Chasing startup growth? 🏃‍♂️ | Connecting hustling founders | Follow for daily exponential growth hacks | Growth @ ContactOut | Curated learnings from YPO & EO founders

Sushmita (Sushi) J 🐸

I pasted 5 domains. Got verified contacts, ICP scores, sales triggers and a written outreach sequence in under a minute.

Introducing ContactOut's AI Prospector.

It's just 4 steps:
→ Analyse your ICP
→ Enrich target domains
→ AI research + scoring
→ Find decision makers + draft outreach

One tool. One place. Under a minute.

No complex AI workflows. 
No over-engineered prompts. 
No tab switching.
Just paste and go. 
Honestly, this is enough. 

Comment "AI Prospector" for 50 free ContactOut API credits.
🔗 Link in the comments.


Here's why we built it (a bit of backstory):

ContactOut grew 60% in 2025. To keep scaling, we needed more qualified leads hitting our sales team faster.
But after sometime it created a bottleneck, as managers spent all their time sourcing leads instead of coaching reps.

So we flipped it. Gave reps the tools to own their pipeline themselves.
It worked!

Reps started to add AI research in the workflow-  sharper angles, better outreach. 
But not every rep wanted to learn prompting, it's too time-consuming and too expensive to get wrong. Many times it becomes disappointing because the workflows are not easy to create.

So we took the prompts our top reps were already using and built them directly into the tool.

We built this for our team. It worked so well, we had to share it.

Big shoutout to Greg Hermo and Siren Li for building this with me 🙌

This is the beta, so all feedback is welcome. 


Also, thanks to ElevenLabs for helping me generate the AI voiceover for the demo video.

Sushmita (Sushi) Jadhav 🐸

Building Athena.vc | Growth Lead @ ContactOut | SEO → Traffic → Enrich → Deals

The Broker for Homebuyers and Property Investors | 🏆 5 x Top 100 Mortgage Broker in Australia

I’m Redom Syed, FBAA Broker of the Year 2025 and Founder of Flint Group, one of Australia’s fastest-growing mortgage businesses.

What started as a mission to help families like mine make better money decisions has grown into a $10 B vision — to build one of Australia’s largest, most impactful mortgage groups.

💡 Who we are:
Flint is a modern brokerage, built for modern brokers who want to command attention.  We are a group of 100+ professionals across Australia and overseas united by one purpose: to empower Australians to understand, plan, and act with confidence.

🏆 Why clients and professionals choose us:
	•	Award-Winning Expertise – Recognised as Australia’s FBAA Broker of the Year (2025) and in MPA’s Top 100 Brokers for 7 years running.
	•	Ex-Treasury Economist Insight – We combine data, economics, and lending strategy to create smarter client outcomes.
	•	End-to-End Property & Finance Support – From first homes to complex investment portfolios, our clients access 50+ lenders and hundreds of tailored solutions.
	•	Proactive Loan Management – Our dedicated review team ensures every client stays on the lowest rate available — without needing to ask.
	•	Research-Driven Guidance – Our in-house research team has predicted every major rate and policy shift for nearly a decade, helping clients save tens of thousands.

📅 Book a chat → calendly.com/redom/15min￼
🌏 Learn more → www.flintinvest.au￼
📞 Contact → 0489 943 079 | info@flintgroup.au

Redom Syed - Mortgage Broker

I run two businesses. 

And I refuse to let either one be average.

Flint. Alaya. 120+ people. Four countries.

Both growing. Both demanding. Both full of people who show up every day and deserve a leader who does the same.

Some weeks the tension is real.

Flint needs a big decision and Alaya is mid-hire. 

A client situation blows up on one side while the other side is hitting its best month ever.

I don't outsource that tension. 

I sit in it.

Because both of these things were built from nothing. 

With real people, real stakes, and real belief that we could do something worth doing.

I'm not going to half-commit to either one.

So I move faster. Protect my energy harder. Make decisions quicker.

People ask me how I manage it.

The honest answer is: urgency.

I live like I'm running out of time. Because I think we all are.

Two businesses isn't twice the work.

It's twice the reason to make every hour count.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

Redom Syed

Co-Founder Flint Group | Building the Future of Mortgages | 2025 FBAA Broker of The Year

Vinh Giang changed my life.

Not a throwaway line. I mean it literally.

A few years ago, nothing was moving. I had the ideas, I had the work ethic, but I kept hitting the same invisible wall.

Turns out the wall had a name.

I had never actually learned how to communicate.

Years of economics, strategy, analysis - and nobody once told me that none of it lands if you can't make another person feel it.

That realisation stung.

Since then, every Sunday I audit my own communication from the week. Not my numbers. My words. Where I lost people. Where something actually landed.

Last week I got to see Vinh and say thank you in person.

If you're technically strong and still feel like you're not getting the traction you deserve - it's probably not your knowledge that's the problem.

It's the gap between your head and the room.

My daughters know my team's names.

Not just vaguely.

They ask about them by name.

"How's Christian Stevens today?" "Is Adi Chanda coming to visit?"

I don't know exactly when it happened.

But at some point the people I work with stopped being "Dad's work people" and became just…people they knew.

That means a lot to me.

Because when your family knows your people, it means your people are real.

Not a headcount. Not an org chart. Actual humans who've shown up consistently enough to exist in your home.

I've built revenue. I'm proud of that.

I've built systems. Proud of that too.

But a 4-year-old remembering your team's name because she's heard Dad talk about them with genuine warmth?

That's the thing I'll remember.

That's what a real culture feels like from the inside.

Last week I stood at the highest helicopter landing point in the world with Christian Stevens, Ana Souza, and Rushmi Shrestha.

Right next to Everest.

I looked out and thought - this is probably the highest ground I'll ever stand on.

And I just stood there for a while.

Not taking photos. Not thinking about work. Just standing there.

A kid from Western Sydney. Standing on top of the world.

The trip was originally about business. 

I flew to Kathmandu to visit the Flint Nepal team - the people who quietly power so much of what we do from 10,000km away.

Sitting with them, sharing a meal, putting faces to names - that alone was worth the flight.

But then came the helicopter.

And somewhere up there, above the clouds, above almost everything, something hit me.

Not a grand revelation. Just a quiet, clear feeling.

That the life you build is made of the bets you place on yourself before you feel ready.

I've placed a few of those bets.

Some hurt. Most paid off in ways I didn't expect.

And somehow, they led me here.

To a team I'm deeply proud of. 

To businesses doing things I couldn't have imagined a few years ago. 

To a helicopter next to Everest, thinking about how far this has all come.

I don't know what the highest point of my career looks like yet.

But standing up there, I stopped worrying about that.

The view from where we've already come is pretty remarkable on its own.

When I was a kid, my biggest dream wasn't to be a CEO.

It was to own a factory.

Every Sunday my dad would take me to work with him. 

He was a factory supervisor, and I loved every single one of those mornings.

People showing up, doing their work, looking after their families. 

It felt safe. It felt stable.

Then my parents lost their jobs.

Overnight, that feeling vanished. 

I watched what that does to a family up close. 

The stress. The silence at the dinner table. The way everything shifts without anyone saying why.

I will never forget it.

That loss planted a quiet dream, that one day I'd build that place for other people.

Last year, it became real.

We opened Flint Nepal. 50+ people. A real community, built from scratch.

I think about my dad every time I walk through those doors.

Every blind corner, every moment of doubt, every stumble along the way.

It all makes sense now.

I told my team early on: if you're burning out, tell me before you break.

I meant it. But I wasn't sure anyone would actually do it.

Then someone did.

I'm not sharing who. That's theirs. But I'll share what happened.

They didn't send a dramatic message. No crisis. No breakdown.

Just a quiet, honest note saying they weren't okay. That they'd been pushing through it for weeks and couldn't anymore.

That took more courage than most things I've seen in business.

My first instinct was to fix it. Immediately. Restructure their workload, solve the problem, move on.

But that wasn't what they needed first.

They needed to feel like telling me hadn't been a mistake.

So I listened. Really listened. Before I did anything else.

What I learned from that conversation changed how I lead.

Burnout doesn't announce itself. It builds quietly behind someone who cares too much to complain.

The people most likely to burn out are usually your best ones.

The ones carrying more than their share because they don't want to let anyone down.

If your culture only rewards output, that's exactly who you'll lose.

I'd rather build something slightly slower and keep the people who make it worth building.

Check on your team. Not their numbers. Them.

A lot of investors discover commercial property and think they've found a cheat code.

Better yields. Longer leases. Tenants who look after the place.

They're not wrong about any of that.

What they miss is what sits underneath it.

Commercial doesn't forgive the way residential does. 

A bad residential purchase in a decent area sorts itself out eventually. 

The market carries you.

Commercial doesn't work like that.

The tenant matters more than the building. 

The lease matters more than the suburb. 

And when vacancy hits - not if, when - it hits hard and stays longer than you'd like.

Those details aren't fine print. They're the whole story.

Done well, commercial is a powerful part of a portfolio. 

Stronger income, cleaner cashflow, less emotional noise.

Done poorly, it ties up capital in something very difficult to unwind.

The difference almost always comes down to preparation.

Understand what you're buying before the yield convinces you.

The numbers look good right up until they don't.

The scariest moment in property isn't signing the contract.

It's 3am, two weeks later.

You're staring at the ceiling wondering if you've made the biggest mistake of your life.

Did I overpay? What if rates go higher? What if something goes wrong?

I've been there personally.

And I've had that call from clients more times than I can count.

Always late. Always the same quiet panic in their voice.

Here's what I tell them.

That feeling isn't a warning sign. It's a rite of passage.

Every serious investor I know has had that 3am moment. Usually more than once.

It doesn't mean you got it wrong.

It means you care. It means the stakes are real. It means you're a human being who just made a significant decision about their future.

The doubt is normal. Sitting with it is part of the process.

What I've never had? A client call me two years later and say they regretted buying.

Not once.

So if you're lying awake right now second-guessing yourself…you're not losing your mind.

You're just in the part nobody posts about.

It passes, and what's on the other side of it is usually worth it.

Consumer confidence is at a 53-year low.

And if you read the headlines, you'd think Australian property was about to fall off a cliff.

It isn't.

Here's what actually happens when confidence hits the floor.

Owner-occupiers pause. Emotional decisions get deferred. Auction clearance rates drop from 75% to 55%.

And investors, the ones paying attention, face less competition, better negotiating conditions, and a market that's pricing in fear the fundamentals simply don't justify.

This pattern has played out before.

COVID trough, April 2020. Confidence at historic lows. Those who bought at maximum pessimism made 25-30% within two years.

2022-2023 rate hiking cycle. Sentiment deeply depressed. Prices were already recovering before confidence even normalised.

The "time to buy" index has been a famously poor predictor of property prices for 50 years running.

Because the market doesn't move on feelings.

It moves on supply, demand, population, and credit.

Right now: vacancy at 1.2% nationally. 400,000 new arrivals a year. Supply pipeline broken. Credit slowly easing.

The scoreboard doesn't match the sentiment.

That gap is where the opportunity lives.

I wasn't naturally confident.

I just got very good at acting like I was.

Early on as a broker, I used to walk into meetings terrified.

Dry mouth, rehearsed lines, over-prepared in a way that made me sound robotic.

No one told me that confidence isn't something you have.

It's something you perform until it becomes real.

So I performed it.

Every call I didn't want to make, I made.

Every room that felt too big for me, I walked into.

Every time I wanted to wait until I felt "ready," I went anyway.

And slowly, something shifted.

Because I proved to myself, over and over, that I could do hard things scared.

That's actually what confidence is.

It's not the absence of fear.

It's the evidence, built up over time, that fear doesn't stop you.

I still get nervous, before big conversations, bold decisions, before I hit post on something real.

But now I know what's on the other side of it.

That knowledge is worth more than any amount of natural confidence.

Everyone asks me where they should buy.

Nobody asks the more important question.

Where you buy is the last decision. Not the first.

The first question is: what does your life look like in 10 years?

More kids or fewer? Staying in this city or leaving? Building a business or climbing a ladder? Semi-retired by 50 or still grinding at 65?

Because the right property for one version of that life is completely wrong for another.

I've seen people buy brilliant assets in brilliant markets and still get it wrong.

Because the asset didn't fit the life.

Wrong cashflow position for where they were headed. Wrong timeline. Wrong structure.
Great suburb. Wrong decision.

Before I talk to anyone about where to buy, I want to know who they're trying to become.

Not in a philosophical way. In a practical one.

What are you actually building toward?

Answer that clearly and the ‘where’ almost answers itself.

Skip it, and you're just buying a postcode and hoping for the best.

Somewhere along the way, being tired became a personality trait.

"Busy" became the default answer to "how are you?" Exhaustion became proof that you care.

I've never bought it.

The genuinely high-performing people I've been around aren't running on empty by Wednesday. 

They're sharp. Decisive. Fewer decisions, but better ones.

Burning yourself out isn't dedication. It's poor engineering.

If a business only moves because everyone inside it is redlining, that's not high performance. 

That's a structural problem wearing a hustle costume.

The best thing I did as a leader was stop celebrating stress.

Real performance looks like precision. 

Sharp calls made early, and systems that run without someone heroically holding them together.

You don't prove anything by how much you can suffer for your business.

You prove it by building one that doesn't ask you to.

I hit a revenue goal last year that I'd been chasing for a long time.

And for about four minutes, it felt incredible.

Then nothing.

I remember sitting in my car in the car park thinking "okay, so this is it?"

That scared me more than missing the target would have.

Because I'd been using that number as proof of something.

Proof that I was good enough. That I'd made it. That the doubt was wrong.

But the number arrived and the doubt was still there.

Turns out the doubt doesn't care about your revenue.

That was the moment I realised I'd been building toward the wrong thing.

Not the business - the business is real, and the work is meaningful.

But I'd been treating a financial milestone as a finish line.

And finish lines are the wrong thing to chase.

Because you cross them, and then you're just standing on the other side, still yourself, still with the same questions.

What I actually want is to build something I'm proud of every day while it's happening.

The milestone is just evidence that it's working.

Not the point.

My girls don't celebrate walking.

They just walk, and then they run, and then they want to climb everything.

That's a better model.

Most brokers are trying to solve the wrong problem.

They obsess over lender policy, serviceability calculators, and product knowledge.

All useful. None of it is what separates the great ones.

The difference is never what you know.

It's how people feel after they've talked to you.

Great brokers listen more than they talk.

They pick up the phone before they feel ready.

They follow up when nobody asks them to.

They tell a client not to proceed when it would've been easier to just write the loan.

And they stay in the fight long enough to get good - because the first year is brutal, and most people's belief runs out before their skill catches up.

I didn't learn any of this from a training manual.

I learned it by getting it wrong in front of real clients, with real stakes.

That's still the best education available.

It just costs you your comfort.

The most uncomfortable feeling in business isn't failure.

It's a Thursday afternoon when everything is fine.

Numbers are okay. Team is okay. No fires burning.

And that word  ‘okay’ sits in my chest like a warning light.

Because okay means we've stopped pushing.

Okay means we've found a comfortable speed and settled into it.

Okay means there's a next level we haven't gone after yet.

I don't say this to be dramatic. 

I genuinely love what I'm building and the people I'm building it with.

But I didn't leave a career I worked hard for, risk everything, build two businesses from scratch, and drag a team across four countries just to arrive at ‘okay’.

When everything feels fine, that's my signal.

Not to celebrate. To look up and find the next thing that scares me.

A bigger goal. A bolder bet. A conversation I've been putting off having.

Fine is the enemy of great. Okay is where ambition goes to get comfortable.

I'd rather be chasing something that keeps me up at night than sitting still in something that doesn't.

Okay is not the destination.

It's just the starting line for whatever comes next.

I used to think a silent office meant everyone was being productive.

Then we had a day last month where our space was absolutely packed. 

Zero moments of quiet. 

Energy that was almost impossible to describe.

Content being filmed in one corner, a deal being worked through in another, conversations bleeding into each other across the room.

Loud. Chaotic. The best the office has ever felt.

Silence in a workplace is often just people not talking to each other, and teams that don't talk to each other don't function as a team.

The standards here are high. The work has to be good.

But I've stopped believing excellence needs a sterile environment to grow in.

The people who thrive here find their footing in a fast-moving room within thirty seconds and get straight to work.

Either the energy fuels you or it doesn't.

I'd rather have a loud room full of people who are genuinely in it, than a quiet one where everyone's just waiting for the day to end.

When I feel stuck, I don't write a five year plan.

I give myself six weeks.

Looking too far ahead when you're already overwhelmed just makes everything heavier. So I shrink the timeline.

Six weeks of showing up. Every day. No waiting for motivation, no waiting until it feels right.

Something shifts around week three.

Not because the problems are solved. But because momentum is its own kind of medicine. 

You stop feeling stuck because you're moving.

I've done this reset more than once.

You don't need a perfect plan. You don't need to feel ready.

You just need six weeks and a decision that you're not allowed to quit on yourself.

The rest takes care of itself.

Leadership, to me, starts with seeing people properly.

Seeing what they’re capable of…sometimes before they see it themselves.

My job isn’t to keep people small or comfortable.

It’s to ask what they actually want, then help them move toward it.

And that looks different for everyone.

Some people want to grow inside what we’re building. I’ll back them hard.

Some people want something bigger or different down the line and that’s okay too.

People don’t owe me loyalty forever. They don’t have to stick around.

If someone’s goals go beyond what I can offer, I don’t hold them back.

I’ll take them right to the edge, help them get ready, and watch them take off.

Leadership isn’t about possession. It’s about contribution.

If people leave more confident, more capable, and clearer about who they are than when they arrived, then I’ve done my job.

Everything else is just a bonus.

Most investors are optimising for the wrong thing.

More properties. Higher valuations. Bigger numbers on a spreadsheet.

Then rates move, credit tightens, and that impressive portfolio becomes something you're just trying to survive.

I've seen it more times than I'd like.

The investors who sleep well aren't the ones with the most assets. 

They're the ones with the most options. 

Cashflow that doesn't depend on everything going right. 

Buffers that absorb the unexpected without forcing a decision you're not ready to make.

That's what yield actually buys you. 

Not just income - agency.

The freedom to hold when others are forced to sell. 

To move when others are frozen.

Wealth has always been less about accumulation and more about what your asset base allows you to do - or not do.

The most valuable thing a well-structured portfolio ever gave me wasn't a number.

It was a Tuesday afternoon where nothing was on fire and I had nowhere I absolutely had to be.

That kind of quiet doesn't happen by accident.

Build for flexibility first. Everything else follows.

I KPI'd myself for Q1.

For the first time in a long time, I gave myself a 10 out of 10.

Not for results. Not for performance.

For effort.

Showing up at the gym every single day. Showing up for my wife. Showing up spiritually. Showing up at work with everything I had.

Every. Single. Day.

Results and performance? Always room to improve. That never changes when you're genuinely chasing something.

But effort? Full marks. And right now, that means more to me than the numbers.

I'm my own harshest critic - always have been.

So giving myself a 10 out of 10 for anything doesn't come easy.

Which is exactly why it feels worth saying out loud.

On to Q2.

Big things ahead. ✌️

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Sushmita (Sushi) J 🐸

Redom Syed - Mortgage Broker

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taplio

The Battle

Sushmita (Sushi) J 🐸

Redom Syed - Mortgage Broker

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Sushmita (Sushi) J 🐸's LinkedIn Performance

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