With 14 social media posts, 2 YouTube videos, and a lot of other work being done, we have made it to the end of another week in trying to build a $b company.

Crazy right?

This is Week 11 of The Unicorn Founder and this week I pushed a lot of mental barriers, comfort boundaries, and broke a few glass ceilings.

I used my own tech to get leads, setup 2 very important meetings for Monday, and well, the web app is almost complete — notwithstanding the rest of the crazy things that have happened.

This Week’s Update Overview:

• 🙋‍♂️ Practice what you Preach: How a lousy lead-generating day pushed me to use my own tech for getting new clients.

• ✨ One very Surprising Meeting: When the unexpected happens, make note of it and don’t take it lightly.

• 👀 The Founder Perspective: What’s keeping me up at night and what I’m doing to avoid that situation happening.

• 💼 Where The Startup is at: The two very important meetings coming up & what they mean to me, as well as how the technical app development is coming along.

• 📱 A Moment for the Socials: What’s going on with what I am putting out there to the universe via social media.

🙋‍♂️ Practice what you Preach:

Tuesday was horrid in terms of getting more clients.

And btw, getting more clients = more estate agents keen to use the AI Caller.

I just went on to IG to go find the estate agents that were putting content out there, as well as paid ads, showing me they were serious about their work.

I then DM’ed all of them with this message:

“Hi [name]! I’ve built some pretty interesting tech with the goal of automating real estate agents, with the first product being an AI Caller — which last week managed to call 300 leads in under 10 minutes getting the agent 9 interested sellers. If you’re interested in hearing how it sounds/works, I’ll get it to give you a call at [agent’s number] or a different number if you’d prefer.”

And how many people responded?

One.

That’s it.

And it took soooo much time to convince him for me to just give him a call with the AI.

This isn’t gonna work — is what went through my mind.

And so, after venting out to my advisory board of directors (aka my family) we came up with the ingenious idea of using AI to call them.

Wow.

Talk about removing the plank from your own eye before judging the speck in someone else’s.

Here I was telling agents to use AI callers to get leads and I didn’t even use it myself…

Enough!

So, Wednesday I got a whole list of agents together, around 100, and got to calling.

The results were insane.

98% of the people called didn’t even know they were talking to an AI caller. Seriously!

So, that helped me to get a few agencies interested in the tech, with conversations being underway with two pretty big agencies in Cape Town, and confirming the two upcoming meetings with another two pretty big agencies on Monday.

✨ One very Surprising Meeting:

Follow the breadcrumbs they say.

Who “they” are — I do not know. But it is astonishingly true.

Nobody has the whole path figured out, and I certainly don’t, and so taking the most “right-looking” actions is the best we can do.

And then to keep doing that over and over again, following the results that come from each action.

Well, that led me to being introduced to an interesting chap on Thursday who represents a few family offices, they’re looking for more tech investments, specifically in AI.

I’m not tryna allude to anything here because for the time being we’re just building a relationship with each other — but what I am saying is that opportunity comes when you follow breadcrumbs.

And opportunity is out there, it’s waiting for proactive people. It doesn’t just arrive at your door.

And if it does, you’re usually not prepared, so it’s best to go find it yourself.

👀 The Founder Perspective:

Market share. Competitors. Intellectual Property.

These are few of my favourite things… (that song from the sound of music, you know what I’m referring to right??? lol)

These are hectic things. Things that I need to prepare for.

And I am prepping for them in many ways by building a moat around my castle i.e the startup.

With tech you’ve gotta be sooo careful, because intellectual property security strength can make or break you — an indication of how easy it is to replicate your service and then undermine your current offering.

And if you wanna get big — like I do (billion dollar kinda big) — you need to have your checks in order.

So, that’s why we've moved off into completely custom code (which we can copyright) and we’ve been investigating heavily into the AI component of the tech and how to get some intellectual property rights around it.

With ideas on eventually building out our own AI, training it with our own data and the like.

It’s a work in progress, as with everything, but it’s definitely a big concern for me right now as we start getting more and more clients.

And because I’m so noisy on social media.

💼 Where The Startup is at:

So, Monday coming up tomorrow means a lot because:

IF it goes as planned, then we will have two pretty big agencies signing on, giving top-down orders for their agents to use our tech, meaning:

By onboarding the head of the snake (the agency) the rest of the body has to follow suit, getting us a whole bunch of people using the tech in one foul swoop.

Which is a lot easier to do than trying to pick up every single agent individually.

The Development:

Our Github repository (where all our code is stored as a documentation of the backend) is getting filled out properly.

Below is our signup page backend, as an example.

The Vision

My unexpected meeting on Thursday also got me thinking a lot about where I want to take the startup, what the vision of it all looks like…

And although I haven’t sat down and thoroughly gone through it in my head yet, I do have a pretty vague, broad, but good idea of where I want to go with it all.

The real estate industry automations is our ‘selling books first’ from Amazon.

Hopefully that simple sentence gives you a good idea of the level of ambition sitting here on the other side of the computer.

📱 A Moment for the Socials:

Buildspace inspired me a lot to post on social media progress updates and the like — and I’ve used it for that plus added thoughts that go through my head and how I’m tackling/responding to problems/opportunities/issues etc.

It’s been really cathartic actually (a satisfying feeling of getting something off your chest)

And YouTube has been the place where I’ve decided to post longer form videos of multi-layered/-dimensional thoughts & ideas.

I’m working on planning a bit more regarding what exactly I want each video to be about, but for now there are two videos up.

Video 1 & Video 2.

They’re both a lot about my mentality, and what prompted me to go down this specific road of life.

And in order to keep myself completely unconcerned about views, likes, comments, hate comments etc. for all my social media channels (because that’s such an easy temptation I find myself open to):

I am framing the whole endeavour as a documentary for my future self, that’s it, nothing else.

And on all the other platforms I am trying to mix in a bit of progress updates, with philosophies, ideas, and epiphanies that come to me each day.

If you do find them valuable and enjoyable that’s an added bonus 🎁 

😌 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