Rarely, if ever, does a business look the same as it did when it started. This can be especially true in the world of startups— something Founder/CEO of ReLease (formally Cios) Terry Wang knows very well.
ReLease is a financial technology company with the mission, “to give renters the freedom to move any time, without fees, with an experience that is simple, painless, and liberating.” To get where they are today, the company and Wang had to make some big changes over time.
We sat down with the gener8tor Investment Accelerator Cohort graduate to learn more about the pivot.
Q: What is new with ReLease?
A: So much has happened. We went through a huge pivot—a complete rebrand—and have grown by leaps and bounds. We essentially took everything we had built with Cios, learned a lot from it, and built strong relationships with some of our major partners. Then we went back to square one, cut a lot of things down, rebuilt the product around updated needs we discovered, and turned that into an actual company. Restarting from the beginning is never easy—though it was a pretty fun experience—but rebuilding everything from the ground up was a challenge. Now, we’re working with about 12,000 active apartment units, with 7,800 fully engaged. Revenues are climbing month over month, and we’re focused on growing the team even further.
Q: How many apartments were you partnered with and when did you make the pivot?
A: In June of 2023 when we made the pivot, we were working with more or less two management companies and maybe a couple hundred units. Then we essentially went right back to zero. In fact, we’re not actually working with those same companies anymore. We took a lot of valuable feedback from them, but ultimately, things didn’t quite work out—timelines got a little bit construed. So, we went back to zero and rebuilt everything from the ground up. It’s been a journey, but a good one overall.
Q: What valuable feedback did you get that facilitated that change?
A: I think the whole business model was flawed. What we realized was that it was less about getting specific feedback and more about validating the core problem set we were working with. Fundamentally, we were spot on: tenants, particularly on the residential side, want more flexibility in their leases. They’re willing to pay for it, and they want that process to be easier. It’s something they’re actively looking for and even choosing apartments based on. But we just didn’t have a product that worked for that. I think we had the right hypothesis going in, but the product simply didn’t do what it was supposed to do at the time. We were working on a leasing solution to make things cheaper for people, but the business model fundamentally wasn’t sustainable. We lost money most times someone used the service, retention was really low, and it was incredibly hard to differentiate from existing solutions. So we ended up throwing the entire business model out the door and refocused everything around, ‘How do we best solve this problem in a way that actually works?’




