Empire State of Mind
Empire State of Mind
Building User-Friendly Home Inspection Software With Dalen and Matt Maxwell
In this episode of Empire State of Mind, hosts Matt Williams engage with Dalen and Matt Maxwell, founders of Report On Anything, a software company tailored for the home inspection industry. They discuss the challenges and triumphs of developing software while managing inspection businesses, the importance of creating user-friendly tools, and the future of technology in the industry, including the potential integration of AI. The conversation highlights the need for efficiency and innovation in home inspections, emphasizing how software can enhance productivity and ultimately improve the quality of service provided to clients.
In this conversation, Matt Williams discusses the journey of developing home inspection software that aims to enhance efficiency and user experience. The discussion emphasizes the importance of community involvement, the iterative process of refining the software based on real-world feedback, and the vision for future innovations, including AI integration and interactive reporting. They highlight the challenges and triumphs of creating a product that not only functions well but is also enjoyable to use, ultimately aiming to lead innovation in the home inspection industry.
Contact IEB -
- web: www.iebcoaching.com
- email: support@iebcoaching
- social: @iebcoaching
Contact Matt -
- email: matt@dciabq.com
- IG: @the.matthew.williams
We believe the purpose of owning a business is funding your perfect life. Welcome to the next generation of growth and opportunity in the inspection industry. This is the Empire State of Mind. Empire State of Mind Helping build companies with faster growth, higher profits and more time freedom. Finally, a podcast for the home inspection industry and beyond. This is the Empire State of Mind and this is your host, matt Williams.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Empire State of Mind. On this episode we're talking to two guys who started their own software company. Report On Anything.
Speaker 1:Everything.
Speaker 3:What are you guys reporting on? Anything? Anything Reporting on anything. Guys, thank you so much for being here. Will you guys just take a quick second? Introduce yourself? What's your name? Where?
Speaker 2:are you from? My name is Dalen. I am from Arizona, northern Arizona, and I own a home inspection company there, okay, and doing it since 2017. Done a myriad of other things across my life that actually helped me out like a lot coming into this, into this industry, and yeah, so started the software about three years ago, like coming, just like working towards where we are today. And uh, yeah, this is my best friend. Brought him in at the beginning of the year.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, and Matt, I'm Matt Maxwell. I'm also from Arizona. I live up in the Prescott area. I too own a home inspection company and silver hammer inspections, a multi inspector firm. And um I company it's silver hammer inspections, uh, multi-inspector firm and um I. Before I was ever in inspecting I was building houses with my dad, who's a contractor, and I worked in timeshare sales. So the sales and marketing side of like the the industry is kind of where I thrive that's awesome, you guys like arizona does it get hot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it's like the only thing it doesn't have is the ocean, but everything else is the best.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm kind of reluctant to actually talk to you about it because everybody has this opinion of Sedona, where it's just this desert and there's cactus everywhere. We live in northern Arizona. I live in Prescott. There's 80-foot pine trees in my yard.
Speaker 1:I live on a creek.
Speaker 4:You know there's lakes. There's, you know, there's, that's cool, there's you know the I live. We live in a climate where you actually get four seasons without humidity, all right, which is like and we don't have huge bugs, so like it's kind of like the best of everything, don't tell anyone hold on a minute.
Speaker 3:So like do you, do you have to deal with, like, the 120 degree temperature?
Speaker 4:it never gets over 91, where I live Shut up. Where is this?
Speaker 2:Stay away Prescott.
Speaker 3:Prescott area Prescott okay.
Speaker 4:It's still Prescott but if anybody hears, you call it Prescott they'll murder you.
Speaker 2:That's an outsider thing, prescott's an outsider, prescott, I say Prescott, I do. He also doesn't live there.
Speaker 3:I used.
Speaker 2:You live in the Sedona area right, which is like all the vortexes and the oh man, the spirituality stuff that's there I was just there recently, and so my, my, my side hustle is I'm actually the holistic home inspector, so I go in and just kind of vibe out with the property first.
Speaker 3:I love that is that like an upsell, like like an extra charge, absolutely.
Speaker 4:We'll save your house.
Speaker 2:We'll save the house. We'll spiritually cleanse it.
Speaker 4:Crystals everywhere, and then we'll write up the odors and recommend an ozone machine. That's hilarious, that's so funny.
Speaker 3:I spent some years of my life as a Christian minister, so did he, yeah, did you. Okay, right, so then, I kind of joke around. I was like actually we should add a spiritual cleansing and have a minister come and spiritual cleanse yeah exercise the house right. Kick out any spirits that shouldn't be there, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I saw somebody years ago had a little certificate that they would give to kids on inspections and said it was monster free, yes. Did certificate that they would give to kids on inspections and said it was like monster free yes there's a guy in my market that does that.
Speaker 3:It's so cool. I think it's super cute. Yeah, so they make a great like monster free certificate people love that stuff yeah, they love it. Good, you know yeah and it's what is it a piece of paper and you have some fun with it like a door hanger on the kid's bedroom would be a good idea right oh yeah, your closets have been checked.
Speaker 4:I been checked, that's hilarious.
Speaker 2:If you're a new guy in the industry and you're trying to set yourself apart, do little things like that, because it really does stick. All it does is take your logo and implant it in an agent's mind that this guy treated the kids kindly and paid attention to them. I give my electrical tester to kids and say go away when they're following me, Like go check all the receptacles. That's so funny, Stuff like that.
Speaker 4:My favorite like covert advertising is when you get up into an attic that another home inspector or a pest guy's been in and you see their card like stapled on the wall Text them a picture of it.
Speaker 3:That's so funny. There was a guy in my town that would put him inside the electrical panel, right, yeah, which you know.
Speaker 3:You're putting paper inside of an electrical panel. I don't know. That seems like maybe fire hazard. You write a fire hazard, yeah. And so, like I started, there was a short season where I was being petty and so I actually would if I'd find them when I was out in the field. I'd find them, I'd pull them out, I'd take a picture of it, you know, and then I would, I would uh, send it to them, you know and so I was like.
Speaker 4:Found some trash in the electrical panel yeah so, like I would always like talk, like we'd talk, right and we're homies, like we're good, so we would do that to each other.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so it's kind of funny to do that, as I found some trash in the panel.
Speaker 4:What's the best thing you found in a panel like the?
Speaker 3:craziest thing, craziest thing you found in a pen, I mean a whole snake wrapped up in, there fried I can see that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, snakes, my, I'm in albuquerque new mexico, so I got the desert thing going too, so yeah, like snakes, um mice, um, like whole, yeah, like whole like rat's nest looking things in there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely the one that I uh the one that sticks in my brain.
Speaker 4:I found one that was a snake that had gone through right, went in between the breakers right, so it caught the bar and arced itself out while it was eating the mouse that was escaping from it so like it had it in its mouth, and both of them were just mummified yeah, that pic.
Speaker 3:Do you have that picture on your instagram? Right, I need to.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that was right when I started I found like some crazy little mummified frogs and stuff in houses and things. Yeah, it's, it's weird way we found a.
Speaker 3:We found a huge snake in a sewer line. Um, like it's a python, like yeah, no, it was huge. Like, like, so we're running the camera down, like the thing, and like, all of a sudden you're like what is that? And you're like, you come up to it, turn up, it's the head of a snake. Like what in the world you like bump against it. It's totally dead in there. Um, and it was like it filled the pipe, though like it was the the diameter of the sewer line. So the diameter of the snake was like three inches. Like it was big. That's a huge, freaking snake clogged the sewer line. Yeah, like, how do you? How do you fix that?
Speaker 3:you know, and so, anyhow, yeah, right, yeah, yeah roto-rooter, like you said, the blades, like the blades to get the roots out it's like a bloodbath to get that.
Speaker 4:I have no idea what they did, but you like cut up the yard and dig it out, like like I just cut out a three-foot section.
Speaker 3:All of us were like that we, all of us in the office, are like watching the video. It was like how do you like? How are you going to fix that?
Speaker 1:like the only way out, yeah, the only, like the only way it's going to be messy.
Speaker 3:You're digging a big old hole or you're running a blade to try to chop it up or something. And and the other thought was like the head was facing towards the house, so it's like it came from. Did it come from the main line? It was coming on its way up like I, we don't know, like we're running the numbers and like that that horse. Right then it was in uh, it's in this really nice high end gated community area. So you know it's like.
Speaker 3:It's like everyone's like that's in our neighborhood I would call the hoa you put an advertisement out easy care slow down slow down right, yeah, so somehow this big old snake was like yeah, in the main, and like went up that person's lateral is what we're thinking, I mean, we don't even really know and it died like part way up, so just got stuck. Got stuck maybe and I don't know, like, but yeah, you have enough.
Speaker 4:Uh, you know I think there'd be lube yeah, but you got enough poop water coming down like drowning, drowning, the snake that's how it?
Speaker 2:got so big it was your gulp. Yeah's like okay everybody, just shut the video off and listen to this portion of the podcast Close your eyes. Viewer discretion people and then finish it up with that.
Speaker 3:Maybe we have to NSFW this label. It not suitable for work.
Speaker 2:This is explicit. I'm sitting in the middle of it going.
Speaker 4:Oh my God.
Speaker 2:IBF attack.
Speaker 4:That's right.
Speaker 3:We only published one of those After dark ones, but every event we would come in in the middle of the night and be not sober.
Speaker 2:That's a real thing. Yes, oh, my god, I just threw it out. There we have an IEB after dark. We would just hit record, and after dark.
Speaker 3:So we would come in and set up, we would just hit record and like people would talk and we would say like there's no names, like no names, and people would not be sober because it'd be like one o'clock in the morning you know, at the bar was closing down and we'd just be like let's go hit a podcast, and so we'd throw up people in I don't know how many times, like between seven and 10 times maybe only one episode ever was published.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there were a handful that were like career ending you will get canceled like this.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this will go viral in all the wrong ways, yeah. So, yeah, there were some ones that were like, oh, this is hilarious Because a conversation, it just would go random. The craziest subjects of this is somebody could take a six-second clip out of this and ruin somebody.
Speaker 2:So we were like no.
Speaker 3:Everybody's minds are going. Oh my god.
Speaker 2:The next morning all the text messages dude. I'm going to need you to erase that memory right now.
Speaker 4:The pod walk. Of shame yeah.
Speaker 3:So we have one after dark episode that made it out of the vault Next one.
Speaker 2:We should. We should certainly be helping steer the conversation. There we go.
Speaker 3:So you guys are both home inspectors and then, in the middle of all this, you saw a need for some software changes and you guys create your own software. Man, tell me a little. About what does that journey look like? Any any regrets on the way? Is this? Uh, you're like man, why did I disinfect houses?
Speaker 2:yeah, there's always absolutely I two weeks ago doing an inspection and my client.
Speaker 2:Because, you're like man, why didn't I just inspect houses? Yeah, absolutely Two weeks ago I was doing an inspection and my client was an inspector. She was getting her license and of course she was hitting me up about how to do this business and we were talking about software because that's important. And I go oh yeah, I actually started my own because she brought up the options she was checking out. I said, yeah, I actually started my own Cause she brought up, you know the the options she was checking out. I said, yeah, I just started my own.
Speaker 3:She goes oh, really Is that easy and I just go no, and I said, in fact, and cheap too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like literally so cheap. And I just said I said in fact, fact, if I could go back and tell my previous self, I would just say don't do it not because it's it's just it's a lot and and it's a there's a reason why the the amount of software platforms that exist. There's a reason why it's a small number, right?
Speaker 3:it's a big task. It's a huge task. It's not a solo thing. Like you have to have tech, like programmers and code writing and project managers, and like it's a lot of undertaking to get a software company going, and and then you gotta have marketing and sales and you gotta have all these different pieces that are running in order to get this thing off the ground and I know there's other companies out there.
Speaker 3:There's a handful of like big companies out there and one of them just recently sold. I think it was Spector just recently sold for 40 something million or something, just like part of it, though yeah, I'm not sure what it was it was yeah, it was like. But you start seeing like private equity money once you get into this. Once you build a software company up, you see it not just the inspection space, you see it in all kinds of other spaces as well, where software companies, once they're up and running and going and they're successful, people pay big money for it, because it's such a huge undertaking to get a software company off the ground. And so you guys are running inspection companies and launching a software business. Do you guys sleep? How does this work? Never.
Speaker 4:And I mean, how many people have you heard say, oh, we're going to start a software company for this industry, and then it just fizzles out and it just doesn't become a thing, right?
Speaker 3:Yes, because, yeah, so much work, so much work.
Speaker 2:This could have absolutely been that. Yeah right, there was many times along the way where it was something that I was just you know either at my wit's end with because you know life was happening around it, right, yeah, and that gets stressful, but when you believe in something, just like with home inspection, there were my first like two or three jobs and I was building a template and trying something new. I was stressed to the max.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know like oh, how am I going to get through this report and deliver this in a day? There's no way. It's such a big thing. And now two or three a day is like I'm done by 3.30, you know drinking beers on the couch by 5.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that is one thing I ask. Once you have this industry, the home inspection industry, down, once you know how to be a good inspector, like yeah, you can get really efficient with your time, it'll change your life.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's one of the big things that we actually wanted to focus on, and the reason that we got into this is like we realized that, like, anyone can build a software if you have enough resources, right, or you have a good idea. Yeah, enough resources, yeah, but it takes something special to be the person in the industry using the tool to build a software that works really, really well for your industry. So what we decided was when we were going to build our software, it was technician first, it was look at this person, see what pain points they are having in the field and let's fix that first, because business tools you can do all day long.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. Well, if you make it work well for the inspector too, like, cause that's the guy actually using the software. I know that, like realtors and buyers, right, are going to see the output product, they're going to see the refinance finished report and that has to look good, obviously, and be good for them as well. But on the other side, making it inspector friendly, like that's what really helps, because software costs money but it really makes you money Because if you can be more efficient, then you can get your job done faster because the software is working for you and working with you and not against you.
Speaker 3:I can't tell you how many times like I remember being in the field and being frustrated with the software I was using because, like it, just like I felt like I couldn't do it the way I wanted to do it and like the software was holding me back, it was a stumbling block along the way. Oh, I can't like just put something in here the way I want to. I have to go back up multiple screens, go down to this category, go bend back over this way, and I find myself jumping all over the report trying to make sure that you know I've got everything in the right way and it's like well, at this point in time, like I feel like I'm working, I'm working for the software, the software is not working for me, right and so to to take it from a technician perspective, like you guys have done, you're like no, let's make sure this works in a flow that the inspector on the field is actually going to like really worked well with him.
Speaker 4:Well, you nailed it on the head with like the amount of taps and screens and functions that you have to work your way through right, especially when you're dealing with your camera and those kinds of things. So that's where we kind of started was make this speed my job up. Like this has gone in evolutions. I remember being, you know, with a digital camera and a laptop or a notebook and building, you know, a report.
Speaker 4:It was like a three on the job a few hours back at the office and you were happy to be like one and done. You know right. And then you start using software and it's magic right yeah even with the pain points you were experiencing, it was still magic, because it got you from five hours to three hours or two and a half hours, or whatever well, now we've gotten to the point where that was awesome, but it's not magic anymore.
Speaker 4:And now what can be the next thing that that makes this better? Right, and so we're like let's speed it up and now. With the software the way that it is and with the cameras the way that we build them and the navigation the way that it functions, we've taken a two hour 45 minute inspection and turned it into a two hour and 15 minute inspection yeah, and that extra 30 minutes is a big deal.
Speaker 3:It is. You know, it means two yeah times two, because if you have two inspections in the day, you've saved an hour off of your day. You know well, if you are running your stuff right now, instead of doing me able to do two inspections in a day, you might be able to do three inspections in a day. Yeah, you know well, that's extra job, that's an extra billing.
Speaker 2:Or hang out with your wife and kids for two extra hours.
Speaker 4:It's been nice because it does allow you to have that freedom. I've got guys in my company that coach sports and stuff in the afternoons and we really try to encourage that. So our goal has been make this better to make your life better get better, so it makes your company better.
Speaker 4:You know those kinds of things like. I have a few like solo inspectors that we talked with here at ieb that came out and they were just talking about okay well, how will this be better for me in the field? And as I'm sitting there walking them through everything, I'm like okay, now, let's say the phone rings, what do you do then, like if you're in the middle of your inspection?
Speaker 4:the phone rings like you have to get out of your, whatever your software is. Go figure out all this, this stuff that you're answering on the phone, bring yourself back to your frame of mind and get back into it. Well, what we did is we set up a platform that allows you to, from the screen that you're working in long press into your schedule or take your phone call, add your appointment and be right back into where you left off, like no problem, see, like that's, that's fantastic and that just helps people be able to move forward through this, you know.
Speaker 3:So you guys are in the space of developing software. What are some things that you see coming in the software space? I know like people talk about AI and other things. What are some software advances you see that are coming down the road? Maybe not this year or next year, but maybe the next two, three, four, five years. Do you think artificial intelligence built into software is something that's going to be coming soon? Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So, like you mentioned earlier, right, it's report on right, so you're reporting on something. Our slogan is anything and, as a future casting thing, I mean, like you mentioned, this is not tomorrow, right, but I would say, provided people are like, yeah, we dig report on vision, we want to use it, which is going to give you the resources to build that vision right.
Speaker 2:As a you know like. Consider Siri as an AI assistant. Imagine if your app that's helping you complete a task any task is that, is that simple. You just go hey, any, and that's the name that we, sort of like I came up with, just thinking well, what do I want to say? Right, what's the name? Like a Siri or an Alexa, and so our thing is anything, so any will help you do anything. Oh, that's awesome so, anyways, that's sort of like, and just imagine it with ai.
Speaker 2:Everybody's going to talk about it and I do not claim to be an expert. I do know that I do have my ear to the ground with it and I'm learning about it constantly.
Speaker 3:Um, do you think it'll ever be in a place where, like you, can walk up with your ipad to a water heater and just take the camera and, just like, sweep your camera over it and have it?
Speaker 4:have ai like find the effects for you that will be in our software, like in the near future, like that's not even like far away thing.
Speaker 3:But being able to walk around with your camera like to a water heater and kind of look at it and you'll automatically see, oh, that gas line's not even like a far away thing. But being able to walk around with your camera like to a water heater and kind of look at it and you'll automatically see, oh, that gas line's not connected properly, that drip leg is in the wrong place, absolutely.
Speaker 4:Because when you train in artificial intelligence and you train it properly the camera is more sensitive than you will ever be right. And as soon as you start mapping things out with LiDAR and building your 3d models and the cameras are all looking at stuff and it's going to start talking to you and it's going to say hey, you know what about this thing that I'm highlighting for you to look at?
Speaker 3:you know, and wow sort of like highlight potential issues. So if you're walking up to a furnace or a water heater or anything like you can, you can it'll like highlight. Okay, watch out for this. This absolutely there's that's coming.
Speaker 2:There's a. I saw like.
Speaker 3:I saw like almost here, like you guys are like actually developing that kind of stuff, we will it yeah yeah, like, like it's on your radar, wow our, I think, on our radar.
Speaker 4:First and foremost, what we see coming before necessarily the need for ai is the need for integrating your extra services into your report writing software. Being able to take other specified reports, like termite inspection reports, trex stuff, and all of those PDF-style forms that need graphing and mapping applications and things that just make your business work better, need to be able to be brought into a single ecosystem so you can manage all of those things as as good as possible and keep your software costs down. I mean, like my business, for instance, when we are running termite software outside of, you know the home inspection software. So that's an additional cost that my company has to eat every year for all of my employees because everybody's a termite inspector. So if we can make it so that we can take the state required forms for termite, make that part of our software and get it functioning appropriately. Now, as you're filling out your appointment details, as you're filling out your inspection, it's pulling pertinent things over to the other things that you've been scheduled to do to again speed you up.
Speaker 4:You know who likes putting extra information into their radon monitor. Who likes putting extra information into any of this stuff? Right like right. We live in an age where, if you do it right, those things should become more automatic oh, that that's really cool.
Speaker 3:I like what you're talking there. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, so you can take PDFs like a national or a termite report PDF, build your system and you can have it filled out by the software, that's cool, yeah, and then we'll just continue to expand tools and things as as the industry demands them, right, you know that's.
Speaker 4:Another really big thing about our company is we're trying to be home like inspector, centralized. You know. We're trying to bring people into the fold and make this community part of what we're doing, not just a community of people who are consumers of what our product is Nice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's awesome, that's good. So you guys started this company what? Three years ago? Yeah, that's okay, it's going pretty good.
Speaker 4:We're about to see yeah, this is our first event here. This is the first event with IAB.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Okay, that's awesome. Yeah, so you've got people using it right. Obviously, you have customers. You have clients and it's going along.
Speaker 2:Just me, just you, just me. Okay, so you guys are just now launching. I got 500 inspections, almost 500 inspections, through it at this point.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 2:I have.
Speaker 4:So it's absolutely on on the infant side of like you're just launching it yeah, so for for years you've been developing, working on it, building it well see that's the difference between us and just a regular software company, right like because we are the technicians in the field. Yeah, we had the ability to let dalen be the guinea pig, so to speak, and let him take the hit for all of us and say, okay, let's use this in the field and see where it needs improvement and where it needs to be better, because we knew we couldn't come to an IEB meeting with something that didn't function the way that we said it wanted to. Yeah, your product has to be good, it has to work right, it has to work. So we took our frustrations out on him and his company.
Speaker 1:so that nobody else would have to feel it.
Speaker 4:And now we've gotten it to the point where it can compete. That's awesome. Man would have to feel it. And now we've gotten it to the point where it can compete, and, uh, that's awesome man, that sounds like it's, like it's a lot of yeah, I don't know that's exciting, it is, yeah, getting that thing,
Speaker 3:going and chasing the dream and we've gotten a lot of really good response.
Speaker 4:we had, uh, two people here at the conference that signed up and we're like I'm going to implement this, and we've had a handful of companies that have multi-inspector firms come to us and talk to us about how we're set up, how the business is running, how we're doing all the stuff and looking at coming in actually like participating in the program and bringing tons of inspectors in right away. So, with our growth projections and what we're trying to do with bringing extra developers and stuff on in this next year, I can see our plans for everything we're talking about just really falling in line for us over the next handful of years. And this thing being it's pretty rad right now, but it'll be amazing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's cool. I had a chance to kind of poke around on it a little bit. You showed me some of the stuff that was going on in there and and yeah, it does look like a pretty, pretty amazing software. And then the workflows are like really smooth. That you're showing me some of the workflow stuff and I was like that makes sense, like like you're walking anyhow the things that would normally you have to stop and like re-navigate the software, for it just was really intuitive to be able to just jump in and do things. And so I see how it would cut time. And it's one of those things.
Speaker 3:As an inspector, you know, no matter what you're using and doing, any tool, anything you're using, anything you can cut and shave some time off and get more efficient with your time. And it's always five minutes here, two minutes there, one minute there. It's the little steps that make a big difference because they compound into big things and so being able to be able to be efficient. Plus, you know, just realtors and buyers if you guys have had that experience where they come up with a home inspection and then an hour into it, they're just like are you done yet? I'm like, no, this takes a while.
Speaker 3:There's a lot to look at, like no, I'm not done yet, yeah, and so being able to get it done quicker in the field is going to help with even the customer experience is going to be better. You know realtors will also be appreciative of that, you know. So everybody in the industry will appreciate that. The speed and everything else like that. You know, I think it's. It's cool that it's going to maybe speed some things up, get your workflow a little bit better, which gives you more like work-life balance.
Speaker 4:You know, whether it's picking up another job or going to coach a football game or something well, and how many times have you been in the field where you're just like man, I wish this was better, that was better, or I wish it worked like this or whatever, and all of us have those ideas. Where I got lucky is I.
Speaker 4:I have dalen and dalen's the guy who will sit there and just like dig into a problem and be like let's work this from start to finish and figure out exactly how we're going to get there, and just set a goal and start moving in that direction. And he built this whole thing on pain points. That's how it was built. It was literally like let's find where this needs to be better and make it better. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think that's really great coming from the inspector's perspective too, like the guy in the field is actually building it out, um, and I wonder if all software maybe starts that way. You know originally, um, you know from back in the day and uh, but being able to deal with, like even today's modern everything starts that way you think about right, right, right.
Speaker 2:Somebody has a pain point about something and they decide to fix it, and so you know it's like with this.
Speaker 2:I'm just not the type of person that doesn't try something yeah you know, I mean like back in the day I like one of the craziest things I've ever done is I tried to build what's called an hho generator and I got like really wrapped up in this thinking I was going to solve like fuel economy issues with this bolt on device. You know to and it worked, but you know it wasn't practical. So I'm just that guy Like I just like what's your background? Like curiosity.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah, like a certain kind of engineer.
Speaker 2:I had a lot of erector sets growing up okay, yeah, like a kind of engineer, I had a lot of erector sets growing up, yeah, right, like I, I just, I just really am curious about everything until, oh, just I am, and so with software. It was really uh it was really just a a frustration and home inspection. I've told I told this a couple times this weekend week which was it just was really good to me yeah. Home inspection changed my life.
Speaker 2:And you know as much as this is a product first thing, you cannot do any anything without profit Right, and so I that. That just expanded my scope of what I thought was possible, and software is something I think most people can relate to, like oh man, I have this great idea for an app.
Speaker 1:Yeah Right, how many times do people think that?
Speaker 2:And so that's what happened.
Speaker 2:I started staring at an app every day, all day, and, and in the beginning I was able to feed my thoughts to the, to the people who were making it, and they listened, and it was a great relationship. And then I stopped being heard. And that's just neat, right? Most people don't care about that. Yeah, I happen to care, and so I'm not the type of person that gets ignored very easily and I just decided like, hey, let's give it a shot. And it worked. So it's taken a long time, but here we are, and it is now at that working phase where I feel comfortable saying like, hey, sign up, from here on out it's just gonna improve. And if you can use it and be happy you know, happy enough, right? Yeah, to get you by for a little bit of time. I promise you know we're gonna. We'll make this thing, you know right? Not not a software that you have to use, the software you want to use yeah, yeah, that's a big.
Speaker 2:That's a big difference, like well I I use the term I'm building. I want to build apple level software for the service industry. I mean, when you open your iPhone and look at the operating system, it's beautiful, it works great, it's smooth, it's efficient, yada yada yada. It doesn't feel clunky, right. So imagine a service industry software that have just that mindset. We're not just here to build something that functions, we're here to build something that's fun.
Speaker 4:Yeah, also yeah, and I would say, like the cameras, snapchat, inspired yeah.
Speaker 3:That's awesome.
Speaker 4:That's cool, yeah, yeah. And like I remember through this whole development process, watching him like deal with pain point after pain, point after pain point and having discussions with that, and it went from being something that was a pain to use to something that he says is a pleasure to use. Now, right and that's I've heard him say that like, a billion times, like was it was.
Speaker 3:It was it painful to use in the beginning? Yeah, yeah, I bet right. Well, not so bad.
Speaker 2:But just also, if you wanted to have what it was, it was what people are used to. It was just just like that.
Speaker 2:Right it was very similar to what they're used to. Three years ago at Super Conference, we were having this exact scenario play out. Having conversations, we thought, okay, we have a product, we'll launch it and it fell on its face. But what I saw there was I was having conversations with people and just going like holding my hand up not even a device, but holding my hand up, saying if it could do this, if this is how the software worked, how would you feel about it? Right, and people were like, if you build that, I'm in. Yeah, I even had a guy. His name is John Chittick. If you ever see this, john, he's a good dude, he's. We were talking and he was had talked to Matt and my other business partner at the time. It was like a hard no, I'm never gonna see ever change. I'm happy.
Speaker 2:What I those guys yeah, and I just I said that. I said here imagine this was what you were doing in the field and forget the business stuff for a second and imagine this is how the app worked for you in the field. And he goes, and he pulled this piece of paper across the table, wrote his name on it, slid it across at me and that's all he said. And I go. Well, there you go.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:So now fast forward. And now I'm not holding my hand up, I'm holding the phone, my phone up and I'm doing the thing with your app that. I actually built. And and it's like getting seeing that reaction on people's face in real life. Not just that they're imagining it, but they're seeing it and they're like holy Yep.
Speaker 3:That's got to be a really cool feeling to see, like the thing you've imagined in your head actually coming out now after a couple, three years of like just slaving away at this to get this thing to the place where it's at.
Speaker 2:I mean that's got to be cool to see the vision in your head reaching out and actually holding it it sort of like see doing building software sort of feels like like you're god in a way, just because it's so magical you know right the developers. I call them wizards because they're. That's really what they are. You know they're. They're just crafting digital spells for us.
Speaker 4:But it is exciting and I've talked to a handful of people that, like, as I'm sitting there going through, like the pain points that we fix, I get excited about it right I'm getting all amped up and they're like, oh, you guys are jazzed about this, aren't you?
Speaker 4:I'm like, yeah, we're jazzed about that and and it took. It took a little bit Because I think it's easy to walk down the hall of a conference and see everybody's booths out and just see, oh, it's another vendor, it's another software, or somebody saying they've got a software at least right, and it's easy to walk by that as a business owner and be like I'm content with where I'm at, I'm happy with what's going on, I'm just trying to, you know, find little incremental ways to build from here.
Speaker 4:And we really knew like you had to have something special to compete in that kind of a mentality and this weekend showed us like we're there, like people have just taken the time to actually like, let us show them how we're doing all of these things differently. And they're just like okay, you really have something here. We should talk more. And that's been the most exciting thing for me Like whether you make a dollar this weekend or zero dollars, like that reaction was just the best it could have been.
Speaker 3:Well, it's cool to see something you've, like, been dreaming about, working on, enslaving away, on starting to finally come out and get to a finished place, and it's cool to hear how you guys are forward-thinking as to how AI is going to be used. And is there anything? Else you see in the future of report writing software that could be like a.
Speaker 2:Imagine Everybody's talking about a lot of tech stuff. Now is glasses.
Speaker 3:Oh, like augmented reality stuff Like Google Glasses and stuff.
Speaker 2:Why not? Why wouldn't you throw on a pair of glasses when you walk onto the property and have the application just sort of guide you through doing inspections?
Speaker 3:Would it be like an overlay, where you'd have like like things that pop up like, hey, take, what is this, what is this, what is that?
Speaker 4:or imagine that'd be cool it like a lot of the things that I've seen. There's like finger sensors, right? So if you're looking through your glasses and you're talking to annie and annie's guiding you through your inspection, you say, annie, I see something up there, and she sees what you're pointing at and you go and you take your picture or you do something, or it's just always recording and building your model as you're going, like there's so many ways. That's really cool.
Speaker 3:This will be awesome. Yeah, I'm curious what the inspection industry is going to look like, because it wasn't that long ago that it was. You know, all you have is a flashlight, a pen and paper with like carbon copy paper and, and the introduction of software was about maybe 20 years ago maybe. And then it's like we had software. The software was really clunky, like inspection software was ugly and it was barely functional. People used to have Word templates like Microsoft Word templates. That was how they got going in the beginning. And then the software was coming through and it got clunky and it got a little prettier and a little prettier.
Speaker 3:And then a number of years ago, um, uh, there was a big jump. Uh, spectra came out and man had a huge leap forward in like the way things looked and were presented. And then, and then you start seeing all the other companies coming and they all start a huge leap forward. Um, the whole industry made a big jump in the last what, maybe five years ago, where everybody goes, oh, we can't just functional, we need to look good and be good, and there was a huge leap. But then all these companies kind of jumped there and they've kind of been a little bit of a. The industry's kind of been in a well, not a holding pattern, but it had massive innovation and then it just kind of like flatlined a little bit Great products. What you guys are talking about doing is pushing the innovation bubble a little bit which I think is really cool.
Speaker 4:Imagine it on the consumer side of this too.
Speaker 4:If I do an inspection for you, matt, and I send you my report. Just imagine this you open up your computer or your tablet or whatever you're looking at it whatever device and instead of just being a written report, all of a sudden a 3d interactive model of your home appears and there's just little glowing dots everywhere that are different, color-coded to your severity levels of things, and somebody can go in and explore the 3D rendering of their home and see exactly where the issues are at on the model. And when they choose that, annie has a little Ask Annie button and they click on it and Annie does a plain Jane explanation of the issue in layman's terms and says oh, and, by the way, I can see that we're living in New Mexico. Here's a list of 40 plumbers in your area, or here's a three roofers that have five stars on Google, or whatever the parameters you know will be, but she'll be able to be a liaison between your company and your client not just a helper in the field, which is great because you know these.
Speaker 3:The clients are coming back. They've been working all day they're they're. They come home and cook dinner for the kids that you know they're doing. They get to actually looking at the report like in depth. You know it's seven 30 at night and they're going through everything. Well, we're probably not going to answer our phone at seven 30 at night with all the questions that they have. So to be able to bake stuff like that into it is really cool. It's going to help the client have a better experience too, my inspection company.
Speaker 4:we do a lot of like explanations, right? We'd have a lot of like out of state customers who come in that we do videos and those kinds of things for them. So I would love it, because how many times have I gotten the phone call from some you know 75, 80 year old lady who moved into town and doesn't know how to light her fireplace, Right?
Speaker 4:Right, she just can't figure it out If you had a report where you could like zoom into the fireplace and you click on the information tab where it shows us operating the fireplace, and you click on it and you say how do I operate this fireplace and it brings up the schematics and says well, here's how you operate the pilot and here's how you think about the level of interaction that you could have.
Speaker 3:That's very cool. I love how you guys are like dreaming big and like pushing the envelope of the next wave of innovation within report writing software. I think there are seasons in life where you, like went from you know, pen and paper to a Word document. People were freaking out and put a document to an actual software designed for it, but it was clunky, but it worked, and so, and then it went from there to you know. Then you have the new wave of very graphical, pretty looking reports that came out five or six years ago, and that wave, and then and now you have what you guys are talking about doing is I'm pushing the envelope yet again into another, another layer, another level of innovation. I think that's really cool and I love that you guys are seeing the pain points and like pushing on this and pushing the industry forward.
Speaker 3:And, um, you know it's, uh, you know it's. It's one of those things where you're going to, you're going to push the window and and, if the, and if the, if your stuff really takes off, then everybody's going to start following suit, you know, and like there's, but there's always leaders in innovation, and I think what you guys are working on is a lead. You're working on being a leader of innovation in this space, and so I'm really excited to see where you guys go with this thing. Um, it's always cool to see new innovation coming out in um in in our industry, but traditionally had not been very innovative, so it's a fairly new industry too relatively you know, yeah, compared to the other service businesses or trades.
Speaker 3:They've been putting roofs on houses for hundreds of years, thousands of years Exactly. They've been putting some sort of roof product on.
Speaker 2:And that goes to show that ReportOn's philosophy is not that we're even Of course we're competing in this space, but realistically we're a field management software where our goal is is to improve anything that is, I would even say, task driven right, so report on anything.
Speaker 3:It's not necessarily limited to home inspections no, no, we, we, we're encouraging that, because that's where we live.
Speaker 2:You know, that's our, that's our corner of the world, right I'm uh, you know, and I the idea makes made total sense to me just because I, like I said, I've done so many things. My uh first real service draw job was, uh, I did office equipment for a couple of years when I was a kid, fixed copiers and printers and things like that, and it just gave me the, the like, at least the mindset, of customer service and then also like hands-on repair work type stuff yeah and, um, like even this right anything.
Speaker 2:That's why I say anything task driven, because I've sort of like went back into my previous life and I was like well, what if you had a? Software application that could map out this task for you. Would it have been easier? And I'm like well sure I wouldn't have had to look at a technical diagram. You know which is. I had manuals for those types of things you know. And so now imagine what we can bake into this, and you know like on the ai front ai is is a general term, like tissue paper, like you know it's, it's a kleenex.
Speaker 2:Kleenex means a lot of things. Uh, ai is the same thing. It's a very generic term that means a whole lot of stuff. Yeah, and the secret sauce is not in bolting it onto something. The secret sauce is making it something that you don't feel like as an, as an add on, but rather something that's intentionally there.
Speaker 3:Like woven into the fabric of it.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and that's cool and with the goal of the AI, with our software, is to be that and, to you know, to be a part of literally everything, and it really is like it's something that you have to train you can't just expect that, that the the creators of the model, as they're all AI models you know that term.
Speaker 2:Yep. So the creators of the model? They're just thinking of the general intelligence of it. I want to make it actually understand the task, like feed it code for plumbing, feed it code for electrical or standards for home inspection right yeah, it's, it's.
Speaker 3:That's our code, right.
Speaker 2:It's the standards, right yeah so feed it those types of things and then it's immediately aware of what you want from it on a more focused way, rather than just broadly saying hey ai, you're this now and hope that it understands. That way you know it understands.
Speaker 3:Right. So, yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, you got to train it up, that's right. You got to train it to do what you want it to do.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, guys, thank you for being on the show today. I just got to tell you like this is really fascinating hearing some of the new innovations coming out and report writing and all the stuff you guys are working on. I'm sure people are going to have questions and they're going to want to know how do I get a hold of you guys, and they want to learn more. What's the best way for someone to get a hold of you?
Speaker 4:guys, our website is wwwreportoncom and our app is available on iOS and Android stores right now. If you are using other softwares, there's a very good possibility that we can import your template into our software to just try it out and give it a feel If somebody's out there in Wonderland who wants to just play with it and see if it works for their business. So if you're interested, reach out to us and we'd love to talk to you, so website.
Speaker 3:and then on the website, is there a contact button or is there an email address?
Speaker 2:Mine is daylon at reportoncom. How do you spell Daylon? D-a-y-l-a-n.
Speaker 4:Okay, and I'm Matt M-A-T-T at reportoncom.
Speaker 3:Awesome guys. Well, thank you guys so much for being on the show. This is really awesome.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Empire State of Mind for the home inspection industry and beyond. Our passion is to elevate the home inspection industry with mindset, strategy and tools. We hope you've enjoyed the show. Make sure to like, rate and review. For more, follow on Instagram at IEB Coaching and don't forget to hit the website at wwwiebcoachingcom. Learn about IEB at no cost and have all your questions answered on our open call once a month on the third week of the month. We hope to see you there and we'll see you next time on the empire state of mind.
