Woah, we’re here again.

End of another week that felt like a year long.

It really does pay to set such unreasonable standards for yourself — you’re forced to get a lot done.

Can’t believe it, but welcome to Week 13 of The Unicorn Founder — it’s been hectic.

I completed my final submission for Buildspace this week, built a ___ ton of stuff for the startup such as the post-call automations & the personalised property automations, and managed to fit in a full day on Wednesday for StartupClub ZA’s 8am - 5pm Founder Day.

This Week’s Update Overview

• 🏗️ The Actual Building Work: What we’ve been focused on, why, and what’s coming next.

• 💰 The Actual Getting Customers Work: The situation with getting paid lol and how I’m getting more ppl to come pay me haha.

• 📈 The Actual Progress: An overview of what this week means for us, the relevance of Buildspace, and what’s top-of-mind.

🏗️ The Actual Building Work:

So it took a bit longer than expected to get the web app actually functional.

— It’s a work-in-progress —

But the main foundation of it all is there and it’s ready to just be refined and improved going forward.

That’s the main thing.

One of my concerns: do we really need to be spending our time building this web app?

Why I have that as a concern is because one of my meetings with a guy in the automative industry — looking to implement the AI caller, and co. into his operations — mentioned that he’s looking for integration > a new dashboard to sign into.

And funnily enough, one of the agencies we’ve done demo calls for, their director also wanted integration > a whole new dashboard (more software to add to their software they’re already using).

So, it seems like from what I’m hearing, we’re all a bit tired of another app to download, another website to log into, etc.

And I can see the rationale.

So although we’ve got a lot of the ground work done for now with the web app, we’ll still be running things manually until we just don’t have capacity to handle it manually.

Manual Operations Setup: We get sent the spreadsheet of leads, clean the data manually, setup a new backend for each agent, and to then manually input the leads into that backend for calling.

So, I’m rather apportioning efforts into the automation production side of things — getting that all working 100%.

Because that is the main product at the end of the day.

Post-Call Follow-Up & Property Recommendations Automations

We’ve been testing some stuff out on Make.com for the post-call follow-ups for both WhatsApp and email — that seems to be working well.

The next step is to just test, test, test and to bring in dynamic data for each person’s name and the data collected in the call.

The Big Idea: After a successfully qualified lead call, the lead will receive a message on either WhatsApp or email (whichever they specified in the call) thanking them for the call and getting the conversation transitioned from call onto text.

I’ve managed to make some really good progress in a very short space of time regarding the automatic property recommendation — completely personalised to your needs.

I just setup a GPT on OpenAI, gave it instructions, built out a function for it to use in order to structure the responses correctly, and then linked it to an external server to call information from the property listing sites.

Simple right? haha

This is an example of the process it goes through:

How we’re testing demand for this feature is by literally just having a basic website where people can do this one simple action, and I’m gonna go share it all over social media and bring ppl to the site to use it.

Now, we haven’t even got a live link for the website yet, the website is almost done, but when it is, I’ll be putting it all over my social media and in the next week’s email.

The Big Idea: All you need to do to find your dream property is input the property’s specific details and then we do all the heavy lifting to find all the ones currently on the market and send them over to you.

No more doom scrolling property24.

The Main Rationale: Build things quickly, test them rigorously, and get feedback as fast as possible.

I do not want to be wasting my time building something ppl don’t want.

So, following the Lean Startup philosophy, I’m trying to be as efficient & effective as possible.

Next Steps:

1. Get Dream Property Finder website & post-call automations up and running asap.

2. Get users on the website and post-call messages sent out.

3. Get feedback from users.

4. Refine & Repeat steps 2 - 4.

💰 The Actual Getting Customers Work:

So the two big agencies that have signed on for the demo’s of the caller in action have been rlly slow.

Like seriously, mind-numbingly slow.

The one agency had an on-ground emergency happen in their offices, so they were completely preoccupied with that the whole week — so I was put on the back-burner.

The other eventually sent me his leads to do his first 100 free demo calls — of which they went extremely well, earning him 8 interested buyers — a pretty insane result out of 100 leads (especially taking into account the fact that it would’ve taken him a week and a half to call them on his own time).

And now I’m just awaiting his confirmation to start with the paid calls.

Of which, he has been slow to get back to me on.

Oh my goodness, why are people so slow???

That’s been my biggest frustration: I want to move fast, but my customers are slow as hell.

This coming week should be interesting as I work closely with this guy from the automative industry to build something out for him.

Getting more customers:

Whilst I wait for the slow coaches to catch up, I’m not gonna sit around and do nothing.

I’m going to be driving more and more traffic to the casperai.co site, as well as to the Dream Property Finder — essentially appealing to both agents and interested home buyers — both ends of the market.

My whole plan is to get extremely active on:

• Facebook groups (I’m, on like 20 different real estate agent groups)

• Reddit (there’s so much out there from both home buyers and estate agents)

• Quora

• Twitter (aka X)

• And other social media platforms.

The Big Idea: Get conversations going with all the people in your target market, drive people to the websites, and ideally get more ppl to sign up on the waiting list.

In addition to all of that:

Now that Buildspace is done, I’ll be really hyper-focusing on my personal social media presence.

I want to make sure the content I put out there is consistent, relevant, and most importantly, authentic all around striving to build a billion dollar company.

I have already had a taste-test of the incredible power of building-in-public these last few weeks.

But now it’s time to ramp it up properly…

So, yeah, really, rlly excited to be curating some insanely cool content/storylines/and brand image.

📈 The Actual Progress:

“So who even is this Buildspace Ethan has been mentioning through this newsletter?”

Sorry about that: They’re basically a place for people all over the world to build cool things (from music albums, to tech startups, to robots, to films — whatever the hell you want)

And they hold an annual season called nights and weekends: a 6-week program where you go from zero to one with your idea you’ve been wanting to work on but have been delaying for some time.

At the end of those 6 weeks, you curate a 90 second demo video showcasing your idea, how it looks/works, and explain the journey, as well as where you’re headed next.

So, here is my demo day video showcasing my update from the last 6 weeks.

Plus, they have $100k on the line in the form of pure cash grants for the most consistent and dedicated builders — of which I’d like to think I am, and so hopefully stand a chance to win some additional capital for the startup.

Plus plus, they showcase your work to their 200k community/network, comprising of investors, other founders/CEOs, and a bunch of other cool ppl who may have interest in what you’re building.

So, this week:

Has basically been about completing stage one of the startup:

Getting a basic product out there, with a few users on it, some sort of traction, and a lot of feedback & understanding of what the next steps look like.

Now, onto stage two:

Getting paid, refining the product, and making everything better by working with the customer to build your solution.

Finally, what’s top-of-mind:

1. Getting first revenue in ASAP.

2. Getting more feedback from target market.

3. Building community over all social media channels.

4. Adding on a little bit of additional progress every, single day.

Yep, that’s it.

Let’s see what we can do in the next 7 days.

😌 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