Kendall Bazan - Groundfloor Finance
How Kendall builds borrower demand engines in niche lending markets and why the handcrafted moment is making a comeback.
No Playbook, No Problem.
There is a specific kind of operator who thrives without a playbook. Someone who has been dropped somewhere unfamiliar, forced to orient quickly, and trained by necessity to move before the picture is fully clear. Kendall Bazan is that operator. She just happened to train for it in Siberia.
Meet Kendall
Ask Kendall Bazan for her happy place, and she does not hesitate. It is Berlin, late fall, a cafe table at 7 p.m., German beers on the table, her partner beside her, a show to catch later. Two weeks, no agenda, music in the air. It is a window into someone who genuinely likes being somewhere, absorbed in the texture of a place rather than just passing through it.
This instinct traces back to a Fulbright fellowship in the early 2010s, when she was placed not in the western Russian cities she had been angling for, Sochi or somewhere near Moscow, but in Irkutsk, a city in Siberia on the shores of the world’s deepest freshwater lake. It was, by her own description, a random draw.
She spent 12 months there, experienced negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit, the precise point where the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales converge and came away with something harder to quantify than a credential. “You learn very quickly when you don’t have a playbook and when you’re the singular person doing something,” she says. “You’ve got to learn to move quickly and to adapt a lot within an ecosystem that is changing every day.”
That operating style has carried through everything since. She is now VP of Revenue at Groundfloor Lending, a real estate private lending platform that is actively scaling its borrower acquisition engine from the ground up, and Kendall was brought in to build that program.
The Audit Before the Build
Groundfloor’s lending unit was in its early stages as a standalone business unit under the Groundfloor Finance brand when Kendall arrived. A small number of early-stage marketing channels were running. Her first move was a spreadsheet, not a campaign.
“When I jump in to either building from the ground up or inheriting a small marketing team, I tend to start with an audit. Give me the rundown of everything that we have running or not running right now. Let’s just get it all documented.”
From that baseline, her next step is to identify constraints: which metric are we actually trying to move, and what is the gap between where we are and where we need to be? At Groundfloor Lending, the mandate was clear. Grow the lending pipeline quickly and build a sales motion. That translated directly into a focus on lead and demand, with marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) as the early North Star.
What she discovered was a channel mismatch quietly limiting results. Groundfloor’s brand equity, built over more than a decade, was concentrated on the investing side of the business. The channels that had performed well for a self-directed retail investor audience (content-driven, comparison-site-adjacent, direct-to-consumer) were not a one-to-one match for borrower acquisition.
“I knew exactly where to plug in to get those borrowers,” she says, drawing from nearly a decade spent building the borrower demand engine at the company that would later become Upright, a real estate lending platform she helped scale from 12 people and around $1 million in revenue to $65 million in annual revenue across three business units. “Because you’re right, it’s a smaller, total addressable market that hangs out in very different places.”
Where the Borrower Actually Lives
The first channel correction was directional. Real estate investors, fix-and-flip operators, new-construction developers, and rental-portfolio builders who are Groundfloor Lending’s target borrowers do not spend their days at a desk. They are in trucks, moving between job sites, managing subcontractors, pulling draws on active loans. The content formats that work in traditional B2B SaaS-type demand generation motions do not reach them.
Kendall learned this through ride-alongs. Early in her time at Upright, she joined salespeople on site visits and in conversation with borrowers. “Sit in the car or the truck with your borrower or tail behind them and understand what their day looks like,” she says. It was a revelation that directly shaped her channel strategy.
The formats that actually reached this audience were audio and short-form video content, social platforms where working investors actually spend time, and niche industry communities built around real estate investing. Specialist trade publications and industry directories offered immediate, practical entry points. Paid search, targeted around the specific financing terms real estate operators use when they’re actively looking for capital, was an area where Kendall had scaled results in her previous role and is now building out at Groundfloor Lending.
What did not work: long explainer videos, dense blog content optimized for broad search terms, and any format that assumed a seated, distraction-free audience.
The Deferred Loan: A Product Story That Was Not Being Told
One of the clearest early wins Kendall identified at Groundfloor Lending was a product-differentiation story that had never been told in the right language. The company offers a true deferred payment structure: origination points and fees are financed into the loan, and interest accrues throughout the project and is paid in full at maturity. No monthly payments. For an operator running three or four active projects at once, that means a cash flow architecture that changes how many deals they can carry simultaneously.
“No one else at scale is doing what Groundfloor Lending is doing with a deferred payment product,” she says. “In nearly a decade as a lending marketer, I had never seen it. The product existed. The story didn’t.”
The messaging had stayed internal — operational, structural, lender-speak — without ever reaching the borrower’s actual experience. Her first move was to put a borrower on camera. The output was specific and unscripted: no $16,000 leaving the account every month, more capital available for materials, more deals running in parallel.
That is the approach she brings to product marketing in a commoditized space: stop describing the product from the inside out. Lead with the borrower’s operational reality, then let them describe the impact in their own language.
Loyalty in a Loan: Servicing as a Revenue Function
In real estate lending, the loan closes, and many lenders move on. Kendall’s view is that the close is where the relationship actually begins.
Borrowers draw down on their loans at project milestones. The speed of that draw process — how fast the lender disburses funds once a milestone is verified — directly determines whether the borrower can pay subcontractors, acquire materials, and keep the project moving. Delays are costly in ways that compound quickly across a portfolio.
“Being in lockstep with our servicing team and treating them like a customer success team, and recognizing the impact they have on revenue, that allows you to have a lot of really interesting marketing-driven touch points.”
A loan operates more like a SaaS contract than a one-time transaction, often running 6 to 18 months. The borrower’s decision to return for the next loan is earned or lost during that window, through every draw, every check-in, every moment the lender is either easy or hard to work with. Kendall views the servicing team as a partner to the revenue function because, in her model, they are.
The Handcrafted Bet Against AI Noise
Kendall uses AI to compress the analytical middle: the cohort analyses, the model building, the reporting. Tasks that once consumed weeks of a junior marketer’s time. Her approach to building teams follows what she calls a “first who, then what” philosophy, prioritizing curiosity as a leading indicator, including curiosity about AI itself.
She is also watching a pattern develop in lending, marketing, and building deliberately against it. “You start to sniff it out that content or posts are created by AI, and it hasn’t been totally edited,” she says. “Everybody’s kind of saying the same thing.”
Her term for the alternative is unpromptable. Marketing that could not have been generated by a prompt, because it required direct human observation, genuine customer insight, or a spontaneous act of generosity that no model would think to produce.
One example from her time at Upright: when investors closed with the company, the team sent handwritten notes with a cocktail (or mocktail) kit. “Thanks for taking a shot on us.” Assembled in the office, personalized by preference, nothing was asked in return. It was not designed to scale. That was the point.
In a space where lender messaging is nearly indistinguishable, she argues that the brands that earn repeat business are the ones that feel like they were made by someone paying attention. That standard does not come from a prompt. It comes from knowing your customer well enough to surprise them.
The Practitioner’s Edge
Across nearly a decade in real estate lending, Kendall has built the same engine multiple times: start with a clean audit, find out where the customer actually spends their day, then build for that reality rather than a theoretical one.
The channels, the product stories, the servicing touchpoints, the handwritten notes. These are the specific decisions of someone who has built this from scratch before and knows where the leverage lives. At Groundfloor Lending, she is doing it again.
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