Birmingham’s Landing is growing, and founder Bill Smith has ambitious plans to extend its reach into big and small market metros throughout the U.S. in 2025.

Today the company announced it has secured $180 million in debt financing, which Smith says will allow Landing to scale its portfolio of fully-furnished accommodations, as well as its on-the-ground customer service team, sales force and marketing.

“Raising $180 million is a huge amount of capital, and I think it really validates where the company has been and where we’re headed, and we’re incredibly excited about the future,” Smith said.

Landing offers a monthly membership which allows users to choose furnished apartments in U.S. cities for short-term or long-term stays. For property owners, it fills what would be otherwise vacant apartments, while users get stays in accommodations that are more than a hotel room.

The platform has grown since its inception in 2019, rocking along with a sometimes-volatile economy while figuring out what the market needed.

Smith, the founder of Shipt, came up with a concept that marries convenience with freedom of movement, while avoiding some of the problems of competing services, such as consistency of experience.

See also: What is the future of Landing in Birmingham? ‘We are in growth mode,’ founder Bill Smith says

Smith this week gave an interview with AL.com, where he talked about a wide range of subjects related to his company, his experience as an entrepreneur, and what it takes to get your idea off the ground.

This interview has been edited for style.

What is driving Landing’s growth?

We’ve always set out to change the way that people stay and live. When we started the business, we did that by leasing from apartment communities.

That’s a great way to get started, build a network, and get apartments around the country. As we built a brand and a reputation in the industry, we’ve been able to transition the business out to a true platform, where we now partner with owners and developers around the country to bring this product to their building and take advantage of all the growth that’s happening in the category.

That transition has gone really well. We’ve grown significantly – we’ll probably grow 100% in revenue this year, and this additional capital raise enables us to meet that demand that we’re seeing.

The economy has been through a lot since you began Landing, with the pandemic and its aftermath. Where are you right now in terms of where you thought you might be?

We’re ahead of where I thought we’d be. My vision from the beginning was to build a platform to enable the multi-family market to serve this rapidly growing segment of demand which we refer to as flexible living.

We’re really ahead of where I thought we would be. I really thought it would take us a decade to transition to a true platform, where we are enabling our partners to share in that business and share in the revenue.

What’s been the biggest change from your original vision?

When we started the business, we were really focused on serving people who are living for more than 30 days in a specific location. To stay with Landing, you had to be at a location for a month, minimum.

Now you can stay with Landing for two nights, or seven nights, or two weeks, and so the percentage of the market that is now accessible for us is probably a thousand times greater than what we originally thought.

There’s a much smaller percentage of the population that’s going to be traveling somewhere for a month. That’s people traveling for work, or relocating, or digital nomads. That’s a relatively small portion of the entire population. But when you look at people who are traveling, maybe taking their family somewhere for three or four or five nights, or maybe they regularly travel to another city for work each week, and that is a massive part of the market.

I tell my team that Landing has really become a product for the masses. Your family would use it, your friends, it feels a lot more like Shipt. Everybody buys groceries. Landing fits in the same category.

Everyone can use Landing, not just people who want to use it for a month or move from city to city. Our addressable market is significantly larger. It’s really a product for everybody in the U.S. We’re providing such a differentiated experience.

What does the landscape look like for Landing?

When you think about where Landing fits in the market for accommodations, you know, traditionally, there’s a lot of hotel brands in the extended stay market, which is the fastest growing portion of the market.

There’s a number of brands in the mid- to upscale extended stay market. And you’ve seen alternative accommodations, like Airbnb and Vrbo. We sit in the middle. We give you the consistency that you would expect from a hotel brand, with the additional space that you get in an alternative accommodation.

Staying in a Landing would give you twice as much square footage as you would get from an extended stay brand, and we also give you a true, full kitchen, in-unit laundry, separate bedrooms, and most of our properties are brand new class A apartment communities, where you are getting resort-style amenities, pools, fitness, not usually available at competitor extended stay brands.

People love alternate accommodations, but there’s no consistency. Every unit is different. Sometimes it’s somebody else’s home. You don’t know if it’s professionally cleaned or professionally operated. On the hotel side, you’re not getting as much space, you don’t get the great amenities.

We’re giving the customer the best of both worlds, and our customers are really loving it. We think it’s jet fuel for our business to have extended into that area.

What are your plans for expansion through the end of this year?

We operate about 350 properties today, and I think we’ll be in the range of 600 to 700 by the end of the year. We’re in cities all across the country, major cities like Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, Denver, Miami, and we’re also in smaller markets like Raleigh.

My goal is to have great Landing properties available across the country so that wherever you want to travel, Landing is there for you.

How would you say the experience of forming Landing was different than the beginning with Shipt?

The way Shipt launched, we hacked our way into the business. We launched Shipt without any formal partnerships with retailers. We figured out how to build a catalog of items that were sold by retailers, and how to shop the stores, and we were able to launch and get off the ground incredibly fast.

With Landing, that path wasn’t available. We needed to work formally with every property and we had to get buy-in. We are six years in, and we had to work property-by-property to help properties understand what we can do, and how we’re able to drive unique demand that they can’t access without us.

The real estate industry is a slower to adopt type of industry, and it takes a long time to build that reputation. Now that we’ve done that, our growth has accelerated tremendously. It certainly helped that I had a track record with Shipt, but those industries are so different. The grocery industry has nothing to with real estate.

While I had a reputation as an entrepreneur, I didn’t have a reputation in real estate, and as a company, we had to go and build that. We’ve seen growth because we’re proving the model.

You’re hearing a lot of talk this year about uncertainty in the economy. Has this changed any of your plans or do you just roll with it?

We just rolled with it. I think people in the real estate market are wondering how demand is going to look. I think in some areas demand has been impacted, and that’s actually helped us.

People are looking for additional ways to drive revenue and occupancy at their property, and we’re showing up with a way to do that that’s unique, and so people have been really open to partnering with us.

Outside of the overall economy, in the multi-family market in particular, there’s been an imbalance of supply and demand at a local level where some areas have been overbuilt. And people are looking for ways to drive demand from new channels, and that’s been a tailwind for us.

You probably encounter a lot of people who have ideas for companies. What can you tell someone who has their eye on forming their own startup?

What I always tell people is that you just have to get started. A lot of people have ideas. I think people get hung up on all the things that could go wrong, and they’re trying to plan for those in advance. I’ve built multiple companies, and what I’ve found is the things I worried about generally never ended up being the problem, and the problems I encountered were completely different than I anticipated.

You just have to get in the game and start playing the game, building the company, and then you’ll learn what customers really care about, and what the real challenges are. And you deal with them as they come up instead of getting stuck in analysis paralysis.

The other thing I share with people a lot, and this has been true in every business, is that there are always challenges building a company. You just have to be persistent and resilient and stick with it even when it’s incredibly difficult and incredibly challenging, and you might look at the problems and think, “I don’t know if I’m ever going to solve these.” And you just have to show up every single day, keep working on it, keep solving the problems. And you wake up one day and you’ve built something incredibly valuable, and it becomes very difficult for someone to catch up. That’s the miracle of compounding. People think of it with compounding interest, but I think of compounding as compounding capability, and opportunity, and you just have to stick with it.