Bilt 2.0 Breakdown: Behind the Scenes with Richard from Bilt | Ep 290

Ajouté : 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]I think there was a main lesson learned that we've talked about internally since the roll out of card 1.0 is we vastly underestimated the emotional attachment that people had to card 1.0 and we should have done a better job bringing people along the journey of 1.0 to 2.0 rather than drawing that hard line in the sand that we did and said 1.0 is over 2.0 is here and here it is.

[00:00:19]>> Hey there points people. You just heard a clip from Richard Kerr, GM of Travel for Built. In this episode, expect to hear about how does Built actually make money because most of it isn't from where you think. How to earn more build points whether you live in a big city, a small town, an apartment that you rent, or a house that you pay mortgage on.

[00:00:38]Some of the lesserk known features of the built platform and so much more. And if you're looking to level up your points and mile skills, we will be releasing a series of challenges for people who are looking to redeem miles they already have, but maybe they're currently stuck and don't know their next move. It'll be structured similar to a weight loss challenge or money-saving challenge. And this will eventually be a paid product, but we are looking for testers to test out some of the different challenge exercises in the meantime to help us gather data on which of the strategies get people the best results. So, if this sounds like something that you would be interested in getting free access to in exchange for testing out the different exercises, you can apply to be a tester at geobtravel.com/challenge.

[00:01:19]And now, on with the show.

[00:01:26]Hey, Richard. Welcome back to the Geob Breeze Travel Podcast.

[00:01:30]>> Welcome back. It's been a few years if I'm remembering. Does it even count if it's been more than three years?

[00:01:34]>> We're going to say yes.

[00:01:35]>> All right, cool.

[00:01:36]>> Um, when we recorded our first episode, Build Head just launched. It's grown quite a bit to say the least. For anybody who has been living under somewhat of a rock lately and is not familiar with the Build program, what is Build? How did we get here?

[00:01:52]>> Oh wow. That's that's a massive question. First of all, yeah, thanks for having me on. Um to say that this has been a rocket ship and a roller coaster of a ride over what's now been 5 years for me at built, which is just really hard to believe that it's been that long. What started as the idea of just points on rent has really grown into what we call the membership program for your neighborhood. I think most of the members of your audience and your listeners think of built as a credit card. Something that you and I have talked about as we're getting ready for the show is just how big the business is outside of the card. So less than 10% of Built members today have the card. And there's an analogy that I give when thinking about the membership of your neighborhood that I think resonates most with people for what built is today. So Julia Amazon $2 trillion company, right?

[00:02:37]And we look at Amazon, we say there's three main pieces of their business about why they're three or$ two trillion dollar company. One is they have a marketplace. Number two is they have the checkout on their rails. It's in the Amazon ecosystem. Number three, the reason they're $2 trillion company is logistics, right? Two day shipping anywhere in the United States. For those of us that live in cities like New York, same day shipping, like unbelievable that you go to a locker a couple hours after you order something, pick it up, right? So if you have those three pieces of business, $2 trillion company. So number one, a marketplace. for 6 million homes today. One in four apartments now pay their rent through built. That is a powerful marketplace if you think about 6 million homes with the launch of the mortgage business a couple months ago here at Bill, which we're really excited about. We fully anticipate that being 10 million homes by the end of this year.

[00:03:20]So, if you have a marketplace for 10 million people in their home, right?

[00:03:24]That that is a marketer's dream.

[00:03:26]Somebody has a toothpaste company and I'm trying to get my toothpaste. Where do I go? I can go to the marketplace of 10 million homes and say, "Hey, the day that you move in, the day that you close your mortgage, the day you sign your lease for the apartment, here's toothpaste to get you through the first couple of days. Here's a household cleaners. Unbelievable marketing capability and that goes across a lot of different verticals." So, we have a marketplace just like Amazon. Number two, checkout. As everybody listening to this knows, you can pay your rent. You can now pay your mortgage nearly any way that you can move money in the United States. If you live in an in-et network building that uses built, you can pay your rent via a PayPal, Vinmo, Zel, Apartments.com, debit card, credit card.

[00:03:59]Yes, the built card, but we have a massive checkout business that now goes into our neighborhood. So, if you're checking out at restaurants, whether you're a built member or not, we're on boarding restaurants that you will check out using the built checkouts system.

[00:04:12]So, we have checkout. Now, we don't have logistics. That's not number three.

[00:04:15]Number three for us is loyalty program.

[00:04:16]So, we have a marketplace of 10 million homes. We have the checkout where you move the money through our payment processing and now you have a loyalty program to put on top of the marketplace and checkout to drive the behaviors that you care about. We really hope that's going to follow the likes of Amazon.

[00:04:29]Amazon has the most successful Chase co-brand portfolio out there, but nobody calls Amazon a credit card company. We have what we feel is a fantastic co-brand card portfolio that's doing really well since the relaunch in January, but people still call us credit card company. So, we're not a credit card company. Yes, we have a co-brand card for members that want to go deep with us. But that's probably the easiest way to explain the scale of the build business and what we're doing today and really for all your listeners about yes, the co-brand card is awesome. We're really excited about it. We continue to innovate with it. We're going to all do awesome things with it. But 10% of the business, there's so much going on with built. So that was a really long answer to your first question, but if somebody's like, "What is built? It's like where to stop?" And there's so much more info we can go about what Built is doing in and around the neighborhood and the home and then obviously my arena of travel, but that's how I would describe Built today. Okay, so a lot of people on the internet think that bill makes its money from the credit card where people are paying interest if they don't pay off their credit card bill in full every time, which I'm sure everybody listening to this episode is absolutely paying off every credit card bill in full every month to avoid those interest payments.

[00:05:29]Rule number one of points and miles anyway. But a lot of people think Built makes a lot of money off of those interest charges and then also off of the interchange fees because whenever you swipe your credit card at a store, the store pays the credit card like 3% or a little bit of it. But really to keep going on with the analogies, I think it's a lot more like a racketin model where everybody understands like, hey, you get points if you shop through Racketin somewhere else because that restaurant or that store gives Racketin a commission and they give you a cut of it. That's how Built has such a big valuation at this point, right? Because every time you refer a Built member to a restaurant or to Walgreens or to Lyft or to something else, Built gets a little bit of a cut of that. Is that how that works?

[00:06:12]>> That's certainly one way that we make money. And that's probably after your first question, you're asking the right second question that I get asked most often, which is how does Built make money? Yes, there's a lot of economics involved in the car business, but let's remember, you're talking 10% of the member base, a small percentage of the member base, right? So, how does Built make money? Like let's talk through a few different arenas and let's start with housing. One in four apartments, 70 of the top 100 largest landlords in the United States. Built now powers their building operations. Like the property management system is a built platform.

[00:06:39]The property managers go in and they can do all kinds of things on that built platform. We processed a hundred billion dollars of rent through that platform last year. When you're moving that kinds of money, there's a lot of different ways to move money. a a percentage of every payment that goes through and the economics are the different on that for an a versus a credit card payments and that's just in housing right then we go into the neighborhood and you're right we have 50,000 merchants in the built neighborhood rewards program today 3 years ago we started to look at built much larger than just the four walls that you live in being your home and we thought hey 80% of disposable income outside of housing is spent in the neighborhood how do we make shopping and dining and doing everything that you need to do in your neighborhood better and more rewarding and one of the simplest models was the card linked model that you see today Go link any debit or credit card to the built wallet, go shop, dine at one of our 50,000 merchants, and many of those merchants are more than happy to pay us a commission on every dollar that we drive from built members because they want the people that live in their neighborhoods be their regular customers, but also running now checkout for that, right? There's a small fee like you you've seen from many of the point of sale systems out there for every single checkout that goes through built platform. On the travel side, we are selling a lot of travel every single day now to six million homes and we get commissions from travel suppliers to sell that travel. Like the you know revenue, knock on wood, not a problem for built today. None of which has to do with the cart which yes does make us money but I see so many siloed conversations especially in our community. I say our community because I am at my heart a dieh hard points and miles person always have been always will be. Focus on the cart but again let's just focus on the scale of the built business today. 50,000 merchants.

[00:08:12]That's 20 billion dollars of spend that we drove in our merchant program. And if you think about why so much and why merchants are happy about that, if you go back to the neighborhood marketing level, if I'm a restaurant here in meat packing, I'm looking out the window at our gorgeous new built office. We have all these restaurants here in Meat Packing. Before Built existed, the way that one of these restaurants would try and get their locals to come in to the meat packing, we'll call it a new steakhouse around the corner. They would stick the paper menu into the move in packet at the building or underneath the doors at the building or they would flip up a windshield wiper and put the menu underneath the windshield wiper and be like, "Come to the new steakhouse in the neighborhood." Now that steakhouse can come to Built. We know where everybody in the neighborhood lives because they pay their rent through us and say, "I want to give people who live in the neighborhood a special offer to come into my restaurant." And through Built's deep technology integrations, we can really make some magic happen. So, let's just I'll make up a name. There's an American steakhouse around the corner here. Meat packing. They go, "Hey, Bill, everybody who just moved into the meat packing neighborhood in the last six months, I want to give them a lift ride from their apartment and a free round of drinks to come into the American steakhouse." And because we're integrated every major reservations platform, because we're integrated into the point of sale system at the restaurant, and because we can match everybody by their phone number across those ecosystems, when Julia just moved in, she gets an offer that says, "Hey, come to the American steakhouse and the meat packing." She makes a reservation on resi with your phone number. By the time that reservation is there or it's time for your reservation, we send you a text that says, "Hey, the lift is on the way. It's going to pick you up in a few minutes. Track your light here to take you to the American steakhouse." You get in the lift, you get to the American steakhouse hosting station. Use the same phone number with the reservation you made on resi to check in at the hostess station. The hostess says, "Ah, Julia, welcome to the neighborhood. Hope the ride in was great. Let's go have a seat at your table." At that same time, we fire the drink order for free round of drinks into the toast point of sale system that we're integrated into. And by the time you sit down at that table, you've gotten a free lift ride. You've been welcomed to being in the neighborhood and you have two drinks for free at your table. All without any human intervention. There's no QR code to enter. There's no coupon to scan. And you're saying, "Wow, this is an awesome way to come and dine in the neighborhood." And maybe that American steakhouse restaurant does additional things like first time the manager on duty, you know, is looking at his built profile, his built system that that restaurant's using and can come to the table and give you an extra welcome.

[00:10:18]They can get you a ride home. They can give you a friends and family discount.

[00:10:21]like unlimited things that they can do that did not exist before Built was here. And like that example is really the scale of the business and why that that neighborhood merchant program has gotten so big and just really continues to grow every single day. And if that American steakhouse is like, "Hey, here built, here's a 10% commission based on Julia's bill at the restaurant, they are more than happy to do that to make neighborhood customers become regulars at their establishment." So like that's the scale of what we're doing, you know, and still so many more layers to go in on top of that. But that that's what built is today. A common question we get is, "That sounds cool if you live in Manhattan. What about people who live in suburbia or more rural areas? Is there a use case for even downloading the Built app if you're not near all of these restaurants who want all of these different cool marketing techniques for customer acquisition?"

[00:11:07]>> So, we started in the 10 largest cities in the United States. The Built member base now is nationwide. But remember, there's so many ways to participate in Built. I know people want to know what are all the different ways I can earn points. First of all is you can pay any rent or mortgage in the United States through built. So yes, no matter where you live, you should download the built app and participate and you can uh you know add on to that with other ways that we have inside of our ecosystem. To your point, one of our biggest gaps to date has been where's the built merchant network outside of the big cities. I think if you download the built app and you take a look at the neighborhood map around you that shows you every restaurant fitness studio remember we have every Walgreens in Dwight ring in the country and I guarantee you no matter where you go in the US probably not very far from a Walgreens even small town Georgia where I'm from you have Walgreens there with the built neighborhood pharmacy you get 100 points for every prescription you have filled you get 2x 1x bill points for shopping I think you will see later this year some national partnerships come to life in categories we're not in yet that's going to fill out that map in suburbia even rural America very nicely that we're excited about so that that because of the power of the marketing of that merchant platform and because the power of the guest experience that built members have, you're going to see quite a bit of growth in our neighborhood program this year.

[00:12:11]>> And even if somebody listening to this podcast does live in suburbia or in a rural area, you're probably on this podcast cuz you are interested in using your build points for travel. And there's tons of transfer partners, transfer bonuses, all of that. How many are there now?

[00:12:26]>> We have 25 now. And maybe sneak peek for all the listeners here, but we're not done. But yeah, 25 transfer partners today >> with the very generous transfer bonuses where we see like 75 100% 150%. A lot of people predict like, well, there's no way this is sustainable because we're getting so much value out of our points, which I like to remind everyone, we live in a weird silo bubble and not everybody is doing that. How do most people actually use their build points and how does that make this more sustainable for everybody? Yeah, Julie, we've been at this for five years and from month one here, all I've heard is there's no way this is going to last. And we're here 5 years later. We've just redesigned our entire program with sustainability very much at the top of mind. I don't know how many times I can say it, but continue to deliver. But the value of the built program is here to stay. It really is. And number one way that people redeem bill points is to cover all or portion of their rent, which is great because if that's where people need to save money every single month, that's literally why the program exists is to give people something where they previously had nothing. Number two is travel and rent and travel are a substantial amount of all redemptions.

[00:13:30]This is a very young demographic in the built member base. They have let it be known loud and clear that travel is mandatory in this rewards program and that's why we invested so heavily in the travel program. So rent number one, travel number two, but to your point like transferring points is complicated.

[00:13:46]I have spent the last 15 years of my life in this space dedicated to first for the first 10 years educating people on how to best use points and then for the last five years trying to make valuable ways for people to redeem points. It's just complicated and people are not going to put the brain power into it that you and I would love every single person to do. So very much I think the points and miles world lives in a silo and forgets how rare it is to know how to transfer points to a travel partner and redeem for a premium cabin flight. There's an analogy that I always give in this. Imagine you're on the 405 south of LAX and you're jam-packed in traffic and there's an accident in front of you and the 405 is at a gridlock. If you've been there for an hour and you're like, I need some fresh air and everybody gets out of their car, how many people a mile in front of you and a mile back of you can you go up to and say, what is the value of a Chase point and the most valuable transfer partner to transfer that to and redeem? Should be like five people on the 405 with what you're talking about. Right? That is that's an analogy to keep in mind if you're listening to this podcast how rare you are. So when we do things when we give transfer bonuses and people are like there's no way they can do this like remember ladies and gents you are a rare breed that knows how to maximize these points to the level that you do and the value that we give is tiered right not very many people have built platinum status and that's on purpose like not very many people can realize that value and of the people who can realize that value even fewer know how to maximize it one of many reasons that we can continue to give the value that we do. Let's talk a little bit more about those statuses and the new cards and there was a lot of different rollout with build 2.0 and some people are a bit confused on okay so what do we do? Can you kind of walk us through what are we looking at here? What are we working with?

[00:15:19]>> Yeah, I can and this has been an incredibly loud time for us at build. We heard loud and clear the feedback of the card 2.0 rollout and you've seen if you stayed engaged that every single day we are changing something, improving something, making it better based on everybody's feedback. I think there was a main lesson learned that we've talked about internally since the roll out of card 1.0 is we vastly underestimated the emotional attachment that people had to card 1.0 and we should have done a better job bringing people along the journey of 1.0 to 2.0 rather than drawing that hard line in the sand that we did and said 1.0 is over 2.0 is here and here it is like we've heard everybody loud and clear. On one hand it's amazing to sit back and realize we created a financial product that people were this passionate about. I think that's pretty rare, right? How many other financial products are there that are out there that people have this much passion for? Just not very many. But on the other hand is wow, we have some things to learn here based on how look car 2.0 you have no annual fee, 95 annual fee, 4.95 annual fee. Our biggest problem has been keeping up with demand of physical manufacturing of the carts so they can be shipped out. We saw a huge percentage of active card holders shift over and we've seen fantastic behavior because people love the value props of the new cards and the value again is sustainable for the long term right that's why you see built cash is a way to give additional value beyond what we could do with built points where you get value externally of the built ecosystem in a lot of places and I think you'll just continue to see us work on getting this even dialed in further we heard the message loud and clear about the confusion and this is complicated people like you and I have had a job in this arena for a long time because everything in this space is difficult to understand at first. What we have seen, our hypothesis was is that once people got their hand on the product and they went and redeem built cash for the first time, they would go, "Oh, okay. I get it. It's not that bad." And it's really not, right? Especially compared to everything else that's in this ecosystem. I have people that have published five-page PDFs to keep track of every single offer on their other premium card or every credit that they have to use every quarter. And there was an outrage about how complicated that was, but Bill Cash came out. Everybody's like, "This is too complicated to use."

[00:17:22]I'm like, "This is literally the exact same thing that people have PDFs published for." And we just have more flexibility of what you can do, right?

[00:17:30]You're not locked into how you have to redeem built cash. There's no quarterly expiration of this one specific thing that can only be you. Like, you decide where you want value. I would just really encourage everybody if you go and download the Built app and you earn your first bit of built cash, which you can do from participating in the build network without having one of the built cards and you redeem built cash for the first time, you go, "Oh, this is actually pretty easy." Like, this isn't bad at all. And we've seen that story come out as people have gotten the product more and more in their hands of, hey, this is pretty easy to use. It's a couple clicks to get my lift credit automatically put into my lift account or to get accelerator to now earn 3x on everything if I'm a bill paladium card holder. Just a couple clicks of how easy that is. And if you don't want to mess with that, if you truly are like, I don't have time for this, we heard you.

[00:18:11]And now the amount of points that you earn on housing is based on how much that you spend every single month on your card outside of housing. And you can earn up to 1.25x doing that. And set it and forget it and don't worry about it. No more built cash to redeem, but if you want the flexibility and the value built cash, and I personally earn as much built cash as I can every single month. So, we will continue to work on making things better and better. We are so actively engaged in every form that we can possibly be in as a company listening to folks and what they want because ultimately we want this to be a success. But we are very encouraged by the adoption, the amount of folks who are spending every day on every single purchase. And really the narrative that we see come out gets better week after week after week of people saying especially the Palladium card is a it's a no-brainer. It's the daily driver.

[00:18:52]It's the stays top of my wallet now. And hope that continues.

[00:18:56]>> Yeah. I think the two answers for like how do you use build cash? You have Palladium like I do. Just get that extra point per dollar. So I'm earning 3x on pretty much anything that I put on my card. So that's my new default card. The other correct answer is the transfer bonus boost. I know a lot of people did that for the gel transfer bonus that happened a few weeks ago where people were getting what was the maximum transfer bonus you could get there?

[00:19:18]>> 125%. Right. Yeah. Just and that was right after we heard the narrative loud clear of you know built's not going to be here to stay. There's no way this value persists. We're like well here's 125% to Jao like and we certainly saw the participation that we'd hoped for from the member base. I mean we did fundamentally program changing volumes on that day so that everybody could go travel to Japan and beyond. me included, like every bill point I had was going over there to take advantage of it, which is just an awesome perk of my job that I get to cheat a little bit and know what's coming up on rent days to save my points up for. But like that kind of value that we're going to continue to deliver and like we are coming up with all kinds of new ways that you'll see this year of to deliver more and more value and give people more and more options where they want to realize that value >> with earning points on rent and mortgage. The rent side seems pretty straightforward, but there was the variable component that was confusing to people. If somebody gets the build card, how many points do they earn on rent on mortgage? Is there that little fee that they have to pay in order to do the processing? Like how does that work?

[00:20:19]>> Yeah. So, you have two options, right?

[00:20:21]You can earn built cash with every single purchase every single month. And you redeem that built cash in order to earn points on your mortgage or your rent. There is no fee to earn points on rent or mortgage. You will redeem your built cash to earn up to 1x points.

[00:20:35]Like, that's it. So, if you decide, I only want to earn 2,000 points of my $3,000 mortgage this month, it's not like you're going to pay a fee on the remaining percent. It's just a redemption like any other redemption for built cash. And again, if you don't want to mess with bill cash, so it's every $30 of bill cash is a,000 points on rent or mortgage. There's no cap. If you have enough built cash, you can pay your parents mortgage, your second vacation home mortgage, whatever you want to do.

[00:20:55]If you don't want to do that, then you can switch over to the housing only option and you'll earn up to 1.25x. And that's just a ratio of how much you put on the card every month and then how much your rent or your mortgage is. But no cap, you can decide. Again, I would really encourage everybody if you pick up the product to use it the first time.

[00:21:11]It's all there in the Built app. Pretty easy to do. We have seen a lot of people pay their mortgage, their elderly parents senior care home, their college kids rent on top. We've seen neighbors pay each other's mortgage and Vinmo the payment back to like we're great. That's the way we designed this in order to do that. Again, you got to use the card a lot if you're going to do that. But for people who are getting 3x points, such as yourself on every single expenditure, plus built cash on top, and now they can pay multiple mortgages or rents a month, the points are just so valuable and they add up so fast that it's really a no-brainer.

[00:21:42]>> If that was still too complicated of an answer, there's also the option to just put your rent on the Alaska card and then you get three Alaska points per dollar there. you do have to pay the 3% transaction fee, but that's a pretty simple answer and a lot of people are moving their build points over to Alaska Atmos anyway, >> right? It's a fantastic program. They're an awesome partner. They're very excited about this. Bank of America is very excited about the performance of this.

[00:22:06]If you have a $3,000 rent, which is not unusual from what we see in the big cities around the US or even the suburban cities around the US now, that's 9,000 atmost points a month. Like that is crazy. And people are more than willing to pay the 3% fee. As you and I have probably seen a thousand reals at this point about when it makes sense to buy points or not. You you're essentially buying points for an incredibly low rate and getting something back on what is a painful expense every single month. And you're right. Uh since this transition of card 1.0 to 2.0, the adoption of both the United benefit, which is 2x, and the Alaska benefit, which is 3x on their co-brand cards, people are like, "This is fantastic. This is great. And then I can subsidize these with bill points that I can transfer in on top." And I had just moved to New York City last summer. myself and I am paying my rent on the new Alaska Atmos card because it's just too great of a program, too great of a partner and too good of a value prop to pass up.

[00:22:54]>> Does that work on any of the Alaska cards with Bank of America or is there specific ones that you need to do?

[00:22:59]>> So for Alaska and for United, any personal co-brand cards it works on. It does not work on the business cards. But yes, if you add a United personal co-brand card or an Alaska personal co-brand card to your built wallet, you will see the value prop appear on that card's benefits in your built wallet.

[00:23:14]And then it's really simple to go and pay your rent with that. And again is only rent today. Not open to mortgage yet. We hope to open that up later this year, but rent today for the United Alaska co-brand cards.

[00:23:24]>> Another way to easily earn more build points, even if you don't have the card, is with Racketin because you guys rolled out that partnership. Everybody loves moving racketin points over to American Express because it's worth way more than just the big fat cashback check or whatever. And now there's the option to do that with built points. It's changing a little bit this quarter because the ratio of racketin over to built is changing. Can you kind of walk us through how does that work and what to do to optimize that going forward?

[00:23:54]>> Yeah, so we said it may change this quarter. I will tell you, you know, that decision and that expiration date has not formally been decided upon or announced. So for now, it's still 1x bill point for everything that you get from racketin. If it does change, it will be basically you need a build status, right? It's an incredibly rich value prop which I think everybody recognizes and again with sustainability in mind and with rewarding people who engage with us we think it's a great lever to pull to encourage people to further engage with us. If you're not going to engage with us very much then just like any elite status program that's out there you're not going to get the most valuable or most value back possible. And we look at our elite status program the exact same way. Hey this is an insanely rich value prop from Rakitin. If we really want to reward people then they should have to engage with us back. We just think it's a fair customer company relationship that we're asking for, but we'll be sure to give everybody an adequate heads up, let everybody know when this is going to change, if this is going to change. And again, way beyond racketin, there are many reasons that you should just be earning built status and you should be investing into the program. We think beyond Racketin, but I couldn't be more thrilled with the Racketin partnership, the behavior that we've seen. And again, another way to to make the things that you do every single day far more rewarding than they were before built existed. In order to move your racketin settings to pay out in built points, do you need to go through the built app and then make a new racketin login or can you use an existing racketin account from way back when and then just say I want build on this now?

[00:25:17]>> Yeah, you can use an existing racketin account. Just make sure you go and link your built-in racketin accounts and then you can change in racketin how you want to get paid out.

[00:25:24]>> Perfect. I know before there were different features in the app where you could refer a friend to a built card and get a lot of referral points there. With the roll out of 2.0 I know that was gone a little bit. Is it back?

[00:25:36]>> We're close friends. At time of recording, it is back. So, if you're not a member of the built close friends community, really been a huge success for us. Shout out to our marketing team and brand team who run that. If you go and click on your profile icon in the built app, you'll see a close friend section. You can apply to be there. I would tell you, please fill out that application. Seriously, we do review every single one and people who just say, you know, not real answers. You're not going to be approved. But we wanted a place for our most passionate members and fans to come in and have extra opportunities to engage with us, test out features, hear directly from Built Leadership, and that's what happens in the close friends section of the app.

[00:26:08]One of which is, hey, a limited time referral bonus. So, right now, we're giving 5,000 bill points out for everybody that you refer to sign up for the built card. That's for the first five. After the first five, it drops to 2500 bill points. And we just want to see how this performs and how it tests just like we do everything. Close friends. Again, awesome. Please go and apply to be in that. But, uh, as a Bill's employee, I do have access to close friends and I've certainly used my own personal referral link this past weekend in order to get a few folks, um, to sign up because 5,000 bill points is awesome. It's incredibly valuable, especially if I know in the back of my head, hey, with an upcoming rent day, this could be worth more than 5,000 bill points. So, we hope to see how the performance of that goes and then if it's going well, we certainly will roll it out to the larger bill population.

[00:26:48]>> Speaking of friends and the neighborhood and everything, you guys have a lot of events that you host in New York. We see it on social media all the time with the Build Cafe and different comedy shows, all of that. Is that just a New York thing or like I want friends where where other people go?

[00:27:03]>> No, we just had an event in Vegas yesterday. I think it was yesterday is what we did. We had a comedy show at the Fountain Blue that we did. We have comedy shows, we have dining events, we've done sporting events a few times.

[00:27:14]Built is the neighborhood. It's a membership program for your neighborhood and we want your neighborhood to be nationwide. So, every single rent day, we come out with the next month's experiences. Those happen in the largest cities around the US all the time. I went to a comedy show in Atlanta right before I left that was awesome. Like if you haven't done the built comedy shows, they are just objectively great times.

[00:27:30]Like usually includes some food, usually includes some drinks. You can redeem your bill points or some cash to buy the tickets after when it comes out with rent day. It's fantastic. The curated dining experiences are great value. I mean, it's like a hundred bucks or not very many bill points for dinner for two with a curated tasting menu and a round of drinks. And again, we do have these in New York, but we also have them all around the country. And I trust we keep our experiences and brand team super busy creating these things around the country. Your best bet again during rent day to keep an eye on the built app built website and see what they're coming up. And if you really like have not thought about going to one of these yet, like I just highly encourage everybody to check them out. They're they're so well done. And I'll be honest, when our founder gez I guess two years ago at this point was like, "Hey, we're going to have built comedy shows."

[00:28:12]We were like, "What in the world are you talking about, dude? Like that's so random. Like there's no way that's going to be a success." The way that everybody can come together in a neighborhood, regardless of which way you politically or religiously lean, and just laugh at a comedy show has been awesome and it's just been such a resounding success that we're even going to host them here in our new office in the Meat Packing District as soon as our, you know, basement and bottom floor are done.

[00:28:32]They're so good and it's been such a unifying way to bring that neighborhood message together for our members. So, please go check all those things out.

[00:28:38]Tell us a little bit more about the strategy for a lot of these like seemingly very unrelated things that we see on build up like celebrities Martha Stewart's cookbook a lot of the different sports celebrities you guys had Lance Bass from Insync um doing the monthly trivia thing um there is that show the Roomies that you guys >> Roomies Roomie yeah nominated for two web awards everybody go vote such a great show >> there's that which was like a show you guys produced an Eric are going to on Real Housewives of New York. There's like so many seemingly random things, which I just assume are all going to come together where we're all like, "Oh, yes, I see now. The strategy makes sense for anybody where they're like, why is Built investing so much into TV production shows? What is the strategy here?" I mean, if you are not following our Instagram series of Roomies Roomies, it's so good and it there is no overt mention of Built anywhere in there except I think on the Instagram profile it says a show by Built and that's it.

[00:29:40]Like during the episodes there's nothing directly about Built and it is just objectively a excellently written show by our in-house talent here and the actors and actresses that play the cast are so great. is just such a relatable show that we felt like making these cultural moments and making things that people can relate to and enjoy is just a great way to have them interact with the brand without saying buy this give us this money there's no subscription to watch Roomy's room like it's it's just been so well done that I mean it's getting like major publishing and marketing not you know notice now to say how is this company marketing their company without marketing their company right and I think that's what all these cultural moments were trying to do is number one is what is a cultural moment that everyday people can relate to that just bring you back to the brand and a brand that can make this happen. But number two is back to the neighborhood.

[00:30:26]The Roomies Roomies thing is all about the New York City neighborhood, which if being somebody who just moved to New York City can actually really relate to.

[00:30:34]I'm watching Ellie figure out her daily life here. But it's tying the all these things into the neighborhood together, right? Or into the home, right? What does Martha Stewart's cookbook have to do? Like everybody has a kitchen in their home and a kitchen is a core place to the home, right? That's a core place that Built operates in. What is a comedy show? It's a way to bring the neighborhood together. And none of this we want to be an overt like, hey, here's a transaction that you have to complete with us. Even though rent by definition and housing is a very transactional business, we don't want to be thought of that way. I think we're always going to look for what resonates with our members, what resonates with the demographics in our members. And how do we stay culturally relevant to today's times? And all of this at the very least gets people talking, but at most, right, it's another way to get insane value.

[00:31:14]Giving away 10 free months of rent every single month with rent free from a celebrity, giving away bill points, having these awesome experiences just goes so much further for folks than saying, "Hey, go make this transaction with us. Thanks very much. See you next month."

[00:31:28]>> Fair enough. Any other new features you want to highlight that we didn't cover today? I know we covered a lot of them.

[00:31:34]Anything we missed?

[00:31:35]>> Yeah, we barely talked about the travel business and the things that I get to completely nerd and geek out on every single day. If you haven't gone to the built travel portal, you can book flights in hotels through that today. If you're a built platinum or gold member, again, another reason to invest in our elite status program. You have access to home away from home and our luxury hotel collection. We are trying to do travel different here. And the the way that we view built members will stay in our ecosystem is if we give them the best built travel booking and travel experience. And in our opinion, the way we do that is to drive direct bookings.

[00:32:05]So, if you go and you search for flights and I have what's called an NDC connection to an airline, it's going to be a little direct booking badge that says if you book this flight through built on this flight that says direct book, it will be as if you are booking it on the United website or if you're booking it on the Spirit website so that you can call United and they will handle the servicing, right? Not the OTAA experience that people get so frustrated with. On the hotel side, any home away from home booking is a direct rate with that hotel. You're going to get your high points, your merit points, your help points on top of the home away from home benefits, on top of 2x bill points.

[00:32:37]You're going to be able to call the hotel and have them service that booking. And we are trying to make that happen with all of our hotel inventory, with all of our airline inventory. We don't want to be in the game of how much margin can we drive from a high volume business. Like that's not where we're going to win. And my team sits in incredible praise of privilege where we had a hundred billion dollar payments business last year where no matter how many hotel rooms I sell great for us but not the reason that we're doing it. The reason that we're trying to make the best travel program is that people love build so much that they stay in our ecosystem in their home and in their neighborhood which yes makes us revenue but it makes again if you go back to the original thing we talked about today the marketplace makes a mature marketplace.

[00:33:14]So if airlines and hotels have direct connections to built members to this, you know, 6 million households today, 10 million households by the end of this year. What if I'm an airline that really wants to compete in a certain market?

[00:33:24]Now I can go and sell my direct inventory to that market only. What if I'm a cruise line that is an ultralux cruise line and I go, "Hey, I can have direct inventory sold in this built marketplace and I can say, "Hey, built everybody with a high credit score that pays a mortgage, I want to receive this offer." That is powerful, impactful marketing to that cruise line. And now it's an awesome offer for built members to have. So again, built travel program is not about making as much money as possible. It's about helping built members realize as much money as possible and about creating an awesome marketplace where travel brands can come in and through direct inventory distribution that they really like because they're not beholden to OTAA commissions, they can put all that value back into an awesome offer for built members so that everybody wins. Built makes commission off of that cruise sold. The built member gets an awesome offer because the cruise line didn't have to pay 20% commission, they paid 10% commission. and the cruise line has an amazing marketplace where they can come in and do impactful transaction-based marketing. Right? That is the built ecosystem that we're going for on the travel side, not here is an OTAA experience where we're going to give you really bad customer service and make as much money as possible. Like a really really important distinction and we have a lot more rolling out all the time. New partnerships, new direct connects, loyalty only hotel rates are coming. Like really really excited about the way that we structure this platform.

[00:34:37]All right. So, we've touched on all of the pop culture type of things. We've touched on the Racketin partnership, new ways to earn points with Build 2.0, the travel side. What else? I feel like there's so many things going on, we possibly can't have covered it all.

[00:34:53]>> If I just had a message for everybody listening, you know, specifically, you know, to this audience is yes, we have an amazing co-brand card, but I just need you to understand the scale of the built business today and what we are really trying to do. The one thing that we haven't really talked about is the built concierge that sits on top of everything that we do with built. You can go into the app today or really use the built concier. It's our own in-house agentic layer that is far more than just a discovery tool, but it can execute everything inside of Built. So, if you want to sign a lease, if you want to call a car, if you want to book a fitness class, if you want to change your hotel booking, everything that you can do across the entire Built ecosystem is now executable in the Built Concierge. and that just has some really cool capabilities that are going to really take everything we've done to the next level through deep technology integrations and we just feel like you know doubling down on AI right now but making it in a way that is useful in your everyday life is the way to win rather than hey here's just another discovery tool. So everybody take away number one the scale of built in the company today far outside of what we think is an amazing co-brand card and number two that there is an agentic layer that's going to sit on top of the marketplace to check out and the loyalty program to tie everything together and do some really really cool unique capabilities moving forward like that is built today.

[00:36:04]>> I think people probably know where to find you. I think the internet at large at this point knows how to find you. But in case somebody has questions and they don't know where to find you or how to find the built program app, where to sign up, where to watch Roomies Roomies, all of that, what are the links that people should go check out?

[00:36:22]>> Yeah, I mean built.com is where you start where you sign up for a free account. You need to be a US resident in order to become a built member. Second is my Instagram is ker points. K R points. Yes, everybody knows where to find me there. If you're coming for, you know, everyday influencer, you you'll be a little bit disappointed. Most of my content's dad and New York City life now content that you can follow along, but always I put teasers and really cool stuff. We're doing it built on there.

[00:36:47]And look, I I am super responsive. I mean, as everybody knows, right? I've spent years on Reddit, which everybody knows at this point, trying to advocate for the built community and the build member. And people send me DMs all the time on Instagram. I love talking travel stuff for hours, as you know, Julia. I can talk to stuff forever and ever and always. And I'm always open to what needs to be fixed. And if something is broken, I am responsive as as I can be with the volume of of DMs and things that come in. But please don't be shy to to shoot me a DM and let let me know your thoughts. All as a built senior leadership team is connected. We respond to emails every single day. I promise.

[00:37:20]Respond to DMs every single day. I'm here to listen always and get the latest feedback.

[00:37:25]>> And where do we watch Roomies Roomies?

[00:37:27]>> They have their own Instagram handle, Roomies Roomies. Um that you can go look up. It's such an awesome show and really well done and yeah, it's it's fantastic.

[00:37:35]What do we think is going to come down the pipeline with build 3.0?

[00:37:38]>> I don't think there's going to be a built 3.0 anytime, you know, in the near future. But I would tell you that, you know, iterations is core to this business. It is ship and learn, ship and learn, ship and learn, and we will continue to do that with built 2.0. But I think we've largely gotten things on the right track now and really excited to see where things go.

[00:37:58]>> Fantastic. Well, thank you again so much, Richard, for joining us on the show again. Hopefully we have you back on where it's not another five years before you're featured here again. But super excited with all of the cool things going on with Built. I've been a fan since day one.