This episode documents the first wave of beta testing feedback for Land Pricer after a year of development and tens of thousands of dollars invested. Initial testers, including top land investors, struggled with the complex script, and no one reached the actual pricing summary, the core function of the product. The feedback revealed the product prioritized accuracy over usability to an unusable degree, forcing a strategic pivot to simplify the user experience while maintaining acceptable accuracy levels.
Key Takeaways:
- Speed of Recovery Defines Elite Performance When negative feedback hits, the ability to process emotions quickly and move to problem solving separates high performers from everyone else.
- Perfectionism Without User Validation Is a Trap A year of development work proved unusable because the script was too complex for experienced investors to complete, demonstrating that internal quality standards mean nothing if users can’t reach the core product.
- Accurate But Unusable Beats Perfect Every Time The script will be rewritten to cut completion time by 50% or more, accepting some accuracy loss because a price users never see has zero value.
- Volume Leads Beat Perfect Positioning Serious Land Capital received more deal flow than ever during the Land Pricer struggles, proving a profitable core business provides critical fallback when ambitious projects face setbacks.
Hear the full episode for the unfiltered emotional reality of building ambitious products and the specific frameworks used to recover from major setbacks.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital vacant land funding partner. Another update on the land price side. obviously this has been really top of mind for me a lot going on in, that particular area. I think, really pertinent updates for you all. obviously yesterday’s episode was cataloging, the general.
excitement about having the product ready for beta testing and sending out those invites and finally being ready with a year’s worth of work to finally start getting feedback and prep for an industry-wide launch. So, I’m very fortunate to have some excellent connections within the
land industry and for some of the, won’t just name drop here, but some of the biggest names in the industry were willing to help test out the product and jumped into it immediately, even spending an hour plus of their time or sending their top team members to review the product. And definitely some.
some UX issues that I’m trying to solve right away, but kind of the overwhelming feedback was that the product just needs to be simpler. It needs to be easier. The script is too complex. It takes too long to get through. In fact, out of the testing that’s been done so far, no one had made it to the actual pricing summary. The whole name of the product is land pricer. So if you don’t get a price, it kind of defeats the whole purpose of the product.
Ultimately, that needs to be solved. And again, the people testing this are very experienced land investors. And if they’re kind of struggling with learning curve and things taking too long, that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the industry or especially beginner land investors too. So that definitely deflated the balloon.
quite a bit and so know after a long day yesterday I was just sitting in the evening and it was starting to feel a little bit despondent I’ll be honest with you guys and you know just kind of got into a woe is me attitude for you know 15-20 minutes and kind of questioning.
You know, the, whole state of the product is like, man, did I, did I really screw this up? with, you know, spending tens of thousands of dollars a year worth of time, so many resources, for something that just took the wrong approach here. And, yeah, it was definitely not, not a good feeling. but then, you know, once I kind of.
got through the, uh, the emotions of that particular point and, you know, went back to, you know, my mentors language of just, uh, you know, the highest, um, the highest level performers, their speed recovery is, is world-class. So, you know, when you hit a roadblock or, um, you know, negative feedback or critique or whatever, uh, whatever problem, um, that needs to be.
overcome, uh, you know, okay, you know, feel it and then figure out whatever that next step is, you know, um, decrease that, that time to recover and figure out what needs to be done. And I really try to keep that top of mind as much as possible. Another quote is, um, you know, don’t wish it was, uh, don’t wish it was easier. I wish you were better. Um, so, you know, that
You know initial part of the quote that’s more of a kind of victim mentality. Oh, man, you know, I spent so much time on this why you know, I Shouldn’t the product be you know kind of perfect out of the gate and you know when I we actually approach it from that side It’s like yeah, I know it’s completely unrealistic. No, no one just knocks out of the park instantly When when they first create something and you know, to test it in the real world like there’s inevitably gonna be
tweaks and adjustments that are gonna be required to actually fit the needs of your user or client base. And so I just need to be better. So, okay, are you gonna sit around and just wish things had gone another way and you hit this perfect right off the bat or are you going to still kind of take solace and realize
Hey, you know, some of the absolute top investors, biggest names in the industry were willing to, like immediately start beta testing your product within, hours of receiving an invite. They’re providing real feedback. clearly there is a desire for a product like this. it’s not an easy thing to do. if it was, it would already be available. so.
Okay, let’s roll up your sleeves and figure out what needs to be done here. If people are saying it’s too complicated, then how do we simplify? and so, you know, this was around like 8 PM last night, trying to start to shut down my brain. But I’m like, okay, let me set up my next day tomorrow. What do I need to start working on, to solve this? And, you know, I started thinking, okay, you know, for the script, which was really my primary part of the product.
you know, what am I doing in my own business? You know, we probably review more land deals than any other company in, in the industry. especially on a nationwide scale, like how do we do this efficiently? You know, we have our due diligence questionnaire. Can I adapt it? You know, the land price or script to be even more aligned with what we are already doing. And so once I started approaching it from that perspective, I realized.
Okay. You know, the whole point of land pricer, it was, you know, a trade off of time for accuracy. Cause you know, pricing land for the most part is not an easy thing to do. if you don’t follow certain steps and we think we’re the best at it in the industry, you’re going to lose out on accuracy, but because we waited, or, know, we pushed too far in the direction of accuracy. it was, it was just going to take too much time.
So much time that people weren’t going to have the patience to even get to the accurate answer. So, you know, there has to be a balance there. Yes, the, you know, ideal case would be, okay, you just input your property software spits out price. That’s just not realistic at the moment. Just yet given the engineering research resources and data required, we will eventually get there, but there has to be a middle ground to start off with. And so if.
I need to adjust the script to be at the cost of some level of accuracy in order for people to actually use it and get to the price. That’s just going to be the name of the game. And the script updates, it’s not a tremendous amount of work, probably a day’s worth of work to do that. And I can also give people an option of…
basically write it as soon as they log in. Hey, here’s a simplified version of the script. It’s a little bit faster. It’s not gonna be as accurate. Or for more complex properties, here is a more detailed version of the script. It might take a bit longer. I’m still gonna work to shorten it considerably compared to what it is. Right now it’s basically unusable. It’s too much of slog. But still give people an option to, okay,
can go the more accurate route at the cost of time or more simplified for maybe easier properties to review or kind of less complex characteristics associated with them. So those were the approaches that I think could cut down on the total time spent by 50 % or more. That’s certainly gonna be the goal and then we’ll keep refining.
via further testing. Plus there were some, yeah, just user experience issues that my engineering team’s already gonna complete by the end of this week. So, yeah, now I’m feeling a bit better about this because it’s like, all right, there’s still a route forward here and you just have to figure out the right middle ground, find a way to get people.
to use the actual product. You can always make it better later. But right now there just are more fixes required. So just wanted to share some of this that was going on. Plus there were just other fires, annoying fires, like I was locked out of my land pricer.
Gmail account from Amazon side and they blocked access for me to even try to get past the two of a and so just dealing with some annoying issues there that were just on top of, you know, other work trying to get done. but, kind of moral of, of, of this story today is just, you know, wanted to share again, the
You know, personal roller coaster journey of being an entrepreneur. It never ends. No matter what level you play at, there’s always going to be uncertainty and the higher the level you play. like that, that uncertainty is just going to inevitably creep up. regardless if, if you’re really trying to push yourself in, you know, I just had to remind myself, you know, this is an ambitious project from the start. There’s no guarantee of success.
Um, and, know, absolute worst case was like, okay, you really tried everything and, um, maybe the product’s just too before it’s time. Um, or you just, you know, I’m not smart enough to figure it out. hope that’s not the case, but even if that is the case, um, I also had to take salt towards like, you know, our funding business, serious land capital is getting more leads than we’ve ever gotten.
you know, maybe even more leads than we can kind of barely keep up with at the moment. and you know, that, that business is, very profitable moving forward. you know, that, that’s not a bad thing to fall back on where it’s like, you took a stab at software, is notoriously, something like the hardest, if not the hardest type of business to, build successfully given competition and so forth and various user habits.
that you still have an excellent engine in the background that you can just continue to build regardless. So that’s kind of a privileged position to be in compared to just trying to start something completely from scratch and having no additional fallback. So I had to remind myself of all those additional blessings. And again, the fact that people, you
very, very high level operators were, know, trusting in me and willing to, put aside their time and, and test a product I built in the first place that is still extremely promising. and I really want to deliver, for, for their sake is as well as mine here. So hopefully this is helpful. today I’m throwing a bit of the vulnerability in here. That was always.
point of this podcast to keep it real with you guys and share the good, bad, and the ugly of trying to build a world-class real estate business. And this one was definitely a hit to the dopamine and trying to recover after the excitement you heard my voice from yesterday’s podcast. So if you’re looking for funding, Serious Land Capital.
Zero cost review of your land deals at land daily diligence Facebook group. I’m gonna do another review tomorrow. I have a huge backlog for that and obviously landpricer.ai which I just remarked on during this chat. With that, take care. Talk to you all next time. Subscribe and share. Bye.
