DealMachine
👤 David Lecko (with Dave Oster) (Engineer-turned-investor who lost a deal by following up too slow, so he coded the fix that weekend and dogfooded it daily.)🌐 siteLinkedIn
A driving-for-dollars app for real-estate wholesalers: pin a distressed house, pull the owner, auto-mail a postcard.
Will it work? · our read
Recurring wins. The app was cloneable — many copied it. The move was charging monthly instead of per-postcard, even while cutting mail prices: $20K became $1.3M in one year.
01How the money moves
Investor pins distressed houses while driving
→
App skip-traces owners, auto-mails postcards
→
Monthly subscription + mail credits bill the investor
02The numbers
$17M/yrStatedannual revenue, 2026
2026-04
the sentence on the page
David and Dave's leadership, the company has grown to include 170,000 investors nationwide, generating $17 million in annual revenue. Founded in 2017, DealMachine provides real estate data and lead…
Founder-stated growth; the pricing switch, not the app, drove the jump. GlobeNewswire
$20K in 2017 to $17M in 2026 — recurring subscriptions.
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- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
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See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 9 August 2026
GlobeNewswire (2026): $17M annual revenue, 170K investors, 36 staffDealMachine blog: the origin story (driving for dollars, first app)Action Academy podcast: $13M ARR and the pricing-model history (founder)Insivia interview: cutting churn as the growth ceilingInc. 5000: DealMachine, #36 in 2021
Revenue ($17M, 2026) is self-reported via the company's own GlobeNewswire press release and echoed in founder podcast interviews ($13M ARR stated in 2023) — not audited. The pricing-history figures ($20K, $1.3M, $6M, $9M, $13M) are David Lecko's own statements in interviews. DealMachine is widely described as self-funded/bootstrapped and the story supports it, but I found no filing officially confirming zero outside capital. The churn/commodity-data "dies" thesis is our read, grounded in the founder's own churn-focused interview and a crowded field of data resellers. We never score you.