He Raised $140M+ to Change the Housing Industry | Galiano Tiramani Digital Social Hour #90

Musk came in and we got all these press articles, and then things went to a whole nother level of awareness of the company.

And it's just been a wild ride for sure.

Yeah, so he did buy a boxable quesita.

It was actually one of the first three prototypes that we built.

He's got it in his backyard at SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas.

So what happened was he saw a post with the video of the house unfolding and he liked the post.

And then the next day, his assistant called me and was like, hey, can we buy one one of these?

Actually, they wanted to buy more than one.

And I was like, well, I only have three and I need to keep at least two.

I'll sell you one.

Welcome to the Digital Social Hour.

I'm your host, Sean Kelly.

I'm here with my co-host, Wayne Lewis.

What up, what up?

And our guest today, Galiano Tiramani.

Hey, guys, thanks for having me.

Absolutely.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, we got Boxable here in Las Vegas, actually.

We got a big factory and we are building houses every day.

Nice.

How many houses a day are you building?

Right now, we're just doing about two houses per day.

And then later this year, we're installing a whole bunch of automated manufacturing equipment and we're going to be ramping up big time.

Hopefully, get about 10 houses per day out of our current factory space.

Wow.

And you had 10,000 pre-orders, right?

Yeah, we got a big list of names.

Well, no, it's 170,000.

Yeah.

Oh, 170,000.

170,000 people on your waiting list.

Yeah, it's amazing.

So we went viral on social media many times.

So you guys are like the Michael Jordan of like the Jordan shoe of houses.

Yes.

Of modular homes.

Yeah, of modular homes.

Yeah, we got 170,000 names on the wait list for the boxable casino.

That's unheard of.

And that was zero paid?

10,000 of those people have about 10,000 people.

Well, imagine if you just charge everybody like a hundred dollars, like what Elon Musk did with that cyber truck just to be on a waiting list.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Well, we charge 200.

Oh,

so all those people paid $200.

So about 10,000 people have paid $200 deposit and some other tiers of deposit in there as well.

And really, we just did that to kind of prove interest-prove demands in the product so I could go out to investors and say, hey, if you give me the money to build this factory and build these houses, we're going to sell them.

We got people lined up to build them to buy them because it's easier to raise money when you have some revenue right yeah we gotta prove a whole bunch of things to raise the money and and demand is definitely one of them so in in five years you guys have a three billion dollar evaluation not too shabby

that ain't bad that's crazy and he raised 140 million yeah 140 million 170.

what what what what's the actual number so we decided to do crowdfunding uh to raise money for the company and leverage social media and ended up raising

social media yeah ended up raising over 140 million dollars to fund the boxable vision and gust started roughly around early 2018 just with the idea and now we just actually signed our third factory building last week wow

How big are they?

Pretty good.

So factory one, which has been in operation about 18 months now, is 170,000-foot warehouse building.

Building two, which we got signed in January, around January, is about 130,000 feet and then the new building is 100,000 feet and we managed to get all those three buildings just right next to each other and we just keep ramping up and you know dialing in the technology and getting better at producing housing faster and lower cost.

This is a big problem you're solving because a lot of people can't afford a house.

Yeah.

So I feel like you're helping out.

Yeah, I like to think that this is the biggest problem that I could be solving.

And if you look around at different market industries, building construction is massive.

This is, I think, trillions of dollars worldwide.

And it's really the last big kind of old school product that hasn't moved into the factory.

So like everything you see is built in a factory-owned assembly line.

This microphone, my sneakers, my iPhone, but houses are not.

Houses are still built literally guys with hand tools one at a time with like a hammer and nail standing on a ladder and it's slow and inefficient so there's a huge opportunity there to make it work in the factory and that's what we're trying to do is solve all the problems that stopped building construction from working in the factory so that we can just turn up volume like crazy on the production speed lower the cost and hopefully dramatically reduce housing costs for the whole world so you're basically

This is kind of a proof of concept.

So it's possible that you may be able to build parts of a home that are manufactured to where it's kind of like plug-and-play, in a sense, like even with 5,000 square foot homes, walls, stairs, everything, just

kind of putting it together like a Legos.

Yeah, so the first product we have is called the Boxable Casita.

It's basically a 360-square-foot room, kind of the size of this room.

It's got bathroom, kitchen,

bed, and couch.

And that arrives on site, just finished, ready to go, sets up in a few hours, and you have a little house.

But that's just the beginning.

The full vision is a building system where we would mass-produce different room modules in different sizes that can stack and connect to build everything.

Whether it's a single-family or a big thousand-unit apartment building, we want to build like most all buildings on the planet using our system.

And in order to do that, we have to go like really big, like ridiculous.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

yeah do you live in a boxable yourself no no

you know I have a wife and and four kids but if it was just me I would I definitely wouldn't mind living in one so how many square feet is the casita model so it's roughly it's like 19 feet by 19 feet so three about 360 square feet nine and a half foot high ceilings

really feels very nice upscale great for one person or a couple and the idea to start with that product was to focus on backyard, accessionally dwelling units.

So in California and other places, they're changing the laws to allow you to put a little house in the backyard of your main house as a way to increase housing affordability.

So we thought great place to start a great market then.

Oh yeah.

Huge amount of interest coming from over there.

Did you see they just did some weird law with house insurance in California?

Yeah, they removed house insurance out there.

Stay farm is pulling out of that market.

Because of all the crime.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

I I kind of feel like something massive is going to happen.

Yeah.

Either some kind of earthquake or something.

They don't want to be responsible for it.

Wow.

Yeah.

Oh, that's what you think?

An earthquake?

I think, I mean, think about it.

Why would an insurance company pull out of the whole state?

Yeah, it's never happened before.

I mean, you got Oklahoma, you got Texas, they got hurricanes, tornadoes, all that you can think of, but California, they're like pulling completely out.

They want nothing to do with the market.

I thought it was the crime, but yeah, something catastrophic is about to happen.

There's no way an insurance company just totally pulls out of the market and wants no interest.

They don't even care about the

monthly payments or anything like that.

They don't even care about the reserve.

It's just like, no, we don't want no part.

So is that related to like the government?

No, I think it's just

them, you know, they know something that we don't.

Some details that they're not giving because the insurance companies usually don't pull out of a market.

California is one of the richest markets.

You guys, most cars, the most expensive cars, most expensive homes, most people who live there have a lot of money.

Yeah.

So why not?

But they're like, no.

It is interesting because insurance companies make a lot of money.

So for them to have done that, that means something new.

They make money off of what if.

Speaking of insurance, can these houses be insured?

And do they have warranties attached to them?

And

what do you guys protect or replace?

And what are some of the problems that you've seen these houses may have in the future?

Yeah, definitely have the warranty.

And as far as like insurance financing, pretty much all the same stuff that applies to a traditional house is going to apply to our house, except that the way we are engineering building the house is we've selected different building materials, different manufacturing methods that we think resulted in a better house.

So, for example, all our houses have hurricane speed wind ratings on the walls.

They all have amazing energy efficiency, fire resistance.

So we've actually not only figured out how to mass produce the houses on an assembly line, but we're building a better house.

And I think eventually way more durable than

you live in house that you leave it.

Exactly.

And I think eventually that will translate into lower insurance costs once we're out there in the market for a while and the insurance companies can establish, like, oh, you know, these houses are less likely to be damaged by the environment or something else.

So you can make them bulletproof, too.

Well, it's funny.

Actually, I...

Think about it.

Doing that, you can make them bulletproof, right?

So we tried that

and got banned from TikTok.

Yeah.

Why?

That's funny.

That's what we said, though.

Bulletproof houses.

So we laminated it in Kevlar and we did this whole funny video of us shooting it and then it got pulled from TikTok for violating the rules.

You're not allowed to shoot on there.

Yeah, I feel like I've been shadow banned ever since then.

So it's

wouldn't be surprised.

So how do you handle the success and the success that you have and the success that's coming?

Like how do you handle this much success?

Because you're going to be possibly a billionaire at some point, right?

Maybe multi-billionaire.

Yeah, I mean, right.

And is this something that you plan on selling?

Do you plan on holding it forever?

Like, what's your ultimate goal with this?

I think that I'll have a lot of value to provide to the company for quite a while.

Eventually, I'll be mostly spent once the company's matured.

But I think I'm going to be with the company until we IPO, till after that, until we continue to build it up and develop it.

And, you know, in general,

it's been a wild ride because we've gone from being unknown,

being very small, to all of a sudden

having everyone know about us.

Like, not only, you know, nice people who like us, but also crazy people.

And so I've experienced this like whirlwind of craziness, and it's all the result of how we raised the money and how we got the interest.

I leveraged social media in a way that kind of set records.

And of course, that brought us, you know, $140 million plus dollars in investment money, this huge wait list, all these other resources and opportunities.

But there was a dark side to that as well.

Explain how you raised $40 million leveraging social media 140 100 100 I'm sorry 140 million leveraging social media to those that think social media they hate social media or it's for whatever like how did you do that and was that a plan did you plan that or just kind of just manifested itself and you like all right I'm gonna go with this you know at the beginning I was just trying anything and what do you mean trying just trying anything to get the word out to further the company and and things started working and I kept double down doubling down on that So you know social media was the way the best way to get the word out.

It worked better than going to the traditional press or the local news.

So I just kept running with that and you know raising money via crowdfunding is something I would suggest to most entrepreneurs.

It's just an amazing way for you to control your own destiny, for you to

really

make sure you're commanding

the project.

And then you can basically generate excitement in that and then give people a way to invest in the company through various securities exemptions.

For example, Regulation D, Regulation CF, Regulation A.

And it's just, it's, it's, there's so many positives to doing it that way.

And highly recommend.

And you mentioned there's a dark side.

I feel like not a lot of people dive into this topic, but what's some things you could share about that?

So, like, going from

you know, just being a private person to having to kind of like pimp myself out on social media for the benefit of the company.

And then realizing like, at this point, I kind of have sympathy towards some celebrities because

I'm, you know, dealing with like 1%.

But if you're a celebrity, I can't imagine like how much crazy people you have, how many hate comments you have.

Like,

you need like a psychiatrist after that.

I mean, it's, it's insane.

So, you know, we, we have a huge volume of people looking at what we're doing, focusing on what we're doing.

And, you know, along with the positive comes a few, you know, crazy people as well.

What's the craziest person you've dealt with?

So

funny story, sad story.

Actually, I'll mention, and I won't say the name, but there was a guy actually inside our company from early on who turned out to be a very kind of

evil psychotic character.

And what he did was worked for you guys.

Yeah, he worked for me.

Back when we were just a small new company, just a few employees, I hired this guy.

And he's a very slick, convincing guy.

And eventually we figured out that he was actually stealing from investors.

So this guy stole about, I think, about a million dollars from 10 investors.

Yeah.

So really like just a horrible betrayal from someone who I was very, very nice to.

And what he he did was, he basically

worked in our investor relations department, befriended some investors, and then went ahead and told them, Hey,

I have shares in the company that I would like to sell you, personal shares.

He said, Wire me money.

I'll give you 10 shares for the price of one.

And he convinced a few people to wire him about a million dollars, and then he fled the country.

No way.

Yeah, real fing assh.

That's crazy.

Real fing assh.

Did you get the money back?

No.

It's all still kind of pending right now.

It all just happened pretty recently.

We discovered he left abruptly

the company and then we discovered what he had done, started investigating it.

Eventually, he kind of confessed everything.

Not sure why.

So we figured out

what he did.

Yeah, really horrible.

The guy had a family too

that he basically, you know,

abandoned

over a little bit of money.

That's okay.

Really, really sad.

A million can't last you your whole life.

Yeah.

And doing something like that,

what's the end game?

Like, you're going to get caught.

Like, it's not like he stole

cash.

It's not like he stole cash out of someone's drawer.

Like, this was like

a paper trail.

A conversation.

What was the end game?

Hey, is it done yet?

Yeah, you wire yet?

There's a wire record.

Right.

All kind of records.

So, like,

back to the boxables is it possible that you can implement ai to where it's like a smart home are you have you thought that far like maybe it's possible to where you can command the whole house to kind of do whatever it is that you want since you're kind of you know you're you're basically

like in doing a little bit of innovation here so like have you thought that far like making it a whole smart home yeah there's a lot of opportunities for uh smart home stuff ai stuff not just in the house people live in but for example like in our manufacturing facility.

Yeah, so

huge amount of

work and effort put into the logistics, the way the parts are moved around the factory, the sourcing supply.

I mean, AI, of course, is going to have, you know, as we all know, a huge impact on everything as it continues to roll out.

So we'll be excited to implement that at our factory as soon as we can wrap our heads around how to do that.

Yeah, but as basically putting smartphone.

Smart home would be sick, dude.

I have a smart oven.

You put any food in it, and it recognizes the food and it tells you how long you want to cook.

Do you want it cooked extra burnt?

Like light roasted.

Wait, so you're saying it sees the food with the camera and knows how to cook it?

Yeah, so it's called a June, it's a June oven.

So I put eggs in there and it hard boils it for me every morning.

Wow.

I'll put broccoli in there.

It knows it's broccoli.

Salmon.

So imagine the smart home is just like it knows what time you're getting home.

Make sure the house is heated a certain way.

Just like just little stuff like that, or even telling it what to do and how to do things.

Yeah, it'd be cool to have your, you could control your AC from like your phone.

Yeah, I mean, so when you come home, the house is nice.

I mean, it just makes it a whole smart home.

It's in the works at Boxable.

So we have this mascot called Frank.

He's a pig.

So we're going to do.

Yeah, he's a pig.

So we're going to do, hey, Frank, you know, hey, Frank, lock the doors.

Hey, Frank, close the blinds.

We're going to be able to kind of own that whole ecosystem.

Okay.

You know, where we build it all out custom for our buildings and it all works together cohesively.

So, how did the Elon Musk connection happen?

Was it a DM?

Was it a phone call?

Was it

an email mysteriously from one of his people?

Like,

how did that whole synergy happen?

Well, it was Twitter, of course.

Oh, it was Twitter.

Before he bought it or after?

Before he bought it, yeah.

So, I guess what happened was...

Is he an investor?

No.

He's not.

Okay.

Elon Musk is not an investor.

Those rumors aren't true.

No.

But he did buy a boxable casita.

It was actually one of the the first three prototypes that we built.

And he's got it in his backyard at SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas, I believe, right now.

But yeah, so

one of the accounts.

He was promoting it heavy.

He was like sleeping in it.

He kind of was promoting it.

I mean, so what happened was he saw a post with a video of the house unfolding, and he liked the post.

And then the next day, his assistant called me and was like, hey, can we buy one of these?

Wow.

Actually, they wanted to buy more than one.

And I was like, well, I only have three and I need to keep at least two.

I'll sell you one.

And they were like, sure, we'll take it.

And I went ahead and deployed it in Texas.

And at first,

we weren't allowed to say anything about it because we had NDAs and all that.

So we didn't.

And at some point, months and months later, he tweeted about living in a $50,000 house.

And then the press jumped up.

Yeah, he was promoted himself.

Yeah, so I heard that.

Well, he didn't say the brand.

He just said 50,000 foldable house.

I think he said boxable.

So

it's a little tricky because what happened was he wasn't originally he wasn't talking about the boxable.

But the press put two and two together and put out articles saying that he was talking about the boxable.

More leverage.

And then we couldn't say anything.

So people were asking me the whole time and I'm like, no comment, no comment.

And then they're like accusing me of lying.

I'm like, I said no comment.

And then eventually he came out and explained in another podcast, like, yes, I did buy one.

I do own it uh i wasn't talking about it in that original tweet but yeah it's it's a cool product he said that's awesome uh yeah that that was great and you know before that happened we had already been doing so well with social media like uh we did what's called a a reg cf uh where we raised four million dollars in 13 days and i think that was like a record uh back then for that type of fundraising

and and then after

that after that musk came in and we got all these press articles right and then things went to a whole nother level of of awareness of the company.

And it's just been a wild ride for sure.

A lot of businesses struggle marketing on social media.

Do you think your success has been the product is just so unique and different?

Or do you think you had some unique marketing tactics?

Yeah, you know,

I can't take all the credit.

I definitely do a lot of different stuff.

You know, I try a lot of things.

But at the end of the day, this is all off the back of a really cool product.

And, you know, the sales and marketing that we have right now, frankly, it's not even executed that well.

But we've done so well on it.

So there's still like a lot of meat on the bone for us to improve on it.

Like five years, right?

If that.

Yeah, it's five years from just an idea, but we've actually only been producing houses about 18 months now.

Wow.

Bro, at a $3 billion evaluation.

That's insane.

Yeah.

That is crazy.

That's even more crazier.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know,

the valuation and the size of the manufacturing facility and all that, this is still just the very, very beginning.

And it's still almost proof of concept because what we're doing right now is just proving that we have the potential to scale manufacturing, that we've solved the problems that will make it possible to scale manufacturing.

So really, you know, what we have is a pretty big manufacturing facility, a pretty big operation, but it's not where we need to be.

And where we need to be is what you see with the automobile makers.

So, whether it's like a Ford factory or a Tesla factory, they're putting out pretty much like one car a minute output out of these factories.

100,000 cars, yeah,

exactly.

So, so we need to get to that with housing.

And there's no reason we shouldn't be able to do that based on all the innovations that Boxable has.

So, what I'm doing now is basically saying, look what we've done.

We've proven out all the basics.

Now, come and give me the resources to scale up to that one house per minute number, which, of course,

is

really needed by the market, you know, housing demand and everything.

But when you start to mass produce, you and I both know that you run into a significant amount of problems.

Like you mentioned Ford, they have the worst cars,

some of the worst cars.

Quality control.

Right, yeah.

So how do you manage the QC pumping out

not a home a minute, but I would you would you say a part a minute?

Because there's no way you can manufacture a home in a minute, but how would you manage the QC on you know each individual thing?

So, you know, right now we can already build a house.

The output could be, if everything goes perfect in a day, maybe one house every two hours or so.

And that's just at this early stage.

Yeah, just a house every two hours comes out the door.

And that's just early stage, very manual stuff,

first-gen.

first-gen product, no no custom automation.

So we're already doing really good.

And then when I look at the next level of scale, the next level of mass production, I want to look out into our factory and just see a sea of robot arms going crazy.

And you're right, there is going to be a huge amount of problems and challenges.

Absolutely.

And we have a huge amount of problems and challenges at the company right now.

Actually, it's extraordinary to me just how many problems and issues there are.

But that's the way it's got to be because if it wasn't that hard to do, somebody would have done it already.

So we just grind through, and every problem we solve is a barrier to entry for others and

a benefit for the company and puts us further and further ahead as we get every little thing squared away, whether it's manufacturing quality control, marketing sales, regulatory, just so many different variables that all need to be dialed in.

And we keep grinding away and we just get into a stronger and stronger position as a company.

And I know you mentioned too that you want to do a charity too that actually

is for the homeless.

You want to you know kind of start going that route where you're giving

you're creating a place where homeless people can can go.

Can you speak about that?

Yeah you know in general the idea behind the company is to do you know good works and make the world a better place

on a very big scale.

And the idea is that we want to dramatically push down the cost of housing and achieve that benefit for humanity through capitalism and successful business.

But you know we are planning also to seed a small charity soon and kind of get that in the works so that we can hopefully provide a little extra boost where it makes sense for you know needy families and help the housing to be more affordable.

That's a real problem, especially in San Francisco, California.

Even here,

the homelessness is like a real problem.

So you even thinking about that is like

the homeless thing is a pretty, you know, controversial issue with a lot of different areas.

And I think there's a few different sections.

Like, there's people who are maybe just down on their luck and they won't necessarily be homeless that long.

Then you have like mental health, and then you have drugs as well.

And the drug people and the mental health people, it's almost a problem separate and above and beyond housing.

However, I think that if we can lower the overall cost of housing forever, create an abundance of it, an availability of it, you would be able to actually put those people somewhere and deal with them versus having them out on the streets creating an even worse nightmarish scenario that you have now.

How do you deal with competitors?

Because I saw a few online.

You know, it's interesting when I think about competitors because

first of all, you know, 90% of building construction is done on site, not in a factory.

So I think of that whole section of companies and people as potential customers.

Like if we show them a better way to build that's faster and lower cost for them, they're going to jump all over that and then, boom, they're our customers.

But beyond that, the demand for housing and the housing price is so high that really there's enough room for everyone right now.

If you can provide housing, you know, it's gone, it's going to sell, even at an astronomical price at this point.

So, I don't really see a huge competition going on, and I certainly don't see anyone who's figured out as much as we have.

The biggest competitors that are established real businesses are the manufactured housing guys.

So Champion,

Clayton Homes, Cavco Homes.

These are trailer homes, double-wide, single-wide.

Those are the only guys that are doing factory-built housing in a way that works.

And they kind of have a kind of a limited market as well because of the type of product that they have.

Will you guys be adding garages soon?

Are you already working on that?

Is that something that's going to be in order too?

Yeah, I mean, we're going to have a whole lineup of products.

So, right now, we have the 20 by 20 room module.

It comes with the kitchen bathroom done.

After that, we'll roll out maybe another 20 by 20 that just has maybe one bedroom in it, or it has only a bathroom in it, or maybe it has two bedrooms in it.

At that point, you can start sticking those different boxes together.

Then, later on down the line, we'll roll out bigger boxes.

So, currently, 20 by 20, we'll do 20 by 30, 20 by 40.

Then, you start getting a really big room that you can connect to other rooms and

stack and arrange.

And then, yeah, garages too.

And try to roll out this full product lineup to simplify the build process for the developers and builders.

And how much is the shipping cost and the total, like customers, what are they paying total for this complete to?

Yeah, so one of the big innovations with Boxable, probably the most important innovation, is that we've actually fixed shipping.

So traditionally, you know, buildings are very big.

So if you try to ship a building, it becomes very expensive because it's too big for the road.

And that's the case for manufactured housing guys, other modular house companies.

So at Boxable, we figured out how to make this a highway legal load to ship it at the lowest possible cost.

And what that does is it opens up the shipping radius from the factory.

So whereas a traditional factory built housing guy, they're only going to ship a few hundred miles from their factory because if they go beyond that, it just costs way too much.

But we can ship anywhere around the whole country cost effectively.

That's the single most important thing that allows us to actually scale up manufacturing, have a real mass production,

take advantage of the economies of scale, take advantage of the automation, and then hopefully push it down to the lowest possible cost.

So, not only are we shipping highway legal load that's not overwide, that doesn't cost more, but we're shipping

20 feet on an eight and a half footprint.

So, 20 feet of room is on an an eight and a half footprint.

So a traditional factory-built house, you would actually have two 10-foot loads to equal one of our units, and both of those 10-foot loads would be overwide.

They would require special permits, special routes, police escorts, like a whole nightmare of nonsense and regulation and added cost.

So for us, you know, we have this crazy efficient way of shipping, and that opens up everything else we want to do.

And we can not only put a 20-foot-wide casita on a single truck, but we can actually put two casitas on one truck.

So, I don't know if you've ever seen, like, you know,

or are they

already opened?

Um,

so uh, the house folds up from 20 feet down to eight and a half feet.

Oh, okay, and kind of all the empty space gets compressed, uh, but there's still a portion of the room that doesn't actually fold, and that's where we put kitchen bathroom in this model.

That's where we could put other things in other models.

That's awesome, Darliano.

I can't wait to see where this goes, man.

Yeah, we'll be rooting for you.

It's going any closing comments?

I think you guys should come check out the factory.

We also invite anyone else to come take a peek.

We do tours every day.

There's models in the parking lot that are actually open 24-7.

And I'd suggest anyone who's interested checks out our social media.

We're basically posting non-stop

live what we're doing on YouTube, on Instagram, so you can stay up to date with the latest info on there.

And one other thing, we're looking to hire the most talented people from all around the country so please check out our uh jobs section on our website as well nice there we go wayne

get a boxable

please they're cool check them out guys i might have to get one honestly yeah i think um

i think this interview ended too this is i'm not done talking yeah we'll have to do a part two podcast studio boxable yeah oh yeah let's take a hire we could build all the studio inside one of them literally oh yeah just drop it in all right thanks for tuning in guys.

Digital Social Hour.

See you next time.

Peace.