To listen to this podcast, visit Ep 57: Measuring Walk-In Traffic with Michael Guimarin.

Kevin Oakley 0:12
Welcome to Market Proof Marketing, the weekly podcast from the marketing minds at DoYouConvert. com where we talk about the current state of all things digital and how they impact Home Builders and developers around the globe. We are not here to sell you, we’re here to help you and to try and elevate the conversation. I’m Kevin Oakley and with us, as always, is the ad doctor, Andrew Peek.

Andrew Peek 0:31
We’re number 57. Today is the third of July. Jackie is with us, everyone. I decided you need to do like a Yoda version of this.

Kevin Oakley 0:45
not sell you…help you if I must. There’s

Jackie Askews 0:49
marketing you’re welcome to

Andrew Peek 0:53
be amazing. We could probably go and Fiverr something and pay someone who’s perfect at Yoda’s voice to I love to do that.

Kevin Oakley 1:00
Right after this commercial break from our sponsor. There you guys kidding? Don’t do it.

Jackie Askews 1:07
Don’t do it trap ever.

Andrew Peek 1:11
$5 anymore. So I

Kevin Oakley 1:13
I started really listening to some of the Akimbo podcasts, which is done by Seth Godin. And I can’t tell if this is intentionally genius or what but after he does a quick intro, he’s always like, we’ll be back with a message from our sponsors. And then it just skip straight to it because he has no sponsors. And I don’t know if that’s a dig at like silly podcasts who have sponsors, or he really just as looking for a sponsor doesn’t have one yet. Anyway, that’s not that’s not why. Today, we’re here we’re here to talk about new home marketing and all the fun that goes along with it. And we begin as always with something that we call story time. Do I need to go first because no one else has it. Ready? I have

Andrew Peek 1:53
I have stuff I decided to do a list because story lyst the story stick one story jealous tickle like BuzzFeed. Okay, that’s where it’s taken a while ago. But we’re like Final house update for me, Andrew. Yay, yay, yay. Closing God’s laid that out. And another that all the stuff shenanigans for movie like four times before we move, go from this parent to that parent. It’s been great. But we got our final calendar invite from the title company for next Friday the 12. So super excited. It’s only how many days? Is that too late? The 24th of June to the 12. That’s probably not that bad, I would think right. Three weeks now. Terrible. Who knows? I don’t see that feeling. It’ll be over soon. worse. It’ll be over soon. So that’s it’s like child or

Kevin Oakley 2:34
Yo, yo, black it all out?

Andrew Peek 2:38
Our house? Yeah, yeah. Great. You get there. You’re like 32 weeks, like, nope, you need to go home or they make you walk the hall. If you had a baby. And you know this, you’ve taken your way there. You’ve got up yourself. And they’re like, Oh, it’s not time yet. Same thing. Just

Jackie Askews 2:51
go home. Andrew, I can imagine the entire peak household is just so ready. I’m sure after bouncing around. Yeah, parents are probably ready.

Andrew Peek 3:02
I’m super, super excited. And then at the schedule, there’s so many things I’m excited about. But like my office is me five feet from the kitchen. This me amazing. Like it’s dangerous. Anytime I want on big giant monitors. So that’s first story. second story is Kevin, I were talking earlier today. And I decided that Excel Microsoft Excel needs to be like a, you just need to know it. I don’t know if there’s any other way. Okay, you’re trying

Kevin Oakley 3:27
but impress me now.

Andrew Peek 3:28
I’m trying to impress everyone. Well, it just opens up like a creative, a technical creative component is that that trademark that in your brain sounds good for that for the ability to do things that you cannot do otherwise, that would take forever, or be inaccurate, if that makes sense. But if you are like, Oh, I could do that thing in Excel, and it will take me 10 minutes versus six hours, where if it’s six hours, whatever the task may be, like, you’re like, I’m not doing that. That’s not that’s not possible. But if I know, just having that capability to be there, and there, I’m sure there’s other things in life for like, if you just know how to do this thing, then you could do all these things, if that makes any sense.

Kevin Oakley 4:14
Yeah, you’re right. It is super helpful. It’s one it’s something that I am just certainly not as good as I say, You’re depressing me. I mean, I can I can get in there. And I can maybe do stuff four times faster. But yeah, not to your level. So I think

Andrew Peek 4:27
I might be on the extreme

Kevin Oakley 4:28
end, I think you volunteered to do a series of solo podcast slash screen shares for how to become better at Excel. Excel.

Jackie Askews 4:38
I know so many friends that use it for personal life outside of work as well.

Andrew Peek 4:45
As I do that,

Kevin Oakley 4:45
yeah, I need to get better at it as well. So unless you eat pancakes, that would be something to take you off my friend list. That was

Andrew Peek 4:55
funny. No, well,

Kevin Oakley 4:57
no, it is it is important. So important that our friend Will Duderstadt has told me that that is an interview. question is what is your favorite function in Excel? And I think he tells them, you’re also not allowed to include the some function because that’s just adding up a total. Just to see if people who claim that they can use Excel actually can.

Andrew Peek 5:18
Because I feel you magic either way.

Jackie Askews 5:20
Good to know. I should start practicing more. You should Why?

Andrew Peek 5:24
Maybe for you, I don’t know if there’s

Jackie Askews 5:26
so much I would utilize it. I think I would outside of maybe design work. But I’m all for learning something. So if you are willing to teach,

Andrew Peek 5:37
I go to meeting time. Yeah.

Party. Okay, that’s, that’s my two. That’s the shortlist tickle. Only two guys, you want minute. Good, man.

That’s perfect.

Jackie Askews 5:48
So for me a story time, I recently was talking to a friend at a builder partner. And like anything else you get together. And if anybody’s in that same industry, it’s just nice to be able to unload on each other. And they were telling me how different approaches the online sales, also pull in the sales team as well with that in the marketing team, how different they are with each other, those approaches, and how easy it is for there to be missed communications between both departments that leave everyone frustrated. So for example, an ad goes out with a particular number on it. And the sales team isn’t brought into the loop. So once traffic picks up, you know, they’re not aware of it, they got all these random calls, and prospects asking questions, and they have no idea where that information is being pulled from. And that got me thinking. So, you know, you think although both specialize in their own niche function, they both exist for the same purpose to increase overall sales. And these ambiguities of their roles, and overlapping responsibilities could make the entire operation less efficient. So we were talking, and we kind of came up with a couple things that would probably help and really decrease just frustration between the both departments there, they’re there to serve, and help each other. And if there’s any frustration, that just limits what you can do together, for there to be a team. Yes, so whether that’s utilizing the same CRM technology. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a group of people not having maybe the proper training between the departments, and really not able to properly utilize and use it to its full capacity. So that’s something so whether it’s getting everyone together to kind of go over the same training, keep in constant contact, whether that’s weekly, multiple times a week, bi weekly, just to access the same information on a parallel basis. And encourage your team to talk often. And based on what your team needs. I think that’s just as long as everybody walks away feeling as if they’re on the same page, and not to be afraid to take advantage of group chat. I think a lot of people think I’m annoying them or I’m too much the up their grill. But at the end of the day, you want to pull your teams together and establish clear roles and responsibilities, because those lines can get fuzzy. And it’s worth setting standards early.

Kevin Oakley 8:28
Yep. Now, we don’t want to go too deep into the specifics of this one particular builder partner. But I also think it’s interesting, that really shouldn’t be as big of a challenge long term, right? Obviously, if there’s changes that are made that can that can happen. But when that happens consistently, it’s usually because marketing’s a little off the reservation. I’m not saying they were in this case, but what I mean by that is, community is struggling. So marketing comes up with a brand new tagline, or starts talking about how great this thing is about the community that is kind of or to true but stretches things. Whereas if everything is pulled from the same place, ie the the builder site, or it’s kind of just in the wheelhouse and marketing is just communicating what is already publicly available to sales customers, everybody, that that’s just one other thing to check. I don’t think because I know the situation, it’s not, it’s not the impact here. But in a broader sense that can happen where if marketing is just kind of pulling stuff out of their hat to try to make things work, then you really have to double down on that communication that you’re talking about. Because, yeah, if it’s not being talked about on the website now, or in any of the materials that the salesperson will be using now, they’re all they’re gonna be like what we say what now about this? That’s not Yeah, that’s something we normally do.

Jackie Askews 9:49
I agree. And I think a lot of it to even with the sales team, they may not realize also how beneficial they can be to the marketing team, whether that’s providing insight about that customers, and because at the end of the day marketing team is putting together this information about the buyers, and who better than the sales team that has that one on one FaceTime interaction. And I just think at the end of the day, that could help optimize lead strength, the marketing team is bringing in dozens of new leads a week. But if those leads are weak, and they aren’t that interested in making purchases, that doesn’t do sales team much, but so I think overall, I think it’s just getting everybody to be one cohesive unit. It’s like having a big family meeting

Andrew Peek 10:35
big family, they love each other a family meeting.

Kevin Oakley 10:39
Awesome. My story is a short one. But there’s a tool called Krisp with a K, Krisp Krisp.ai, you’ll see the link in the show notes. And what it lets you do is mute the background noise during calls using artificial intelligence slash neural networks. I don’t know I’m guessing does. But it’s amazing. I’ve heard folks like Jeff Turner and others share samples of themselves using this couple months ago. And I guess I’ve been holding out on everyone. But it was a Mac only thing. So it’s like who uses Macs anyway. But the the Windows app is finally out. And there’s a great sample demo that you can do where it shows how powerful it is. And what it basically does is it it makes a artificial microphone input and an artificial speaker output that basically becomes a buffer. And in a split second almost unnoticeable. It’s running artificial intelligence to say is that the person speaking or is that background noise and silencing it for you. And it’s pretty darn amazing. And we’re checking out. So now there’s one less excuse. You know, I work in a busy office and people scream at each other and have Nerf gun fights all the time. And you can get rid of it. If you’re in a coffee shop, you can get rid of it. And really trust that they’re only hearing hearing your voice. So anytime we come across cool little things like that. We always want to make sure we share it with you.

Andrew Peek 12:06
Yeah, I just listened to a few of those demos they have on their other site. They have like street screaming child airport coffee shop, like different circumstances. And yeah, that’s that’s pretty cool. They need like the dog barking, I think would be a good one to put on there. So that doesn’t work by like sampling the sound prior like it knows like, okay, that’s not Andrew, I

Kevin Oakley 12:27
think it’s always listening. And then it’s filtering once you start talking. And it can tell obviously, that your voice is closest to the microphone.

Andrew Peek 12:36
Gotcha. That’s pretty cool.

Kevin Oakley 12:38
Yeah, very, very cool. And you can download a free trial. The one thing to note I believe about the free trial, though, is that it only lets you test listening to the person that you’re talking to. So if you want to make yourself sound better, you do have to pay for the full version, I believe. But definitely go check that out. If that’s something that you struggle with, or you’re working a lot on the road. Make sure you give it to Ted, you that guy who always joins every conference call with his windows down in his car. Yes, so we can get rid of one part. Ted, I think you need to meet yourself, Ted. Right? You know who your Ted is?

Jackie Askews 13:13
Yes, I

Andrew Peek 13:14
have called it today.

Kevin Oakley 13:20
Alright, well, let’s, let’s shift over to the news. And the first news item is that we now have the ability for you to call in and, and interact with the show with your voice and about as easy away as we could come up with so feel free to call this number. leave a voicemail with questions that you’d like us to answer comments or feedback from the previous week’s episode. Things that you think we got right? We got wrong just missed out on completely will address them on the following episode. Whenever we get those and that number is 4043692595. Or again, click the link in the show notes on your mobile device and say hello get interact with us before their

Andrew Peek 14:03
their voice will be on the podcast. If yes, don’t sue

Kevin Oakley 14:07
us when you’re like I didn’t know your voice will be on the podcast. We can change your voice. You don’t have to say who you work for you not to say your name. Do what it is. But your voice will be on the podcast. And at the end. Let’s just say this. I know how crazy some of you are. If you want us to disguise your voice, make you a little bit higher pitch, lower pitch, whatever we can probably look at doing that just said send me the mystery.

Awesome. That is funny. So the first real news story that we have is the kickoff of online people talking or op t with Jen Barkin, and it’s a monthly video series dedicated to enhancing careers and lives of online new home sales specialist. And really it’s like a virtual support group to it and or virtual training for your boss if you think that they might benefit from having a little bit more broader exposure to how they’re all works and different aspects that that all my sales people struggle with. And episode one features the team from Starcraft builders Tanner Brewster, Lacey Warburton, and our very own Jen Barkin. And together they manage 400 leads a month for one of the country’s largest builders, and they have just been on a tear, I mean, they’re kicking butt and taking names. And anytime you go from a team of one to a team of two, kind of like being promoted from a salesperson to a sales manager, it’s either going to be awesome or terrible. And there’s really no in between. and these two are awesome. So we’re going to play a short clip here, so that you can get just a flavor of it. And you want to hear the whole thing, go to D convert calm and click on the link.

Jen Barkan 15:53
Now one thing that I want to ask you that that came up with what you said is, when you look at activities as a whole that you’ve got to have accomplish, you know, you have mentioned long term prospecting is one thing that as a team, you tackle together. So talk a little bit about that, how you plan out what you’re going to do for the month and how to tackle some of those things together.

Lacy Warburton 16:15
Yeah, so typically, in the the monthly meetings that we have, we’ll sit down, and we will plan the long term follow up emails for that month, in the next month. And we send out the same email to all prospects because in sometimes some things do crossover. And you don’t want to send one person one email and another person another email, and what if they contradict each other. So we always want to make sure that we’re sending out the same materials, and that they can kind of blanket over all of the areas and that really helps keeping our brains together. Right? If I was to have my own emails and he did his own, then you wouldn’t have that support of every you know, both of us being able to work on the same project together. Being a team really, really helps in this scenario. I couldn’t imagine doing this by myself.

Kevin Oakley 17:01
next item up is one that we posted about in the market proof marketing Facebook group when it was breaking news, but Zillow Group is introducing a new and improved assessment algorithm that uses impart and use this computer vision to see exactly what is in your home based upon the images that are uploaded. So it’s time to again yet another excuse goes down the wayside of well our homes sell so quickly. Why bother putting the latest greatest photos or and This sparked a lot of conversation actually in the group to people curious of if I’m uploading low res pixel images currently because that’s all my website will support Am I being hindered? A lot of good things and we’ll we’ll ask for some clarification if the if the Zillow team is able to give us any on how exactly that works, but essentially, artificial intelligence computer vision is looking at these pictures and able to tell the types of products materials and just kind of general build quality finish finishing level that the home has and give it the appropriate bump or drop investment value.

Andrew Peek 18:08
People could imagine forgot we were talking about this but I would assume that Zillow is able to with their speed this is AI based or somehow it’s I have no idea. Like hey, this is this countertop at some point a person individual was looking at samples of granite courts, marble, whatever they going, this is marble. This is quartz. I assume that that’s like teaching revenge. He knows how to

Jackie Askews 18:35
look at it. They may know Yeah, the home may sell for a little more seeing

Andrew Peek 18:40
that this is that and just the catalog and imagine like later like the next I’m sure they’re having like you upload your own and then you take a picture of just the countertop for Zillow use so that they could get a betters estimate which would be back to like the person who the question about like, hey, my photos, hello rise, wonder if long term Zilla, like will pull from your feet. But if you are able to provide product sample photos, I don’t know what would be called but like, so they could be like, Oh, you do have this type, of course that generally sells more or less, if that makes sense. So like separate photos from that just for the sake of the titles 12 by 24, not 12 by 12? I don’t know. And that’s but that’s

Kevin Oakley 19:24
okay. That’s what consumer wanted to know. Anyway, though, right? I mean, that’s it goes back. Yeah. Like, this isn’t a good thing to do what you should have been doing anyway. Exactly. Right. But people wanted to see the detail of the tile work, they wanted to see the list already details, all those things were already there. And so it’s just, it’s awesome. And I think I was I was chuckling when you’re talking about training the artificial intelligence because I’m sure, the best way to train it would just be to say in today’s world, watch a fixer upper. If it’s in that show. In the second half, like you better know it add value 10%. But this update is good include more than just the computer vision. It also includes for the first time directly evaluating the homes list price and listing description. So again, the words that are being used, which is those already been telling us for a long time that better descriptions do cause more leads to happen. How many days to spend the market, as well. So they’re shuffling the deck on a lot of things. And we saw those estimates on some of the homes that we’ve been working on changed rather dramatically already, I still have a hunch that one of the things that are in this latest algorithm update is simply how many eyeballs are looking at a home slash favorite in it. I think that’s that certainly makes sense to have that be included in the mix. But hey, investments are definitely here to stay. And again Zillow wants it to become a standing offer. So they’re not just doing this out of response from what home builders have been complaining about a real estate agent. It’s like, nope, what’s the consumer need to know to make an informed decision? And I think it’s a good step forward. Yeah. And that is something that

Andrew Peek 21:00
I feel like I hate to keep going on this. This is almost like it’s, they’re getting every detail about the home that they will potentially hold for that period of time without having to put an individual out there as much early to make that process scalable, and more efficient. As far as like, oh, here’s the homes we want. That was not updated, don’t want it This one is updated. We do want it, although I think this so every home would have the offer

Jackie Askews 21:25
reading through everything to like besides the sophisticated machine learning techniques for the special features that looks like it also will factor in location details to commute times and proximity to different key spots around the area. So it’s it’s taking a little of everything,

Kevin Oakley 21:44
which in some ways, you could say that the price of comparable homes that were sold already takes all that into account. But I think it’s just awesome that they’re saying we’re not just going to go off comparative sales of a similar sized home in a similar area. We’re going to start looking at that separately as a check and balance because you’ve seen that example all the time, but one house sells for way more than it ever should have. Or one house sells for way less than it ever should have. And and not having that just be a one size fits all smack on this estimate, but but have these other pieces to check that and try to make it as accurate as possible. So that’s awesome. And speaking of computer vision, yeah, because Facebook melted today on the third. All of a sudden, bunch of images just weren’t showing up. And

Andrew Peek 22:33
it’s still melting. Yeah, this was at like 9am kinda sucks

Kevin Oakley 22:36
Yeah, I do

Andrew Peek 22:38
as if it’s still down. But they had a bunch of articles. Yeah, I think everyone saw here. Yeah, that’s still broken. You saw instead of an image there was like, it was almost like the alt text. If you’re thinking in terms of HTML and SEO makes up that’s a image contains or may contain house outdoor door, clouds, man and suit more than four people or whatever the number one you’re like, that’s, that’s like the dumb version of what Zilla will be doing or is doing with their computer vision. Of course, American Facebook is, you know, the amount of the range I guess not maybe not necessarily the depth, but just a range of things that they could recognize and an image is just infinite. But you know, absurd like it just keeps going and going may contain like, if you post a picture of let’s say I’m drinking right now it’s called heyday. cold brew coffee. It’s in a can the size of Red Bull can they could if I put a picture of this they could build read this whole thing. Like oh, cool, this guy drinks cold brew coffee. That’s pre packaged. And I could be advertised to for this type of

Kevin Oakley 23:47
product. I need to ask a completely unrelated question. How long is cold brew coffee been a thing? I don’t know. cuz I’ve got about a month and a half.

Andrew Peek 23:56
But I really don’t mind is it all set means anything? It’s over. It’s too I like it more bitter or bitter strong. Ya know what? I like to

Kevin Oakley 24:06
get rid of that stuff. I like the habit.

Jackie Askews 24:07
How do you are you drinking it from a can? I got it?

Kevin Oakley 24:11
From a can sounds I know we’re putting the water in cans now instead of bottles. Coffee from a can is a place I don’t think I want to go

Andrew Peek 24:20
repackage ones are good. And again, like this one. And they have some that are like

Kevin Oakley 24:23
how do you add your cream to it? I still can’t like

Andrew Peek 24:27
this was actually it’s called salted mocha heyday. cold brew coffee. So it has a little bit has a little bit of sugar in it and a little bit of cream.

Jackie Askews 24:35
See I’m the title I like a little bit of coffee with my crown and sugar so exactly probably have to have like half a Canfield so that I could

Kevin Oakley 24:44
write that’s a problem. So no, we bite and bark and like gas eyes and then pour it out. But that’s Yeah. Anyway, I just want to I always like to check how out of touch on becoming with life. I’m going on

Andrew Peek 24:54
Google Trends right now to see because I feel like it’s the past year. Everyone has cold brew. Now. I don’t even know if people know. Like, are they just doing it? Yeah, I was at our brand new Starbucks around the corner and they had nitrogen something called was like Guinness for cold brew coffee. But at first I thought it was just Starbucks was serving alcohol.

What is it? What is this? It’s on tap? What is the

Jackie Askews 25:15
World Cup day? Yeah, you know,

Andrew Peek 25:17
I’d be the day I’m sure you’re what’s the what’s a cool area we went to Eastern? Is that the huh? Yeah, I’m sure that we have Starbucks here that serve alcohol at night. After a certain time. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Craft Beer, man. Certain wines? I’m sure that one does. That’s a really cool spot. The Eastern one. I would think or maybe it’s the Florida thing. Maybe not sure. What you’re saying the one right by my

Kevin Oakley 25:39
house. It just opened up.

Andrew Peek 25:42
In the cool stuff. You mentioned, I know what you’re trying to

Kevin Oakley 25:46
get me, David on.

Andrew Peek 25:50
Whatever it is Eastern. It’s

Kevin Oakley 25:52
Oh, yeah. Nice. It’s very nice area. And hopefully soon you many of you will be able to come visit us on for many different reasons there. But back to So Facebook is using computer vision, as well. And and while this site is down, it’s kind of fun to be able to see what it is. And of course, a lot of that started for privacy concerns to be able to root out stuff from Russia and other countries or terrorists or just bad content. But obviously, it’s also being used to match content to the right audiences who care about man, man and suits band, or housing, or whatever else it’s able to see may contain company in that ad creative. And then our last news story, Facebook, housing, employment credit changes coming soon. This is straight from the Facebook reps. Andrew, I’m gonna let you do this. But it’s, it’s getting real. In fact, also some geographic targeting Yeah, I changes that are

Andrew Peek 26:51
like awful statement, like the end of a radio ad for like,

Kevin Oakley 26:55
now we’ll link to it or sides.

Andrew Peek 26:58
Essentially what I noticed the other day and has not been rolled out to all accounts, but on a few. There’s a button that is now you have to self select, which I thought was interesting. At the campaign level, if you make a Facebook ad, it says does this advertise, XYZ housing, employment credit. And then you can click it or not click it. I’m surprised it’s self selecting right now. So you’re opting in that you are doing that. But then you do that. And then your targeting. Age goes away. Like you there’s no age option. Gender goes away. So there’s a female. And then zip code, you cannot do anything with zip codes. And the minimum radius when you do put in say, Columbus, you type in Columbus and the smallest circle you make is 15 miles. So which we are so I know

Kevin Oakley 27:49
I sound like the old man is lost their mind. I think they’re letting people self select right now. So they can literally just be like, Okay, hi, do you want to sue someone? There you go. Yeah, we made the box. They didn’t check it. So just because you can ignore it right now. I still I know. It sounds crazy. And it makes me me sound crazy. But I would I would check that box and I would start doing things the right way. Because you’re gonna have to figure it out sooner or later. One

Andrew Peek 28:15
way, yes, it’s the same one way or nothing. Here’s the disclaimer statement, I will read here’s what Facebook starting June 27, we will be first introducing these requirements in AD manager as an option to a small subset of advertisers. All advertisers target us must comply with these restrictions when creating or editing, housing, employment and credit ads by September 2019, in ads manager and all interfaces by the end of 2018. Let’s make the sorry, this is this Islam will require all new ads related housing and employment and credit. So it looks like this, this self selected by 2018. And then September, you better pick it on your own understanding, we need a we need a lawyer this. That’s a lot of language and commerce. And so yeah, but the important part though, is if you go in there and click everything at once, it will reset your targeting, to back to nothing. So if you had all your radius is perfect, and you click the button, and you think it will hold it even if you were already in compliance. It just defaults it to like Hey, get in there and reset it. So you might have to take some time if you have a lot of campaigns. Awesome, super fun. Awesome. Well,

Kevin Oakley 29:29
that’ll do it. For the news will come take a quick break. When we come back. We’re going to be joined by Michael from door do our that’s the company remember, they found them in my spam box. We have some conversations, but it continues to move on. And this is going to be a fantastic interview with Michael clarifies a lot of things going to give us some pricing details. You’re not gonna want to miss this. And again, this is the tool that tracks using infrared cameras foot traffic through your model homes or retail locations. We will be right back.

Welcome back to our 360 topic of the week counting traffic with door. We talked about them a couple weeks ago and our new segment and our storytime segment. And now Michael Guimarin from Dôr is here with us, Michael, thanks so much.

Michael Guimarin 30:36
Absolutely. Thank you for having me on.

Kevin Oakley 30:39
Yeah, you bet. So, Dôr for those of you who missed those other episodes is a company. I’ll say what I think they do. And then Michael will correct me. It is providing a solution to count, walk in traffic, retail traffic for lots of different industries and get caught our attention as something that may be the right answer for lot of home builders and developers out there as well. But tell us quickly how Dôr came about and what problem you’re trying to solve kind of the origin story. Sometimes we use superhero analogies on the show, Michael, So what’s what’s kind of the origin story of Dôr?

Michael Guimarin 31:15
Yeah, absolutely. So our company came about a few years ago when Michael brand the CEO, so everyone’s name in the company is Michael makes things a lot easier. When he he had this thought that with smartphones, making small sensors a lot cheaper, that you would be able to instrument, a lot of spaces, commercial and otherwise. And he realized that there wasn’t a really good way to measure foot traffic for commercial spaces. The traditional systems use these stereoscopic video cameras that were difficult to install, difficult to maintain and difficult to calibrate. And so he asked, okay, is Would it be possible to make a sensor that is much simpler, that people could install and two, three minutes, and you know, start getting that data immediately. And basically, once they had the first prototype, and they started showing it to small businesses, people got really excited. And one thing led to another and now we’re a series A funded startup with 12 and a half million dollars under our belt here in San Francisco, just about 35 people. Wow. And

Kevin Oakley 32:19
I stalked a little bit on Michael as well. And he has some background in hardware design with Apple, right. So it’s not, it sounds very similar to a nest or other kind of even smart home technology companies that have been created with with Apple, former Apple executives.

Michael Guimarin 32:37
Exactly. So Michael and the CTO, Greg actually met at Apple. And they I believe we’re on the iPod team. And one of the big things that they had talked about is that a lot of technology in the retail space and in commercial spaces is quite ugly. And so since the beginning, design has been a very important part of door. And actually the sensors are quite beautiful, very simple, very minimalist, nothing extra, nothing fancy, you know, it’s something they actually take pride in is the design aspect of it. And I find that really nice, actually. Cool, we’ll hop in more into the device itself and what door does, but let’s back up a second and talk about walking in traffic as a whole because you guys door wasn’t developed for home builders. And developers, your kind of first plan of attack is going after retailers, which kind of very similar to what Home Builders do And in some ways, but talk to about talk to us about walking traffic for retailers. And in today’s digital world, is that still a concern that they have? What does that look like? Talk to us about what the pain point that you’re trying to solve for retailers and how they view? Yeah, sure. What is causing that pain? Sure. So for a lot of retailers, their physical spaces carry very high fixed costs, right online is great, you know, you don’t have to employ workers, it’s easier from inventory management’s perspective, because you can centralize everything in a distribution center. But a lot of these folks still have large store presences. And what they’re finding out is that the store experience is a huge component of their brand value, and why people come to them. And so foot traffic is really an important metric for retailers, because it allows them to connect the bottom of their marketing funnel with the top of their sales funnel. And basically, to walk through what that looks like, you’ll spend money in a in a geography, maybe print radio, even digital ads, to get people into your stores to experience your customer service, and then hopefully to buy your products. And if you’re not counting foot traffic, then it’s difficult to separate out a good location from a good management team. Or really to understand if the promotions that you’re running are being effective, right? Imagine you had a website, and you didn’t know how many people were visiting it every day, you just knew how many transactions took place. It’s very foreign to a lot of our digitally native brands who are opening stores. They say What do you mean, we don’t have this data of, you know, who comes to our website? That’s ridiculous. And, you know, we send them the device, and they have it installed within a couple of days. And, you know, then all of a sudden their analytics start to look the same.

Kevin Oakley 35:19
Yeah, that’s hilarious. Because we many years ago used to help homebuilders understand the importance of website by explaining that it was kind of your virtual model home. And that was home builders had no problem building a half million dollar model home and staffing it and putting collateral material and content in there and, and all the things that were necessary to make that work. But then at the beginning, when you ask them to start investing, quote, unquote, real money in their website and person to respond to leads on that site, etc, they were kind of like we don’t why would we do that this is just a our latest flyer and helping them understand speed you’re talking about, a lot of people kind of circle around the other way and seeing the the importance that that physical location has on their digital business. It’s always huge go to any mall in the United States, and you will see a store vacancies in the stores that are really thriving are the ones that you know, are just in time, or they have really high quality customer experiences. And I think everybody really wants that. And I think that’s what’s making people stand out. And so they need foot traffic data,

Andrew Peek 36:18
with your product with a retail store, be able to track say, I’ll buy I’ll like authority and promotion for a certain type of product. I would imagine you could place the sensors in more than one location and kind of get a just like a website, you’re like, Okay, did people view this product category? Or this this floor plan? Yeah, do the same type of type of thing? I would, I would think,

Michael Guimarin 36:40
yeah, exactly. A lot of people want to do that. And in fact, there are a lot of companies that claim to do that in the space. Our technology is not particularly good at that, because we require a doorway, which actually led to kind of a funny story with a home building a very large home building retailer, where they’re like, Okay, well, we’ll just create a doorway on every single one of our aisles really might be a little strange. And you know, when you have these ideas about how things are going to work, and then you try them in the real world, and you realize just how ridiculously hard they are. And for us, just counting people that go under a standard American single or double door is a hard enough challenge. Looking at where people on an aisle or where they are in a store is an extremely difficult machine learning challenge. And I don’t think anyone has solved it yet. Wow.

Kevin Oakley 37:31
Yeah. Again, it is the only one who’s going to be close to that with their their stores. And that’s obviously not an inexpensive, simple and elegant device solution. Like what, what you guys are describing. And I also do not tell this to because I don’t want to get you in trouble. But it has to be either Menard or some like, I can’t imagine a Lowe’s or Home Depot being like, let’s build a doorway. It’s got to be someone like an artist, my guess?

Michael Guimarin 37:56
Yeah, no comment on that one. I will, I will say this about Amazon’s go stores to people. If you have one, you should visit one. They’re an incredible experience. And you should walk in and buy something like really simply like walk in pull water off the shelf or something and then walk out and see how long it takes to get a receipt and then walk in and maybe try and trick the system a little bit, and then walk out and see how long it takes to get a receipt. And you might you might be surprised at the latency between those two, which would suggest that perhaps it’s not working the way they claim that it’s working.

Kevin Oakley 38:31
I you know what? You’re my new person, Michael, just saying just try it. No, this is this is one of our big beefs. And just got an awesome question to follow up with you on but one of our big challenges with companies and technology suppliers, or marketing vendors is calling things artificial intelligence that you said without saying, right, there’s there’s some human element that’s there’s something flagging, saying, Hey, we’re not sure what’s happening here. And there’s like a human being who’s having to make a judgment call and fill in the gap, which doesn’t sound as slick or as cool. But as the reality of where we find a lot of artificial intelligence, or what people claim to be artificial intelligence today is,

Michael Guimarin 39:12
yeah, it’s as a technologist or as someone who in the valley, I wish more people would be upfront about and I’m not saying that Amazon is doing this, although you can gather evidence for it. But yeah, you know, the idea of using people who are a lower cost per hour to manually label data. That’s a great idea. Right? Like, and there are a ton of different contexts where that happening? Absolutely right. Like, think about like automated trucks, you don’t need the truck necessarily to be able to drive. But you could have a guy like in a in a warehouse somewhere who’s driving 15 trucks. Right. But I think people should be open about that sort of thing. But anyway, absolutely. No. and capture uses humans to solve that problem. Exactly. And a lot of ways, right. And so it’s also a great way to help those folks potentially, as long as the working conditions are good, and everything else good, get a better wage. So but I think it’s just that’s Anyway, here, my new favorite.

Kevin Oakley 40:12
I just think too many people are duped into signing up and paying a high level pricing for a product or service that actually doesn’t have much artificial intelligence yet.

Michael Guimarin 40:24
Totally. Yep. So okay.

Kevin Oakley 40:27
All right, Andrew.

Andrew Peek 40:29
That was awesome. And this is I thought this was a super simple question. But after the last one, like, well, maybe it’s, maybe it’s not, have you found work with retailers? is walking traffic more or less valuable? Maybe like my comment after this? Like, maybe we don’t? We don’t know, if we’re not able to track as much?

Michael Guimarin 40:48
Yeah, that’s I thought we did, you know, I feel for retailers, because there are a lot of shifts going on in the American economy. And I think, you know, all of us who’ve been adults for 1020 years can tell you that things are drastically different. And they get a ton of advice from different folks who are industry experts, or commentators or consulting firms about, you gotta have data, and they’re drowning in data. And so when we talk about foot traffic, I think one of the most important stories for them is the simplicity of it, and how it’s easy to say something like let’s rank all of our stores by foot traffic, and then compare that to the ranking of all of our stores by revenue. And gaining insights from something like that, like simplifying the process of processing, all of that data that I found has been really resonant. And people appreciate that, as opposed to saying, here’s my data scientist, and he’s going to talk to you about a dozen, you know, PhD level correlations. And it’s very difficult in a lot of times to connect that complexity and that level of back insight to real business drivers, right, like one of the ones I like to talk about is, okay, so you notice that your best customer is a five foot five tall woman who has red hair, what’s the business insight that you can get from understanding that, like, you’re going to tell your all your associates to only talk to that person? I mean, it’s kind of absurd, right? But that’s, that’s the level of data that people are collecting. And that’s the challenge that they have. And that’s where they’re defaulting to, which kind of goes into the question that I had, which your approach is not meaning to sound negative, because I actually think it’s brilliant. But it’s lower tech, and that you’re not trying to connect with Bluetooth, you’re not trying to use facial recognition to identify that this person is a female, or five foot five, you’re trying to just simply count the thermal signature of a human being passing through a doorway. Do you think that just talking to me about privacy concerns of devices that are are not like, or how that has played out in the landscape of Yeah, well, so I think, I don’t think many Americans are aware just how much data is collected about them. And I joined door because it was a lot of ways the least surveillance the surveillance company that I had ever come across. And the basic idea was, we want to try and collect the absolute minimum amount of data to provide the most business value. And when you get right down to it, just knowing that someone came in, or they went out it, it gets you like 60, or 70% of the way there, because there’s so much you can do around looking at the effectiveness of promotions, looking at the, what’s called a z squared score for like the weather, and all this other stuff that foot traffic can tell you and then you don’t need to collect everyone’s birth certificate records all the way up through, you know, when the last time they ate at McDonalds was, you know, and, and people. It’s crazy. And this idea of an omni channel cookie, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, basically. Oh, yeah. I, I worked my entire life in Silicon Valley. And you’re just like, wow, you know, there’s absolutely nothing that these guys don’t know about you when you walk into their store. And as a consumer, I just find that wrong. So I anyway, I appreciate that we collect.

Kevin Oakley 44:17
So for everyone else, though, listening just quickly, omnichannel cookie kind of talk to give a quick

Michael Guimarin 44:23
Yeah, so it’s basically you know, your computer, when you browse websites, those websites store information on that you went to them. And there are other ad networks that can extract that information through a series of legal partnerships, and build a model of your behavior. And what an omni channel cookie is, is that it uses some personally identifiable information, like your cell phone has special numbers associated just with it. And they try and connect that cell phone with your online digital persona. And it’s at the level now where you walk into a store in some instances. And mostly this doesn’t happen in the United States, because people are, I think are a little bit afraid to go full bore. But you walk into a store and the sales rep has a point of sale tablet that tells them everything about you. Just everything instantly. Wow. Right? And you can imagine I had a I had someone tell me a story about how they were training sales associates in another country that does this. And you know, a really kind of rich person walked in relative to their normal clientele. And all the sales people were like leaving their customers to go talk to that person. Yeah, that’s, that’s a great, that’s a great thing. And that hopefully doesn’t happen soon in the US. But

Kevin Oakley 45:40
well, I think the point that you’re making, which I completely again, agree with is, for the last decade, everyone has been working to get this attribution and connection. From the beginning to the end, I can see where Kevin or Michael first clicked or interacted to every purchase, they’d be in every source. And I just to me, as most companies are just now starting to get to the point where they can get within 75 80% of that, Mark. I think the privacy movement in this country, especially, is heading to the point that by the time they get there, you’re not going to be able to do it anyway. Or you’re going to wish you never had

Michael Guimarin 46:20
you know, it’s very difficult to put technologies back in the box, especially when they’re so inexpensive. And relatively speaking, these technologies are very inexpensive for the amount of value that you get. Yeah, yeah, I think it should be very interesting. I mean, we just had another so I live in San Francisco, they’ve banned facial recognition technology and a couple of contexts. We just had another minutes palette in the USB and facial recognition technology in Massachusetts, it would be interesting to me to see how many people end up doing that. And then of course, there are a whole lot of concerns with using facial recognition and other PII when you maybe have like a European citizen coming to the United States because of something called GDPR. All right. And as a home builder, or as a retailer where your core competency is building homes and selling people things that they want. Having to understand the international implications of storing personally identifiable information about German citizens visiting your you know, home in Iowa, is insane. And so I think if people can reduce the amount of information that they collect, it will actually be a net benefit in the future. And as a privacy conscious person, that makes me happier, because now they don’t know, you know, that I use crest toothpaste as an example.

Kevin Oakley 47:33
Right. And that’s where we know our consumers and customers are also going to be glad when we can say that we either no longer do this or never have done this. I think it’s a it’s a potential strength. And I agree with you, the technology is not going to go away unless the government mandates it. Although your own legal team may, in that example of someone from Europe, going online requesting information from a home builder, as they’re thinking about relocating Taiwan mean, that still is inside.

Michael Guimarin 48:01
I can’t even imagine the liability. Yep. How does Dôr track to not be like that, as far as like, what’s the mechanism of tracking, I don’t think we covered that, how it actually works doors and infrared sensor, there’s actually a number of sensors on the device. And they’re all extremely low resolution. And what that means is the data that comes off in this very basic. And so the primary most advanced sensor on our device is eight by eight pixels in the infrared spectrum. So you think about like predator for a second. It’s only 64 pixels, which you cannot get PII from that. And just those 64 pixels are a difficult enough problem for us to separate out like a group of people walking under the sensor. And then what direction are they walking so that we get ins versus outs. And so it’s a hard enough machine learning challenge as it is just to do that. And in terms of PII, it’s just not possible for the sensor to collect that sort of information. And because we’re, I didn’t, we didn’t say this yet, but door is peel and stick and therefore better battery powered. When we connect to the cloud. The only thing that gets sent is a message that says this is the time someone walked in, someone walked out. So there’s no, there’s no way to actually extract data out of our system at any level, to get identifiable information. And in fact, I have a customer that is very sensitive. And if you knew who the customer was, you would understand why and their government customer that uses this to track through a secure facility. And they are very comfortable with it because it doesn’t collect any information. And it’s extremely difficult to get into the device number one and number two, even if you did what you’re going to get a heat blob. not helpful. He

Andrew Peek 49:47
like it. Cool.

Kevin Oakley 49:50
Back well know that that is awesome. And that that let’s start diving into a little bit more of practical application and how this actually works and potential homebuilder uses. So unlike your large home building supply company, home builders have lots of doorways. And that was one of the things that intrigued me is home builders often get have gotten pushback when they’ve tried to use trip sensors, or light sensors, or the main door to the sales office opening. The pushback has always been well, those folks are you know, the construction guy is coming in and out four times a day, salesperson went out to go get lunch and came back or, you know, there’s all this all this noise in the system. And it seems like in particular home builders who are in someplace with 30 different doorways or 20 different doorways, they can choose a potential location, with it being battery operated, where they know there still may be some noise. But the majority of the people who are going to go walk through the master closet doorway, are on a tour. They’re actually shopping versus someone coming back for their fourth visit and only going in the sales office to sign a piece of totally. And then I

Michael Guimarin 50:57
think it was you guys. So I’ve had a number of homebuilders call up just Curiously, I think it was you guys who suggested the master bathroom. I think that was brilliant. Because it does solve a lot of the UPS driver type situations in terms of, you’re not going to have your sales associate using the master bathroom unless they’re actually showing a client. And so that signal noise ratio gets a lot better. Right? Thank you guys for that. But yeah, because the sensors are peel and stick and we use those three m command strips that you may remember using if you have rental and you wait,

Kevin Oakley 51:30
you’re supposed to say you’re using a proprietary AI engineered? Oh, yeah. Okay. Nice. Oh, yeah.

Michael Guimarin 51:39
Yeah, okay. It just doesn’t jive with me personally. But maybe the company will write that. Yeah, this is, what I was gonna say is they allow you to install the sensor, collect some data, right. And then you can just move the sensor if you decide you don’t want that door. And I wouldn’t necessarily move locations without telling us because you would actually want us to cut the data off, then start a new location so that when you’re doing your analysis, you’re not actually completing to, but certainly you could move from say, like, the side entrance or the garage door, entrance to the master bathroom at the same location, if you decide that the traffic pattern is weird, or, you know, turns out that the people who are visiting this particular model home, don’t visit the master bathroom, for whatever reason, you can just do that.

Kevin Oakley 52:23
Now, which also might be interesting to know. So that’s another use case potentially, is putting multiple sensors in a home. That is a newer design, to get feedback of where people are naturally interested in and moving through the home in which rooms they may Yeah, totally to no interest in. Good idea. And so this information is pushed to the cloud, once it gets to the cloud, or our users enabled to export it into Excel, CSV, other formats, if they want to pull it into something like a Data Studio, or a Power BI or something else like that. Is there a capability to do that? Or does it only be done within the cloud? Yes, service itself? So

Michael Guimarin 53:02
the answer to all those questions is yes, we have a dashboard that allows people to be empowered to do interesting things, they can also click a button that will actually download an Excel file. If they want to go a little bit more sophisticated, we can drop a CSV, which you then can import into basically any modern analytics tool. And then our most sophisticated users and think about guys who have like hundreds to thousands of locations, will actually use something called an API. And they’ll actually write some custom code to connect their API Sure, ingest system two hours and then pull the data that way.

Kevin Oakley 53:37
Okay, so we work with some web design firms who use API’s all the time. And so for those who want to invest in that I’m not obviously I’m it may or may not be super expensive API’s. Kind of like a I see sometimes people, it’s very expensive to connect that. But so if the website of a homebuilder could call that API and pull traffic data and line that up in their own CMS, or back end system, potentially, someone could see traffic and physical traffic in the same

Michael Guimarin 54:10
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of really, as I’m talking with the homebuilders, there are a lot of very interesting use cases, in terms of let’s rank houses in a metro area, let’s rank all kinds of things. Let’s look over time. I mean, a lot of this stuff is stuff, you know, like most people come in on the weekends, but you may find that there’s, you know, a little bit of variance that you may not have otherwise guessed, and then the, the accuracy is a lot higher than using a person. So a lot of people who are coming to us for the reasons we’ve already discussed, don’t use the traditional foot traffic counters. So they have their sales associates doing it. And even the best sales associates are still people until they may make mistakes. Whereas this system is, you know, it just, it’s just supposed to count people, and it doesn’t have any sort of bias.

Kevin Oakley 54:55
Right. And you would never say this. But sometimes people make mistakes, and sometimes coming sales, people want to be able to just say they need more traffic, because they couldn’t convert the 25 that they saw last week,

Michael Guimarin 55:07
oh, I would totally say that. We have retailers this to happen all the time. I mean, we have to be really honest about how the data is, is being used. And we really have to make sure that everyone from the store manager and the retail employees all the way up to the C suite, if they’re looking at the data, understands all of the context and the potential incentives that people have to cheat, or, you know, put tape over the sensor or, you know, I mean, people are people, right? Like, if you, if you go in and you tell them, Hey, we’re using this to, you know, fix the marketing, or to get you guys more resources or to understand training, there’s a ton of positive reasons to use the data other than like, we’re going to track your performance, then people can be a lot more friendly about it. And then they’re very excited to do this. Because, you know, they feel like they’re helping out to make the whole company better.

Kevin Oakley 55:57
Awesome. Okay. Little bit more the device itself, roughly, how how big is this device?

Michael Guimarin 56:04
Yeah, it’s, it weighs about a pound. And I would say it’s probably like eight inches wide, two inches tall and about two inches deep.

Kevin Oakley 56:11
So pretty much any any doorway? Obviously. That’s what it’s made to go. Yeah, we’ll be fine. It is it is Apple White. Yes. Joke. So most homebuilders are going to have white woodwork in today’s world. So that’s gonna, that’s going to blend in well, with that, in terms of a case opening around a doorway as well. Any lights or physicals things on the outside that would draw people’s attention? Or let you know, when someone has been counted? No,

Michael Guimarin 56:38
there’s nothing that indicates that they’re being counted. Yeah, we the devices are designed to be very unobtrusive, and to sort of fit into this year style that you’ve just described. So like, I put one up in my house, and my wife didn’t notice it for like a week. And then it was over my office door. But because I was trying to test out like, you know, every company claims Oh, yeah, it’s really easy. Anyone can do it. And you know, the reality of that is you have to test it. And I wanted to test that out. Yeah, it really did take me about three minutes to install, which was surprised. So is the setup similar to when you get a new Alexa device in your home? And you’ve got a you’re just talking about the kind of simple steps to set up once I stick it on the doorway. Yeah. So what comes down? Yeah, totally. So the the device, we’re now and I think our fifth or sixth iteration of it, basically, there’s a back plate that you pull the command strips on. And then the reason why there’s a back plate and then the main devices so that you can replace the batteries. Basically, it’s battery powered. And then it has a square in a circle. So it’s not possible to mount the device improperly with magnets, and then it just sticks on. And then you push a button and it beeps. And then it works.

Kevin Oakley 57:47
Wow. So it’s predefined to go to the right place in the cloud, or how does that

Michael Guimarin 57:51
Yeah, so there, there is a activate process depending on so this is where it gets complicated, because different customers of mine have different ideas about how they want to integrate this into their stacks. So the devices all have serial numbers, and there is a like a software activation process. But it’s literally like, Oh, great, you know, go to activate calm, enter the serial number and then press enter and take a picture of the device. Because what will frequently happen, even though they’re supposed to be very simple. I would say about a third of the devices need to be moved just due to human error. Yeah, let’s put it that way.

Andrew Peek 58:26
Yep, yep, catch it, they might put it like above say door right above the trim. And then that could block some of the sensor or something like that would be exactly

Michael Guimarin 58:35
that would be the sort of a general explanation for what happened. I couldn’t explain to you. Like, there’s a diagram there’s a video how to install it. We include a piece of paper and just a lot of things and the company

Kevin Oakley 58:48
trust Oh, yeah. Michael, I did tech support for dial up in Okay, when I was in college. And so there were a number of people who would call in and say their internet didn’t work, I would just ask them to make sure their computer was plugged in to the wall that solved a lot of my calls, too. So I I get well, I get it.

So to wrap up here, all this data getting pushed the cloud, is there any type of general recommendation in terms of ideas or strategy of how how to try to connect that walking traffic data to Google Analytic data or other data that they may be collecting? Obviously, that’s a complex question. But anything high level that mistakes that people make, or, or things that you would say, start simple and in this direction?

Michael Guimarin 59:37
Yeah. So I think personally, in this context, if you have, like 10 model homes that are instrumented, and you therefore know how much traffic each one is getting, I would rank them by traffic. And then I would, you know, make the second column in my Excel spreadsheet, how much money I spend on marketing per month. And just do a comparison like that, you know, keep it simple. If you’re, if you’re asking a generalist question like that, it means that you may not have a very sophisticated process, and that’s okay. And so you should start small, and just try and get like the bare minimum, right? So you just the first enrichment is like, how much am I spending to get these people, right? Because in retail, you really want three statistics? How many people are coming to my locations? What percentage of them are converting? So in your context, maybe it’s filling out a registration card? And then the third one is, How much money did you spend per person to get them there? And if you know those three numbers, you can change your entire business?

Kevin Oakley 1:00:34
Yeah. So hit rewind, 30 seconds that that button on the left on your iPhone, and re listen to that, again, because there’s all kinds of great, those are three simple ones. But you can quickly riff off a couple of those and comment on builder challenges and say, oh, man, that could help me there to Michael, thanks so much for hopping on. And you don’t have to, but any anything around pricing, or ideas of pricing or ranges that she’d like to help people understand kind of how this system works?

Michael Guimarin 1:01:07
Yeah, absolutely. So I think a lot of people don’t have budget for foot traffic counters in homebuilding. And that’s fine. You know, our technology is for retail. So we’re making a pretty drastic price cut. But if you’re willing to commit to an annual contract, we’re willing to make the price around hundred dollars a month. So 1200 dollars for the sensor for the year on that annual contract. And then the hardware, the hardware is it does cost about $400. And basically, depending on volume, we can discount that hardware down to two free, right. So if you’re coming at us with more than 100 locations, no hardware costs. And we do all the maintenance and support and repair and all that kind of thing. Again, depending on where you put them. We have customers who sell mattresses right, and the mattress will hit the device and it’ll fall off and break. They’re actually designed to break away elegantly, but they do break and we do we do something important fix them when they’re under contract. So it’s definitely full service. We just want you to install them and then collect the data. But yeah, that’s that’s what we’re trying to get for the homebuilders is basically to make it $100 a month per doorway that they want to track.

Kevin Oakley 1:02:14
Awesome. And Michael said this earlier, but they are a series a startup, right?

Michael Guimarin 1:02:20
Yes, we’re a series a startup, we’ve raised 12 and a half million, we have about 35 people in San Francisco, and a few people across the US, we mostly only sell to the US. And you know, we’re already in facilities, retail all kinds of contexts, just because people don’t really, this technology was like 10 to 50 times more expensive before door entered. And so all of a sudden, there’s a lot of new use cases with us.

Kevin Oakley 1:02:44
Well, I’m also re emphasizing that to give you the out of if you are listening to this podcast in the year 2024 or something. He may Yeah, things change rapidly in startups in terms of pricing and product and all the rest. So absolutely, yeah, very generous of you to give a pricing model that you’re in now. But understand that, you know things do change rather rapidly and startup land. So thanks again for hopping on. Michael, you are my new favorite person who works at a traffic counting company in San Francisco.

Michael Guimarin 1:03:13
Sure. Love it. Thank you, Kevin.

Andrew Peek 1:03:17
Yep, thank you. It was great.

Kevin Oakley 1:03:37
That was a blast talking to Michael. He really is my new favorite person from San Francisco that we talked to today. I mean, just his his frankness about how artificial intelligence has been positioned and used at times inappropriately, just to try to get people excited. It was awesome. A lot of clarity, really simple direct stuff, but but really helpful for for building and others in terms of tracking foot traffic. And that’s going to continue on into this week’s new question of the week. But first, let’s go back to the answers from our previous question the week which was, which project management tools do you use to keep yourself and your team organized? And we did a survey style with a lot of options here. So and not all the Jedi mind tricks? If I click it, but no one knows. Yeah. So most popular, and then we’ll read a couple quick comments at the end Google Drive, and base camp or the top two. Interesting, then email, which is scary as heck, that project management tool to keep yourself organized. Cool. So you can select more than the box. So it’s a

Andrew Peek 1:04:47
right. It’s part of the whole picture.

Kevin Oakley 1:04:49
Yeah. Right. So yeah, I’m looking at the people who checked that box. And they also checked Google Drive and base camp and other things. Trello not far behind. And we’re starting to like that more and more as we start using that a lot bit ourselves. It’s a little different format. Excel. Oh, yeah. There you go. Andrew. Yeah, see? rows and columns, right. What does Monday mean? Is that an app?

Jackie Askews 1:05:11
night? Yeah, I guess.

Andrew Peek 1:05:14
You haven’t seen their ads there. Maybe they’re all over face on my Facebook. It’s like the anti, at least the way I perceive their ads. It’s like the anti project management tool tool. And their video that they make interesting, it looks like Trello. Like, they definitely have the I don’t know the correct name for it, like the Trello board. You know, the vertical stacks. It has like the Gantt chart thing, you know, where you have dependent, the dependencies, and the dates, and all that stuff. And then Excel type of friendliness, where you could just do things

Jackie Askews 1:05:46
very needed. Yes. gonna say that’s

Andrew Peek 1:05:49
so that’s interesting. But it’s looks affordable. Some of those

Kevin Oakley 1:05:54
round things out, Google Keep and one drive. We’re in there. And then, Renee, Renee, I love I always love your honesty. I have admittedly all over the board, but open for suggestions company wide, we use Google Drive, but email tends to be my best form of organization. In that if it’s in my inbox, it needs action. Yeah, I think the biggest hiccup and Mike loves to teach people about this live in person at our summit. Other times is when things need action, but you can’t take action right now what happens that’s usually when email breaks down, and you have the 6000 unread email, because you might need a Sunday, but today is not that day. And what do you do in the meantime? And then Shannon? Said, or Shannon, I sorry, Shannon, I know your name is Ashley. But it says Shannon Ashley. So sorry, not sorry. Short Trello Google Docs sheets slack. I like Slack, too, is like it’s just a good way to get things that do not require action, but just conversation around things similar to base camp, one of the reasons I do like base camp is being able to have a conversation next to milestones and and to do’s as well. But awesome. And our new question of the week, how do you? Or do you? So how do you measure traffic and your model homes currently? Or do you even measure it, and I’ll be the first raise my hand and say there was a point and at our time when heartland was private, before we were acquired, where for about two and a half years, we only use lasso to measure all traffic on site traffic as well as online traffic. And to get that process. You know, of course, we had paper cards, we had the reports went back and forth. And once we got those numbers, terms of lasso, and that other method, within about an 80% consistency of those numbers correlating, we discover killing this other thing, and we’re we’re only using this CRM and that was a big win for us. But a lot of people that we interact with and and work with his builder partners still are measuring foot traffic outside of the city. So do you use paper cards? do use digital registration tools? Do you have a self contained kiosk where they can do floor plans registration and all those things together? Is it just on an iPad? Is it on the wall a TV would love to hear how you guys are measuring foot traffic in your model homes and sale centers today? And if it’s part of the CRM, that’ll be an option in the answer as well. If you’re just using the CRM, that’s perfectly okay. Yeah, it’s consistent. But I think it’s just interesting, kind of like phone calls, you know, gosh, four or five years ago, everyone’s like, Oh, yeah, measuring phone calls. And now that’s ubiquitous, everyone’s measuring their phone calls. And we’re still those who have made the jump to only do it in this CRM, they’re kind of like, yeah, it’s a black box, we don’t really know. I mean, I was talking to someone yesterday, and I’m about to have a coaching call with their boss. Today, she showed me this chart that they’re using, and the sales people are putting in a manual thing in a Google Sheet. They’re submitting stuff in then they also have, so then they also have another document I’m like, and none of it as an agreement with each other. So you just pick which one you like, at any given point, or why why are we doing so many different versions of this? I just think it’d be good for us to talk as a group in that Facebook group about how you guys are doing this and, and try to help each other out.

Andrew Peek 1:09:20
Very cool question. Love it.

Kevin Oakley 1:09:22
That’ll do it for this week for published articles, blog posts, videos, and more check out do you convert com. It’s also the best way to find out how to connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and everywhere else. So we are online. Have a fantastic week, and we’ll see you next time. See you next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Ep 57: Measuring Walk-In Traffic with Michael Guimarin [TRANSCRIPT] appeared first on Online Sales and Marketing for Home Builders - DYC.