1M22 #1: Initial idea for business

First of many posts about my journey to start a business and sell it for $1M+ in one year...calling the journey 1M22. This post is dedicated to my initial idea and what my plan is.

I currently work for a large ($1B+) mortgage software company and we have a bunch of ideas floating around of things we should build, but they're always pretty far down the roadmap. One of these ideas has gotten me excited and I think I can build it and apply it to a different market, real estate agents (we work exclusively with loan officers).

The idea is to build a calculator / lead gen form that answers the question of "should I rent or should I buy" and sell it to real estate agents. It's a relatively simple project, but there aren't a lot of resources out there for agents. We've punted on the project at work because our customers are loan officers and their clients already have decided to purchase a house as they are applying for a loan, but I think with real estate agents it would be a lot more applicable. I'm also looking for a new place to live right now so the project answers a direct question I'm having.

After the first calculator is built and agents are using it, we'd start to build out different tools for RE agents to compete with new VC startups trying to disrupt them (Homie in Utah, many others in different cities). I think the market for that is huge, and very much love the vision of building tools to supports independent agents rather than trying to displace so many jobs. I think technology companies that enable rather than displace are awesome (looking at you Shopify), and would love the mission associated with that. "Arming the rebels" of real estate agents.

There are many small tools (additional calculators) and large tools (CRM, listing management, cash offer tools, etc.) that could be build out once we get a small product that people love. So the potential is pretty big. But the first step is to build a small thing that a few people love, and that is obviously difficult.

I've started building the calculator and have pretty much the whole backend done. We actually fleshed it out for a hackathon project at work, but I had to rewrite everything from scratch the last few weeks because I want to be sure I'm not infringing on any code or anything. My goal is to get a beta out in the next 2 weeks and let some of my RE agent connections to start to use it for free.

We'll see how this goes. Thanks for reading and following along. Please leave any feedback or reach out at any point along this process -- I want to meet a bunch of new people through this as well and would love to connect.

Build on 👷

links...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/buy-rent-calculator.html