This episode documents the final stretch of a year-long software development project that has consumed nearly $80,000 in personal capital and hundreds of hours of deep work. With beta testing scheduled to launch within days, the episode captures the anxiety and lessons learned from building LandPricer.AI, a tool designed to systematize land underwriting and diligence processes for investors nationwide while acknowledging this investment may never be recovered.
Key Takeaways:
- Who not how failures cost five figures in wasted expense Spending six months trying to build the script personally before hiring specialized engineers, then failing to properly interview multiple agencies before selection, resulted in over $10,000 in unnecessary costs and months of delay.
- Travel timing during peak development burned significant capital A 2.5-week trip to Europe during October’s busiest development period, planned a year in advance, cost weeks of engineering progress and thousands in wasted contractor hours due to inability to maintain deep work schedules across time zones.
- Inadequate script auditing required extensive rework Prioritizing speed over quality control meant letting the engineering team’s mistakes accumulate, ultimately requiring personal rework of their output after ending the retainer relationship and moving to hourly billing.
Listen to the full episode for the complete breakdown of budget overruns, the decision to self-finance rather than raise external capital, and why this nearly $100K bet represents an acceptable loss scenario.
(Podcast transcript below)
Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital vacant land funding partner want to give you an update on land price or progress so Feeling pretty accomplished at the moment. I just want to kind of record Where things are at and have been just spending weeks
trying to get demo videos for all of these various scripting elements for LandPricer. Again, you can check it out, landpricer.ai. It’s been this software project that they’ve been working on for well, a bit over a year at this point, conceptualized even before that, that is just trying to put
everything that we’ve learned and do within our land land business to underwrite and perform diligence on land deals into a software form so that you can accurately price land across the entire U.S. And, you know, completing this piece right here. Now I’m just waiting for engineering team to complete the final audit on
their side so that we can upload the new script and get it out to our beta testers before the end of this week. That was the target. So, you know, before we actually get, you know, externalize on this project for the very first time, I just kind of want to record this feeling of anticipation, you know, some level of nervousness, how it might be received. it going to be a complete dive? Did I just?
mess things up entirely and, you know, is it going to even be accurate when we’re testing across multiple different properties? We don’t know that until you actually get it out there, but I know that it put, you know, hundreds of hours of thought into this and how it will be most effective for both beginner and more advanced.
land investors, regardless of the types of properties that, that you’re working with. So, yeah, I just wanted to record a couple, key lessons that I’ve learned here. First, you know, again, this has been roughly a year since I started working on the project. And initially I just totally messed up.
the, you’re going to hear this a lot, like messed up a considerable amount. could have done so many things better in retrospect. But here we are. And yeah, I did not use who, not how properly for close to the first half year of the project. I was just trying to find any spare hours to just work on the script myself.
And it was just painstaking, constantly got pushed to the bottom of the pile as we’re building up our funding business and you know, just progress was not being made. so, you know, ultimately had to find a agency with, script writing engineers that could really take all of my looms and process for how to review land deals and actually
put that into a, you know, if, then else statement format across, you know, a multitude of different subtopics to be able to review any, you know, land parcel within the U S. Um, I probably could have gotten better pricing on that and communication was less than ideal off the bat. And I’ve remarked on this in another podcast and we had a switch around some of the project managers.
Yeah, I nearly dropped the agency, couple months in after I paid them like a pretty big upfront fee to even start on the project. So that didn’t feel the best. we eventually sorted it out, but in retrospect, I wish I would have priced out other similar agencies and interviewed a few other ones before selecting that.
script engineering team, you know, was referred over to me by a trusted colleague within land. though he didn’t use them personally, it was just, knew the operators. So that is a regret of mine, probably cost somewhere in the five figures of extra, know, expense associated with building out this project and, you know, lot of.
I had to re-audit their work because they were just messed up communications back and forth beyond that. Then I had hired a separate firm, a separate team of contractors that was actually handling the backend and the front end development for the product. That I did way better job of interviewing multiple different groups and…
having extensive conversations before solidifying them. I mean, they were more expensive than just the scripting engineering team. and even then, there was one U S space project manager and the rest of the engineers were based in Pakistan. So I was able to get a significantly lower hourly rate. I’m not sure I could have gotten much lower than that for the quality of work that needed to be done. So I’m pretty pleased with that setup because I think I saved.
a good amount of money compared to if I went to a full, you know, US or Western Europe team instead. Nevertheless, still could have handled communications better and had more routine.
routine auditing as well. there was, you know, in kind of peak development when both these teams were involved was last October and I was gone traveling for like two and a half weeks at a mastermind and then in Italy for a mastermind. And then I had taken my wife out for a personal vacation right after that land mastermind in Italy. And that, you know, I can’t regret.
being out there as far as memories made and so forth, but it was an extremely busy time for both land price or development as well as the business. just put, like, I regret kind of that timing or just stacking so much travel together at that point in time, especially being outside the Western hemisphere, having to work late hours Europe time to keep up to date with what was going on in the U.S.
was really difficult. And, you know, just what I was paying these engineering teams, it was just hours, you know, a few weeks really getting wasted because I couldn’t properly audit their work and keep up a routine deep work schedule on my own while I was traveling. And so that ended up costing me a lot of money, fell behind.
with our target release dates and just progress on the project. So that was not ideal. And I would definitely change up planning for that. The issue is that like I had planned that particular trip a year in advance. this was all planned and set in stone.
before I even began work in earnest on land Pricer. And then just, it ended up matching to be like, know, busiest time for development with that trip. it was just, it was just kind of a tough, tough situation that ultimately 2020 hindsight could have planned better, but we dealt with it, you know, burned extra cash, but
And then I had to catch up after that. set us behind, but you know, eventually we did get back in the groove there. additionally, I just, should have been even more focused on the auditing process, especially on the scripting side. So once I saw that things were trending in a better direction,
You know, I was really focused on speed because initially I was trying to launch this project before the end of 2024. Now here we are in mid February and it’s still not launched. Um, so it’s really trying to rush and get things done and we were making progress, but. know, ultimately even over the past two or three weeks, like I had to redo a lot of work that the scripting engineering team had done and I had let them go from a retainer basis. Now I just pay them on an hourly rate, but you know, that
There’s like a ramp up time if I have to bring them on versus a retainer when they were just on call. you know, I was already over budget on the, on the development costs for, for land pricer. So that ended up costing me a lot of extra hours of work to sort through all of those mistakes.
So that was another piece that was just concerning. just that type of work, it’s really deep to do too. again, when we were just been in big growth mode for the funding business, I’m just having to react and still put out a lot of fires within the base business. So if I have just a spare half hour or something, it was hard to just dive in and audit script engineering or…
record videos and really nail the process down from a user perspective. So I ended up trying to set up a couple reactive days and then I could take maybe a day or two a week of the deeper work on land prices so I could get that done. But I was just kind of getting irritated at myself. Like, yeah, why can’t you just work harder and harder and do that?
I knew that if I saved like the deeper work till the end of the day, like my mind was just not, it wasn’t there. was going to end up making more mistakes anyway. Like I need to be fresh to do that type of work. So, you know, just had to balance that as best I could until I was able to get it done. You know, again, things got a little bit more delayed probably by a month, than I would have liked, but you know, here we are to where we’re set to begin testing.
Additionally, I would have wanted to do a lot more pre-marketing for LandPricer. Like I had some initial demos done, but I wanted to like warm up my email list and, you know, show some of the work that we had been doing. And I just didn’t get around to it. I was like, I need to get the actual scripting done. The video’s done so the product can be set first. Like that is the most critical piece. Otherwise I’m never going to get this thing released.
And it was like the biggest blocker in my head. Like I didn’t really look forward to working on that. cause it was, was just such a beast of, effort to have to get through and like the ancillary, now I have to like set up an email list and all that. And even if I can get like AI and a VA on it quickly, just like that initial push where you have to kind of set the templates and, and, know, grease the groove for getting that set up.
Like I just fell behind and I didn’t get that done. So that might come back to bite me a bit as well from a marketing perspective, but you know, here we are. Um, you know, I’ve been trying to mention land price or on podcasts and my land daily diligence, you know, occasionally via email, know, just individual emails and so forth. Um, but yeah, that could have been handled better as well. Um,
trying to think if there’s a couple other elements here. you can see, hopefully that this might help some of you who might be undertaking some of those projects like these. Yeah, again, like I made a lot of mistakes and yeah, again, just like full transparency. I initially want, I’m fully financed this project personally. I didn’t have my partners within Sirius Land Capital involved here. Like I knew this was a bigger risk on.
on my side and it would have cut into our profits a lot to try to develop this product in-house. didn’t try to go raise outside capital or anything either. It’s kind of like a hormones thing to you, especially I’ve tried to do some software in the past. Like it didn’t, it didn’t really go anywhere. And this is like, was my bigger push in an area that I know well. but you know, kind of like hormones, he says to you, if you’re initially getting started in new area, it’s better to risk your own money.
versus other people’s money and have that reputation risk and so forth. And so I thought initially, I might be able to get this project up and going like an MVP, minimum viable product out to the market with like 20 to 30K of spend. I’m probably at about 75,000 that have personally put into the project and…
70 to 80 K was like my cap, where it’s like, okay, that I have to get something out by then. And if I can’t figure out any type of traction with users and figuring out if there’s real value here, like I’m just going to, that’s an acceptable loss to me. That’s a big, it’s a big number. I think for pretty much anybody who’s not sitting on, you know, multi, multi-millions of dollars of liquidity or cashflow coming in all the time.
Uh, so, you know, to take that as personal risk there like that, that’s, that was a big chunk. Um, and so now all of that is sitting in, you know, various business credit cards that, know, strategically use the 0 % APRs. And so I’ll have to pay all that off. Um, you know, Q3 of this year. So I was trying to time that. Yeah. Can I like get initial traction and then, you know,
I don’t expect revenue to come back and pay all that off. No, certainly not. Again, the whole intention is for this to be a loss leader. Initially in a lead magnet for a funding business and eventually when we get more gentrification into land price or where there’s less user input needed, then it can be more of a premium product, but off the bat, because of the level of human effort required to utilize it.
really want to prioritize? we get just get more funding leads and help the land industry grow as much as it can and avoid bad deals for as low of a price as I can afford for the projects. That’s why I’m being as transparent as possible with, you know, here’s how much I spent and it’s, and you how many hours I’ve spent personally on this. It’s been a huge investment, like a year long project.
almost a hundred thousand, you know, out of my accounts that I might not ever get back. like there’s definitely a certain level of stress here and just not knowing whether it’s going to work with all that investment. you know, maybe I could have done some of that different as well. You know, gotten out a testable product for less spend. not.
I’m not sure the best way to have done that because I really wanted to make sure the quality was very, very solid before. it’s a big vision too. It’s not just like a simple little project trying to price all land in the US. To do it well and we have the reputation for being the best in the industry, it just takes a lot of effort. I’m not going to shovel out a shoddy product.
that that hasn’t undergone a lot of scrutiny and and thought across the entire thing so Bottom line here is I wrap this up Very excited to get this this out and tested amongst the Initial beta tester group and and assuming we can work out some of the kinks and all that get this arranged for
a full launch to the industry. But yeah, I just wanted to record some of my excitement, anxiety lessons learned so far over the past year. I can probably go into a lot more detail about all of those avenues, but hopefully this helps. Hopefully this was of interest to you all. Subscribe if you want to ever hear more. Check out landpricer.ai. I just remarked on.
This whole podcast, SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding requests for land deals and Land Daily Diligence Facebook group for zero cost review of your land deals. Talk to you tomorrow. Bye.
