Teen-Created Hive App is All the Buzz

Using precocious teenage business savvy, Riverwood International Charter School student, Ari Milrud, parlayed a “bee in his bonnet” (a business need) to make things happen by connecting house flippers with contractors through his app, Hive.

Since he was seven years old, he has been popping out creative business ideas, “a lot of them were bad, especially then,” recalls Milrud. In high school, he took an interest in real estate as a 14-year-old and began wholesaling properties, working directly with distressed homeowners and investors.

He stated, “I had to learn everything on my own, watching videos and talking to agents. I even deepened my voice to be taken seriously on the phone. It was a big learning curve as there’s a lot of formal lingo in the industry. I believe wholesale real estate is a great way to get into real estate with no prior experience.”

Eventually, Milrud landed wise mentors and acquired an acquisitions role in a small real estate company. He then found a deal to flip his first house and walked it through with different contractors.

He recalled, “Actually speaking with contractors, I realized a huge problem: flippers and contractors rarely speak the same language, both figuratively and literally. There is a huge transparency and trust issue. Contractors know exactly how much construction knowledge you have within the first two minutes of the conversation. This leads flippers, especially new ones, to often get taken advantage of in an extremely relationship-based industry. I couldn’t find a tool out there built for investors to solve this, so I decided to make one.”

Enter Louis Singer, a student at Mount Vernon High School, as technical co-founder. Milrud spends most of his time on the business side in market discovery, contractors, investors, talking to users, and shaping what Hive should be. Singer, as chief technical officer, leads product development and is thoughtful about design, user experience, and long-term vision. The former moves fast and pushes hard; the latter is more methodical and level-headed, which keeps them both grounded and ambitious at the same time.

Ari’s parents, Eduardo and Cristy Milrud, are immigrants with mom hailing from Mexico and dad from Argentina. Milrud credits them as role models in terms of work ethic and resilience. None of the Milrud clan is in house-flipping or large-scale renovation, but they are all are hard-working and entrepreneurial in spirit, which rubbed off on Milrud ,who said, “I don’t think my interest came from a specific relative flipping houses; it came more from curiosity about business from a really young age, and then discovering real estate as a space where young people with hustle could actually get started.”

In terms of leveraging being bilingual, Milrud stated, “I ‘m not completely fluent in speaking Spanish, but it definitely helps, as I’ve been able to see just how many contractors speak primarily Spanish. We want to make Hive a multilingual tool that enables underrepresented communities and addresses language barriers that other existing platforms don’t.”

When queried how to source the “gelt,” Milrud said, “Hive will monetize in a few clear ways. Our core model is marketplace-based: we plan to take a small percentage fee (around 3.5 percent) on accepted jobs from flippers and charge contractors a flat monthly subscription for unlimited bids. Early on, we’re keeping the platform free to build trust and accelerate adoption, but long-term the monetization is very straightforward.”

For college, Milrud is aiming for the University of Texas (Austin) to major in finance while continuing to build Hive. He views college “as another environment where to meet people, learn, and grow for myself and the company. Long-term, he’s interested in venture capital, but right now defines his passion as “very much in building.”

He concluded, “Yes, I’m Jewish; I belong to Temple Emanu-El, and I had a bar mitzvah, but it was virtual during COVID. My faith and community are important to me.”

In five years, he sees Hive “operating in multiple markets, meaningfully improving transparency and outcomes in residential renovation, and becoming the go-to platform for investors and contractors to work together.”