community and how many people engage with that every year, and I was also sad because you know hundreds of thousands of people try to do this every year and 97% of them will fail before ever doing anything meaningful, and so that kind of got my gears turning.
44:45 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Why do you think so many people fail at it? Do you think so many people fail at it?
44:48 - Param Shah (Guest)
Well, look, I think the first thing is and this is not to discount at all, but like it's building a business I always talk to real estate investors and they're like hey, I want to, like you know, do this on the side, do it passively, that sort of stuff. Like, yes, that's fine, but if you're coming in to do real estate investing, it is a full contact sport, like you have to be in it to be able to get a deal done. And so I tell people I'm like, don't kid yourself, you are running a business doing this. And I think most people are not prepared to run a business from the get-go and so they don't have that mindset. They jump in, they spend some money and then they realize, wait a second, I don't have the bandwidth, the mindset, whatever it is to be able to run this business as a whole. So I think that's why a lot of them fail. I think the second reason is it's just really hard.
45:39
I want to give the example of Shopify and for people who may not know what Shopify is, it helps people create stores online to sell products. And what was interesting is you kind of think about what it used to be. People would create this awesome product. They would go to a farmer's market and maybe sell it at the farmer's market to start, or sell it to friends, and they would kind of create a following all on their own until they could go to a retailer to then sell their product or set up their own shop. It was really difficult and sell their product or set up their own shop. It was really difficult With Shopify, which is now, you know, multi-hundred billion dollar company.
46:19
What they did is they took and they basically took all of the hard parts about creating a business, a store, online, and they abstracted it away. So like, how do you create a website? How do you put products up there? How do you transact payments? How do you put products up there? How do you transact payments? How do you do marketing? They basically made the easy button for people to create online stores and thus a lot more people can be successful doing that today, and they have been. So that inspired me to look at this and say, wow, within real estate, there's so many steps. There's creating your LLC, there's being able to pull the right data from different sources, actually get the skip tracing of the data, making sure you're prioritizing the right data, doing the actual cold calling, the follow-up, it's, it's a crazy amount of stuff before you even get to doing the transaction, which is a whole set of math.
47:08 - Preston Zeller (Host)
That's just the lead gen side of it.
47:11 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah, and so I said you know what, like GoForClose, can be a vehicle to essentially achieve what Shopify did, which is create an easy button for real estate investors to create a business, because I still believe it's one of the most amazing opportunities for people to to build wealth and to build a business today.
47:33 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, definitely, because you got into it around 2021, right?
47:41 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yes, so I started investing in real estate in 2022.
47:56 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Real estate in, yeah, 20, 22, 20, yeah, I mean you know last, I mean we talked about this a lot. You know, with the group we were out last week too, um, but just how much has changed? Of course, right, because I think we went. We went through this interesting cycle of, you know, I think real estate investing and these alternative models um becoming mainstream. And then, you know, during all the covet, stuff really went mainstream. Oh yeah, we're sitting at home watching. You know all the, you know these, these videos and these tv shows started coming out.
48:24
Um, but man, the, the rate at which things shifted in 22 when rates started to change, it just I think it like was definitely a reality check for not just new people but experienced people too, and it's made you had to be for any kind of business really, right, like that much more buttoned up. And and so I mean most people don't realize a lot of 23 and 24 are the lowest retail transaction volume since, like the mid nineties. This year, like 2025, is not pacing any different than the last two years. So when you know people think about getting into it, they're like an off market yes, different, but still I mean mean it's like how easy is it for deals to to uh take place? And so if you're not like at least somewhat aware of that and that you're gonna have to fight for these deals, it's not.
49:20
Oh, yes, you know. Ah, let me just go. You know, casually, do this, like you said, it's a full contact sport. You're just gonna be disenchanted, and I think that goes for a lot of stuff. It's just like, hey, go in eyes wide open, not, um, just uh, willfully ignorant of the possibilities. And that's not to say you have to know everything.
49:45 - Param Shah (Guest)
It's just be okay with, like, pivoting along the way I I spend most of my time, my team spends most of our time, with new investors, just teaching them about what to expect and, frankly, putting scary numbers in front of them. It's like for us there's too much in this market of like all right, you do this, you're going to be successful, quick turn in that and we do a lot of all right, it's going to take six to eight months to make this happen. This is how much money, et cetera. And what's really heartening, I think, at the same time, is that people are up for the challenge. Like they're up, like hearing all that, they're still up for the challenge.
50:27
And I once I've sort of educated them on those expectations and they've realized that, okay, in a particular market, it might cost me $10,000 to be able to get my first deal and I need to be mentally prepared to do that. Once they're past that hump and they're ready to take the plunge with eyes wide open, then I realized it becomes my responsibility to like get them the right tools to be successful and then, from there, be a partner to help them stay on track. Like people need community, they need other people to push them forward and continue, even when things get tough, even when expectations are are set for them, and that's just being a business owner, like plain and simple, and so that's just kind of what we're in.
51:14 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, so what are your goals with GoForClose? Like going into the future.
51:21 - Param Shah (Guest)
For sure. So it's very interesting. I've run the company now for a year. A lot of this year has been spent looking at our system. So, as I mentioned, there's two big portions. There's data, where we essentially pull different data sources off and niche data sources, as well as work with other providers like Batch, like different systems like that, to pull in these data sources. We then score that data to basically understand what is likely to sell within a short period of time. And then we have the marketing components, where we run multi-channel marketing campaigns on demand to those basically prioritized data lists in order to generate leads to the client.
52:10
Now, when I first kind of came in, I spent a good amount of time just shoring up those systems, making them more cohesive, making them more automated so that we can take on more investors and work with them over time.
52:24
And I always had this vision of that Shopify for real estate investors where how do we make it easier and easier, basically create that easy button for real estate investors to come in and start to build businesses quicker.
52:38
We're still pushing down that vision, but more and more, what I've realized is that we present this really core part of the ecosystem, which is we help investors actually build sustainable businesses by putting in a data and marketing system that they can rely on consistently and sustainably in the future. I think that there's paper lead providers and these things out there that, yes, sure, you're getting in the investor that can spend the dollar and get a lead back, and that sort of thing, but that's not sustainable and that's not running a business. I've provided that all myself. I've tried that out, platform and system in every single real estate investor's business to help them actually truly build something that's meaningful, that generates revenue, that grows, and, along the way, we're starting to lean in much more with other partners in the ecosystem that provide these various components that we can integrate into and basically create value for everybody.
53:50
There's so much room to go around and there's amazing platforms like batch that are out there, that ultimately you know. We believe that plugging in and providing our components is going to help lift the system as a whole. That's. That's what we're doing today.
54:08 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, awesome. So anyone who wants a you know more sort of done for you approach, right Is go find, excuse me, go find, go for clothes, right, correct?
54:22 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yep, and so ultimately, data done for you, marketing done for you, might focus on the one productive thing that real estate investors can do, which is talk to motivated sellers. That's it. Nobody can convince me otherwise. And ultimately what we do is we take all the hard things away from that and just have you focus on that Talk to motivated sellers.
54:44 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, fantastic, well cool. It's been great chatting with you, pram, and I'm looking forward to seeing what GoForClose does, and, of course, everyone should go check it out and see what they could do for your real estate investing business.
54:59 - Param Shah (Guest)
So Awesome and I appreciate the time Preston.
55:02 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Yeah, and where can people find you?
55:04 - Param Shah (Guest)
Yeah, so you can find me. Really, if you go to Goforclose.com, you can click the button right there schedule a time. That often goes directly to me or goes to one of my team members, or you can reach me at rmparam at goforclose.com.
55:24 - Preston Zeller (Host)
Sweet. All right, Thanks Param. Thank you.
55:28 - Hope (Announcement)
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