That is the kiwi translation that those of us who sometimes darken the door of geek and business events all know, albeit slightly sanitised, because no-one expects a builder to know swearing words of profanity, right? (or maybe we are supposed to know them, but not use them, I dunno)
Guts is, we have been working this product lineup for a while – I built a messy messy messy database, which helps us produce reports a fair bit faster than the old hunt and peck method ever could, but heck, this game is still time consuming.
For reference, our average time on site is now back up to just under 2 hours. Why? We started collecting plans. This lets us answer some very specific questions, mainly prompted by the residential tenancies act, and healthy homes guarantees act. But it also plays into our goal to know more about your house than anyone.The idea, is big data, applied to houses – How long does a roof last? When will my hot water cylinder fail? What cladding actually requires more maintenance? Which suburbs grow moss or lichen faster? What renos are objectively the best value for money? Etc etc.
Time offsite, well, 15 odd minutes to collate 2.7k head camera videos (Gopro hero 7 black, awesome stability, good microphone, terrible file naming convention!!) another 10 minutes to set and forget processing for our 5.7k 360 degree videos, which typically take an hour or two to process per house. The basic file structure setup, so that when you click buy, you get the correct and complete report, well, that is in theory easy to automate. In practice, its easier to break! Then comes the writeup. My world record time is 27 minutes. Normally however, it is more like 2 or so hours per inspection.
- 15 mins – Drive the cool little prosperbuild BMW i3 to the house.
- 120 mins – Inspect
- 10 mins – collate data sources onsite
- 15 Mins – Drive return
- 15 mins – Gopro vids
- 10 mins – Insta 360 oneX vids (plus 2 hrs processing)
- 120 mins – Produce your report
- 20 Mins – Collate data sources to cloud and stick em on the webshop.
That’s 5 hours and 25 minutes, not allowing for CPD, research, admin, overhead etc that is necessary for both our software, and technical inspecting. The new system aims to about half that!
This is kind of a round about way of saying, man, we are pretty good at collecting whack data, and doing awesome stuff with it (You want to know REDACTED about REDACTED? We already collect and compare that!) But sometimes we suck a bit at getting the material out the door where it matters to you, as fast as we would like… And if we don’t immediately jump on text messages etc, it is probably because distraction is far too easy a road to meander down, which only delays things more! (but hey, if you have ever rung me, you will know I do love a good yarn with good people!)
To that end, very shortly, our reports appearance will change – a new, more fully featured system is just around the corner, one that uses a LOT of logic, JSON, and some pretty gnarly back end gymnastics to try and punch our written report out by the time our video has finished processing, (or even before!) – its a frikken nightmare to make that look as pretty pretty as the offerings of our last few years, but we will. I have broken the system more times than I care to count, but you guys made it pretty clear – a day timeframe, in this day and age, its too long, now is far gooderer. I have worked a bunch of 14 hour days this year, with one end goal in mind – I have done enough breaking sheet, now its time to go fast (and learn everything about your property, so we can tell it to you in a way which doesn’t sound like we are speaking in martian)
Thanks for the love, and continuing support as we learn to grow better!
Jonno
Hey, one of the next steps is an easy to use CRM, that is basically JonnoProof - It has to chase me, because I am a bit rubbish at chasing it. It needs to poll me after my phone rings - was that work? What did they want? Who was it? I'll save the number and categorise it for you, without leaving it to the vagiaries of your memory! Heck, even attaching recordings might be good (forgettery, nothing to do with paranoia!) Any suggestions for an on phone app which could do that, would be well received - this one would be a pain if it has to hit the cloud!
