This episode reveals Land Pricer’s strategic pivot from broad market tools to serving sophisticated operators like the funding business itself, with accuracy now exceeding 95% on contour analysis through systematic prompt engineering. The product targets 5-10 minute property reviews versus competitors’ 20-second tools, trading pure speed for granular accuracy.
Key Takeaways:
- Build for Yourself First Reorienting Land Pricer to solve Serious Land Capital’s internal comping bottlenecks provided crystal-clear product direction after months of building for imaginary customers.
- Equity CTO Beats Cheap Contractors Replacing a $10/hour Pakistani dev with a CTO holding equity stake unlocked 10x progress speed through ownership mentality and autonomous problem-solving.
- Prompt Engineering Is Legitimate IP Spending weeks mastering proper prompt structure creates defensible competitive advantages—single-digit percentage of workforce does it well, making it genuine moat material.
- Speed Kills Accuracy in Land Valuation 20-second comp tools miss critical features like flag lot access, easements, and location nuance—5-10 minutes captures what actually drives value.
Listen to the full episode to understand why AI integration done right requires obsessive daily practice and how it’s reshaping competitive positioning.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. I just wanted to provide a update on land price are here. So I know I’ve done some anecdotal, not anecdotal, but just piecemeal updates over the past few weeks that we’re really trying to speed up the process of.
you know, getting property reviews done that, you know, and we got to the first, like of beta testing, was taking you upwards of an hour to review properties. And even people who really appreciated the level of detail we were going into is like, it’s just too long. So we really had to figure out how to shorten that significantly down to like five, 10 minutes. Plus just, you know, considering my own company as
an ideal customer to go after like I’m should be the best customer that you know, my funding business would use So that I should have been thinking about like I’ve made a million mistakes trying to build this company out But I think I’m solving a lot of those problems quickly, especially over the last six weeks or so for way better or less Less cost as well, too. So
There’s a lot of improvements along the way. And, you know, now that I know who I’m building it for and, know, to fit within my own team has just made it easier to make certain decisions, from a product standpoint. And, yeah, I’m in, as I’ve mentioned before, Callen’s Automate to Accelerate program. And, you know, our homework this week was just to build out a brand guardian and a
ICP ideal customer profile utilizing AI. I spent some time over the weekend building that out. And even though I funding business, it’s like way larger, right? Lampricer isn’t even launched yet. you know, our marketing efforts are so solid with serious land capital. Like we, we, we already have a lot of leads coming in. So I was having more difficulties, okay. Figuring out what Lampricer would look like. Cause I think it’s going to be a heavier lift marketing wise.
plus the brand voice would be identical, because it’s like through my voice. know, Serious Land Capital and LandPrice are, they’re built by the same team, the same, you know, it’s the same vision, you know, just orienting towards different product lines. So the overall voice will be the same there, but the customer profile might, you know, might not be the same.
in terms of how we would orient marketing language. but I felt like after a few iterations, know, Claude wasn’t quite getting it at first, but once I corrected it, you know, using again, myself as the ideal customer profile, like, okay, this is really nailing it down. so I feel a lot more confident with how we’re going to market. And I know there’s some of the other,
you know, lot of people are trying to figure out comps and I saw it, you know, land insights, land portal. have new solutions built within their, you know, $500 a month software of like, you know, all inclusive. Um, and those guys have built really sexy products, very, very solid operators, um, and going like for pure speed comps and so forth. Like I still wouldn’t use that internally. Um, because I don’t think it’s capturing the granularity of, um,
key features on the subject property and really relevant details associated with comp level data. So, you know, I would rather position myself in the market of like, hey, we’re not going to be able to get you comps within 10 or 20 seconds. We’ll still be fast, you know, still efficient, five, 10 minutes per property, but with an extra level of accuracy. And, you know, it’s not going to be for everybody, but I know
Like for myself personally, I wouldn’t use these 20, 20 second comp tools. Like it’s not, I don’t think it’s going to capture that eventually. I’d like to get land pricer to get there. And I think over time it will, especially as the compute and AI gets even better and we’re building with, you know, LLM backend to solve a lot of our,
you know, pricing related, solutions. but you know, off the bat it’s for the MVP. It’s just not going to be there, but it’d be a heck of lot faster than that. The first version, that, that had initially done. And so it’s like, yeah, again, just marketing speed, Kate, more damaging admissions. Like, yeah, we’re not the fastest, but you know, we’ll have extra accuracy, and still be pretty darn efficient.
so again, you’re not never going to be able to please everybody, but you know, a sub-sector sub-sector of the land industry, I think we’ll really appreciate where we’re heading with this product direction. so I felt that gained a lot of clarity for myself personally, and in terms of, okay, how am I really going to orient this product? And again, it’s really centering on my own problems within my own business, for, okay, how do we overcome these hurdles of freeing up more time?
and maintaining accuracy and being able to delegate a bit more on how to price out land parcels. Like, how do I solve those problems with a product? Like that’s, that’s has to be my North star for figuring this out. so that even if we don’t sell to anybody, ultimately it’s going to be something that’s going to benefit my own business anyway, and something that I would use personally. So I have to keep that in mind when my original version of the product,
was I thought I was building it for myself, but I really wasn’t. just didn’t work out just from the speed perspective. And I should have been thinking more about that from the start. Yeah, 2020 hindsight to get better every day, or at least that’s the goal, otherwise you’re going to quickly go out of business. And so I also just oriented the team a lot better because now I have a
CTO who you actually has equity upside within this business and You know, I’m just not technically oriented so I really need somebody with ownership And also has success building out other You know tech products and startup level. That’s what you need like the startups. I just need trailblazed I need people who can solve problems on their own and not need much hand-holding
You know as teams grow companies become more mature you need different personality types and skill sets But like off the bat you just need people who are just you know carving your way through through the jungle That’s what I’m used to doing and have done that for years on end And so it’s great to have somebody who’s very technically oriented who’s just like yeah I’m just like improving the code base everything’s getting a lot faster and I don’t actually need to know all the context of that so long as
Like we are headed towards the same vision and working on parallel tracks to get the necessary things done. Like we’re just moving a lot faster than we had in the past and for way less cost. And we had brought on another Pakistani developer hire over the past few weeks and he didn’t really work out. Um, he was the younger guy, you know, cheaper. But, you know, I’m cognizant, you know, there’s the war time between Pakistan and India and he’s getting caught up in.
in that, having to relocate and everything, and even understanding all the circumstances, like I was just, my instincts were showing, hey, this is like not the best fit. Progress is just not getting done, not understanding things as appropriately, even with like very clear instructions. And so we brought on a different Pakistani dev who has a very extensive working relationship with my CTO.
Work successfully is a little bit more expensive, but really not that much. It costs you like 15 bucks an hour with a decade plus of coding experience and even more availability, more reliable. So we just brought them on today and think our progress is going to be even faster. So this is just like another, like if somebody’s really not working out, you you give a little bit of a test, fine, just not just move on and figure out the team members who are going to be working. And that’s something I learned from.
My mentor, is probably like my weakest area in business is the hiring cycles. Um, I just don’t really make time for it. And I always try to teach in internal hires. And I mean, we just have infinite amount of contractors and people like, you know, realtors and so forth working with us. But in terms of like people internal, um, there’s just not, not that many. It’s like a pretty tight team, but like one of my core mentors.
Um, just has phrasing of ABH always be hiring, always be hiring. And that is something I am really deficient in, uh, like a huge, huge room for improvement and probably will be a massive unlock as we continue to grow. Um, but that’s like something always to keep in mind is like the more you grow, the more you want to be thinking, okay, am I kept by my team’s inherent talents or training or, you know, should I
You know, if I have the extra money potentially, or just make even more of a bet from profits that we’re bringing in to bring even a more talented employee or contractor into the business or partner, whatever, to help grow even faster and more reliably than the talent that you have on the team. So.
I really get that mentality. It’s just, it isn’t something that is internalized as deep, but I’m trying to get better at that. And also just being able to delegate out like Ron, the CTO, I was able to recruit him through own just kind of like force of personality plus the, you know, deep interest in this product where he thought there was real upside. And then he’s, he has a whole cadre of other engineers he can bring on and I’m not having to handle that hiring besides kind of figuring out, okay, are they fitting within?
the culture that we’re trying to build and actually getting work done most importantly. So that’s been another update there. We’re still aiming for an end of June launch. We have a very clear roadmap of what we’re orienting to. just have to do so much prompt engineering on my end and still carving out time with running the funding business. Like it’s just, it’s hard. It’s hard to figure that out with being like CEO of two different companies and how you balance that. You know, try to.
get a lot of reactive workout during one day and then try to carve out more time for deep work on a following day. Um, but that’s how I’m trying to think about it. It’s just, you know, it’s growth mode. It’s hard to do, but have to solve those problems in order to get to the next step. But that’s why I’m even more focused on just getting better at AI literally day after day and automate to accelerate because that’s directly playing into.
what I think is going to be the future success of landpricer is building out these prompts for AI to actually price land. And it’s not an easy process. I prompt engineering, look at the whole workforce. There’s like a single digit percentage of people who do it well. I’ve only started to think I can start doing it at a very high level, even within the past few weeks. But once you start realizing
what proper prompt engineering can do. Like it just, becomes so addictive. Like every single problem in my life now I’m just orienting towards how can AI solve this? How can AI solve this even personally and so forth. there, you know, there was a…
a bill that came back, well, an estimation of benefits, but, you know, for my daughter’s dental checkup for like 400 some odd dollars, and like, no, insurance is supposed to cover this. So, you know, pre-AI, it’d be like, who do I have to call here? It’s such a pain in the butt. Now we can just throw it to AI. Okay, it’ll instruct how to deal with this. You know, it’s still going to be a pain, but at least we’ll have better guidelines. Now I’m just like, okay, this is less mentally stressful than these problems would have been in the past.
So all of this is just compounding on each other, solving personal problems, work problems. know, land price are inherently having IP surrounding prompt engineering is just absolutely critical. So just wanted to update you guys as far as how we’re orienting the product, how we adjusted the team, where our progress is to date, how we’re orienting our marketing.
engine and who this product is actually going to be for. All of this is continuing to build in the background here and can’t wait to show you guys more here soon. So hopefully this was helpful. If you’re looking for funding SeriousLand.Capital, definitely getting more capital back in soon to finally reliquitate or recapitalize a bit more.
still tight, running a whole bunch of transactional deals back to back and a whole bunch of exits coming in. Anticipated end of May here. you know, again, macro economy might be looking a little bit better. So, you know, we’ll still be cautious. But anything that might help buyers out a little bit more is definitely good news.
And Land Daily Diligence just got off that. Zero Cost Review of your land deals. Saw some pretty interesting ones today. And landpricer.ai, which I just discussed. So subscribe and share. Finally, Land UnConference in early August. Only nine spots left. You can see landonconference.com. $200 off your ticket using my last name. Hope to see you there. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. So take care.
See you next time, bye.
