Episode 389 - Short Cuts with Alex Gustafson, Founder/CEO - Oppy

00:00:00 - Alex Gustafson

You've got chat GPT, and I would compare that to more of a consumer app, or just one to one where you're talking with it and you know, you see exactly what it's doing, and you know that it's got a broad context of the entire Internet. And with Awpy, you set a few goals for your company. You tell tell it which company it's working for, and then you can feed it to the relevant web pages of your site.

00:00:33 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the real estate sessions, and I'm your host, Bill Risser. With nearly 25 years in the real estate business, I love to interview industry leaders, up and comers, and really anyone with a story to tell. It's the stories that led my guests to a career in the real estate world that drives me into my 9th year and nearly 400 episodes of the podcast. And now I hope you enjoy the next journey. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 389, the Real Estate Sessions podcast. It's another shortcuts. This time I'm going to be talking with Alex Gustafson. I met Alex, oh, at an Inman event five years ago or so, and just really bright, doing some cool stuff. He's working with video, virtual stuff. This is back then. He has a marketing agency up in the northeast, and he's doing some cool stuff with AI. And I always like to talk to the AI people to see if they're, they've got some sort of different take or angle or focus that we all need to hear about. So let's get this thing started. Alex, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:34 - Alex Gustafson

Hey, Bill, thanks for having me.

00:01:36 - Bill Risser

Yeah, it's great having you back. I'll never forget how we met. I think you have to help me here. It was at the Aria hotel at a. Was it a tapas bar maybe?

00:01:47 - Alex Gustafson

I think it was, yeah, it was the lobby bar there. And yeah, you've got a mind like a steel trap. That was probably back in 2019. 2018.

00:01:58 - Bill Risser

That's the next question I wanted to know. Did you know how long it's been since you recorded your episode? And you're right. It's 29 October 1, 2019 is when episode 207 was released. And that's when we were talking about what you had going on, and it was great. You were there for the Inman event, right? I think you were there to learn as a young entrepreneur. Do I have that right?

00:02:19 - Alex Gustafson

Yes. I was there just to do some networking and working on one of my products at the time and making some connection. So glad we bumped into each other.

00:02:29 - Bill Risser

Yeah, well, I really like doing these shortcut episodes because I get to go back, talk to somebody that I enjoyed chatting with the first time. So it's really, I know this is going to be a nice, easy conversation. And if I remember right, you had a company called Remark, which was still is a kind of a real estate marketing agency up in the, in the northeast, correct?

00:02:52 - Alex Gustafson

Yeah, exactly. And we started in about 2012. So when you and I met was right before COVID which really made things kind of take off and made people focus more on virtual tours than they had before. So it's been a very exciting time since we spoke with re Mark and then with my other products.

00:03:14 - Bill Risser

Yeah. With the pandemic being a part of that, that span. I like to ask this question. It's, what's the biggest thing that's happened for you personally or professionally since the last time we chatted? So that we're going back to 2019 to today? What's that thing for you?

00:03:35 - Alex Gustafson

Definitely kids on the personal level, I've had two beautiful, healthy daughters since we talked, and so now she's turning three next month and a one year old, she's going to turn one next month. So. Wow.

00:03:52 - Bill Risser

A girl dad times two. Nice.

00:03:55 - Alex Gustafson

Yes. Yeah. So it's definitely been a whirlwind I can't even imagine.

00:04:02 - Bill Risser

So a couple years apart. Wow. You have a wonderful, wonderful life ahead of you. And I'm not being facetious there. I just, as somebody who, we only had one child, a boy. But if the only thing I, I like to say to a new, a new dad or a new mom is in, in my opinion, wherever you're at with your daughters, it's only going to get better. Each phase. The next phase is better than the last. Now, there is that teenage thing, and we can't help that because you know how you were. I know how I was. But, I mean, but getting up to that phase is so cool. So enjoy the hell out of it. That's awesome.

00:04:40 - Alex Gustafson

Appreciate that. Yeah, it's been a blast. And, yeah, you take the good with the bad every day and, but no matter what, you know, it's always fulfilling and exciting.

00:04:52 - Bill Risser

Yeah. Now, you were you did you were you born and raised up? And I know we have this on the other episode. I can't. My steel trap isn't as steely as you think.

00:05:01 - Alex Gustafson

Where'd you grow up? I grew up in Connecticut, in West Hartford, Connecticut.

00:05:05 - Bill Risser

All right. So are you happy about the Celtics?

00:05:08 - Alex Gustafson

Honestly, couldn't tell you what happened with the Celtics, but I'm pretty sure they won, and I'm so embarrassed. And I'm such a. I'm ashamed to be an east coaster, especially somebody who grew up in Connecticut, because sports have always eluded me a little bit. I like being on the field and playing, but when it comes to actually following games and tracking, I'm really not good at it.

00:05:34 - Bill Risser

Look, two kids, a company or two, you're very busy. No excuses needed. You don't have to feel bad. All right, I'll get out of that quick. Let's go on to look. I did a little looking around to see what's going on with you, and you have started a new company and I think that's cool. Let's talk about Oppi. And if I remember correctly, it's not oppi.com comma, it's Oppy dot Pro, correct? That's the website.

00:06:01 - Alex Gustafson

Yeah, exactly. And yeah, so Oppy has been a really exciting project and built off a lot of the tools that were proprietary to my booking platform that we built through re mark. And when we saw AI coming out, we realized that over all these years, we had great websites for people to go on and book and get customer support and, and at the end of the day, within the space, residential and real estate, phone is always the preferred medium. And people always prefer to send a text message or an email versus like, going and learning your website and how to dig around. And so when we started seeing tools like chat, GPT and others, we realized, like, this is the time to move a bunch of these tools over to the phone and create just a all in one, basically AI employee suite where you can manage a whole AI team and they can take bookings for you, they can help with transactions, they can send emails, send text messages, and keep you in the loop the entire time.

00:07:23 - Bill Risser

So the ability to create, I'll just call it a chatbot because that's what I think of when I think of what people were playing with maybe ten years ago, trying to come up with a way to, you had to teach it and learn language and all those pieces to the puzzle. Right? It sounds like it's not really the same anymore today with the advent of AI and all these things that it does and as it keeps growing, did it make that creation of what you created way easier?

00:07:54 - Alex Gustafson

Yes. And I had first hand experience building my own. They're called IVR trees. Before all of this technology where you're dragging, like if this, then that, and where you get those text messages, press one to go to sales, two to go to support, and suddenly we realize, like, you just delete all that you don't need any of that. It's just the AI can make a lot of the decisions for you and based on just what you would send new employee in the training, just documentation of how things are done in your company. And so within, I would say, three clicks, we generally promise that you can come out with an AI with a phone number and up to you if you want an email and it'll know your business as well as like an intern. And the more time you spend giving it some feedback or feeding it some more web pages from your site or some resources, the better and better it gets. And it's something that'll work for you 24 hours a day and doesn't have feelings that can get hurt or take sick days and all of that. So it's just been so exciting building this product and just the industry as a whole, seeing all the new stuff that's come out.

00:09:27 - Bill Risser

So there's always been this part of me with AI and look, there's a lot of, you know, there are a lot of people that are scared to death of it. There's the deepfake stuff, there's, I saw Bryce and DeChambeau. Someone totally did a great job of getting his voice and having him rip a bunch of players. You could tell right away if you knew Bryson or if you knew golf that this was somebody having fun. But there's this negative side to it and I think whenever you're just kind of letting AI go out and do something in the world, you never know what's going to come back. However it sounds like what you've done is you're saying this thing we're doing is going to look only specifically at very, very direct information about you and your company, and that's all it's going to refer to. I think everyone thinks, oh, my gosh, it's going to be out in the world looking for all these answers, not yours. You've really focused it in on, let's get these responses for this business, the way this business operates.

00:10:30 - Alex Gustafson

Yeah, exactly. And that's, it's built for business. So you've got chat GPT, and I would compare that to more of a consumer app or just one to one where you're talking with it and you know, you see exactly what it's doing and you know that it's got a broad context of the entire Internet. And with Awpy, you set a few goals for your company, tell it which company it's working for, and then you can feed it the relevant web pages of your site. So that it knows to stay on track and always revert back to those goals. And it's always been helpful for me to build products because I have my own service business and I first hand experience a lot of the pain points that come with, with running something like that. And I realize a big piece is like, okay, I build this thing and then I'm going to go release it to my customers. That's a big jump and it's a scary jump. So we've spent a tremendous amount of time and effort on making this what we call a human in the loop dashboard so that you can watch what's going on if you want to. When you roll it out, you can watch it, but you also are BCC'd on everything and you have the ability to delay responses so you can stop them or edit them before they go out. And so it's made for a pretty beautiful tool that knows when to ask for help from a human or it knows when to keep going on with the conversation. And it all gives you peace of mind knowing that you can step in at any moment and it won't get off track.

00:12:27 - Bill Risser

So are you focused on certain verticals or is it more real estate related or. It sounds like this could kind of work across a whole range of businesses.

00:12:37 - Alex Gustafson

Yeah. So I guess you right now we definitely have been spending a lot of time in the real estate space and we find that real estate agents and brokers and even MLS's have found a bunch of use cases for oppy. That said, the product itself is technically agnostic. It can pull in details on the fly from a web page and a lot of these things that it can do just work really, really well for real estate. And so we're going to continue on that path of being focused on real estate for a while.

00:13:15 - Bill Risser

And then I have this weird question about prompts. Right, because it's for the longest time, longest time, it's been a year and a half, I think. But it's all about the prompt. The prompt is what drives great results out of most AI tools. So with yours, it just seems different. I'm trying to think, is the prompt coming from the caller, the texter, or am I? Have I got that backwards? This is where you're going to have to help me. You have to help me here, Alex.

00:13:44 - Alex Gustafson

Yeah, so it's kind of cool because you are the one, as the business owner of the admin, you're prompting it when you first set it up. So we've, and I'm going to butcher this word and it's a word I use all the time and I need to, to get it down. But anthroporphize. Anthropomorphize. We're making it, essentially. So when you go and you create a new oppy, it comes up with a human looking and sounding name, and it's a unique personality. It's got its own email address, and you give it goals. So these goals you can consider prompts just like you would prompt chat GPT, you would fill out these goals saying, let's say goal number one is capture the person's name and email and phone number. If you're going to build like an open house capture type oppy. And then the goal too would be after you're sure that you've captured their email, then feel free to send them a video tour or whatever the carrot was that you put on your piece of paper there when people sign in to incentivize them to text this number. And so with very basic prompting like that, you're able to get these supernatural seeming conversations out of the oppy because we've done a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of, of putting the safety guard rails in place and making sure that it knows to stay on track.

00:15:27 - Bill Risser

All right, Alex, I have a question. If I ask Oppi or the anthropomorph, oh, I'm gonna stop. I'll stop.

00:15:37 - Alex Gustafson

Yeah, I know you meant to cut that one out. Sorry.

00:15:41 - Bill Risser

If I asked the human sounding machine, are you, are you a machine? What will it say?

00:15:50 - Alex Gustafson

So, generally it will say, hey, why don't we go back to the subject and talk about this video that you want for your real or want to see of this property that you're looking at.

00:16:01 - Bill Risser

Yeah.

00:16:02 - Alex Gustafson

If you want it to tell the person that it's an AI, it'll absolutely do that. I think by default, a lot of people don't really care whether it says it's an AI or not, but it will try to change the subject.

00:16:17 - Bill Risser

That's funny. I think there's a part of me that just goes, wow, this agent gets it. I would think you'd want it to go, you got me. I have some kind of funny response. You got me. Yes, I'm working with so and so. I'm their AI tool, but I can help you. Let's get back to it or something. I think that would be so cool. And you probably have a few users that may go that route, right?

00:16:40 - Alex Gustafson

Yeah, I would say it's probably 75% say they just leave it as not telling that it's AI. And then the others wanted to say that it is AI. And I've had some funny experiences with that, with our human in the loop dashboard. When I'm sitting at my computer and somebody writes my oppy to schedule an oppy demo or an appointment with me, and they're asking, hey, are you in AI? And I just hop on my computer and pause it, and I remember I said, I am if you want me to be. And this is Alex. Right now you're talking to a real human, and I can turn it back off and it'll just go on autopilot. And I think you raise a good topic that if you're getting the response quality that you want and need out of something and you're getting the information that you need, do you care if it's an AI? I personally wouldn't. And so with Oppy, by the time you ask a question, you can almost, almost before you remove your fingers from the keyboard, you're going to get an answer. A lot of times it's a matter of seconds before you get a full, detailed response. And so this is about providing a very, very good experience for your clients more than anything. And if, if it's fast and it doesn't seem like it's a human, well, who cares that that's a happy client, you know? So that's my mentality, right?

00:18:22 - Bill Risser

That's where we're headed. We're absolutely headed in that direction in a lot of things in life, and I am with you. If I can get fast, quick responses and not sit in a queue waiting, or, or, you know, being redirected three other times to get to the right answer, I'll take it every day of the week. So I think this is great. I can't wait, first of all, to play with it. I'm. I'll reach out to you after this. And you and I are going to have a, I want a demo. And we'll, we'll have a, we'll have some fun.

00:18:50 - Alex Gustafson

Absolutely.

00:18:50 - Bill Risser

Seeing how this works. But if others want to reach out a question for you or who knows your AI, what's the best way for them to do that?

00:19:00 - Alex Gustafson

Yeah. So anyone can, I would say find me on LinkedIn is the best way to reach me. I'm more active there than generally I am with filtering through my email, but if you want to shoot me an email, you can too. It's ag pro. And then if you do want to talk to my AI assistant, her name's Sloan. She's very delightful to talk to. Her phone number is 949-844-6268 and she's always ready. She's, yeah. So that'll be firsthand demo.

00:19:35 - Bill Risser

That's great. I love that. Alex, this has been a lot of fun. Great catching up with you again. And yeah, I knew when I was talking to you a while ago you were going to do some cool things. And this is really fun to see where you've been in the last five years. Maybe we'll reach out again, hopefully quicker than five, but see where you're headed in the future. So thanks again for being on the show.

00:19:58 - Alex Gustafson

Yeah, thanks so much, Bill. And at the very least, I'll see you at inmend this summer.

00:20:03 - Bill Risser

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