Week 20 Update - May 17

I fell behind on DPP status updates here once again. I’ve been heads down on sales deck and trying to get a couple core app updates completed before going into content creation and marketing mode.

Mortgage Moneyball Sales Pitch Deck

I spent a good portion of the Week 20 of 2021 working on a sales “content” deck for webinars. I can up with this concenpt of Mortgage Moneyball based on the book and movie staring Brad Pitt. The story is about the Oakland A’s in 2002-2003 and their use of statistical analysis to try to build a winning team on a budget. The focused on OBP or On-base-percentage and Slugging Ratio (which is bases / at bats), instead of the typical batting average and RBI stats that teams would obsess over.

They basically found undervalued players. My idea with Mortgage Moneyball is to encourage Loan Officers to look for undervalued home buyers by stepping back in the home buying timeline, before they are talking with loan officer or real estate agents…. before they are pre-approved. …before they have a down payment!? Yep, that is where downpayment.gift comes in. A Loan Officer can engage with a prospects, weeks and months before, add value, help them become pre-approved and then find a house (via an introduction or elsewise). The slide deck uses a home-buying timeline to show where downpayment.gift can find the undervalued deals.

It’s not a perfect analogy but it should be fun to present and should break up the normal product tour, demo content webinar.

Mortgage Moneyball is all about finding undervalued sources of leads to fill your purchase pipeline as a mortgage lender/broker.

I will post a replay on downpaymentproject.com once I have a good recording.

Test uploading and playback of videos in Demio, webinar software

I am using Demio for webinar pitches. I have accounts with numerous webinar softwares… and will be spreading the use across them. Demio has a nice feature for video playback inside the webinar stream. You can upload mp4 files and tag them as resources in the webinar itself. When you want them to play, you trigger and share them. It just works, plays the video and audio. It’s the sytem audio that presents the big problem. Zoom seems to handle this audio loopback as a native application with audio drives I suppose. These WebRTC style webinar tools, like Demio, don’t like to share system audio well…. so this feature is very helpful to make that painless. However, it does require planning. You can spontaneously open Youtube and play a video. You need to download the video and re-upload to the webinar instead Demio.

Demio also has a nice recurring webinar feature that is perfect for scheduling the same webinar over and over and showing only a couple times for the registrants. Is save time, since we can simply add times for that webinar to the schedule and have separate links and so on. Each instance does not require a new webinar setup.

Big App updates

Okay, the big app updates are mostly at the end of the week and next week… all around Stripe integration and jumping to Custom Connect accounts. Here are a few others…

Add simple upgrade link in profile menu. A Partner signs up and needs to Verify there free trial. They can Upgrade in app to an Annual plan with one link.

Fix shopping cart webhook on order.success. Save additional subscription data for reporting and analytics, pass to other apps. Smartly switch between Verify and Upgrade in the Menu.

Social media Heartbeat

I setup contentstudio.io for social posting, social proof-type ‘heartbeat’. I schedule a couple weeks of real estate related content for the rest of May. Sorta random… but they idea is a social ‘heartbeat.’ Ideally we are sharing feedback, customer reviews, success stories, marketing and other product content… not news articles… I just want to be in the habit of sharing out on these social pages to create activity.

Basically, if someone looks at socials… are they going to see a dead page or some activity. It’s not engagement yet.

Misc Bits

Fix cloudflare forwarding urls for giftdown.com and downpayment.io. I’ll be using these domains for some cold outreach. I want the domains to resolve correctly.

Hack Sonoma County meetup; Startup Sonoma meetup

This in person meetup and the Startup Sonoma county held a Zoom meetup. It’s the first try at this… the Hack Sonoma County used to meet at the Maker space in Sebastopol, CA. The Startup Sonoma was a co-working space and community on Slack. Both stopped functioning during COVID. The meetup was kinda cool.

Unfortunately I don’t think I will have time to attend these. I will attend any startup focused ones… but the general Hack (programming and other maker type hacking) meetups will have to wait for now.

Microconf Mastermind implodes

I started meeting with 3-4 other founders in a Microconf Mastermind a couple months ago. We were meeting Fridays, every other week. We have had only 3 or maybe 4 calls and the groups sorta imploding in the Slack channel after a meeting week sideways. I won’t go into too must detail, except that personalities did not mesh between two founders. The go-go, hustle culture and unsolicited advise vs the more Microconf style, slow and steady approach. I was getting reamed on the call for not having more traction and the other participant that was just listening said f’ this. Apparently this is a recurring theme…

After a few days of Slack, emails and Telegram messages… it looks like the calls will continue, minus the hustle-culture founder.

This happened on Friday… as I write this update, the next call is tomorrow, May 28th. I will update here in DPP how it goes.

The whole point of this mastermind was for accountability and sharing positive encouragement between founders. Not to add more drama to our lives. I think we have a good shot with just 3-4 founders attending now.