What is up amazing people.

Another week has gone past and it has felt like a month’s worth of work has been achieved.

Seriously. No Joke.

Welcome to Week 10 of The Unicorn Founder and by next week’s newsletter I’ll have a screenshot uploaded of the sales we’ve made.

We tested the AI Caller, we’ve been experimenting with pricing, and finally, the early stages of the web app development have begun.

This Week’s Update Overview:

• 🤖 The AI Caller In Action: The process we’ve been going through to get it working amazing, the results from our first client demo’s, and a link to one of the demo vids.

• 💰 All About The Money: The unconventional pricing I have been experimenting with, and the plan going forward to bring the first revenue in.

• 💻 Exclusive Dev Insights: What the expansion plan consists of, where we’re at with development, and the reason behind all of this.

• 📱 What Social Media Has Done To Me: The incredible people I have connected with, the insane amount of leads that have come from it, and the platform it has given some of my thoughts on a daily basis.

🤖 The AI Caller In Action:

I’ll start off with saying that it has felt like hell.

Testing, after testing, after more testing just to get this caller working the way we want it.

The way we want it: To be able to handle humour, objections, unexpected responses, and most importantly, collect the correct data.

And right now we’re in a place where it is working pretty damn well.

On Tuesday we demo’ed it with our first estate agent who had 150 leads that he hadn’t had a chance to call for months — which we managed to call in under 10 minutes.

Yes 10 minutes…

And from those calls, we got 4 people wanting to sell, 1 wanting to rent, and 9 wanting to discuss things over Email/Whatsapp.

Pretty cool right?

We had a similar experience with our second agent who also had 150 leads and hadn’t had a chance to call them for a whole year he’s been so busy.

Within 10 minutes it was done and we had 9 people wanting to sell and 14 wanting to discuss over Email/Whatsapp.

Not too shabby if you ask me.

If you’re keen to see some demo videos, here’s the one on Youtube and a few more snippets scattered on my social media pages.

💰 All About The Money:

Most software-as-a-service companies charge a subscription per/month or year to use their software.

But, as you know, I like to be a bit alternative sometimes.

So, I started investigating the potential of pricing our products at approximately zero dollars.

Yep, $0. Completely free.

What’s the catch?

It’s free until you make money.

Meaning: we only earn when you earn.

Less Vague Meaning: I want a commission of the sale price of the property you sell if the lead came through our software service.

And oh my goodness, when we did the numbers, I realised we would need a LOT of cash to keep us going with making the calls.

Why? Well, because in South Africa it takes between 3-6 months for a property transfer to go through (that’s very slow).

So, I was starting to get a bit concerned regarding how we would manage to do this without any investment.

I had already lined up a few potential people to approach.

And then this morning I went over all the numbers again, lo and behold, I had added an extra zero in one of the calculations. LOL.

Classic human error.

So, back to the drawing board I went and well, things started looking let’s say, a bit more peachy.

I managed to work out how much we would need to sustain ourselves for 12 months of operations, leading to the next plan…

Of bringing in the first revenue by first selling the service as a cost per bundle of calls service > commission on sale of properties.

This is also because I believe the greatest value for the estate agent using us is all the automation that we’re building to implement after the call (more in the next section).

And so without that extra value, it’s a bit of a hard sell when they’re gonna sacrifice a portion of commission just because we did their customer calling for them.

So, we get to buy time to develop the additional features, and then also get to build up a handsome kitty of cash in the meantime.

To come full circle: We’re starting by charging a flat fee per bundle of calls until we have additional automations built where we will then offer the commission-based pricing plan.

💻 Exclusive Dev Insights:

So, as I alluded to earlier, there is a lot of work being done beneath the surface…

I have a very big plan for this all, and the AI Caller is only the beginning.

I really, rlly, like to see things visually and so I use FreeForm (native to Apple) for all my thinking, planning, and strategy.

Slowly it’s expanding outwards, but the whole idea prompting this all is that I am trying to think forwards for when having an AI Caller isn’t enough to distinguish you from the competition.

And it’s not enough.

Which is why additional automations, systems, etc. are being built.

The AI Caller is how we get our foot in the door and then we start expanding.

And so, very briefly we have plans to: 

1. Automate the follow-up post-call.

2. The conversation with the client (on both email and Whatsapp).

3. The property recommendations to each client.

4. The scheduling of property viewings.

With a bunch more still underway.

Right now we have just got started (around Thursday evening) with the development of the web app, with the back-end pretty much almost all done.

Below are few draft showcases of the front-end design that’ll be the user interface.

One thing I’m making absolute sure to do is be very deliberate about anything we build.

It starts with a hypothesis, we then need to collect evidence to validate that this feature/idea is important, and then, only then, do we build.

Why?

Because we don’t have time to build things people don’t want.

If this was for a hobby, sure no problem. But it’s not. It’s for a billion dollar company.

So, right now all we’re building is the basic web app that allows agents to sign in, upload more leads to call, and to see the data that comes from each set of leads called.

And even that is not fundamentally necessary at this point in time, because we can do it all manually.

So the point of the web app is to prepare for onboarding more agents than we can manage manually — setting up an automated system for their lead calling.

📱 What Social Media Has Done To Me:

Since last Sunday, I have uploaded on LinkedIn and Instagram every single day, and X and TikTok every single day with one day missing.

Pretty good consistency if you ask me.

Over a longer period time, I can only imagine what that consistency all leads to.

But so far I have gotten from social media:

• 80% of all customers that fit my ideal customer profile (around 20)

• 5 really, really incredibly talented and smart people keeping up-to-date with me every day (with potential collabs coming).

• An invaluable amount of feedback on the startup, the way we are operating, and potential problems that could come up in the future.

Just take a look at this LinkedIn post to see how many people wanted to give their 2 cents on what we’re building — of which I greatly appreciated, whether it was intended as a threat or not lol.

Andre & Sofia giving me a call from San Francisco just this morning. Those 2 are amazing people.

But this is what’s happening from just putting stuff out there in the world.

The people that you’re looking for will find you and you’ll find them.

And then finally, I have been using my stories as a place to write letters to myself.

Here are four from the last few days:

Some people really like them.

But ultimately, they’re just things I end up thinking about as thoughts to consider for myself and how I want to live life.

😌 Want to give honest feedback?

All you need to do is reply to this email to tell me your experience versus expectations.

I’ll see what I can do to improve either a) the experience or b) the expectations I am promoting.

Or just thank you for the really helpful feedback :))))

Did I miss anything? Hit that Reply button and let me know what you’d like to see.

Did someone forward this to you? You can follow the billion dollar company journey here.

Want to connect? Here is my LinkedIn, IG, X (aka. Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube.

Ciao, see you next week!

Ethan