Seth: Hey folks, how's it going? Seth Williams here. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. This is episode 206, and today I get to talk with one of the VPs of Launch Control, Michael Bartolomei.

For the past couple of years, text marketing has been an emerging marketing channel that has grown in popularity for a lot of land investors. It has great benefits to offer that other marketing channels don't, and there are ways you can make it work a lot better if you have a firm grasp on how to use it, how to use it in conjunction with other marketing channels, understanding some of the best practices, and also if you can recognize its limitations and not try to make it do things it wasn't ever really intended to do.

In this conversation, Michael and I are going to discuss the things that every land investor needs to know about text marketing, how to know if this is the right way for you to find motivated sellers, and the do's and don'ts of text marketing. We'll even get into some of the common problems that I hear people mention about text marketing in general, and we'll hear what Michael has to say about that.

By the way, if you find this conversation helpful and if you want to give Launch Control a try, you can help support the REtipster community by signing up through our affiliate link. Just go to retipster.com/launchcontrol. You can also find that link and a lot of other helpful info in the show notes at retipster.com/206.

Michael, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Michael: Thanks for having me on. 206 episodes—congratulations. That's quite an accomplishment.

Seth: I know, the time has just flown by. For those who might not be familiar with Launch Control, what exactly is Launch Control? What does this do? How does it help real estate investors and specifically land investors in their marketing efforts?

Michael: Launch Control is a text engagement software. The easiest way to look at it is what we do when we send out messages—we send messages in a batch. A batch can be 50, 100, or 150. So let's just look at it from a use case of one batch.

When you're a land investor, you want to have individual conversations, one-on-one conversations with landowners who could potentially be looking to sell. But taking the time to do an actual one-on-one outreach to each one of them via text to engage and see if you get interest coming back can be really time-restrictive. Basically what we do is enable you to have a multitude of those one-on-one conversations in a centralized place. So you'll send out 100 messages, you'll get 20 responses back, 25 responses back, and you're able to process those conversations in real-time and know which conversations are going to progress to the point of getting onto a discovery call and really getting into the details of finding a solution that works for both you and the seller.

Seth: I'm curious because I think Launch Control may be somewhat unique in this—maybe I'm wrong about this—but those limitations on the batches of 50 or 100 or 150, what's the usefulness of those limitations? How is that helpful or why do those limitations exist?

Michael: Well, there's a couple of reasons. Part of compliance on a tech level is that no one can use an auto-dialer. So you can't have one message being flung out to 30,000 people—it goes against TCPA regulations. What you can do, as an individual who isn't selling a product or service, is reach out one-on-one to an individual seller, whether it's a distressed property seller or someone looking to sell land. So what we're doing is simply enabling you to process more of those one-on-one engagements.

Even when you send out a batch of 150, you're still pressing send. It takes less than a minute to send 150 messages, but you're still sending an individualized message. We have features within the app which will add variation to all of your messages, so each one of those 150 people is receiving a unique message. It's just creating an ecosystem of one-on-one engagement.

The bigger reason for that limitation is that we did a lot of data testing to see how many messages could be actively processed in real-time because it's something we call the speed of texting. If you think about texting just in your everyday life—if you send me a message that says, "Hey, Michael, are you going to be on time for the podcast today?"—you're still holding your phone in your hand because the expectation with text is that I am going to reply immediately.

When people get a text message, the phone buzzes, they look at their phone, they take it out of their pocket, which I happen to have my phone in my pocket. They look at their phone and they answer. So you're going to hold that phone waiting for the answer because you've initiated an active conversation.

Unlike other marketing, passive marketing like direct mail for instance, where you send it out, you wait for them to process it, you wait for them to think through it, you wait for them to call you—texting is live. It's in the moment. You can start conversations every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. But you have to remember that it's active. They're holding their phone waiting for that response. So when we limit it to 150, it's because if you're getting 20, 25 responses, even given the automation features of the app, there's only so much you can process before the person puts their phone away and you lose opportunity. We don't want you to lose opportunity.

Seth: You actually just touched on something briefly. I wasn't planning on getting into this until far into the conversation, but you mentioned the auto-dialer thing. So one of the questions I was going to sort of grill you on later on is this question of, is it true that cold texting is technically breaking the law? Because in a lot of cases, you're not supposed to blind text a company or a person who hasn't opted in first.

I was looking into this more to try to figure out what the law or the code actually says from the TCPA. This is verbatim: it says that "it shall be unlawful for any person within the U.S. or any person outside the U.S. to make a call other than a call made for emergency purposes using any automatic telephone dialing system or artificial or prerecorded voice to any telephone number assigned to a cellular telephone service."

And what I'm thinking is that the way that you guys get around this whole "it's illegal to cold text people" thing is because it's not an auto-dialer because you are hitting send every single time. Is that accurate? Am I on the right track?

Michael: That's half of it. TCPA, the federal guidelines, those have been around forever, and they were really enacted initially to keep people from robo-dialing because when that first came out, there were a lot of these situations where you pick up the phone, you hear that pause that everyone hates, and then it engages. So all of those regulations actually weren't related to text—they were related to the phone conversations and to keep companies from using those auto-dialers for mass marketing.

Now, when it comes to text, you can't be U-Haul and have U-Haul text the entire continental United States with one text message that just goes out from auto-dialers saying, "Hey, moving anytime soon?" Because at that point, one, it's an auto-dialer, and two, it's blatantly selling a product or service that people didn't opt in for.

So half of compliance is on the tech side—is it an auto-dialer or is it not? Launch Control is not. But the onus for what the messaging going out and the data being used is on the sender. Any platform, Launch Control or otherwise, has to maintain compliance by not being an auto-dialer. But the sender has control over the data and the messaging that goes out.

Now, if you are in real estate and you are engaging in one-on-one conversations, you are not selling a product or service. There's another part of that statute that you quoted—it says that it can't be used for direct marketing for selling a product or service that has not been opted in. But there's nothing illegal about you sending me a text message as an individual, like a driving for dollars sort of situation. I mean, like, "Hey, I looked up your number on county records. I'm looking to buy land in the county. My name is Seth..." But there's nothing illegal about that. You're just an individual reaching out to an individual.

So again, what Launch Control is predicated on is building up that ecosystem of one-on-one conversations and not straying into the "30% discount" marketing, selling a product or service range of things.

Here's an important distinction because I want everyone to really understand the risk profiles associated with this. Because if anybody comes in and says there's no risk—it's just not true. And so people need to understand what the risk profile is before they get involved in texting at all.

I should preface this by saying, I am not a legal compliance representative. I do not have a law degree. I'm just well-versed based on years of experience in this. But if you want to come to Launch Control and you want to get involved and you really want to go through all the safety checks, we can recommend compliance specialist legal teams that can give you the full green light on all of that.

That legal precedence is in place that if you're not selling a product or service, that you're maintaining one-on-one outreach, that's fine. But imagine it from the recipient's standpoint. From the recipient's standpoint, they get one message from you, Seth. They don't answer, they get one more message from you, and then they stop receiving messages. What is the likelihood that they're going to be like, "I don't know this guy, I'm going to sue him?"—minuscule, right?

Now if that same person got 12 text messages from you in a three-day span—which you cannot do through Launch Control, we set safety protocols to make sure of that—but just as a point, right? Now it becomes predatory behavior. And predatory behavior is the kind of thing that triggers legal actions, because the recipient—you could poll 10,000 people across the United States—nobody knows anything that you just quoted to me. They don't know the TCPA guidelines. They don't know the carrier guidelines, the CTIA guidelines, which we'll dive into this, but that's where all of the changes have been in the last year or so is on a business-to-business carrier side.

The recipient doesn't know that. So for the recipient, it's a question of, does this feel right? Does this not feel right? And if they feel like it's an abusive situation, the risk profile goes up. If it's a soft introduction to a potential agreement for land, the risk profile is almost none. And so we send millions of messages a year. We work with thousands of investors on the land and distressed property side. We are not flooded with problems because it works. You're able to do this to maintain this in a healthy ecosystem, and it works just fine.

But does that recipient have the ability, if they feel like they're in a predatory situation, to attempt to pursue things legally? Sure, they can. At this point, it becomes TCPA law. So is it going to be seen legally as an individual reaching out to an individual? Or is it going to be seen as a business marketing and services?

If something legal does happen, then people have the choice to fight it or to settle it. And historically in REI, in the rare cases of this happening, people don't want to deal with it. The investors don't want to deal with it. They lean somewhat on LLC protections. Unless you have 10,000 names where everybody ticked the box and said, "Yes, I want to receive information from REtipster." Then in that case, if somebody sues you, you just go, "Here, I have this," and it gets tossed out because there's no question.

But in lieu of that, I can't promise a thousand percent safety, and nor can anyone else. It is a very slight assumed risk for cold outreach via text or email or whatever cold outreach you're doing. If the person hasn't said "I want this information from you," you run the risk—a very, very small risk, but there is a risk—of having to defend something on a compliance level. Does that make sense?

Seth: Yeah, it does. I'm curious, how often do you hear of people getting sued or threatened and stuff like this? And if they settle, what does that look like? Do they just pay them 5,000 bucks or something? Or is it less or more than that? I'm just curious, from your end, you probably hear about it more than anybody. How common of a thing is this?

Michael: But that's my point—we don't. If this was a massive problem, we would be getting flooded with complaints, and we'd have a ton of people leaving the platform. And we just don't. There are ambulance chasers out there that look for these kinds of text messages and can pursue things legally. And again, this is something that really... you got to talk to a compliance lawyer about this to see what the LLC protections are and all of that.

But this is an important distinction. There is no TCPA body that's out hunting around for these. It only gets triggered if the recipient triggers it, right? If the recipient feels like they felt like this was something wrong.

Seth: If it's an individual recipient claim, then the settlements—I don't know the numbers, but it's not that high and it's somewhat protected by LLC. There are TCPA litigators though, right? Like people—can you scrub them off your list and that kind of thing? And if so, how do you recommend people do that?

Michael: We have a system that anybody that's a known litigator gets scrubbed off of the list. So any data that you put into the system, it gets run through a background check, and any of those names are removed. So we can't promise 100% accuracy, but these services are very well vetted, and they do a good job. Any data that you put in, those litigious people, those hunters that are not even the seller that you want to reach out to, that you just unfortunately got put into a data set, we're going to scrub those out.

Seth: I don't know if you know anything about this—if you've heard this, this is probably a better question for an attorney—but I have heard a very similar issue coming up with ringless voicemail and cold calling, basically just avoiding this kind of TCPA issue. And one solution I've heard is that people can create just like an empty LLC that they use solely for the purpose of texting or sending ringless voicemails or cold calling so if that ever gets sued there's nothing to get to. Have you ever heard of that? Like, is that a bulletproof way to do this?

Michael: This is one that I'm going to punt, but maybe you say, go see where the ball landed. It's definitely something that you should talk to a compliance attorney about. And I would certainly say on the other end, in any land business or any real estate business, you're not going to put all of your eggs in one LLC. You're just not. As you expand, if you start a rental portfolio, you're probably going to have properties in a rental portfolio. You're going to have LLCs in different states. You're going to end up with that essentially network of LLCs to offer you shelter and protection for your business as it's scaling up.

So if you use that same logic for your marketing, it's a smart play regardless. And it's definitely something that I would look into. But there are certain people, certain investors that are just looking for ways to unlock the spray and pray approach—the most volume they can possibly send. It's more of a question of what they can get away with versus a question of what really works and what really resonates with the recipient.

And I think it's a very important thing to think about. Ultimately, what you're looking to do is to engage in a really thoughtful one-on-one conversation with the seller where... You and I have talked about some examples. The person is living in Southern California. They inherited property in Wisconsin. They've been sitting on it for 6 years. They're not planning to do anything with it. They don't want to go through the whole process of trying to find a buyer. You come in at 60% of market value, and they're like, "Yeah, I'll take that. I'll take that all day. That cash sounds great. That cash would be very useful to me in my life in Southern California." It's a win-win.

Michael: And so you want to get into those thoughtful solutions-based conversations. And investors are almost always thoughtful and almost always solution-based when they have them on the phone. Why would you not take that same approach to your first touchpoint? Why would you just throw an aggressive level of text engagement at a community to get them into a trusted conversation? The logic doesn't line up, right?

So even if there are these hacks that will provide safety and shelter, we should still be looking at this from a perspective of how do I activate the highest number of really good conversations with sellers instead of how can I most quickly text 4 million people across the continental U.S. to see how many deals I can shake out of that. Having a more measured and analytical approach that benefits the recipient is always the most effective way to do it.

Seth: Yeah, totally. Quick question on that. So you mentioned TCPA compliance attorney. For anybody who does have questions about this, and when we say talk to an attorney, there's the question of what kind of attorney? And is that what they should be Googling—is just "TCPA compliance attorney"? Like, is that the kind of person who would have these answers?

Michael: Or telecom compliance. Yeah. The word compliance has really been thrown around a lot in the last couple of years. And very fairly, people assume that that means legality, right? But honestly, except for within a couple of states, nothing has changed legally speaking. The same use case that was live and active five years ago is live and active today.

There's a slight perception difference in the distressed property market where people have gotten enough messages in distressed properties that they know that these are businesses behind the messages, right? And so there's just more awareness of the off-market investing community within distressed properties.

In land, you could answer this better than I could, but I feel like it's still kind of where distressed properties were 3 or 4 years ago, where the land sellers have not been receiving text messages into submission for the last few years. So it's kind of an open field, less competition, and a chance really to build a really productive engagement structure with land sellers because they haven't gotten to the point of frustration or oversaturation the way the distressed property market arguably has.

Seth: To start the conversation the right way, if somebody is going to be sending texts for the purpose of trying to find motivated sellers of land, what should a person say? Do you have examples of a best-performing intro script when reaching out to owners? Or is there anything people should not say when they get started?

Michael: It's not necessarily what you should not say, but originality matters and specifics matter. Because imagine you're driving through a rural area and you spot a piece of land that would just be super valuable. And the old farmer's out there and he's by his fence post and he's fixing the barbed wire fence or whatever—you're not going to go up to him and say, "Hey, Jim, my name's Seth. Would you like a cash offer for this land?" That's not going to be your intro.

So if your intro by text is, "Hey, want a cash offer for your land?" it's going to land the same way that I did verbally when you just passed by in person. Most people aren't doing backyard land investment. I think most are probably in remote rural markets that they don't actually have boots on the ground. So when you're sending it out, you want to be able to show some specifics.

You and I were talking about filtering the other day. So if you're looking for something that has no slope, isn't in marshland, and is within 30 miles of a major metropolitan area—so if you're in rural Wisconsin, and you're saying, "I'm really looking to pick up some land within a 30-40 minutes drive of Chicago, nothing with slope. I know the area that you're in is perfect for what I'm looking for. Would you be interested in talking about any parcels you own?"

And you're showing specifically what you're looking for and you're showing specific knowledge of that area—that can be really powerful. And a lot of people will say, "Well, how do you do that? I'm not a writer. I'm not a copywriter." Fair. But someone that I know you've worked with really closely, Callan Faulkner, she's been really leveraging AI for this in a way to do this very quickly.

Instead of asking as a prompt, instead of asking AI just to write messages, she'll give it parameters like the ones that I just scoped out, right? "I need some messages based on it being within 30 miles of Chicago. I need some messages on land being close to a major airport. I need some messages on land that is potentially usable for hunting purposes." Whatever the land seller angle is, creating templates that are based around that. And then once you have those templates and you have your market that you want, A-B test. Try the airport angle, try the near Chicago angle, try the hunting grounds angle, try all of it and see what hits locally. And then you can narrow your focus that way.

Seth: Yeah, totally. It's safe to assume you can't send like a picture or an email address on your first message, right? Is that kind of stuff get blocked?

Michael: Through Launch Control, you're not going to be able to send a URL or any images or video or anything like that. There are versions of text where that's possible, but it's really limited to exclusive opt-in capabilities and having that audience that has ticked the box and signed up for this—then you can activate those things. But if it is outbound communication, things like a URL will often get flagged and the messages will get blocked.

The reason being has nothing to do with real estate. It's not about the real estate industry. You have to look at it from a carrier perspective. They're sending literally billions of messages every day. Billions. And they have to have a Google... Like a Gmail inbox. They have to be able to filter what you want to receive and filter out the junk, the stuff that you don't want to receive.

If you look at your spam folder and your email, there's a lot of telling signs of what's going to get thrown into the spam folder. You've got a headline that says "40% discount on blah, blah, blah"—probably going to end up in the spam folder. So there are these triggers that push it into spam. Dropping a URL in message one, there's a very high likelihood of it triggering spam. So we don't allow it until deeper into the drip automation process phase of things.

Seth: Yeah, totally. Michael, you had mentioned Callan Fox a little bit ago. So in case listeners out there don't know this, Callan and I put together a course together called Text Marketing 101 for Land Investors. I'll be sure to include a link to that in the show notes. You can check it out. Half the course is free right on retipster.com if you want to see that first part of it. Again, retipster.com/206.

Seth: And as part of that, you can actually get scripts that Callan put together about what are these initial messages supposed to look like and how do you follow up and what do you say? And this was before she was getting into the AI stuff. I know that's like a whole other realm of just creativity and effectiveness. I think I heard her say at a recent presentation, she uses clay.com for that to figure out, you know, for the coordinates of every property, what's the nearest highway and the nearest airport? I'm not entirely sure how that's all implemented, but just be aware that's a possible resource if you want to sound more educated and real about the property you're texting about.

Michael: I would really encourage that. I've learned, I think, everything that I know or the majority of what I know about land investing from Callan and yourself. You two have been my go-to resources for that. And Callan in particular has been really at the vanguard of how to use Launch Control for a long time. We're going to do a series with her on AI, how to implement AI through a webinar series as well, probably first of the year. That educational resource is a phenomenal starting point for anyone listening.

Seth: Yeah, totally. I don't know if you know this, but do you know how many of your users are using only texting to do all of their deal finding? Or are they combining it with other types of marketing? And if so, what is the most common other marketing channel people are using texting in combination with?

Michael: Yeah, it's a great question. So for everyone listening, the Launch Control user base, thousands of investors nationwide, probably about 80%, 85% of which are focused on the distressed property market. And then the other 10, 15% are on land. I always say this jokingly, but it's not a joke: We have 10% to 15% of people that are investing in land and 85% that want to.

I definitely see more and more people gravitating that way and getting interested in it, taking courses like the one that you just mentioned. Within that user base, everybody falls into three major subscription levels: light, core, and pro. And they tend to really mirror the scale-up structure of investment businesses.

So if they're on a light package, they're usually just building up their business and trying to get some consistency. Or they're maybe hiring a VA or outsourcing parts of the process to free up time to focus on seller conversations. And then if they're at a pro or enterprise level, they're running a team anywhere from 5 to 25.

Where you see text used exclusively is usually on the light package level. Because text has the lowest cost per entry for marketing of any of the channels. Direct mail can be quite expensive by comparison. And it's real-time marketing. So it allows people at that beginning level who may not have a full schedule to dedicate to this, might be doing this a couple hours a day trying to generate their first deals. It allows them to send out a batch of messages or two batches of messages, generate live active conversations, and get their at-bats with sellers, get their practice with sellers so they can really hone their pitch and hone what they're looking for.

Now, I don't know of anybody at a pro or enterprise level that is exclusively using text. By the time they scale up to that point, they've got a pretty sophisticated marketing system of text, direct mail, PPC, sometimes television commercials, obviously networking within communities. And so the question becomes not so much a question of which, but a question of how to leverage them together to get the most possible deals out of any given data set.

Seth: And on that, where should texting fit in the mix? It sounds like it might not be the first thing that everybody starts with. So like by the time a person does start using text marketing, does the sequence look like, okay, we send a text this day and then we wait a week and send another one. And then after this and this and this, then we send mail? Give examples of like an effective follow-up sequence and where texting fits into that.

Michael: Here's what I see as the most common mistake that happens when people are using text and direct mail, as a simple example. It triggers something that I call "versus mentality," where they take a portion of the data and they send it via text, and then a portion of the data goes to direct mail, and then say, "What's performing better? Text or direct mail?"

Where the question really, from a marketing perspective, should be, if I've got 1,000 potential land sellers, how can I activate the majority of those? Or how can I activate as many possible sellers from that data set as possible? It's not a question of which marketing channel activates more. It's a question of how many can be activated at all.

So if you know, for instance, that you're going to send out a direct mail piece, and it's going to hit three counties in rural Wisconsin, if you send out a text message to those same people a few days in advance: "Via the mail, I sent you an offer for your land. Take a look at that. I'm sure you have questions. You can give me a call at the number that I listed on the mailer. Or if text is easier, you can reach me here as well."

Put yourself in the place of the recipient. They get a direct mail piece from you, they get a text message from an unknown number offering something about their land—they're not going to connect the dots. They're going to see that as two different entities approaching them about their land. And they're going to see that as it's getting counted on their touch points list.

But if you send that text message connecting the dots between the direct mail that you're sending out, now they see you as a single individual that's just giving them options, communication options, communication channels that they can reach out to you.

The other benefit of that is that it combines the passive and the active, right? So a direct mail piece is passive. You have to wait for them to come back to you. But by sending them a text in advance and saying, "You can reach me here," it gives them the ability to just shoot off a text.

The likelihood of someone picking up the phone and saying, "How'd you get my number?" or "How do you know about my land?" is extremely low. They're not going to pick up the phone unless they're more motivated than that. But they might get that mailer with that offer and just text, "I'm going to see a text. Are you serious with this offer? How'd you get that number?"

And if you've got them saying, "How'd you get that number?"—there's a ton of ways you can pivot that. And lean on your coaches for this. Is it your coach's advice that you just pick up the phone and call and say, "Hey, I think it might be easier if we just talk about this over the phone"? Is it your coach's advice that you have a reply that you use via quick replies in Launch Control to vet the conversation further?

Work with your network, work with your coaches to figure out that pipeline, how you advance things in a pipeline. But by setting up those two communication channels, you're doubling your odds of engagement from the recipient.

Seth: Yeah. Am I correct in my understanding that you can't make or receive a call from the Launch Control phone number that you're using for texting?

Michael: You cannot make a call. You can receive a call. So the number that you send the text from, which you'll have a variety of numbers that are being used to deliver your text messages—if the person calls that number, it will be rerouted to whatever number you set as your call forwarding number. If you want to reroute it to your cell phone, you can reroute it to your cell phone and you'll get it, and they won't see that cell phone number. They're only going to see the number that they called, the number they received the text message from.

The reason why you can't call out from Launch Control, the reason why we don't have a dial-out option—the regulations are stricter on calls and stricter on who's on the do-not-call list than they are with text. So we don't want to add any risk profile to the senders by enabling that call tool. And it's also difficult to set best practices with that, of not having someone call five times in two days. So for risk mitigation, we don't do it. But as far as inbound calls, yes, you can receive them.

Seth: Like is direct mail the best sidekick for texting, or is there a different marketing channel? It's like if you could only pick one other thing to use with texting, you would pick this one and here's why. Any thoughts come to mind on that?

Michael: It's an issue of where you are in the pipeline. So if you're just talking about cold outreach, where you're just trying to get that first interaction from the seller, then yes, text in conjunction with direct mail is your best bet. Like I said, it's that combination of active and passive.

But it's important to remember the benefits of texting, the fact that it's very real-time, it's very top of mind. Like I said, somebody has the phone in their hand, they read the text, they're going to shoot off an answer. That later in the pipeline still fits.

Michael: So imagine you have PPC ads that you're running. And then rather than just sending that to a call bank or having your team call back within 5 minutes, you buy yourself time by having an auto-text go out. That triggers an auto-text and they're like, "Hey, we just got your inquiry. Our team is going to reach out. Our account manager, Seth, is going to call you. He'll probably call you in the next 10-15 minutes."

And by doing that, again, you're opening multiple channels. You're not putting all of your reliance on the phone system. You also have a text system in place. And you do it in something more of an automated way. If you have leads coming in through your website, which are fantastic—those are opted in, somebody said, "Yes, send me this message." But you can set up those auto messages that opens the pipeline. "Thanks for following us at REtipster. Here's a few things that we'll be sending you. We won't send you too many messages." You set expectations, you open that channel. Now you can use text as a communication channel with the recipient.

So it really depends on what part of the sales cycle you're engaging as to what it interacts with best. But it's remembering just that real-time aspect of text and trying to put that in as an open pipeline throughout the course of the life cycle of the deal.

Seth: Should a person ever expect to close a deal through texting without getting on the phone? Or is the phone just a crucial component of making this happen? And texts are just kind of the way to start the conversation?

Michael: Do people close deals on text alone? Yes, it happens. Should you depend on that? No, absolutely not. That's the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. There's a higher likelihood that that happens with land than there is with distressed property because the price points are lower. Emotionally, it's not as heavy of a decision.

So there's a higher likelihood of you being able to close a deal on text alone with land or mobile homes or something like that. But the phone is crucial. And the reason why the phone is crucial is because it is... You're running through the mechanism of a real estate investment business, right? You need to find out why the seller wants to sell. You want to find out what their timeline is. You want to find out what their expectations are.

You might find out on a phone call that the person that is selling that land, all of their neighbors in the area use it as a hunting ground every season. And they warn you like, "Hey, they're not going to be happy I sold this." And that triggers for you the idea, well, maybe I'll hold this and maybe I'll use this myself as more of an investment property. The odds of you getting all of that information via text message is less likely. The phone becomes a crucial component to just relationship building with sellers. And I think that that's always going to be vital.

Seth: Do you have any key metrics that you think land investors should be tracking to measure the success of their campaign? And what are those? How do you measure success? How do you know, okay, I'm doing it right versus something's wrong?

Michael: A few ways. One, everyone that comes in to Launch Control, we white glove the registration process. We get you set up. And then the first thing that happens is you get assigned a dedicated customer success representative. Customer success representatives that work almost exclusively with land investors, they know how to configure the app for best practices for land investors, and they know all of the engagement best practices. So leaning really heavily on that assigned customer success representative is a great way to do it.

But we also have within the app, we have a custom tagging feature. And there are different ways that you can use the custom tagging feature. But one way that they could be really useful is having tags that track where that lead sits in the conversation flow. So for instance, if you get a secondary response, where they said, "How'd you come up with that number?" You respond, and then they reply again, and it's actually like a live conversation.

So if you have a tag, you could use the warm lead, hot lead distinctions in Launch for this. But you could also set a specific tag that let you know where in the cycle that is. And then you can filter by that. So you can filter by how many people got to that secondary response, how many people you actually got onto a phone call. So you can use it as an early stage CRM to really track how well you're doing.

And then the other thing, of course, is if you are using a CRM and you are closing deals, making sure that you understand where those conversations originated and what ended up being a deal. Even if it was one of those combinations of, say, text and direct mail, give them both credit. One doesn't have to win. The point is that you were able to get into an active conversation with the seller and that combination got you there. So you don't have to have a clear marketing channel winner. You just have to have marketing channel effectiveness.

Seth: Yeah. And I know it's probably hard to answer this once and for all, because it depends a lot on like what the land investor strategy is and how much they're offering and how good they are on the phone and all this other stuff like what they're saying, but what's normal? Like what percentage of these recipients should make it to the next stage of the sequence and actually get to the point of closing a deal and that kind of thing? Like how do you know, okay, I'm at least doing average or better or I'm lagging behind what most people see?

Michael: Okay, well, let's break it down to this, right? Let's draw the line at discovery call. At Launch Control, we have a done-for-you service that can be either for distressed property investors or land investors where we do all of the text marketing. We take people's lists, the people provide the list, we segment the data, assign it to specific messaging, engage with the seller. And then if the seller is ready to have a conversation, we do a warm handoff.

So we insist that you or someone on your team be able to call within 10 minutes, ideally less. Right, so it has the feeling of, you know, I'm in the office and I turn around and say, "Hey Seth, you got to call this person." So we stop at the point of discovery call because everything up to that is marketing, it's text engagement. We want to see how many people from a list of a thousand we can get to respond, and then how many of those—say 200, 250 that responded—how many are actually... we filter out the nonsense and how many are actually ready and willing to have a conversation about this land that they own.

At that point, it is no longer a question of marketing. It is a question of real estate investment and real estate investment prowess. And so it triggers a whole different set of metrics. From Launch Control, if you can get, say, 50 discovery calls per month, then that would be like working with you, working with their coach to figure out what percentage of those discovery calls should I be converting, and if I'm converting less than that, what do I need to do to rectify that, what fixes do I need to put into place because once it hits discovery call, it's real estate investment.

So you can't look at the end result and say, "Oh, well, texting only got me six deals." Texting got you 50 discovery calls. Everything else became the sales funnel of your business. So you really have to look at it in that line of discovery call and then make your fixes on both sides of the fence. If you're not getting enough discovery calls, fix the marketing. If you're not closing enough discovery calls, fix the sales funnel process.

Seth: I'm wondering, and I don't know how often you get insight into this, when a person signs up for Launch Control, they try for a while, and then they stop and they leave and do something else or quit the land business altogether, whatever they do. But what's the difference you see when people do stick with Launch Control for a long time versus those who fizzle out and quit quickly? Is there something different that happens in their first 30 or 60 or 90 days, or any discernible difference in their approach or why it might not be working for them?

Michael: Okay, well, let's break it down to this, right? Let's draw the line at discovery call. At Launch Control, we have a done-for-you service that can be either for distressed property investors or land investors where we do all of the text marketing. We take people's lists, the people provide the list, we segment the data, assign it to specific messaging, engage with the seller. And then if the seller is ready to have a conversation, we do a warm handoff.

So we insist that you or someone on your team be able to call within 10 minutes, ideally less. Right, so it has the feeling of, you know, I'm in the office and I turn around and say, "Hey Seth, you got to call this person." So we stop at the point of discovery call because everything up to that is marketing, it's text engagement. We want to see how many people from a list of a thousand we can get to respond, and then how many of those—say 200, 250 that responded—how many are actually... we filter out the nonsense and how many are actually ready and willing to have a conversation about this land that they own.

At that point, it is no longer a question of marketing. It is a question of real estate investment and real estate investment prowess. And so it triggers a whole different set of metrics. From Launch Control, if you can get, say, 50 discovery calls per month, then that would be like working with you, working with their coach to figure out what percentage of those discovery calls should I be converting, and if I'm converting less than that, what do I need to do to rectify that, what fixes do I need to put into place because once it hits discovery call, it's real estate investment.

So you can't look at the end result and say, "Oh, well, texting only got me six deals." Texting got you 50 discovery calls. Everything else became the sales funnel of your business. So you really have to look at it in that line of discovery call and then make your fixes on both sides of the fence. If you're not getting enough discovery calls, fix the marketing. If you're not closing enough discovery calls, fix the sales funnel process.

Seth: I'm wondering, and I don't know how often you get insight into this, when a person signs up for Launch Control, they try for a while, and then they stop and they leave and do something else or quit the land business altogether, whatever they do. But what's the difference you see when people do stick with Launch Control for a long time versus those who fizzle out and quit quickly? Is there something different that happens in their first 30 or 60 or 90 days, or any discernible difference in their approach or why it might not be working for them?

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. The ones that stick with it are much, much, much more successful. We tell people, don't get started until you can commit to 90 days. And the reason we want people to commit to 90 days is you're going to send out a bunch of messages in the first month, right? Building up your pipeline. And you're going to get these active responses coming in. You're going to be getting to the point of discovery call, having those discovery calls.

Now, land is faster, right? Like, is there a possibility that you're going to have some land deals that you're at least you've contracted and you're looking for buyers for? Yeah, that's going to happen faster than it does on the distressed property side. But you still need the profit structure coming in. You need to actually be able to have the time to find those buyers, get the cash flow coming in so that you have consistency in your business.

And what you want to be able to do is you want to be able to close with that buyer and turn around and have 3 deals that are 80% complete or are just looking ready for buyers and another 25 discovery calls that you're actively engaging in. And so you have this consistently full pipeline.

You're going to have months where you close a lot more deals, and you're going to have months where you close less. And it's going to be a slight little heart rate monitor over the course of the year. But you're getting deals coming in throughout the course of the year without interruption.

This isn't just real estate investment. In every industry in the world, marketing gets cut first. So you want to save a couple bucks over the next 60 days, you cut marketing. Now you have to start that pipeline all over again. If you wait more than 30 days, you'll have to re-register, which means you're going to have to take that 2 weeks for the registration to complete, plus 90 days to really get the pipeline up and running.

So you don't want to be in this endless cycle of building up a great pipeline and then starting over. Building up a great pipeline and starting over. I would give the same advice for other marketing channels that you're using. So you're scaling up a business—you want a website, foundational. You want an inbound phone number for your business, foundational. You want to have some communities that you're a part of where you know you can connect with buyers or you know you can connect with other investors, foundational.

Text should be foundational. It's just like a website. It's part of running your business. And it's there all the time. And then if you want to as your secondary marketing channel, if you want to implement direct mail, you should be doing that. You can tell me what frequency, but if not monthly, at least quarterly. And you're doing that on a set basis. And every year, you do the same thing, at least quarterly. If you want to up the volume, great, but don't remove the channel. Stay consistent with your marketing channels because they're all going to produce and they're all going to have spikes at different times, right? So ride that wave or those waves, and that will give you the best possible results for your business.

Seth: Gotcha. I am curious, how do you see AI or automation playing a role in the future of text marketing for real estate investors? Do you think we're going to see a lot of changes or does Launch Control have any plans for like implementing new features or anything like that?

Michael: Yeah, I love this question because it's a cautionary tale, in my opinion. And so we started off, we were talking about compliance, right? And the TCPA guidelines. And I said, like those TCPA guidelines were really put in an act like in the early 90s to curb auto dialers or robo dialers, because that was just for the recipient, that sucked. It was a really bad experience.

And so AI has that same potential for people looking... Like I said, a lot of times people aren't looking at this from the recipient perspective. They're looking at this in like, how can I exponentially add volume to my business as fast as possible without thought about the recipient and what their experience is.

So if we use AI in the wrong way, and we use AI with only a mind towards volume, and not towards recipient experience, it's going to get shut down. It will get regulated into non-existence, right? Or raise a very high risk profile for utilizing it.

If we use it in conjunction with the very human processes that we have with sellers, and we use it as a way to add personalization to the messages, or if we use it in a way where I call them like it's like a verbal form fill, where the person knows full well that they're interacting with AI, and it's only for a certain level of information that they would have put into a form anyway, where they don't feel like they're being duped into a conversation with a person, those kinds of things will fly.

We're in a really, really interesting moment in time where we can either make this work as a really, really powerful business tool over the next 10-15 years, or we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot. And I really hope that it isn't the latter.

And as far as what Launch Control is working on, yeah, we're in the lab, essentially, testing quite a few different things. But with that experience in mind of having it create personalization, of using recipient responses to create suggestive opportunities. But all of that is... We're not going to roll it out until it has been really properly tested. We don't want the senders to be the testers. We want to make sure that we have something that's going to be a good product to roll out before it gets integrated into the app.

Seth: Kind of going back to that earlier question I was asking about people that fizzle out and don't end up lasting long with Launch Control, that kind of thing. Yeah. I feel like a lot of times what's going on there is it's just missed expectations. Maybe they're getting into it because they're expecting some result and they start using it or maybe they don't use it at all. But that result doesn't magically come about. It makes you wonder... What kind of person do you think shouldn't be using text marketing at all or shouldn't be using Launch Control specifically? Are there any common things you see from people who are like, "Oh, I thought it would do this, but it doesn't. I'm out."

Michael: Software as a service, the term when a customer leaves is “churn.” So the biggest cause of churn is that misalignment of expectations. And that misalignment of expectations, the vast majority of the time comes from people that are just getting started in the business and are very much in need of cash flow and do not really have enough in savings to support launching a year-long or 6-month plan for marketing. They're looking for that quick hit to get a deal.

I wouldn't suggest getting a subscription if you're looking to get your very first land deal. If you're looking to get your very first land deal, there are a lot of free resources that you can use. When you do have a deal or two under your belt and you've got a few grand to play with, then it makes sense to implement marketing and to give it that 90 to 120 day window to create that pipeline mechanism where you're able to start doing first a consistent level of deals and then a ramped up number of deals.

The other thing that is a limiting factor is when people look at it, I look at text engagement or really any marketing channel as not something you implement, but something you just give it a try. So like, "I'll give it a try for 30 days, see if I get a deal." Like we said, that doesn't actually match the life cycle of the deal. The lifecycle of a deal takes more than 30 days. So unless your commitment is matched to the minimum lifecycle of a deal, it's always going to have a failure rate. It doesn't matter what marketing channel you try. Try PPC for 3 weeks, it's going to fail. If you try Launch for 3 weeks, unless you get really lucky, it's not going to get you the results you want. So if you're into business building, you got to commit to that minimum and then you'll find success.

Seth: Gotcha. I do know, you know, when sending out a text campaign like this, obviously you need people's phone numbers to do this and to get phone numbers, one way to do it is to get a list from whatever your data service is and then skip trace that list to get those phone numbers. Do you have any recommended skip tracers that are known for providing the best or the most information for the least amount of money? I hear this conversation all the time because nobody wants to split test a bunch of them and see which one is the best. But do you have any intel on that? Like, yeah, use this skip tracing service.

Michael: We have a skip tracing service that you can use. It is very, it's highly effective. There's not any one that I think is much, much better than any other. To be perfectly honest, it's kind of like the telecom industry, which there are like levels to this, right? Where you have, you're working with a platform, but they're kind of plugged into an aggregator and that aggregator is plugged into the carriers.

It's the same thing with skip tracing. These big data companies, whoever you're dealing with is most likely a small fish that's plugged into a much bigger pond. So all of the data kind of flows down from the same top end places anyway.

Be leery of two things. Be leery of... If it's too cheap, it's probably too cheap for a reason. You're going to get crap results. And anybody that tells you like, "Oh, we'll get you up to 10 numbers per person"—it's useless. We have the data to prove this in Launch. The reason we limit it to three numbers, and we'd like to limit it to two, is that the effectiveness after the first number goes way down.

The vast majority of verified numbers in Launch Control are the first number provided after post-skip tracing. Then you see a drop, then second number, another big drop, a third number connecting, the likelihood of the seventh number provided by your skip tracing provider actually being you or actually being me is incrementally tiny. So be leery of those two things. Is it cheap for a reason? And if they're really touting how many numbers they can get you? You know, question it.

Seth: Yeah. So let's switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit more about regulation and compliance or whatever you want to call this. If it's, I don't know if it's a legal issue or not, but it gets down to the whole kind of the drawbacks or the hesitations that I hear most often from people when they think about text marketing is just this idea that when I send out my first message, what if there's an opt-out message included that I have no control of it? It just ruins everything. Or what if I'm not allowed to do this here? What if certain carriers are going to get involved and mess this whole thing up?

And I know back in October of 2023, I think it was, you know, where Launch Control sent out a thing saying that, yeah, there's going to be like an opt-out message sent on your first text that you send out. Can you just bring us up to speed? So like, what was that? Is it fixed now? Or is that still a thing? And does this affect all texting platforms? Or was this just a Launch Control thing?

Michael: We have a skip tracing service that you can use. It is very, it's highly effective. There's not any one that I think is much, much better than any other. To be perfectly honest, it's kind of like the telecom industry, which there are like levels to this, right? Where you have, you're working with a platform, but they're kind of plugged into an aggregator and that aggregator is plugged into the carriers.

It's the same thing with skip tracing. These big data companies, whoever you're dealing with is most likely a small fish that's plugged into a much bigger pond. So all of the data kind of flows down from the same top end places anyway.

Be leery of two things. Be leery of... If it's too cheap, it's probably too cheap for a reason. You're going to get crap results. And anybody that tells you like, "Oh, we'll get you up to 10 numbers per person"—it's useless. We have the data to prove this in Launch. The reason we limit it to three numbers, and we'd like to limit it to two, is that the effectiveness after the first number goes way down.

The vast majority of verified numbers in Launch Control are the first number provided after post-skip tracing. Then you see a drop, then second number, another big drop, a third number connecting, the likelihood of the seventh number provided by your skip tracing provider actually being you or actually being me is incrementally tiny. So be leery of those two things. Is it cheap for a reason? And if they're really touting how many numbers they can get you? You know, question it.

Seth: Yeah. So let's switch gears a little bit and talk a little bit more about regulation and compliance or whatever you want to call this. If it's, I don't know if it's a legal issue or not, but it gets down to the whole kind of the drawbacks or the hesitations that I hear most often from people when they think about text marketing is just this idea that when I send out my first message, what if there's an opt-out message included that I have no control of it? It just ruins everything. Or what if I'm not allowed to do this here? What if certain carriers are going to get involved and mess this whole thing up?

And I know back in October of 2023, I think it was, you know, where Launch Control sent out a thing saying that, yeah, there's going to be like an opt-out message sent on your first text that you send out. Can you just bring us up to speed? So like, what was that? Is it fixed now? Or is that still a thing? And does this affect all texting platforms? Or was this just a Launch Control thing?

Michael: It wasn't actually a Launch Control thing at all. So as I just referred to in the telecom industry, you have different players that are different layers going up to the carriers. And so Launch Control, like every platform, has to work with these vendors, essentially, these providers.

Now, if these large scale vendors or large scale providers run afoul of the carriers, the carriers can enact certain restrictions just on that vendor. So Launch Control had too many eggs in one basket to be perfectly transparent. We had to basically comply with the restrictions put on that vendor. And that had knock-on effects for our user base.

Now, it wasn't just Launch Control. That particular vendor was working with hundreds of companies, all of whom had the same impact. So it wasn't about REI. It wasn't about Launch. It was just about a larger machination within the telecom industry. And so adding that opt-out was something that was a restriction put on that vendor that we had to comply with.

So we've since highly diversified the traffic to mitigate that happening, ever happening again. Working within the telecom space, it's just not as smooth as email. I don't know that it's never going to be, but it's definitely an industry that's still kind of working through the kinks.

In the REI and land or distressed property, there's often this feeling that this is about us. It's not about us. It really isn't. It's about them being able to create a clean pipeline for the recipient that also allows them to financially benefit from companies and investors and businesses that want to engage on a marketing level or want to engage on an outbound level with their customer base.

They're looking for balance there. And there are occasional blips along the way. But Launch Control has diversified the vendors that it works with. Any opt-out language that would be added at this point is actually coming from one of the carriers. They have different sets of regulations. So AT&T may have stricter regulations than Sprint, for instance. And if there is a forced compliance there, then we have to abide by that.

The opt-out thing is much maligned in the real estate investment industry. But it is a good protective measure. I understand people not wanting it in the first message, and we try to remove it as much as we can. But if you think about just using email as an example, you don't care if you didn't sign up for an email as long as you have the ability to stop receiving that email.

Michael: You're never going to get upset about it as long as there's a clear exit door. So in text, it works the same way. You still want to have an exit door. So whether or not the opt-in message is included, you have to at least in your engagement with the recipient, if they clearly want out of that conversation, you have to look at it from a recipient standpoint and say, "I'm going to let them off the hook. I'm going to let them out of this conversation."

Because it doesn't limit your ability to send them a direct mail piece. It doesn't limit your ability to hopefully get them to engage with you directly through online advertising or going directly to your website. It doesn't mean that you can never get a deal for that person. It's just that person has expressed a disinterest in text. And you want to respect that and reduce risk for yourself as a business.

So it's a difficult thing sometimes to separate leads and lead engagement from recipients and the recipient experience, but it is important to consider it, right? So be a good actor, essentially, and you'll be in a safe space.

Seth: So interestingly, as we've been talking here about 30 minutes ago, I got a random spam text from somebody I don't know. I'm using Verizon. I don't know if this has something to do with it or not, but when I got this message, you know, I can reply with "stop" they said in the message. You know, "let me know with a quick yes or no" and I just replied "stop" to them but I also got this thing—I'm using an iPhone, I don't know if this is an iMessage thing or what—but it says "the sender is not in your contact list" "report junk" and I have the option to hit that as well, which I assume maybe that's something different than just replying stop or maybe it's the same thing, I don't know, but what makes all this happen? If I were to send out this text with Launch Control, would I get this "sender's not in your contactless report junk" message? Or is it Verizon that's making that happen?

Michael: Yeah, that's the carrier making that happen. And they each have different ways that they go about it. Some don't have it at all. And then some are stricter about it. I mentioned exit doors, right? So one exit door is to reply stop or end. If they actually use those coded words, they say stop or end, Launch Control will automatically remove them.

The ones that the recipient has to be careful for is the ones that are like, "Hey, buddy, how'd you get my number? Like, why are you even doing this? Leave me alone." The system isn't sophisticated enough to pull that one. And also, it's really your choice how to maneuver that, right?

But another exit door, it's sort of the hidden exit door, is what you just alluded to. And that is a big part of the reason why you'll see in the data that your deliverability will be 88% to 92% or something. And it's because there are a certain number of those that either it's a bad number and the skip tracing just didn't catch it, or that person's exiting out the unseen exit door.

What happens from a registration standpoint is you as an investor, when you register with Launch Control, and you register to use text engagement for your business, you're in a B2B relationship with the carrier. So they want to make sure that the traffic going to those individuals that they have contracts with is fairly clean. They'll allow for a certain amount of unwanted messaging, but they have to play both sides of the fence. They want the marketing money, but they also want a really good recipient experience and the contracts on the recipient end.

So they have to play both sides and find the right balance there. So what happens is that if they get a multitude of those, too many of those coming from your registered channel, it's going to raise red flags, right? So there are things that we do in the system to mitigate that. So if too many of those happen, the system will automatically pause texting on your account so that you don't burn your registration.

Seth: When you say "this system," you mean Launch Control?

Michael: Launch Control, yeah. So Launch Control on the back end will recognize a spike in those kinds of submissions, and it will pause the account so that we can rectify things or change things up a bit in order to get the channel back in good standing. Because if the channel gets burned, right? Like if the carrier is like, "Seth, we're not doing business with you anymore," then it doesn't mean you can't ever text again, but we have to go back through the EIN registration process. We may have to change a few things to get you reset up. It's a pain. We don't want that to happen.

Seth: When you say if the channel gets burned, what do you mean by the channel? What is that?

Michael: You're an investor. You register. You're creating a one-on-one business-to-business relationship with the carrier. They see that as texting coming not from Launch Control, but from your registered account. And they want your registered account to be in good standing.

This is a really important clarification. If the carriers get mad, and they don't want you sending traffic through that channel because you've just been spamming people, and they're like, "We're gonna shut down your registered account"—that's the end of it. They shut down your registered account. There's no TCPA body. This doesn't get reported to TCPA. It doesn't get transferred over to any legal conversation. It's just a severing of a business-to-business relationship that you have with the carrier.

End of story. Now you can restart that relationship. You might need to use a different EIN number, but you can restart that relationship and open a new channel. But we don't ever want you to get to that point. So we have safety protocols in place, and it can be annoying. But if your channel is getting spikes, we have safety protocols in place that will pause the traffic on your account so that we can go through a diagnosis, figure out what the issue was and then press restart in the healthiest way possible so that you know you can text in March and April and May and June and not have any of those stop-start interruptions that we talked about.

Seth: Yeah, this is kind of helpful because I've heard this from more than one person that they got their Launch Control accounts shut down or paused or whatever word you want to use—basically they couldn't use it and sometimes it took months to get it back up and running. And they were told by Launch Control, "Yeah, maybe what you got to do is get a new LLC and EIN" or "change your mailing address" or something like that.

You know, in one case, this was a person couldn't even get into their account at all just because they had the wrong mailing address. They were using like a rented virtual mailbox type thing. And there was something against that mailing address. And that's why they couldn't do it. Why is that happening? Is it because some other bad actor was using that same mailing address? And so these carriers are like, "No, we don't like that address or anybody coming from there. You're not going to come through" and you have to somehow fix that or hit the reset button or what's going on there?

Michael: Well, in that case, if we're just talking about setting up registration and actually getting access to the platform, it's a tough thing because we white glove this whole process as an individual. If you wanted to just register with the carriers on your own, you can do it. And you can go through the whole process of just registering on your own if you wanted to use a different platform that doesn't provide that white glove service. And it's a pain. And we don't want you to have to do that—submit your website and update your privacy policy and give your EIN number and all of the business address associated with the EIN number and all of that. So we white glove it for you.

But it has nothing to actually do with Launch Control. We're just taking your information and plugging it into the carrier system so that you have access to that system. Once you have access to that system, then we can turn the green light on with Launch Control. It has nothing to do with the platform itself. It's everything to do with just getting your business registered with the carriers. And we're doing that for you.

The perception often is that, "Oh, I can't access Launch Control." The root problem is getting your business registered with carriers. Now, they can be finicky about this because this is a new process for them. They want to have your EIN information. They want the registered business information to match what is on that EIN. They want the website information to be in line with your business entity. What they're doing is they're checking for legitimacy in business ownership. And they want to make sure that these are real entities that they're dealing with so they can get spam out of their system. If they just let anyone in, then the Gmail spam box is going to be everybody's text inbox and they can't have that. So those hoops are not Launch Control hoops. Those hoops are carrier hoops.

I use one of those personalized mailboxes myself. I run into trouble all the time with people saying, "Well, I need a physical address." I don't have one. I spend most of my time outside of the U.S. I literally don't have one. It causes me headaches all the time. Right? But that is a carrier restriction. That's just being white glove processed by Launch Control. It is not a platform restriction.

Seth: You know, as you sort of differentiated, we have the situation where a person's just trying to get onto Launch Control for the first time, they've never even used it and they're running into this issue. Or other times they got onto Launch Control, and as they've been sending texts, then it gets shut down. And when that happens, is that because people like me are hitting this "report junk" button too much? Like, is that effectively what makes this happen? Or is it just replying with "stop"? Like, is that what makes it happen?

Michael: It depends if we're talking about your account was paused or actually cut off, right? Because if it was paused, then that just means that we're going through a diagnosis process. The system saw that there were too many of those spam messages going through. The system recognized that there was not enough interaction, not enough of people that were responding to create a two-way engagement. The messaging was overly similar. It started to look almost like robo-messaging because we didn't have enough variety in the messaging. There are certain things that will trigger a diagnostic pause.

And that shouldn't take very long to rectify because that's just fixing elements within the setup of the platform and then switching things back on. That's us triggering that pause to preserve your account or preserve the safety of your pipeline with the carriers.

Now, if the carriers pause it or cut it off and say, "We're seeing way too much spam on this channel, we need you to cut it off," we can't go against that. We put these safety checks in place so that it never does. Hopefully it never does get to that level. But if it does get to that burnout level, then there is a chance of having to restart.

With good best practices, you may get a Launch pause. You may get that diagnostic pause. It's unlikely, but you may. But outside of that, with best practices, you should never hit the carrier pause.

Seth: When you say the carrier pause, so there's a lot of different carriers. So like, what if AT&T puts me on pause, but Verizon doesn't, does that shut everything down? Or can I still only send people to the non-AT&T? How does that work?

Michael: No, so sorry. Like, I just broke my own rule here, right? Like, we often refer to the carriers to just explain the telecom industry. But remember, I said, like, there's providers that kind of sit in between the carriers and all of the platforms. They're the ones that are getting messages about these channels. And saying like, "You guys need to take care of this one. You need to clean this up. You can clean that one up. This one's getting too high of a spam ratio. We're going to pull the plug if you can't fix it."

It may be carrier-specific. It may be AT&T-specific. But most likely, in almost every case, to use real estate terminology, they're seeing too many distress factors coming from your particular pipeline. They want to rectify that. So we're trying to stop it before it ever gets to there. There's no such thing as AT&T saying "cut Seth off" or Verizon saying "cut Seth off." There are layers in between that and safety protocols in between that. And it's just a question of, you don't want to get too far up the chain where it becomes a reset process.

Seth: You know, I don't even know if I want to get into this, but I've heard the words carriers, aggregators, vendors, providers—like what are all these things? I think I understand what carriers are, and I think when I hear vendor, is that you? Is that what Launch Control is, or is that something else? Maybe just explain each one of those things for me so I clearly understand who is who, does what.

Michael: It's annoyingly confusing, I understand that. It really is if you really want to dig into the telecom industry. Honestly, from an individual investor's perspective, it doesn't really matter. Can you send out the messages, get the messages through, do it in a healthy way? Yes or no.

It's checked out from the legal side. It's really just a business-to-business discussion. But within that bubble of the business-to-business discussion, you've got the major US carriers and international carriers, and they send worldwide. There are something like 27 billion text messages sent every day. Right? Every day, 27 billion. So there obviously needs to be a network in order to make that kind of volume happen, right?

So the aggregators, which are actually like bigger companies than the carriers themselves, they're these huge international conglomerates. They're the second layer of carriers, aggregators. And then the aggregators, there are companies that will connect with, say, I don't know, a couple hundred platforms like Launch Control. And they're one level down from the aggregators. And then you have Launch Control and other niche-specific texting platforms that have a, even if sizable from a carrier perspective or from an aggregator perspective, a limited user base.

If you imagine in real estate investment, Launch Control has got a few thousand investors using the platform, sending messages, sending millions of messages annually in a system that receives 27 billion messages daily. It's not even a drop in the bucket. It's less than a drop in the bucket. That level, you have to consider multiple industries and you have to consider all of the political messages go through this system. All of the charity messages go through this system. Any text message that you receive on your phone, including the text messages from your friends, all go through this system. It is... gargantuan and sometimes a little messy.

I only say that to illustrate the fact that any idea that the carriers are coming after land investors—no, they're not. They're not. That system is way, way, way, way, way too big. All they're doing is tinkering with the filtering, tinkering with the way that messages are processed through the system so that they can refine their inbox versus spam box as well as they can. There's no lens on us. That's just not accurate.

Seth: Sure. One thing I did hear from our community, you can tell me if this is true or false, but it sounds like, according to this person, they said that if a prospect doesn't respond to the initial text, Launch Control does not allow another attempt for 30 days. And he said, "I think other SMS services are more relaxed on this." And if there's any rationale for this policy with Launch Control or if there's any plans to give people more options, any thoughts on that?

Michael: Yeah, so the reason that we put that into place again was to protect the sender and to create a better recipient kind of outreach process. So we want to focus on those inbound conversations. So when you send the first message you get a 20% response rate or 15% response rate, we want you to focus on those active conversations and to convert as many of those as you possibly can.

It's diminishing returns after that. If you get a 20% response rate on the first message, when you send that second message, even 30 days later, it's something like a 4% response rate, 5% response rate. You send a third message, drops again, 1%, something like that. The vast majority of people are going to respond to the first text message, a few more will trickle in with that reminder message.

What we have to be careful of is someone sending a text message at 9 o'clock in the morning and then sending another message at 11am saying, "Hey, did you get my text message?" And then sending another message at 4pm saying, "Hey, I'm checking out for the day. I'd love to have a conversation if you can." And then imagine that recipient getting 3 of those from you, 3 from me, 3 from another land investor all in the same day. Not a good experience. And it raises the risk profile quite a bit.

We can technically reduce that number, but we only do it when we are working with investors who have a proven history of following best practices and have really good systems and work very closely with our CS team. Then we're able to lower that number. But it's for people that are just coming in and getting started. It's to protect them as a sender, is to create a better receiving experience. And it is because of the nature of diminishing returns, right? You're either going to get a response or not.

Seth: Sure. Awesome.

Michael, I totally appreciate your time answering all these questions. I know it was a lot to get through. Again, if people want to check Launch Control out, we've got an affiliate link to it, retipster.com/launchcontrol.

Also, be sure to check out the course that Callan and I put together. Again, you can see the first half of it for free on REtipster. We covered a ton of stuff going specifically through Launch Control. So it explains exactly how to use this and all the best practices. If you just go to retipster.com and go to the search bar and type in "text marketing 101," you'll find it. I'll be sure to link to it in the show notes as well, retipster.com/206.

And Michael, thanks again. Appreciate your time.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to be here.