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

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

Galiano Tiramani talks about revolutionizing they housing industry by providing affordable housing for all and how Boxxabl plans on creating more units. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/digitalsocialhour/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Musk came in and we got all these press articles and then things went to a whole other level of awareness of the company and it's just been a wild ride for sure. Yeah so he did buy a boxable casita. It was actually one of the first three prototypes that that we built and he's got it in his backyard at SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas. 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 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 galeano tiramani hey guys thanks for having me absolutely appreciate it so yeah we got boxable here in las vegas actually we got a big factory and we are today, Galeano Tiramani. Hey guys, thanks for having me. Absolutely. Appreciate it. So 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 uh 10 houses per day out of our current uh factory space wow and you had 10 000 uh pre-orders right yeah we got a big list of names well no it's 170 000 yeah oh 170 170 000 people on your waiting list yeah it's

amazing so we went viral on social media many times a lot lot of people found out. 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, or about 10,000 have been in a closet.

Well, imagine if you just charged everybody, like, $100, like what Elon Musk did with that Cybertruck just to be on the waiting list. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, we charged 200 oh so all those people paid 200 so about uh 10 000 people have paid uh 200 deposit and some other tiers of deposit in there as well okay and really we just did that to kind of prove interest prove demand in 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 got to prove a whole bunch of things to raise the money. And demand is definitely one of them. So in five years, you guys have a $3 billion evaluation. Not too shabby. That ain't bad.

That's crazy. And he raised $140 million. Yeah. $140 million or $170 million? What's the actual number? So we decided to do crowdfunding to raise money for the company and leverage social media and ended up raising over $140 dollars to fund the boxable vision and got started roughly around early 2018 um 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 uh which has been in operation about 18 months now is 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 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 on an assembly line. This microphone, my sneakers, my iPhone. But houses are not. Houses are still built. factory on an 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 oh yeah just kind of putting it together like a legos yeah yeah so the first product we have is called the boxable

casita it's basically a 360 square foot uh room kind of the size of this room. It's got a 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 a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you live in a box full yourself? No, no. You know, I have a wife and four kids. But if it was just me, I definitely wouldn't mind living in one. So how many square feet is the Casita model? So it's roughly 19 feet by 19 feet. So about 360 square feet, 9 1⁄2 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 especially 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 great market then oh yeah huge amount of interest coming from over there did you see they just uh did some weird law with house insurance in california yeah they removed house insurance out there state farm is pulling out of that market because of all the crime oh wow yeah wow that's not good i kind of feel like some 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 why would an insurance company pull out of the whole state it's never happened before i mean you got oklahoma you got texas they got hurt 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 some 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 the uh you know the monthly payments or anything like that they don't care about the reserve it's just like no we don't want no part so is that related to like the government doing stuff no i think it's just the they them you know they know

something that we don't some Some details that they're not given because the insurance companies usually don't pull out of the market. California is one of the richest markets. You guys, in most cars, the most expensive cars, most expensive homes, most people who live there have a lot of money. So why not? It is interesting because insurance companies make

a lot of money. So for them to have done that, that means something's wrong. Speaking of insurance, can these houses be insured and do they have warranties attached to them and what's what 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 can apply to our house except that the way we are engineering building the houses, 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 way more durable than how that means exactly and how exactly 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. You can make them bulletproof, too.

Well, it's funny, actually. I think about it. Doing that, you can make them bulletproof. So we tried that. Didn't it work? And it got banned from TikTok. Yeah. Why?

That's funny. That would be sick, though. Bulletproof house? So we laminated it in Kevlar. And we did this whole funny video about shooting it uh and then it got pulled from from tiktok violating the rules there's not a lot of shoot on there yeah i feel like i've been shadow banned ever since then so it's sad wouldn't be surprised so how do you handle that success and the success that you have and the success that's coming

like how do you handle this much success because Because you're going to be possibly a billionaire at some point, right? Maybe multi-billionaire. Yeah. I mean, right now... And is it 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, until 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 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 raise the money and how we got the interest. I leverage 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. I'm sorry 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're like all right i'm gonna go with this you know at the beginning i was just trying anything and whatever what do you mean trying just trying anything to get the word out to further the company. And things started working and I kept doubling down on that. So, you know, social media was the way the best way to get the word out. It works 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, you know, really make sure you're commanding, you know, 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, uh, 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, um, 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 going from you know just being a private person to having to kind of like pimp myself out on on social media for the for the

benefit of the company right uh and then realizing like at this point i kind of have sympathy towards some celebrities because i'm i'm i'm you know dealing with like one percent 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 insane. So, you know, 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 uh funny story sad story um

actually i'll mention uh 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... He 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, you know, 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 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 f***ing a**hole. That. Yeah, real f***ing a**hole.

That's crazy. Real f***ing a**hole. Did you get the money back? No. It's all still kind of pending right now. It all just happened pretty recently. You know, we discovered, he left abruptly the company, and then we discovered what he had done,

started investigating it. Eventually, he kind of confessed everything. I'm not sure why, so we figured out. I'm not sure why. Yeah, really horrible. The guy had a family, too, that he basically abandoned over a little bit of money. Really, really sad. A million can't last you your whole life.

And doing something like that, what's the end game like you're gonna get caught like it's not like he stole like like life cash it's not like he stole like cash out of someone's like drawer like this was like this is not a paper trail conversation what was the end game is it is it done yet yeah you wire yet there's a wire record right right all kind of records so like um back to the boxables is it possible that you can implement ai to where it's like a smart home 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 of of work and effort put into the logistics the way the parts are moved around the factory uh 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 i basically put 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 like how long you want to cook you want to cook 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 this little stuff like that or even telling them what to do and how to do things yeah 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 just it's make it a whole smart home it's it's it's in the works at boxable so we have this um mascot called frank

uh he's the he's a pig yeah um so he's a pig yeah he's a pig uh so we're gonna do hey frank you know hey frank lock the doors hey frank close the blinds and uh we're gonna be able to kind of own that whole ecosystem okay you know where we build it all out custom for our our buildings and uh it all works together cohesively um so how did the elon musk connection happen was it a dm was it a phone call was it a email mysteriously from one of his people like how did how did that whole synergy happen well it was twitter of course that was twitter before he bought it or after before he bought it yeah so uh i guess what happened was is he an investor no he's not okay so he's not an investor those rumors aren't true no but but he did

uh buy a box book casita um it was actually one of the first three prototypes that that we built and he's got it in his backyard at spacex in boca chica texas i believe right now um but yeah so so uh one of the account promoting it heavy he was like sleeping in it he kind of was promoting it i mean so what happened was he saw uh a post with the video of the house unfolding uh and he liked the post and then the next day his assistant called me and was like hey can we buy one of 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 run ahead and deployed it in Texas. And at first,

uh, we weren't allowed to say anything about it cause 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 on it. Yeah, he was promoted himself. Yeah, I heard about it. 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 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. I wasn't talking about it in that original tweet. But yeah, it's it's a cool product, he said. That's awesome. Yeah, that that was great. And, you know, before that happened, we had already been doing so well with social media. Like we did what's called a reg CF where we raised $4 million in 13 days. And I think that was like a record back then for that type of fundraising. Via social media.

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 awareness of the company. Right.

And it's just been a wild ride for sure. A lot of businesses 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 different stuff. You know, I try a lot of things, but at the end of the day, uh, this is all off the back of a really cool product. And you know, the, the sales and marketing that we have right now, frankly, it's not even executed that well, uh, but we've done

so well on it. Uh, so there's still like a lot of meat on the bone for us to improve all that. Like five years, right? If that, like if that like yeah it's it's five years from from just an idea uh but we've actually only been producing houses about 18 months now wow bro i had a three billion evaluation that's insane yeah that is crazy that's even more crazier yeah yeah and you know the the 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. 40,000 cars. Yeah, exactly. 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 Voxible 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, 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, the worst car quality control. Right. Yeah. So how do you manage the QC pumping out not a home a minute, but 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 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. Wow. And that's just at this early stage. One whole house at a certain stage. Yeah, just a house every two hours comes out the door. And that's just early this early stage. One whole house. Yeah, just a house every two hours comes out the door. And that's just early stage, very manual stuff. First gen product, 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. 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, we 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 kind of start going that route where you're giving, you're creating a place

where homeless people 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, you know, 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 or California. Even here, the homelessness is a real problem. So you even thinking about that is like hard. Yeah, I mean, the homeless thing is a pretty controversial issue with a lot of different areas. And I think there's a few different sections. 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 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 and 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, um, it's interesting, uh, when I think about competitors, because, uh, 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, of companies and people as potential customers, like if we show them a better way to build that's faster and lower costs for them, they're going to jump all over that. And then, boom they're our customers uh but beyond that the demand for housing and the housing price is is so

high that really there's enough room for everyone right now uh if if you can provide housing you know it's it's gone it's it's going to sell uh 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 the works too? Yeah. I mean, we are 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 and then you start getting a really big room that you can connect to other rooms and and you know

stack and arrange and then yeah garages too and try to roll out you know this full product lineup to simplify the build process for the developers and builders how much is the shipping cost for the developers and builders. How much is the shipping cost and the total? Customers, what are they paying total for this complete? Yeah, so one of the big innovations with Boxable, probably the most important innovation, is that we've actually fixed shipping. So traditionally, 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 a highway legal load that's not over wide that doesn't cost more but we're shipping uh 20 feet on an eight and a half footprint so 20 feet of room is is on 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 over wide. They will require special permits, special routes,

police escorts, like a whole nightmare of nonsense and regulation and added cost. So for us, 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 on one truck so i don't know if you've ever seen like you know is that two casitas or are they already are already open um so uh the house folds up from 20 feet down to eight and a half feet 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. I can't wait to see where this goes, man. We'll be rooting for you. Any closing comments? I think, you know, you guys should come check out the factory.

We also invite anyone else to come take a peek. Uh, we do tours every day. Uh, there's models in the parking lot that are actually open 24 seven. Uh, and I'd suggest anyone who's interested checks out our, our social media. We're basically posting nonstop, uh, live what we're doing on YouTube, on, on Instagram. So you can stay up to date with the latest info on there. And one other thing, we're looking to hire, you know, the most talented people from all around the country, so please check out our jobs section on our website as well. Nice.

There we go. Wayne? Get a box of them. Please. They're cool. Check them out, guys. I might have to get one, honestly. Yeah, I think this interview ended, too.

I'm not done talking. Yeah, we'll have to do a part two. Podcast studio, Boxable. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Let's make that happen. We could build all the studio inside one of them. Literally.

Oh, yeah. Just dropping in. All right. Thanks for tuning in, guys. Digital Social Hour. See you next time. Peace. When you think about businesses that are selling through the roof,

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