Ian R: Welcome back to inspector toolbelt talk everyone we have on again, Beon. How are you Beon?
Beon DeNood: Hey there? I’m doing good. How are you, Ian?
Ian R: Not bad. As you know, I’m recovering from COVID. So that was a fun little bout of unhappiness.
Beon DeNood: Yeah, you sound 10 million times better than you did just even a day ago. So looks like you’re on demand.
Ian R: For the most part. I couldn’t talk when I was sick. Then when I could, I sounded like a creepy sexy Batman. It was just not a pretty situation. I didn’t feel like that. I felt like Batman after he lost a fight.
Beon DeNood: I was gonna say, that’s probably the only kind of Batman there is.
Ian R: Creepy, sexy. But no, that was.
Beon DeNood: But that’s another podcast.
Ian R: The Creepy Sexy Batman podcast? Yeah, no, but I’m recovering from COVID. I’m feeling better. I’m really glad to. Glad to be back here. But man, that was a little bit of a rough spot. But I’m glad. I’m glad my first podcast back from the land of the dead is with you talking about some cool stuff here.
Beon DeNood: Yeah, it’s pretty exciting, you know, I’ve studied the app episodes, they may be not the most popular as far as listens. But there’s a good core of guys who really are interested in just knowing what’s going on. And what’s coming, because we have new features coming all the time. There are some really exciting ones coming up in the next few months that we were really excited to share. They’re going to be part of larger initiatives that are quite exciting for the Holland, home inspector community.
Ian R: Yeah. So if you’re listening, and you’re thinking, Oh, okay, well, I can just take a look at what the new features are online or something. Listen in for just a little bit, because I have gotten a lot of phone calls, messages, emails, everything. The last time we talked about a program that we’re coming out with, to help home inspectors triple their home inspection fees, basically, we’re really excited about Nick has been asking this about and tried to even guess a couple of times what it was. So listen in just a little bit. We have some really cool stuff coming up. Just some great things in the future to help the home inspection community in general.
Beon DeNood: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a very exciting program but yeah, if we just sort of cover a few features that our users have seen in the last few weeks, and maybe I can just give a tiny little bit of background, the shared inspections snuck its way into the last release. It basically, you know, on your inspection, you just have a little “Share button” now you can share it with other inspectors on our platform as well. Now, why that is a big deal. I mean, it may seem like a little feature, but we did a lot of work to lay the groundwork for what’s coming next. That’s a feature we’re calling teams, where we’re going to have full multi-inspector support in inspector toolbelt. So that’s something we’re really excited about, we didn’t want to come out with multi-inspector right out the gate, we wanted to make sure we were in a pretty solid, stable state before we reached out to multi-inspector firms because we know that you rely on your software very heavily to be performing and working well. So that’s one feature we’re pretty excited about.
Ian R: Well, I tell you, even with the multi-inspector features coming out, which I love, basically you have one admin account, and he’s controlling his entire company, all of his inspectors, and where they are and what they’re doing that that just rocks. That’ll be out in what would you say beyond a month or so?
Beon DeNood: Well, yeah, we’re probably looking at around September, that’s probably when we were going to launch that one.
Ian R: Okay, so a little over a month, and yeah. So the shared inspections, though, in itself was pretty cool because I know, for me, it’s always been a little tough whenever I’ve had to collaborate with another inspector and it’s kind of like, okay, well, let me log into your account, or, you know, when we used other software’s like, Okay, now, how do we make the sync and stuff like that? This is real-time sharing. You’re a single guy, operator, hey, I need chuck over there to do a commercial inspection with me and his buddy bill, they’re going to do the inspection with me. Now you just share that inspection with the two of those guys. They’re just jumping in adding stuff to the inspection, making notes, and adding pictures, if you have an internet connection, you can see what they’re doing in real-time. It is, it is pretty sweet. So you could do that kind of before. This is just a whole another level and then when they’re all done, you just revoke their invitation to that they move on with their lives and you send off the report. It controls where people can see to like, do you want to see the pricing? Do you want to see the agreements and stuff like that or not?
Beon DeNood: Right, right. Yeah, we just recognize that every multi-inspector setup has sort of a different way that they go about things so some just want them to focus on the inspection. Others want them to focus on the whole client experience. So we’ve given the ability to lock down what they’re able to do and what they’re able not to do effectively, but you know, as well Recording testing. I remember one point, I had two devices out in the field doing a survey. I was basically sitting in the office watching the progress, and you could literally just see the inspection sort of, you know, progressing as it was going in real-time. So, yeah, it’s pretty slick, we’re pretty proud of how it came together.
Ian R: I know it was, uh, not the biggest feature ever but the calendar view of our inspections, I don’t know why that just, that just still makes me very happy to see. Because I’m a visual person, I like to go click okay, here’s my week. Here are all the inspections, I need to schedule for this day. So I click on that day, and I can just schedule an inspection and it makes it really convenient. Yeah,
Beon DeNood: I’m gonna say, the email inbox view is what we’ve had from the beginning and that has its place but it does seem like a lot of users just won’t be able to see the scope of the week. It gives an instant visual as to how busy their week or their day is. I agree. Great feature.
Ian R: Do we have any other kind of little features that are coming out along with teams later on?
Beon DeNood: Yeah, we do. I also just wanted to throw out dark mode there real quick. Oh, yes. I couldn’t believe how many guys wanted dark mode. I thought it was kind of like a low priority but the guys wanted a dark mode. So we threw it in there for the last release. One more thing before we moved on also is you guys have been working super hard in the support team on getting those new templates in, which is huge. Yeah, the Ben Gromicko template and the InterNACHI template. So we just got a huge shout-out back from the user community when those landed, so that’s great.
Ian R: Oh, yeah, I can’t believe I even forgot the Ben Gromicko template. We’ve been working on it for a while we’ve been working with Ben and we released it. It is awesome. I have already had multiple inspectors, email and thank us for it. I don’t know why they’re thanking me. It’s Ben’s template. It comes complete with a lot of his comments and narratives and it’s just gorgeous. Especially if you’re a new inspector, you can pick that thing up and start inspecting like Ben. If we’re experienced inspectors, I still recommend that you do it. Because I think you’d be surprised at some of the little things that he does to make his inspection go efficiently and thoroughly. I picked up a couple of things from it, just reviewing the template and trying it out.
Beon DeNood: Yeah, what I found interesting about it just looking from my perspective was there were a lot of points in the template for educating the homeowner on various elements, you know, how to care for something maintenance-wise, or what to look out for. So in that way, it was very helpful but yeah, that was very cool to have that land.
Ian R: Yeah. Also the ASHI template, we added one of those that was actually requested by a few inspectors, but the InterNACHI template, and the Big Ben Gromicko template, yeah, there’s a whole bunch of new ones in there. We’re always releasing more templates, it’s actually getting quite big in there is a nice library of templates to choose from.
Beon DeNood: Yeah, I saw that you know, from a designer point of view, I was thinking, Okay, we’re going to, you know, change how this looks, the easier to find and that sort of thing as it grows. The idea down the road is to be able to open up the marketplace template marketplace to all our users so that you can, you can also be able to feature your own templates in that marketplace, you know, but yeah, it’s looking exciting. As far as the roadmap going forward, you asked about, we’ve got a few exciting stuff, and then stuff that’s not exciting, but essential. So we already spoke about teams. So multi inspectors coming out, the fully featured multi-inspector with scheduling and everything in September. Then one that got asked for a lot is video clips, being able to add video clips to the inspection. So we’re working on that right now. It’s a tricky feature to get right because it’s taking the video and making sure we can store it accurately, and then present it to the user in a good way. We want to make sure we do it right. So we’re taking our time with that. We hope we can meet the timeline for September on that one as well but we’ll see that maybe slated for an October release,
Ian R: You know, not to interrupt you but you can already put YouTube videos in the reports now and information cards, you put an information card in and you put the link to the video, and it automatically creates a little preview of the video where you can play it right there in the app. So you can already do it from YouTube. It’s just this would be embedding it directly in the report and sort of YouTube first, right?
Beon DeNood: Yeah, it’s just ways to enrich the report experience for the client further, you know, talking about enriching the report, we also got a feature that it’s almost there. We almost released it this last time but we’ve held back on it because we needed to tweak it a little bit there are a lot of inspectors like putting standards of you know, diagrams and blurbs into their inspections. So we’re looking at putting that into, you can leverage things like the InterNACHI, you know, diagram gallery that they’ve presented for all kinds of defects explaining conditions and things, and a lot of the guys like that fulfill fleshing out their reports too, so that they probably will come out in September with our next release. Actually, they went properties first of August, that would, that would come out. Then the other one I wanted to mention was, that we’re calling it a performance release. Really, it’s interesting what’s happened, you know, when you create something, and then you see how guys’ imaginations take off with it and how they use it. So when guys have started creating their own templates, they’ve actually created very large, robust templates, templates that are much larger than what we anticipated when we designed it. So sometimes, when you have a large template on a device, it may be a little laggy and that’s something we’re looking at solving. So we have the fix for it, we’re just testing it extensively but then once that comes out, it’ll be a very, very smooth experience. The tests I’ve done on that so far, from what the team has put together are looking really, really good. So if you are struggling with a little bit of legginess and a larger template, don’t worry, this solution coming real quick.
Ian R: You know, it’s funny that you mentioned the whole larger template, I always thought that I had a large template. Most of our users have a template that’s smaller than mine but some of these guys are coming in a template searcher. So I don’t even know how they keep track of things because I’m like, holy cow, that’s a lot of do you need to have a separate card for each one of your outlets. Hey, that’s how they inspect. So we’re working to accommodate that.
Beon DeNood: Yeah, though. So that’s sort of the big ones that we have on the radar right now. Obviously, the biggest one we have in the way of or build up an expectation is the one that you mentioned at the beginning, just being able to, come up with a solution, to be able to give the data and the money back to the inspectors and that we’ve got slated, we’re going to start testing. We’d like to start testing next month but we’re hoping September, if everything goes well, October if we run into some glitches, but that is a very, that’s probably the most exciting feature we’re looking at releasing.
Ian R: All right. So I’m calling this whole thing that we’re releasing that we’re not telling anybody what it is yet. I’m calling it, the inspection gate.
Beon DeNood: Inspection gate.
Ian R: When you all listening in, and listen, I’ve had several guys every couple of days, though, text message me, is it this, you know, and they’re just clicking wild stabs in the dark and I’m just like, No, no, that’s not it. No, that’s been done before, we’re basically going to expose a part of the industry that you might not know has existed. To be honest with you, I knew, I kind of knew it existed, but I didn’t know how it existed. I didn’t realize all of the money was in there. We basically are going to open it wide open and say, here’s how much money you’re not making here. Now you can make it when you use our app, it’s going to be pretty slick. I’m super excited because as I’m, as I look over the data, and I see how it rolls, it’s going to be awesome, the amount of money that you are going to be able to make is not only short term up to tripling your inspection fee, but also in perpetuity. So long after you retire, you’ll be making money off of this because of a part of the industry, that is apparently some sort of well-kept secret because other vendors don’t want to pop it out there. So we’re gonna pop it out there.
Beon DeNood: Yeah, I’m very proud of this initiative because, you know, as you said, I think when it comes to data sharing, a part of us just kind of resigned ourselves to Yeah, you know, we share data with companies, you know, I mean, you think of the big ones like Google and Apple, you know, goodness, Facebook, goodness knows what they all know about our lives. So we kind of just get used to that but when it comes to our professional product, you know, what we’re actually doing for our work our output. If your self employed, and you that’s being shared with somebody else, just like home inspectors, maybe you kind of accept that. If you have any idea how much money like you said, How much money is being made off that data? It is quite crazy. So we’re bringing that all back. We’re bringing it back, we’re handing it straight to the home inspector putting it in their control. It’s a very exciting program. It’s never been done before in this way. Yeah, stay tuned guys, it’s really going to be a mind-blowing change in the industry that’ll hit us in the right direction and we’re pretty excited about it.
Ian R: Even sexy dark Batman is gonna love it. It’s just
Beon DeNood: Sexy, creepy Batman.
Ian R: Yeah, no. The more we, more we develop it, and the more we get things fixed, the more we get things in place, the more I’m just like, Man, this is just if it even works 1/10 as good as we think will. It’s just gonna make everybody money for years to come. I wish I could share the math with you right now, because it just, it just gets me excited. We’re not recording this one on video but if you could see my hands are going up and down and left and right because just the income that you would make residually you’re gonna love it. It’s pretty awesome.
Beon DeNood: Yep, that it is everything’s looking pretty healthy. I was looking at our releases since the beginning of the year and it’s amazing just how many features we’ve been able to pack in there, the development team is really doing a great job. So just a shout out to those guys, too. Thank you so much for your hard work. Our support team as well. You know, David and the rest of the gang. Thank you so much for your efforts because yeah, as our users, you know them, and they’re great at their job. So thank you, everybody, for your hard work to make us all come together.
Ian R: Yeah, I mean, we have had a release every month, since the release of our new app last year. That’s pretty impressive new features every month and stability. That doesn’t come from, you know, just randomly throwing it out there you guys, you and Chilwe and Christian, just developing amazing stuff. Then we have people like David and Kim and Kristine and others just testing the tar out of it. If you could see the hours and days and weeks of testing that go into a release, you’d be kind of blown away. So we have an amazing team at ITB. We have a lot of amazing clients too. Oh, by the way, there’s something new if you’re listening in and you haven’t joined our inspector toolbelt Facebook group, please do look it up. Neil summers actually started at one of our users as a knock on the door, and hopefully, he will let you in and you can kind of be the first to know about certain things.
Beon DeNood: That sounds great. Thanks for the catch-up and thanks for your support to you as well because you know getting the feedback from the field. Your past experience as well as current experience, really has helped to shape this product and focus our attention to get the most valuable features out to our inspectors.
Ian R: Yeah, well, we’re all working together as a team but we’d like to keep our state of the app address, kind of short because we get excited about it. We also have some great other podcasts coming up with some great content in it. We wanted to let you guys know where we stood on things. Also, that program that everybody’s been asking about. So stay tuned and we will hopefully have some announcements here soon.
Beon DeNood: Awesome.
Ian R: Thanks, Beon.
Beon DeNood:Thanks, Ian
Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of inspector toolbelt talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].
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