This episode documents the final sprint week for Land Pricer MVP completion, involving daily standup meetings stretching over an hour each with the engineering team, extensive quality control testing of backend math, and addressing UI bugs while the team worked through Ramadan fasting. The week consumed another $4,000 beyond budget with engineers in the Middle East and Pakistan taking calls at 11 PM to 12 PM their time, but achieved satisfaction with product quality and smooth user flow, with only line break formatting issues remaining before Monday completion and mid April public launch anticipated.
Key Takeaways:
- Craftsmanship Over Speed in Competitive Markets Refusing to “ship broken and fix later” despite pressure maintains brand reputation and ensures backend math accuracy that users will trust.
- Quality Control Cannot Be Delegated No one matches the creator’s attention to detail for complex products, requiring personal verification of mathematical pathways and results regardless of engineering competence.
- Software Builds Character and Bank Accounts Differently The final $4,000 sprint investment and exhausting daily meetings proved software is brutally difficult, but the funding business generated record deal flow as a profitable safety net.
Hear the full episode for the unfiltered exhaustion and satisfaction of shipping a year long software project and the specific quality control processes used.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner, recording this one pretty late on a Friday, been a grinding week for sure. It’s flown by a lot of that has had to do with daily extended meetings with my engineering team for land Pricer. Now I’ve commented a couple times on this over the past couple of weeks.
There’s a larger kerfuffle, to say the least, with kind of communication and expectations for getting certain tasks done. to have much more kind of strict measures be put in place. You can listen to some previous pods I did on this last week, how I had to handle the situation. But ultimately, we were trying to get everything done for the MVP this week.
You know, we were having daily standup meetings that ended up stretching onward of an hour or more like every day. plus a lot of my own internal testing and checking on various engineering tickets. you know, this is on top of the, just running the funding company in and of itself. yeah, there was just a lot, a lot going on and, quality control that I had to be checking in on items.
in order to be satisfied with pushing a product out. I know there’s been a number of software companies where it’s like, just ship ASAP and just fix issues as they come out, find a launch, broken and just sort things out. To me, just from a personality perspective, plus the level of…
um, consistency and the reputation for, uh, you know, high quality that, that we’ve built from, you know, the serious land capital side. I want that to be conveyed over on the land pricer side too. So, you know, that’s why, you know, there’s some fairly complicated backend math that has to go in here that requires, you know, even if the engineers are, are doing their job and kind of implementing what I originally designed.
like from a quality control standpoint, no one is ever gonna have as much attention to detail as the person who created it. you know, going in there and really making sure, okay, this math is correct. We’re not having bugs here. You know, inevitably some stuff is gonna creep up, but I really want to ensure, okay, the lion’s share is looking good. The various pathways that people are gonna be following, it is correctly.
Translating over what we are expecting The results to be because again that is by far the most important part of the product Regardless of how anything else performs from a usability perspective and stuff too, but you know, that’s something I also put a lot of time into So yeah, it’s been a lot of kind of Eye-bleeding amount of work trying to test out
all of these features and There’s still a couple key bugs here mainly related to kind of like line breaks and the way that The output appears from a pricing summary perspective so it’s still just it’s a bit too too messy But that should all be fixed by Monday Plus we have basically the full
landing page website set up that allow people to sign up. like basically all of this is done. I think the remaining items should hopefully be less than like five hours of additional work. Again, we’re like way over budget, way over time budget too. So yeah, I credit the engineering team that, you know, I called them out, they jumped on it. They prioritize my project internally.
Um, above all others. Um, so, uh, know, credit, uh, credit’s given where it’s due. Um, you know, nevertheless, you know, this last week and a half, you know, it’s still like another $4,000 bite out of my own checkbook, um, to, uh, uh, have made this additional progress in this latest sprint here. Um, you know, again, a lot of these engineers are
in the middle East and Pakistan Ramadan’s ongoing. they’re, you know, on these calls with me at 11, 12 PM their time. I’ve been fasting the whole day. yeah, it says, it hasn’t been the best setup I’m sure for them personally, but you know, I appreciate their dedication to getting things addressed. And yeah, feeling very satisfied with the progress that was made. So.
shouldn’t be needing these daily meetings anymore past probably Monday or Tuesday of next week. I’ve already been reaching out to some of you for beta invites for this and anticipating like a full public launch by mid April. Now will be the case here. So yeah, you might even be detecting a bit of the exhaustion in my voice, just these endless meetings and my own rigor in making sure that
that, I don’t want to launch anything that I can’t personally be proud of from a product side and something that I’m going to be having my own team utilize internally for reviewing deals here. the quality needs to really be top notch. There’s a certain level of craftsmanship that needs to be achieved here. So that has been, you know,
My strategy and game plan from the start emits all these delays, which yeah, yeah, could have done a million things differently. if anything, I’ve learned that software is not for the faint of heart. It is not easy is for sure. regardless of all these like AI coding related items, it’s just, yeah, it’s probably still a little too early for some of these.
coding solutions to come into play here. So, know, had a strike while the iron was hot. Can’t be waiting around, but feel like we’re perfectly positioned to add this to our repertoire, launch it to the rest of the industry and hopefully benefit so many other land investors. Rising tide lifts all boats, right? So that is our goal here. I just wanted to give you all an update how…
this last sprint and push was where my focus of attention was over this last week. It’s definitely been primary. Looking forward to finally getting these out to beta testers and hopefully not too many other key bugs to fix before we can do a public MVP launch. So with that, I hope you all enjoy.
your weekends, a lot of parts of the country is starting to warm up here. If you’re looking for funding, even amidst not that much else marketing. mean, we were just getting deals and left and right, millions and millions of dollars worth of deals. Very, very exciting to see. you know, just take heart in that. If you’ve been having a bit of a slow period, there are definitely deals out there. We see probably the highest amount that we’ve ever seen in the history of our business and invested.
you know, acquired the most amount that we’ve ever done over the last several weeks. Dispute activity is strong too. So I’ll get into more details about that probably sometime next week. but yeah, if you’re looking for funding serious land dot capital, reviewing your land deals, you can find us at land daily diligence, Facebook group, and then, landpricer.ai, for the software that I just remarked on all throughout this podcast with that.
Hope you all subscribe and share and that you continue to get value out of this. Looking forward to tomorrow. Take care everybody, bye.
