Posts From Category: blog

This is how we should do onboarding

I was looking a new SaaS for video editing, specifically aimed at editing webinar recordings, called Milk.Video.

Milk.Video

They have a pretty clean and elegant onboarding or welcome screen. It’s almost like a full page “slider” with some app function built in and animated GIFs if you don’t take the first option to actually upload a video.

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Why did you build downpayment.gift?

A little back story…

In 2010 we started attending Wedding Shows to generate business from first-time homes buyers.

We were in Santa Rosa, CA in Sonoma County, about 45-50 minutes north of San Francisco. There were several wedding shows at that time (and still today). The largest was the Wedding Expo which often features 900-1100 brides or couples in attendance over 2 days. We would attend this show twice a year and a second, smaller show, twice per year. The show were always in Sept/Oct and January.

Wedding Expo

At the shows we would run giveaways, raffles, serve wine if allowed and collect surveys (lead forms).

These marketing efforts proved to be great way to build a database of prospects with name, phone, address and such. The survey component allowed us to segment the leads between those that just wanted to win the raffle (bedandbreakfast.com gift cards) and those that might be interested in buying a house sooner rather than later. The reception of a mortgage company at these wedding shows proved better than we expected.

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Wedding Gift Funds - Mortgage Guidelines Walkthrough

In late 2019, I put together a PDF about the Mortgage Guidelines for Bridal Gift Funds, aka Wedding Gift for Down Payment and Closing. I tried to give the history of this guideline area in FHA and Conventional, up to the most recent 2017 Freddie Mac guidelines. This is a brief copy-paste of that effort.

Walkthrough Video

I walked through this a PDF on Wedding Gift Funds guidelines at length here:

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What is Down Payment Project?

Down Payment Project is a blog, vlog, podcast, journal, content archive… what ever you want to call it… It’s the real-time story of our journey at building downpayment.gift, a new crowdfunding and gift registry for first-time home buyers and wedding couples to raise money for the down payment on a house.

We are putting out this content for prospective partners, mortgage lenders, brokers, other entrepreneurs, software developers, fintech and real estate startups, investors, and even home buyers–our end users. Ultimately the content will skew torwards mortgage partners and prospective investors. Bootrapped software founders will recognize a familiar pattern. downpayment.gift is a work-in-progress, and DownPaymentProject aims to capture the day to day as we launch and grow this SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). Join us as we embark to work in public!!

downpayment.gift logo

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