Seth: Hey folks, how's it going? This is Seth Williams. Welcome to the REtipster podcast. Today, it's kind of a big milestone because I'm unveiling something that I've been working on behind the scenes for months with my friend, Mike Balcom.

So Mike and I are launching Stride. It's a CRM built specifically for land investors. We created Stride to transform how you manage your land business and help you close more deals with less chaos and less frustration. And today we're going to talk about what this is and why we decided to do this and some of the key pain points we were aiming to solve when we put this together and also why you might want to consider it. Even if you're not looking for a CRM right now, we're also going to share what we think makes for a really solid lead generation and follow-up strategy that works really well right now in 2025. And you can see more details about all this in the show notes, which you can find at retipster.com/CRM.

So, Mike, welcome.

Mike: Hey, Seth. What an exciting day. What a nervous day, to be honest with you. But man, I remember when we talked about this and we thought this would be launching Black Friday of last year. We thought that might be a little optimistic. We thought, okay, by the end of the year, we'll have it for sure. And here we are finally launching. So I can't wait. This is going to be great.

Seth: Yeah. And this all started back in 2024, almost a year ago now. Mike and I decided to work together to teach a couple of live guided courses on how to use AI as a real estate investor, in particular, ChatGPT and other things like Claude and that kind of thing. We worked really well together. I had a great time working with Mike. He was just a really smart guy, a really good thinker and knew how to explain things really well. And I think it was after our first one; we were just talking about different things we could possibly do together.

And you brought up the idea of a CRM and how, you know, wouldn't it be interesting if we were to make something like that for land investors? And both of us knew there were other CRMs out there for land investors. This isn't like a new thing necessarily, but the problem with pretty much every CRM out there—not knocking the existing ones, but you know, a lot of CRMs just can't do it all. There are just certain things they can't and won't address. And it kind of depends on the land investor and what they're looking for.

But we sort of identified a number of different things that we didn't see being addressed out there that we could address. And this is the kind of thing where I, by myself, like, I just don't have what it takes on my own to make a CRM like this. I can certainly imagine what I would like it to be, but the expertise just isn't there. But then Mike enters the picture and he does have the expertise and a lot of experience with other CRMs that I didn't have experience with. And suddenly, what seemed impossible before suddenly became possible. So we decided to start diving into this and figuring something out. And many months later, here we are.

Mike: That's absolutely right. Yeah, it's been a journey. And really quick, too, we might want to touch base on this. We partnered together. Seth, you said we worked really well together. A couple of things for any of you thinking out there: partnering with somebody else in the space, no matter what the business venture is, it is what makes for a great partner. And I have to say, kudos to Seth. We were talking about AI at the Unconference together. And he reached out to me later on, saying, "Mike, we feel amazing together.” With that being said, I never would have picked Seth as a business partner.

Seth is an "everything has to be perfect before it goes out." And I'm a "I'll run out the door and get dressed while I'm outside naked" type of guy. You know, I'm happy to jump out of the plane and figure out how to build the parachute on the way down. And Seth needs to make sure the plane is perfect, ready to go before it even leaves the tarmac. And because of that, it makes for such a beautiful relationship and also one where we hate each other at times, but that's how we make phenomenal products too.

So thank you for that, Seth. Truly.

Seth: It's all about finding that person that fills in the gaps and is good at stuff you're not good at. So there's a lot of things that if I was unwilling to partner with anybody, things that just would never happen and have not happened. And it's a result of partnering with people like Mike that makes a lot of things possible. Learned a lot through this and continuing to learn as we move along.

Mike: So let's dive into it, Seth. I know we're going to talk about our CRM, the best in the world; nothing better than that. But before we dive too much into that, why do you need a CRM? What's the point? What's the reason? Why does it matter? Why can't I just send out 500 neutral postcards, get three deals out of that and just call it a day and have infinite cash flow for life? I mean, isn't that why we got into land investing?

Seth: Well, I think if your business is small enough and if you don't really have any aspirations to get huge or make millions, you don't necessarily need one. Like I, for many years, operated off spreadsheets. I know a lot of people that have as well, but it's not because it's like the best system. It was more for me, just like I didn't know what else was out there. I knew that committing to any new CRM would just take a ton of time. It would probably cost a fortune to do. And even after doing that, there would still be a ton of things that it would lack. It just felt like there wasn't a silver bullet out there that would actually solve all my problems. So I kind of just did things the hard way. And I know many people who do the same thing.

And it's a very common question that I have heard for years. And to this day, people asking, like, what's the best CRM? Like, what's the next best thing? And this is coming from people who both do and don't already have a CRM. So it's kind of a thing where, you know, the grass is always greener. There's always this idea that there's something perfect out there. And I think with what we were doing, there were, you know, some key features that we saw just kind of missing in some of the other CRMs out there. And there are some solid options.

But what were some of those things that first stuck out to you, Mike? Because I know this occurred to you before it did to me.

Mike: To take you through my journey of CRMs, I started with a CRM called Airtable. And I loved it. It was just me. And I was working with one or two other VAs and we were in there and it was great. And then we ran out of space. So we upgraded to a bigger plan and we ran out of space. So we upgraded to a bigger plan and then we ran out of space.

And then I got that beautiful email from them saying, "Hey, you're out of space. Call us to discuss our enterprise program." And I said, "Yes." I'm like enterprise; like, we're a four- or five-person operation at this point. And they didn't have a phone system built in. They didn't have website hosting, just all these different things.

So I moved over to Notion. Love Notion to death. Notion crashes with databases. So then after that, after fighting through that with my team for about six or eight months, we moved over to another CRM whose name I'm not going to say, but they were acquired by Zillow Group last year for 500 million. And they are phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. Unfortunately, I pay about 500 bucks a month for them. And now my team's grown. So to add an additional seat is $50 per person per head.

Seth: And I think when you and I started working in the AI space, it was like, software's cheap. There are amazing innovations that have been out there now. Like, why hasn't a lot of this come into the CRM space? Why does it feel like so many companies are nickel-and-diming you? And how can you create something where they can have a website there, prebuilt ones, they can have automations? You don't have to necessarily integrate Zapier into anything anymore. How can you have automatic text callbacks? How can you just have unlimited storage and unlimited deals and unlimited seats?

And it's kind of what we set out to do is whether you're a solopreneur and it's just you or you have a thousand people behind you, why can't we just have a CRM that does that without paying six figures a year just to have all the functions we need? And I think that's really what we ended up creating. I mean, I've built out some great ones so far, and I've loved the ability to just let my team know, like, "Hey, fresh leads in here. Let's call them within five minutes."

Let's understand actually that. So, a fun fact for you. This is from inside sales. You have a 96% chance of making contact with someone after the sixth call. Now, this does not mean doing six calls in a row. We're not talking triple dialing twice a day to hit it. No, this is like six different attempts to contact this person, with a 90% chance of actually making contact. So when somebody comes into your ecosystem, you or your team needs to be ready to strike immediately. And a lot of people just don't realize that a lot of people drop off after trying to call someone back after two attempts.

You know, another fascinating one is the difference between calling somebody back in five minutes or at least making contact versus 10 minutes is a 400% difference. 400% difference. So I think a lot of those things where I used to love writing Google app scripts and seeing what's going on there, trying to get notifications to my team. Why can't we just create something that's like, "Hey, call this person right now. You know, they are fresh in our ecosystem; make the call" or when they call and it's just like, "Hey, sorry, I missed you right now. You know, I'm at the grocery store, I'm whatever," and just send them a quick text back, host my website on there, or just have templates that are ready to go. And I feel like we've done a lot of that.

Seth: Airtable and Notion that you mentioned you tried, those aren't even really CRMs per se, right? They're more like tools that you can sort of shoehorn into a CRM function if you want to, if you bring different things together.

Mike: I would say that's true. Yeah. Notion's probably mostly for project management. Airtable is kind of like a glorified Excel sheet in a way with a much better interface.

Seth: Yeah. And I know years ago, I felt like Podio was like the thing I heard everybody talking about. And I rarely hear that mentioned anymore. I don't know if something changed, but a lot of these things, they're sort of just a white box product that you can sort of retrofit to do what you want to do. And I think one of the problems with a lot of these CRMs out there, even the ones that are like, you know, tailored for land investors, is that a lot of them kind of force you to adapt to their workflow and system rather than the other way around.

And in terms of the pricing of it, they can almost kind of like penalize growth. Like, the more you grow, it's going to hurt you. Because if you have to add another team member, if you want to track more deals, get more phone numbers, or any of these things, the price is just going to go up and up and up.

And that was one thing that we were kind of annoyed by. Just kind of, I don't know, it just felt like, why penalize growth? Why not reward growth? So we set up the pricing for Stride so that it is the same price, no matter how many team members you have, no matter how many deals you want to track, and no matter how many deal boards there are; it's not going to go up on you as you continue to grow.

Mike: Absolutely. I absolutely love that. And I love just trying to put things into one place. I mean, nothing was worse than even the current CRM we were using just before we moved over to Stride, which is that we're paying almost 600 bucks a month for it. We now are also paying for Zapier to have a Zapier integration. So it'll automatically zap them a contract when that's done. Then we're also having to pay for a signature platform. Why can't we just put all this in one place? I don't understand why it's that hard to do. I don't understand why I have to learn how to use Zapier just to send somebody a contract instantly.

I mean, I will tell you, Seth, I don't know if you have this experience, but one of the darkest days in my land investing career, sad music play now. All right.

No, that'd be so cool if we had a little time effects in here, Seth. But no, one day earlier starting out, I think I had about a team of two or three people just got off the phone with a seller. Good conversation. Gave me a verbal agreement, ready to go. I immediately ping my VA. I'm like, "Hey, send them an agreement. Let's go." We send them the agreement and everything. The next day I call and follow up with them. If I had been better back then, I would have called him right then at that time.

But I follow up with him the next day and I say, "Hey, we sent you the contract and everything. Are you still ready to move forward?" He's like, "Oh, yeah, I signed the agreement with you." I said, "Oh, it looks here that it was opened, but you didn't sign it." He's like, "Oh, yeah, you sent me two of them. I was wondering why you sent me two." Come to find out. Somebody else snuck in there before me.

So while I had been talking to him, negotiating back and forth, he said he had a couple of other offers on the table. That's one of those things where when a seller tells you that, do they, don't they, you never really know. I think in this case, he probably did. And then somebody else just ended up emailing him a contract much quicker; they just had truly better technology than me. And they just did it instantly. After I'd gotten off the phone with them, the guy thought it was me and my team, signed it away and the deal went down the drain. 50K loss. Just like that, Seth. Worst day of my life. Okay. Not the worst day, but it was a rough one. And I guess that's the cost of not having the best technology, you know, or having a system that makes things easier.

Seth: I think we're kind of hitting on a couple of things here. One of them is just the ability to eliminate a lot of external third-party software and services and bring them into one place, not only for the sake of simplifying things and making it easier to keep track of where things are at, but also just for cost savings. When I started using this, I immediately cut about $4,000 a year of just costs that just weren't necessary. Paying for things like PandaDoc, external websites, and email marketing software. Stuff that is expensive in and of itself. But if you bring it all into something like Stride, it makes it much less expensive. And there's just one place you have to go, a single app where you can find everything and it all seamlessly works together.

Mike: And what I love about a lot of things we've put together here is you can now start to brand it how you want it to. One thing that always bothered me with platforms like PandaDoc or SignNow, I thought SignNow was great, a great interface, a great way to send contracts. But then you also receive, I imagine, a seller; they receive this email that says SignNow. Like, that is the name of the company. That's who it's from. It's SignNow or PandaDoc. How professional is this company? If they're using this thing called PandaDoc, the one that I would love to use just for brand recognition was DocuSign. DocuSign's great, but a little archaic and their features and everything now, and they're just expensive. You know, why can't I send you a contract? And it just says that it's Mike's contract. You know, it has my logo at the top. It's coming from my team. I think that just looks so much more professional than SignNow or opening your PandaDoc here. I think it's huge and just helps really create more credibility in everything.

Seth: Let's talk about follow-up sequences a little bit, because this is something that, you know, years ago, follow-up was something that you didn't necessarily have to do. And you could get away with that. The land space was a lot less competitive. There wasn't somebody else waiting right behind you if you didn't take the deal. Things are different these days. And follow-up, it's getting to the point where it's kind of a must if you really want to capture as many deals as you possibly can.

When we talk about follow-up sequences, maybe you send them a letter; they don't respond. What do you do next? You send them another letter, you call them, and you text them. How do you keep the process going? How do you make sure you're getting their attention regardless of what your marketing channel is? Not only the question of when you do it and how often you do it, but like, what do you say?

And this is something that is pretty darn difficult to do if you don't have some kind of a system to either send these things out automatically or, at the very least, remind you of what you need to do when you need to do it. Because you'll have thousands of these different leads, and they're all at a different stage in this process. And it just becomes a nightmare very fast. And as a result, a lot of people either do it poorly or they don't do it at all. And it costs them big time because there are a lot of deals that they don't end up closing as a result of that.

And that was one thing we really wanted to tackle with Stride: creating several different follow-up sequences, many of which would be fully automated so that whether you're somebody who only sends texts or mail or cold calling or some mixture of all of them, there's an automation in there that you can use to handle this follow-up sequence for you. And you can even change it if you want. If you don't like the one we set up, you have the option of moving things around, saying things differently, but at least that basic framework is there for you to start using.

And that was something that we spent a lot of time, especially you, Mike, on putting these things together based on how your business works and also just how most land investors will be able to use it.

Mike: Absolutely. No, they say the fortune's in the follow-up. And I think that is so, so, so true. And it's so important. I know follow-ups are, there's a lot of ways to look at follow-ups. I think a lot of us look at follow-ups in terms of when do we retarget an area? And a question I like to ask is, is your CRM letting you know when to retarget an area? Do you have little things built in there? So if they scan a QR code on a letter, you're texting them, you know, a day or two after that. If you can't agree on terms right now, and they say, "Oh, we're not ready to move right now. But we might be in six months." Are you prepared to talk to them in six months? Are you going to nurture that lead for the next six months?

Because I might say six months, but the reality is I might be ready two months from now. I just say six months just because, like, "Seth, leave me alone, man. Like, I'm tired of talking to you. I get it. I got your letter. I called you up. We can come to terms right now. Leave me alone." But two months from now, you never know what's going to change. So we really went and built it in.

And yeah, I have to give you a lot of kudos on this too, Seth. You know, at first we came in there and I had this killer follow-up sequence, you know, where it's like, okay, we couldn't agree on a number. Okay. Let's send them a text on day one. All right. Three days later, let's drop them an RVM. Okay. Five days later, let's drop them an email. What do some of these sound like? They might be generic, like, "Hey, just want to let you know, we're still interested." Some things might be, "Hey, here's 10 ways to improve the value of your land," you know, and just really trying to give value out there.

And I'd set this up for almost six months straight, a year straight, and then they just go back into the beginning of the sequence. And you looked at me, you're like, "Mike, dude, you have like 10 people on your team. You have this really elaborate drip campaign. What if people just want to shoot out emails? What if they just want to shoot out RVMs? What if they just want to shoot out text?"

So I'm back to the drawing board. Okay. Why don't we offer CRM where you can send out all of those, or you can send out just one, or you can start mixing and matching it, you know, take workflows? We have built it in there for you already, and then just create your own; change it any way that you want to.

And I think that's huge. I mean, a couple of stats on follow-ups here: a lot of people don't realize 92% of voicemails are listened to.

Seth: All of these, we'll drop this in the show notes later on, so people can see.

Mike: 92% of voicemails are listened to. 98% of SMS are read. Emails definitely have a smaller open rate, anywhere between 20% to 37%. But emails are one of the strongest for conversions, and they have about a 15% conversion rate also.

So what are you doing with these things? What are you doing with phone calls? Are you automating it so you are calling up three months from now saying, "Hey, Seth, I know last time we talked, you weren't really ready to move on your land or anything, but you said you were about to hop on a cruise this weekend. I'm just dying to know, I'm thinking about going on a cruise myself. Where'd you end up going? How was it? How'd you like the cruise line?" And do you have a system that tracks those notes in there and just reminds you to do things like that? I think it's huge. And that's where so many people miss out.

I also too, just to back up here, as we talk about follow-ups, I think a lot of us think of follow-ups in terms of just outreach. Let's just get them to ink the contract. That's not the only follow-up in here. We also want to think about follow-ups. Once the contract is inked, what does that look like? Are you shooting them a text a week later, just dropping them a quick voicemail saying, "Hey Seth, hope you're doing well. Just wanted to quickly drop in and say we're still working on your property. Everything's looking great. So I know you should hear from us soon. If you have any questions, just reach out." Something just to nurture that.

I have seen it before where two investors actually both have properties under contract, and then one of them ends up buying it, and the other one's just left in the dark. He later finds out that, oh, I didn't muddy the title. I didn't do anything else. And the seller actually had no idea he had two competing contracts. So how are you staying front of mind in all of this? And I think that's absolutely huge, as well as just really helping gain a reputation as a reputable person in the space, whether you're working on buying land or if you're working on selling land as well.

I mean, we set up these follow-ups so they can also help nurture buyers that are coming into the space, whether it's emails, text, RVMs, or reminding your team just to give them a call, you name it, a lot of this we can do. And a lot of this we pre-built out because I think the reality of it is, Seth, a lot of us stay busy. We're not productive, but we stay busy. I remember when I started in this business, I spent so much time building the perfect website. I don't think it's helped at all. Nobody ever visits my website. I spent so much time on that. I made an amazing Facebook account. I never use it anymore.

Anyway, I think it's nice just to have a lot of these things in place. And then let's start pushing you toward moving the needle forward.

That's what we need to do. A lot of us are like, "I know I'll follow up. I have it on a Google Sheet. I put it on my calendar." But do you actually follow up? Do you actually abide by that Google calendar, by that Google sheet? Does your team know to follow up? Have they ever seen that on your calendar and thought, "I'll take this off of Seth's hands. You know, I'll call the seller for Seth." And then they call. And then an hour later, you're calling and it's like, "Oh yeah, I talked to Dolores an hour ago." It's like, "Oh, how, how'd that conversation go?" And now you're just kind of weird in this situation. And now let's just get it all in one place and make life easy. Let's focus on just getting more deals.

Seth: Kind of what we're talking about here, it sort of ties into the conversation about KPIs and tracking the metrics that matter, like how you can actually know, like, are we achieving your objectives? Like, are things going the way they ought to go to move the needle forward? And that is one of the things you'll see immediately on a dashboard whenever you log in are all the different KPIs that you want to track. And we've got certain ones in there by default, but you can move these around. If you want to track something else, you have the option to put that in there and adjust it to your liking.

Mike: Right. Now, what's really nice with this is you can start tracking individual team members. You can get custom reports made. You can have a dashboard for everyone to see.

And it can be, OK, how many calls did the team make yesterday or last week or last month? How many appointments were booked? How many contracts were sent? How many actually got signed? How many new leads came into the pipeline? How many are listed for sale? How many do we actually have under contract to sell? I mean, really everything you want to see, we're trying to put into one place.

So you don't have to be a pro and build a Google Looker studio to see what these things look like. I've been there and it's not that hard to do once you learn it, but it's just that learning that takes so hard. Why can't it just be click, click? I can see it. That's a nice thing about really starting to put everything in one place, everything in-house.

So yeah, KPIs are right there for you to see, and even more importantly, for your team to see.

Seth: And going back, just a couple of questions: we were talking about the automated workflows and that kind of thing. When you get into Stride, you're going to see a lot of these workflows. But I'll just say my first time looking at these, my brain was just kind of like, what am I looking at? This is confusing.

And it took me a bit of time to really go through some of these and even create some of my own when it really started to click. And I really started to see the power behind these workflows, whether you use one of the existing ones we have in there, or you want to create your own, or even adjust the ones we already have.

This is an amazing thing that can put a lot of work on autopilot, whether it's with follow-up, or sending contracts, or moving to the next stage of closing, or getting properties sold. Like, there's just a lot of stuff that can happen automatically and eliminate a lot of busy work that a lot of us have just become accustomed to that we don't need to do. And that's the beauty behind this kind of thing: it eliminates a lot of that, but it takes a little bit of learning to just get familiar with what is even happening in these workflows and how it makes different parts of your system interact with each other.

Mike: Absolutely. Yeah. Everything we have in here, of course, is going to be a bit of a learning curve to it. I mean, a couple of my favorite workflows we have in there already are clicking one button and it automatically sends them the contract. And that one button is also on their contact page.

So how great is it to be having a conversation with someone, you know, them agreeing to an offer price right there? And then literally just one click of the button and there's a contract in their inbox and you can just make sure they got it, check if it's in their spam folder, and then go into a contract walkthrough right then.

Or another workflow, now that you just mentioned some of these things, Seth, this would be so easy to build out in there. One thing that is really hard in this business is disposition. And you can dispo in-house. We've dispoed a lot in-house. And you can also dispo with agents.

Seth: And it's hard to find a great land agent. When you do, land agents are worth their weight in gold when you have an amazing one. I don't know if you've had the experience, but I've talked to so many people that end up babysitting their land agent. And then they have to remember to email them, "Hey, how many people called last week? How many people went to the property? What'd they say about all these things?"

Wouldn't it be great to just set up an automation that just reaches out to them every week on Monday with either an email or a text just saying, "Hey, what's going on with the property? Should we lower the price? Should we raise the price? Can we start a bidding war? Really, what's happening? Fill me in. Tell me what you think is best." So it's really starting to put a lot of these things on autopilot.

And that thing you mentioned about the one click to send a contract, that's one of many examples. That is a huge deal. I remember the days when it would be a minimum of 15 minutes for me to manually pull up a Word document, type out or copy and paste all of the property owner's information, the parcel number, the legal description, dollar amount, then upload it to DocuSign. I mean, it's enough to make you want to just go nuts.

But all this information is already in your system in Stride. Like, it's put in there from the second you import your list there. It's just beautiful how it brings it all into one place, eliminating the need for all this busy work. And again, that's like one of dozens of different uses for this.

Mike: And on this whole thing of learning the system and how different parts interact with each other, let's talk about the learning curve a little bit, because that's just the reality of any CRM.

Stride is no different, but we went through great efforts to try to straighten out and shorten this learning curve by giving every new user a number of different onboarding steps in the process. You don't just get dumped into the software and you're on your own to watch a couple of videos and figure it out. You actually get an onboarding tech call. That's call number one with a human where they walk through with you. They get all your business information, put it in the right places, get your domain hooked up to it, get your email hooked up to it, and get your phone numbers hooked up. Anything you want to hook up, anything you want to bring in, you can do that.

Seth: You don't have to, by the way. Say if you want to keep using OpenPhone for some reason, you can do that. But if you do want to bring it all into Stride and pay a lot less money and have it all integrated, that's what the tech call is all about. And after that, you schedule your onboarding call.

And that's where another human gets on there and shows you over the course of about an hour how to do all the basic functions with the CRM. Like how to send or receive an email or a phone call or a text message. How to create your website, how to look up all the information on a contact, how to put notes in, and how to deal with the deal boards—all this stuff. Tons of stuff you'll cover. You probably won't remember it all because there's a lot that's covered in that one call, but you get a recording of it. So you can watch it back.

And then even if you still have confusion after that, and you might, you can get on another call if you want and get even more clarity on it. And at any point, there is 24/7 support where you can get on a Zoom call and they will walk you through how to use whatever it is that you're stuck on.

And this is something that in this launching phase, as we get our first handful of new users, we're going to be paying very close attention to the feedback we get because we're under no illusion that this is perfected yet. We know there's going to be wrinkles to iron out and we're hoping to get a lot of that feedback as people get on board and start using it.

So if you decide to sign up and start using this system, definitely stay in communication with us. If you encounter any problems about anything, tell us because we want to know; we'll pay attention, and we'll do everything we can to make this as easy as possible for you.

Mike: Yeah. And let's talk about these calls too. I mean, it's so important that we have a human being there. But what's so nice about this, though, is this is another human being that understands the CRM intimately. So on the tech onboarding call, they'll get you A2P set up, all this other stuff, rocking and rolling, connect your domain, and do everything you need to there. Just a lot of the nitty-gritty that, frankly, is just a pain and needs to be done. So we carry a lot of that heavy lifting.

After that, the onboarding call, you might be thinking to yourself, okay, I don't really want to hop on an onboarding call. If you're like me, you're a millennial, and you think, okay, I know technology. Don't waste my time, man. This guy's just going to read through this boring script. I'm going to be bored on mine. He's like, okay, this is how you enter a contact's first name. This is how you enter a contact's second name.

Instead, when you hop on that call with them, they say, what do you know? What do you know? What don’t you know? Do you know technology really well? Great. What do you want to achieve from this call? Are you a little lost in everything? Okay. We have a basic SOP that they can start walking you through there, but it's really for you to get out of it, whatever you want.

And then, like you said, Seth, 24-7 customer support. I mean, for me, that is huge. Nothing is worse than when something goes wrong in my CRM. When I have a deal that's ready to go and I can't make a phone call now, you know, my website's down, you know, for some reason, my contracts aren't sending, whatever it is, it just, it always feels like the sky is falling. My team's freaking out. They're messaging me left and right, you know, and then I email support and I usually get an instant response back from a support member that says, "We received your email. We will follow up with you in the next one to three business days." Like, no, I need this in like one to three minutes.

And that's really what we've tried to go out of the way here to do. And also just being automation-forward and AI-forward. Let's put a smart chat widget in there that has a huge knowledge base on everything we've built out. You can access the knowledge base yourself. You can chat with it. If it's not able to get you the answer, you just press agent, and you're talking to a human being just like that. Let's get everything resolved right now because the reality of it is the climate we're in. If you're not able to jump on a deal today, it could be lost to somebody else a couple of days from now.

Seth: On that whole note of being able to stay up to date on what's going on right now, being able to respond immediately if something comes up, we should probably mention the mobile app, right?

So any user of Stride is going to have access to a mobile app that will directly connect to their CRM. So whether it's a phone call or an email or a text message, or you just want to see the status of a deal and where it's at in the process, you can see all that stuff from the mobile app. I've got it on my phone. I use it all the time. You can have it send you notifications or not.

But either way, the reality is, while most of us do this business behind a desk, not all of us do. And there are always times when you're just not there right at your computer to respond to things. If you're visiting a property, if you're talking with an agent in the field, if you're on vacation, or whatever it is, that option is there too. So it's not like you have to be behind a computer with a desktop-friendly device to see what's going on.

Mike: Yeah, I think that's huge. It's huge for you. It's huge for your team. I know a lot of us use teams offshore, and the reality of it is sometimes they lose internet. Sometimes typhoons come in through the area, or they say there is one, and then they just don't have internet anymore. But now they have it on their phone. And it's like, okay, if you're able to ping me on Slack, Discord, whatever to say, "Hey, I don't have internet," well, you somehow have data. So now you can also just use the app and continue moving forward. I think that's huge.

Seth: By the way, we called it Stride. Why did we call it Stride, Mike? Is there a reason behind that name?

Mike: I don't know about you, Seth, but when I started this business, it felt like chaos, just absolute chaos. Managing a hundred different tools at once, managing the overseas team, managing sellers, managing title companies.

So instead, I just want my business to have a nice stride to it. I love it when somebody says, you know, you have a nice stride. You know, an appearance, you're seen, you're heard, and it just seems like you have your act together. So why not create a system where you do have your act together? And that's how stridecrm.co was born.

Seth: Yeah. I love that. On that note of chaos. So sometimes chaos happens when you have a huge team or maybe you're not the best at communicating with your team or best at delegating certain things to certain people, keeping people in their lane, that kind of thing.

That is another thing. We kind of already mentioned how you can have unlimited team members in your Stride CRM at no extra cost. Remind me, how many team members do you currently have in your business, Mike?

Mike: Oh, that's a loaded question. 12 core members and then 40 data people. So if you're somebody that has that many people or even less than that, really, I imagine it's important to have very clearly assigned tasks to each person.

And when you invite them into your CRM system, limit the things that they can see, the things that they can mess with, and make it so that when a property gets to a certain stage in the acquisition or disposition process, it's very clear when that team member knows, okay, I've got the ball now. This is in my court. I have to work with it.

And that's a really important part of Stride and really should be an important part of any CRM when a team is involved. It's just making it very clear who is supposed to do what. It's part of what goes into KPI tracking, understanding if your employee is doing what they're supposed to do. It's a huge part of that.

Seth: And there's pretty much the unlimited ability to track that stuff and understand who has which part of the process, right?

Mike: That's very important. I hear a lot of people ask me, how do you trust your team? How do you know what to do? And I've been very fortunate and blessed myself that I've had incredible team members. With that being said, I once had a team member make a mistake when we were using Notion and delete a couple of pages that we could not restore. And it was hard. It was heavy and ultimately led to her termination, unfortunately.

Other reasons for that too. What's nice about this is we set it up so you can actually audit all your team members and see exactly what they do. If somebody decides, "Seth, I'm done. I'm tired of this. I can't work with you anymore. I quit and I deleted all your contacts. Good luck, man." You can quickly restore it. Everything will be saved in there for about 10 or 15 days.

And what's also nice is jumping into the CRM. And now if I want to bring you in just to help build some websites, I could only give you access to websites. I could not even give you access to automation, or I could let you view the automations but not actually manage or edit them, or I could let you do all of that.

So what's nice about this is we can start bringing people in. We don't overwhelm them with everything that it offers. We can pigeonhole them into only the things we need them to focus on. And you have a backup of everything in case one of your team members does go haywire, you know, or if you just mess something up. I mean, I've been there and it's no fun at all. So really trying to make it really nice with that.

Seth: I realize some people may be hearing this who are actively looking for a new CRM. Maybe some people aren't looking for one, but this sounds kind of interesting. They want to learn more and give it a try. So let's talk about our sleep well at night guarantee. We don't want there to be any apprehension, any nervousness, or any risk, really, for somebody who wants to give this a try and see if it's going to work for them.

So we've got a 14-day money-back guarantee. So any new user has a chance to get in there and give it a try, give it a whirl and see, is this going to work for you? And if not, you're welcome to get out within that first 14 days and get all your money back. And if that ever were to happen, we would love to hear why so we can make it better and eliminate that reason.

But that's one thing we wanted to make sure we were offering just so that it makes it more of a no-brainer to give this a shot without fear of somehow ending up in a worse place.

Mike: Right. I mean, this is why you're a great business partner, Seth. I remember when you presented this to me and you're like, "Mike, I want people to enjoy the product we give. I think this is a huge value add, but I hate to take money from people if they're not happy with the service. What are we going to do?"

And my response is, "Tough luck. You know, it's a great product. We know it's great. They lost 200 bucks for a month if they want to leave. So what?"

But Seth, you have the best reputation out there. You really are an OG in the space. And I remember four years ago when I started in the land space, when I was at the gym, I was listening to every single podcast on REtipster. You know, I learned from so many giants in the space all because of you. And I know it's so important for us to just keep that reputation for you, just to make sure people are happy with what we're putting out there. I mean, you got the biggest land investing blog in the space and you came with, "Mike, I want to sleep well."

Seth: I do. It's important to me. And I got a family, I got kids; it's already hard enough to get enough sleep. I want to make sure it's good. So let's make sure 14 days; you're not happy. It's overwhelming. It just seems like a horrible product, the worst thing you've ever seen. Shoot us an email; let us know. If you can let us know what you didn't like, that'd be great because all we want to do is continue to improve.

But if for any reason you're not happy, let us know within those first couple of weeks and we'll just refund you. We'll end up eating some money ourselves, but that's okay. That's the price we take as entrepreneurs, stepping out there off the ledge and building something new. I love that we're doing that.

On that whole idea of eliminating risk for you, another thing to just be aware of is that if you come into Stride, and even if you spend, I don't know, six months or a year hanging out in this Stride environment and you decide you want to do something else or you don't like it, I hope that doesn't happen. But if it does, we're not going to hold your data hostage like some CRM software does. You can export everything and move it on to wherever else you want to go. It's very easy to do. That's another thing that just kind of felt like it didn't feel good whenever we were looking at other CRMs that wouldn't make it easy to take your data and move on to something else. So we're not doing that. If you ever need to move on, just know it's not going to be hard to get the information you need to move to whatever else you're moving to.

And there's something that we're doing as we launch this software that we're calling the Founders Circle, where the first 100 people that sign up for this software are going to get a discounted price on it. The normal price is going to be $297 per month, but for those first 100 people, they can get it for $197 per month, ongoing.

So this is something you'll definitely want to move on or you're going to kick yourself later.

Mike: With that though, Seth, just because I don't want to lie to our audience here, it's not open to 100 spots anymore. We've already had about 23 people sign up. So by the time you're listening to this, hopefully you're listening to it on day one. You still got those. What would that be? 77 spots left.

Seth: Yeah. Sign up now while you can. Have fun.

Mike: Yeah, there you go. It's going fast. You don't want to be late to the party.

So part of the reason we're doing this as well is because we want feedback. We want people to tell us what their experience is, their first impressions, and their impressions after using it for a month, two months, or three months. If there's something in there that's missing that you wish was there, or if there's something you see that's in the way, I mean, whatever it is, we want to know. Mike and I have already spent many, many hours going through this, trying to tweak it and make it perfect through our perspectives.

But the interesting thing about the land business now is that land businesses work in different ways for different people, depending on what your strategy is. I mean, if you're doing double closings or subdivides, or whether you're sending direct mail or ringless, I mean, whatever it is, there are lots of different versions of a land business now. And that was another thing we were trying to keep in mind as we built this, was just making it pliable and moldable to work for any different type of land business out there. So whatever type of business you're running, again, that feedback is going to be key. And that's what we're hoping to get from the founder's circle.

Mike: With that being said, too, our good friend Buck put this really nicely. He said, "Are you going to eat what you're cooking?" And I absolutely love that. So one thing I think is really important for everyone to note is software is only going to get better. It's going to get better. It's going to improve more. And you might be thinking, "Yeah, because we'll be working behind the computer trying to create more automations for you so you know we can make it better." No, that's not why it's going to get better. It's going to get better because we're using the software. We are in the space. My whole team has already migrated over to it and we're using it daily. We've built out some premium automations that we'll be pumping out for the public to see. We'll be sending email updates on that.

You'll see crazy automations that you'll think, "I'll never use that in my life." And six months later, you might be. And you'll be seeing things that don't apply to you at all. So just ignore them. But what I love about this is we're in the space. We're doing it. We're using it. and it's only going to go up from here. I'm so excited about it.

Seth: Yeah, exactly. It's part of why that feedback is so helpful because chances are, if you notice something, we'll both be like, "Oh yeah, that's true. I see that too." Or maybe we'll be like, "Oh, interesting. My business doesn't work exactly like yours. So I didn't even see that, but that's a great point." So again, that's a part of the benefit of both of us using this every day: we know exactly what we're serving up to you. And we're not going to give you something that we don't believe in ourselves.

So as we wrap this up, Mike, I just want to emphasize that Stride was built by land investors for land investors. We know the daily struggle. We know the highs and the lows. We understand things that hold land investors back. And that's what we were aiming to nail with this software. Anything else you want to leave people with as we wrap this up, Mike?

Mike: You said it so clearly, but I think one thing to note is the way that our partnership started was the love of AI, teaching people AI in the space. We've already put some AI implementations in there. Some of them we haven't even built out as much as we want to yet, but they're still available to build out to the audience. So we're big on really being AI forward and just bringing the latest and greatest into the space.

And that's what we're going to continue to do. And a lot of that we already have in there. I think that's what started this idea. So definitely automation forward. If you can reduce team members by having things done automatically, computers rarely make mistakes. I think that's great. And I can't wait for this just to handle more and more and more tasks for us. Oh, it's already doing so much for my team.

Seth: Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. The AI thing, Mike and I both understand that world better than most. Now, something that we regularly see is sometimes things are great in concept, but they're just not quite there yet or not to the point where you just want to let it loose and trust it to handle everything for you. There are bots out there now that can handle text conversations for you and that kind of thing. There are ways you can handle phone calls this way, but we're not going to put it in there unless we're very confident it's solid and it's something you can rely on. We're not going to put some half-baked idea in there that seems great in concept but can't actually deliver yet. But in the future, assuming that stuff does come around, it is ready. That's something we're hoping to play with ourselves. And if it works well, put it into Stride for people.

Mike: And here, Seth, earmuffs right now. So just for everybody else listening to this part too, we actually threw some of this AI stuff in there. We just haven't built it out ourselves. I know. So it's in there. You can build it yourself. We're still working on building on it. We're not going to give you that; that's a plug-and-play ready until we're super confident behind it.

If you're thinking, "Man, these two bumbos in here talking about all this, I know technology really well," come in there and blow us away. Show us what you built or don't show us what you built, but create something amazing, you know, and really blow it out of the water. So some of that technology is already in there. We just haven't built out tons of automations and workflows for it.

Again, if you want to lock in that founder's rate before it goes up to $297 forever, go visit stridecrm.co. You can also find a link to that in the show notes for this episode.

Seth: Retipster.com/CRM is where I'm going to put the show notes for this.

Yeah, Mike, I'm excited. It's been great to work with you on this. I'm excited for land investors in the community who will get to benefit from this. And again, we hope to continue getting feedback and improving it as the months and years go on.

Mike: Absolutely. I'll see everybody over on Stride.