[00:00:00] Speaker A: I think the best way to say it is to love the problem, not your solution. Right. And is to focus on that and not what you think needs to happen. I came into it as a technician, wowing them with how much I know. Unfortunately, that's not the type of communication that really gets eyes glazed over. Why do you have a lack of funding? You had money and you didn't spend it wisely? They have a certain amount of money, they want more of it. Everything else is bs. They don't care.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Welcome to the Entrepreneurs Logbook Podcast. I'm your host Zach Renard. You can find me on social at. It's Zack B. In each episode, I bring on experts from various industries for you to learn about their strategies and insights driving extreme business growth. The Entrepreneurs Logbook podcast is sponsored by WeFeature PR, where we're dedicated to helping entrepreneurs build their thought leadership and business by booking them on podcast and launching their own podcasts. Today we're joined by Steven Morrell, Founder and CEO of Juristeed, an AI powered platform that simplifies taxing and investing for everyday investors. Stephen is a real estate attorney with over 20 years of experience who previously founded a successful title company and serve as chief legal officer at Civic Stores. And then in 2019 he launched JERSD to solve a major problem in the taxing investing world, the overwhelming complexity and legal hurdle that keep most people from accessing these investment opportunities. His platform uses AI technology to automate the entire legal compliance across 50 states, making taxing and investing as simple as managing your retirement account. Stephen, it's great to have you on the show. Welcome aboard.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Steven. One of the things I always love to ask with anyone that comes on your podcast as it is an entrepreneurship business podcast and I know you've obviously been running juicy for a little while here and you've obviously founded multiple successful companies is I'd love to hear if you had to restart your company from scratch, knowing everything that you know today. What's like the one thing that you would do differently that you feel like a lot of entrepreneurs get like totally wrong?
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Yeah, that's probably one of the most important questions you can ask, right? How many startups fail because they don't actually get to that that point of realization. So for me it was approaching the entire opportunity which is obviously to solve an un unserved problem. Right. Or an underserved problem that people want to pay you for. And for me it would be really leaning into the customer journey first before thinking about anything that you believe in your mind is the problem that you want to solve.
I think the best way to say it is to love the problem, not your solution. Right. And is to focus on that and not what you think needs to happen.
And then secondly is to develop your storytelling capabilities.
Most people don't start out knowing how to tell stories. And I don't mean Mickey Mouse Disneyland stories, although they all follow the same story arc. It doesn't really matter, but it's really just about a matter of communicating your idea to others.
But it doesn't stop there. It's communicating others to get them to do it, to take a certain action. It could be as simple as passing the word along to somebody else or as serious as getting venture capital to invest in your company. Right. It all comes back down to being able to articulate in simple terms what is this all about.
And the hardest part for me personally in this journey was the fact that I came into it as a technical. I came into it as someone who spent all these years doing it myself and learn and really getting buy in from clients by wowing them with how much I know and that, which, which wasn't an ego thing, but it gave them confidence that they could trust that I would do it. Unfortunately, that's not the type of communication that really gets, that gets eyes glazed over. That doesn't get buy in from a high level. No.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: But I love the fact that you mentioned like knowing like the problem, like knowing what your customers want. Because in the, there's so many people that start a startup like, oh, I have this amazing idea, people are going to love it. And then you realize in the end that you created this entire product that no one actually wants to use or anything like that. You use all this capital all this time to build something. So it seems for you like being big on like market research, better understanding your consumers, customers and everything like that. And then for you, I mean, you've been in this space like 20 years before you even started the company. So you had a big advantage like knowing really deeply what your customers, clients want. And then you were able obviously to create something that was tailored to what they were looking for. And we'll touch onto that a little bit more because I want to hear it from your own words, but from the storytelling too. You're able to convey that in a very authoritative fashion too because we've been in the space for so long. And that really helped you guys quite a lot from what I could tell here.
I love that.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it's no, it's awesome and it's taken a while. I'll tell you that it hasn't been. The best thing that we had going for us is that we had made sure that we had some revenue along the way because that's the ultimately what brings too many journeys to a halt too soon is the lack of funding and. But that's a consequence, right? Like why do you have a lack of funding? Some of it's beyond your control but a lot of it is because you didn't. You had money and you didn't spend it wisely or you never went out and got enough people to buy in early adopters to start paying a little bit, some kind of misstep along the way or it just took you too long on to get to the point where you could get more a bigger buy in and start to bring on partners that also wanted to go all in on this thing. And because you can't do it all yourself, if you need help, you start to need to grow and if you can't get there, then you might just burn out. Yeah, it's great. One other thing too on this before we move on, I being that I think a lot of people come into startup ideas as a technician. Right. It is a very common path and I think the first thing that you think in your mind is all this experience I have is as the provider. Right. Which is at in this on this again on the solution side. And it's not that you don't understand your customers or you don't care, you don't empathy but you just most of your time is spent on delivering something that they asked you for and it's usually in a much more micro granular context than in the big scheme of things. That is really what they're after is and I'll use an example from our company, one of the many steps that we take to bring value to our customers is digitizing things that were previously analog or static or in paper. That kind of thing.
That's not what they're hiring you for though that might be. That's one of the steps we do but that it was something that was really meaningful to us because we have. It's painful to internally do a paper and having to retranscribe things three times or whatever.
They don't care about that.
Understanding who your customer is and why you're even relevant in their world. Right. These are in our world, these are investors. They have a certain amount of money, they want more of it at the end of the day they see this as a vehicle for which to get there.
That's it.
It's as simple as that. Everything else is bs. They don't care.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: That's exactly why EFG don't really like what they want at the end of the day because you just end up bailing stuff for you because you're like, oh this is great, they're going to love it. And your consumers, investors, etc. I have no desire to use them the first place.
I love that. And just like going back to Josie, because I know we touched on it like a little bit, but I'd love to really understand. Could you walk us through like how do you guys work with clients? Customers? Like when someone comes to your platform, they're looking to invest in taxing or distressed properties. What's the journey from start to finish and how does your technology somewhat simplify like that very traditionally complex process?
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Yeah, it's great question. So for right now we are, we're in fairly closed beta. We have a handful of early adopters that have been become essentially customer partners of ours, which is another great way to learn. And so their journey is they acquire these assets at tax sales which happen around America, in every county and city in most states every year.
And it's a delinquency again delinquent tax bill all about the property to the county. And if it's unpaid, the county needs that money five for that year, tantamount to paying for basic public services. So instead of going bankrupt, they offer it up if it's not paid by a certain time to an investor to pay it for the delinquent person with a promise of interest.
And in other security rights. It's very similar to a mortgage that which is much more common as people understand. A bank is going to lend you money and you're going to pay it back. And if you don't, that they might have to take your property back. The whole reason to get to do that is so they can return their investment. The bank or the lender is stuck because it's in real estate. It's brick and mortar and the only way to get their money back is to liquidated. And so liquidity becomes this big massive end goal that has to happen with all of these assets before they can realize what was their goal. To end up with more money than they started with. Right, but it has to be liquidated. But when something is delinquent and in distress or unpaid, et cetera, whether it's tax or a mortgage, it touches on the legal system it has to in property rights and due process and everything. And so if the goal has these barriers from acquisition to liquidation, and some of those barriers are state by state, different sets of laws and lawyers and legal mumbo jumbo, okay, they either going to navigate themselves or they're going to find someone to help them with it. And in today's day and age, it's much more efficient as investors are figuring out to streamline their operations, outsource more of it. Don't have big teams of paralegals and title researchers and people who send mail and letters and everything like that. It doesn't make sense. And that's not why they got into it in the first place. Right. That was just a pain they had to go through to get to that end result. So what we help them do in simple terms is we help them navigate from acquisition to liquidation, this asset class of delinquent taxes so they can realize greater returns with greater efficiency than they were able to do by themselves. And we do that nation, we say nationwide or some state that we don't operate in every single state. But the whole idea is that this process transcends state borders, which means different sets of state laws. We've normalized that previously investors who were at the enterprise level or mid market or where they were had capital deployed in different states. They had to figure all that out themselves. And not only that, but it brings like a lot inconsistency to. There's different vendors in every state, so they have to manage people. To manage people is a mess. It gets crazy. So we are a single platform where it does not matter where the property is located. It's a process. And when a licensed professional in that jurisdiction is required, we have that handled. When you need to have a different action taken because that state required it versus the other state, we have it handled. You just need to monitor your, the progress and the performance of your portfolio. So it's a, it's an asset management platform for tax liens nationwide, which has never existed.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: Yeah, and I was just going to ask you about that. Like, yeah, different state means different laws. Which means this is probably like an entire mess when you're thinking about like enterprise, like middle market, like companies, like they have to deal with so much. If you have just one state, I mean you have the same like state laws, they might change a little bit. It's like you're more familiar seeing vendors and everything like that. But 50 states, that's a lot of ground to cover, to put it very simply.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: And so what's Interesting is that it's. We've learned so much from working at the enterprise level right where they already. But what it did is it created the opportunity for us to scale up a business that could transcend these state borders and give the all the existing or potential investors downstream from that as small medium sized partnerships the opportunity to have access across the board, across the state lines where it doesn't matter where they're located, doesn't matter where the property is located and it doesn't matter if the rules are different. It's just, it's simply a dollar in dollar out rate of return opportunity that they can now take advantage of.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: And I'd be kind of like curious because I feel like we've somewhat touched onto this. But when someone like comes to you what's typically like the main problem that they're trying to solve that your problem like your platform help with? It's like mainly like just the complexity of being needing to manage all like the legal and everything like that.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: A lot of it is all in one in the same bucket. It is because our solution is fairly novel in the sense that you haven't been able to outsource this to anybody before. Like not the whole thing. You've been able to go outsource the lawyer in that one state or the letters, the legal notices to be mailed out or the title, all these little micro steps. They've been able to piecemeal it here and there. No one has said what if you just show up and say help the whole thing and that. And so we're also educate the customers that on the existence of this solution, not that we're a better version of the other guys who did this last week. And it's, it's a real thing. It's. And I say that with no ego. It's just a matter of if someone has to blaze that trail. And, and so we have to inform and educate customers that hey yes, this is true, this really exists here. And then when they stop and think about it, wait a minute, I could do that too. I can switch gears and not have be an investor. Right. What you really first signed up for. Yes. You can literally worry about how much money are you deploying this year, what are your returns like, how are you like communicating with your own investors like strategic moves rather than managing the process. And that's not been a possibility before at a from it from an end to end.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: Yeah. And one thing I'd love to touch on because you've been obviously in this space for a while You've been pretty deeply involved in like the legislative changes for like tax sales across like a lot of states, specifically in Louisiana, where I believe if you even like co authored some updated like property tax law, if I got that correctly, where you're like pushing for like major reforms in 2026. And one thing that I'd be like, really curious to learn is how do you even stay ahead of these. There's always like new changes, like what should investors know about these shifting, like legal landscapes that perhaps could invest impact through investment strategies?
[00:14:50] Speaker A: It's a different question at this point in time than most times. There's a lot going on right now in, over, over the longer history of, over the past 30 years. It hasn't changed all that much. It doesn't change all that often either. It just happens to be right now there's a lot changing all at one time. And that's a byproduct of a Supreme Court, US Supreme Court case law, which of course then controls what happens in all the 50 states as a matter of course. What's happening is a few years ago, monumental case came out that really took change, the investment from being something that was an interest return plus the potential for an equity bump, an equity gain, and it changed that to just an interest return.
And when you, when these investors have modeled this process and what their expectations are and probably people given them money to invest for them, and I kind of think they've had to rethink this and now in states are scrambling to say, oh wait, hang on, our process doesn't comport with what the big guys up there in Washington told us to do. Now we got to go scramble and changes now. And so it's a matter of staying ahead of it. But, but then states end up in, in between these milestones of massive like federal changes, which probably happen like once every 20 years. Seriously, it's not that volatile. But in between those, you have a lot of opportunity for these little micro changes that might mean that you thought that you. It undercuts your investments because you didn't know about it and it knocks one of your cases out and you lose a lot of money.
Just, just like right now there's a big huge why now? Answer for us. And there's another case coming out this year, this calendar year that might even be bigger than the one two years ago, depending upon how it.
[00:16:41] Speaker B: So with all these little micro changes, they can compound to obviously having some sort of an impact, even if it's not like a major, like changes that are going on or anything like that?
[00:16:51] Speaker A: No, absolutely. Directly to the bottom line. And again, let's come back to the most basic premise here. That's what they're going. What's the rate of return of your portfolio? Whether you have five PAC liens in your portfolio or five 50,000, what am I, how am I doing in a performance standpoint? And these changes of laws can absolutely impact in a dramatic way. If you're ignorant of it or if you're not very competent to comply with it on a regular basis, it can undercut what you're going for and bring your days of investing in this to a premature and unfortunate end.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: And one of the things that I always love to do with this show because we try to keep it actionable, like insightful for anyone that listens, typically entrepreneurial business owners, investors even. And that's one thing I want to touch. So for any taxing investors, whether they're getting started or they've been at this for a while, is there maybe a two, three bullet points, whether like advice or things that you would recommend them to do to improve their strategies or perhaps to start looking into to get ahead of the game when it comes to their investing strategy or like diversification strategy, anything like that?
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Again, it comes down to current times. Right now the most important thing is to figure out ways to mitigate this big change, which is a, from a, from the spring court case a couple years ago which fundamentally changed the potential of how, of how much to make from this investment and also how, and it's going to be hard to make, to keep up with the returns, to actually achieve desirable returns if you don't take some steps to mitigate to offset that. So what do I mean by that? If, if you can't get that big equity piece anymore and that, that, let's say that drops your rate of return 5, 6 points, then what happens?
That, that may not be sustainable, but if you can reduce your costs by 3 or 4% now all of a sudden that loss doesn't look so onerous and you can keep going. How do you do that? Well, maybe outsource to a company that can streamline the whole thing for you and you don't need to pay a team of people to manage, maybe optimize your speed with which you can create liquidity in your, with these assets that are ready for it. Or you can sometimes you can shake the trees a little bit smarter by using intelligence to track down people who are, would pay the delinquency, which means you liquidate it and you get your return if you knew who they were and could track them down timely enough. Right. And so using intelligent actions rather than a spray and pray or just the bare minimum, doing, taking actions like that to offset some of that loss makes it not you now become ahead of the game because everyone else isn't going to be doing those steps. And now you are leading the charge as far as the highest rate of return that's possible given the current legal landscape. I love it.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: Stephen, really appreciate you coming on the show. Jane and Austin share your insights here and one of the things I always love to ask is if anyone wants to get in touch with you. I know you obviously have your main website. Drew C.com you're decently active on LinkedIn. I think you're maybe trying to start pushing more content out on there, but.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: It'S going to be a whole different story.
We have a full mark. We actually have a marketing department that has just, we were preparing for it the last few months of the year, of last year and now we have a whole weekly strategy. We're going to be on LinkedIn, constantly, YouTube, lots of actionable videos. Everything we do is going to be for free. It's just going to be actionable. Just value add, just it's, there's so much to cover that we want to just convey that, hey, we're here.
There's a lot of trust that has to be built to trust for someone to say, hey, this company can help us reach our financial goals, our wealth building goals. Who are they? What do they know? What are they about? We're excited about embarking on this. As I mentioned, on the platform standpoint, we're still in closed beta, but we're going to be launching a larger MVP version of the platform to more customers in the second quarter of this year and then hopefully a full public fonts by the end of this year where we can become effectively the Robin Hood of delinquent property debt as an asset.
[00:20:55] Speaker B: I love that tagline, the Robin Hood. That's a perfect one. Great. Hear that everyone. If you want to learn more, head over to Josie.com you can also find Stephen on LinkedIn. It's going to start to be more active on there and then to your listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You can also find more
[email protected] until then, keep pushing and we'll see in the next one.
