On this week’s episode of The Snapshot, we chat with Homesnap’s Co-Founder and SVP of Product Strategy, Guy Wolcott as well as Homesnap’s Director of Product Management, Lynn Matthysse about a new product from Homesnap that allows agents to schedule home showings within the app without fear of a competitor getting access to the data.
Links Mentioned:
Centralized Showing Service (CSS)
Subpar Parks: America’s Most Extraordinary National Parks and Their Least Impressed Visitors
You can listen to this episode here, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
TRANSCRIPT
Gayle Weiswasser:
Welcome to the Homesnap Snapshot, a podcast about digital marketing for real estate agents. I’m Gayle, the host of the show. In each episode we talk to agents just like you who are successfully using some type of digital marketing to build their brands. When it’s over, you’ll walk away with concrete ideas that you can use in your own marketing to help grow your business. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe using whatever app or platform you use to listen to podcasts. And I’d really appreciate it if you take a minute to rate and review the show. It helps us get new listeners. Now let’s get to today’s guest.
So today’s guests on the show I’m very excited to say are people from the Homesnap office. Sometimes things happen here at Homesnap, which are exciting enough that they merit a Snapshot podcast episode. And I’m really excited that this is one of those episodes. So today we have the actual Co-Founder of Homesnap, Guy Wolcott and Lynn Matthysse, who’s our Director of Product Management. And we’re going to talk about a really exciting new feature that we are introducing this summer slash fall here at Homesnap.
So before we get into that, Guy and Lynn, welcome to the show! Can you tell us a little bit about what you do here at Homesnap?
Guy Wolcott:
Sure. This is Guy, I’ll go first. I’m happy to be here! Lynn, a big get on the guests this time around, congratulations! Well, as you said, I’m the Founder of Homesnap. I’ve been here since the very beginning, since it was literally one desk in one office, so quite humble beginnings. The idea for Homesnap was really just one sentence I wrote in my notebook, like “take a picture of any home to find out all about it” and look at all that’s come about from that one sentence. So pretty exciting to see what it’s all turned into and excited to talk about the next new thing here today.
Lynn Matthysse:
And I’m Lynn Matthysse. So I would have not been here since day one, Guy sorry, I can’t compete with that, but I have been with the company since 2016. So right now I’m the Director of Product Management. But just a little bit about my roots too, is I actually came up through the design space. So I came to the company in 2016 and I was the Designer and after that I was UX Strategy and Research, and then more recently into the product side of it. So I’ve seen kind of a broad spectrum of all the different things that we do here, as well as the phases that we’ve moved through the last year. So that’s been fun. But right now, as the Director of Product Management, I am heading up the product team that partners with design, engineering, development, marketing, et cetera, to build and deliver all the features and tools that we have. So that includes Homesnap search for consumers, Homesnap Pro for agents, Homesnap Pro+ our premium subscription and then our Homesnap Pro Ads product. So all of that is under the umbrella over here, but I’m really excited to be here today!
Gayle Weiswasser:
Nice, I’m so excited to have you both on! I remember when I launched this show. Guy, you got up in a staff meeting and you were like, “so for those of you who haven’t listened, Gayle has launched a podcast, she talks about digital marketing and you’re like, it’s actually pretty good.” He sounded kind of surprised. And I was like, okay, well, I’ll take that. So I’m thrilled to have you on, I think this is going to be around episode 160 or something like that, which is crazy to me, but you were right, you were right!
So what we’re going to talk about today and the reason that I thought this would be a good topic for this audience, because usually we talk about digital marketing on this show, but we do extend sometimes sort of more to a like, a more general technology umbrella. We talk about tools that make agents’ lives easier. And most of the time we’re talking about things that they can use for marketing, but not always. And today what we’re going to talk about is showing services. So these are the platforms that agents use to schedule showing, so that they don’t have to exchange a sort of unlimited number of texts with a listing agent in order to schedule a time to show a home. There are lots of services out there that allow you to do that in a much more seamless way that relies on technology and works nicely with mobile phones and all the devices that agents are using all day long. So here at Homesnap, we have decided to launch our own showings platform. One that is accessible within Homesnap, and for our Homesnap users makes it extremely easy to be able to schedule a showing when you’ve got a client who wants to look at a property.
So Guy, let’s start with you. In the past we have integrated Homesnap and Homesnap Pro with existing showing services like ShowingTime and CSS. And over the years, we’ve played very nicely with them and made it very easy. For example, for our MLSs who used those services and made those services available to their agents, we made it very easy to continue to use Homesnap along with those services. In your mind, what made it likely, or necessary for Homesnap to design its own showings product within Homesnap Pro?
Guy Wolcott:
It’s a good question. As you said, historically Homesnap Pro has always had an integration, not always, but for a long time has had an integration with the biggest showing services, third party showing services out there like ShowingTime and CSS where an agent could easily schedule, kind of jump over from our app to the other app to schedule a showing whenever they wanted to. And that’s been used a ton, like I think, millions or tens of millions of showings have been initiated through that button that you could tap in inside of our app. And one of the things that they tell you to do is like everything you’re going to work on for the upcoming year. And so we went into 2021 with a plan about all the things we wanted to work on. And literally the biggest thing that we’re working on was not on that plan and that gets into the meat of your question there.
As I think a lot of people know, in February, Zillow announced that they were acquiring ShowingTime, which is, and ShowingTime had just recently acquired CSS, the second biggest provider of showing services in the country. And Zillow had also recently become a broker essentially in every single market in the country and joined all the MLSs as a participant. And so all of a sudden you had a situation where the main player for showings is being owned by another broker and that broker would have access to all the information about who’s looking at which houses and how many showings they’re getting. And I think a lot of people kind of in the industry started to freak out, the agents, brokers, MLSs, like what are we going to do? This just doesn’t seem right. We don’t want this to happen. And frankly, we got a lot of calls saying, “Hey, is this something you guys are interested in doing? A lot of agents are already scheduling, they’re showing starting there.” And so really we had kind of a long weekend of calls and texts and talking between the management team here about do we just completely shake up the snow globe for this year and commit to creating a first party system. And we decided, yes, this is kind of right up our alley in terms of things that we could do really well.
We took advantage of a lot of the things that we’re strong at, that already had a lot of agents using our app. They already scheduled showings from there. We already have the ability to, messages back and forth between agents, between agents and clients. And so we felt like this was in our wheelhouse and we could really kind of ride to the rescue in terms of creating an industry-friendly solution from a neutral company that wasn’t playing favorites. And we decided to kind of jump in with both feet. And it’s so easy for me to say, because I didn’t have to do all the work. And that’s kind of where Lynn comes into play about like, okay, we’re doing this thing that we weren’t planning on doing, so how do we do it? What is it? And that’s where it really gets difficult.
Gayle Weiswasser:
So just to make clear, the reason why people were uncomfortable with the news that Zillow had bought ShowingTime, is that Zillow is now a broker, in many markets, like you said, they are acting as a broker. And if they own a service in which people can schedule, it gives them that visibility into how many times a home has been shown. And how many times has it been shown and if there have been offers or not been offers. And there’s lots of strategically confidential information that can be gleaned from a showings platform. And a lot of people were uncomfortable with the thought that Zillow who is no longer a kind of neutral player in the space, but actually is broker in this space would have access to this. And that’s why people understandably came to us and said, “hey, what can you do to combat this?”
Guy Wolcott:
I think that’s basically correct. I think, look at it this way, right? So, Zillow is an iBuyer, so they buy houses and then put them back on the market to sell them. If they’re selling the house across the street, right, they have the house across the street for sale from Zillow directly. Like, do you really want them to know the showing traffic at your listing? That’s a competitive advantage for them that I think a lot of people weren’t willing to just go along with, without at least looking at other options.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Right, okay. So without getting too technical of an explanation, how complicated is it to build a feature like showings compared to some of the other features that we have in Homesnap?
Guy Wolcott:
Well, I’ll start, but I’ll mostly let Lynn answer this, because she knows the real down and dirty answer. I think the thing that makes it difficult is that this is kind of one of those features or products that has one of everything. So sometimes you are creating a feature or a product that’s mostly one thing. And maybe it’s like cooking a steak where there’s only one ingredient, but you have it still, it’s really hard to do it well. But this is the opposite. This is like cooking an entire, maybe an Indian feast or something like that, where there’s a bunch of different dishes, each one of which has a ton of ingredients. Some of those ingredients, you have to go to a specialty store for, some of them you have to buy online from some weird website or whatever, one of everything.
And so that is part of what makes it really, really complicated. And then the second thing is, that the product doesn’t just exist for one user at a time, it’s like a product that works for a group of people. So it’s really hard to test it, just because it works for one person, you can’t set up a showing without two people, there has to be a listing agent and a buyer’s agent who want to work together. And so even just kind of simulating that to be able to test things is really, really difficult. So lots of aspects of this that made it kind of a 10 out of 10 on the difficulty scale, but I’ll let Lynn tell you a little bit more about what those things were.
Lynn Matthysse:
I would agree with most of that, especially the Indian dinner.
Gayle Weiswasser:
All right, Lynn, let’s skip over to you. So what I wanted to ask you about is, and I know that one of the things that you did at the very onset of this project was you kind of looked at all the other showing platforms out there and the features that they have, to determine what did we think was essential to have in ours to make it a good one. So talk about that. What are the attributes necessary to make a good showing service and what isn’t necessary and what were the kind of pain points you saw that we wanted to get, to avoid and to negate in our platform?
Lynn Matthysse:
Yeah, great question! So first of all, I completely agree with what Guy was just saying about the complexity when it comes to not only testing, but all the different wires that get crossed when looking at all the different hands that are in the pot when trying to do showings, right? But to bring that back to kind of what needs to be included in this product, I think in order to answer that question, I need to take a step back and talk a little on how we approach the research and kind of the discovery of Homesnap Showings. So our first step, which is probably fairly clear expected, would be we talked to the people that had the skin in the game to uncover those pain points, right? First of all, we had a standard practice in the market, which people could talk to easily. And so there was a really easy way to say, I like this with how showings are currently done because there was only one contender, right? There was either a ShowingTime or there were a few other ones or a manual process. And so there were a lot of opinions. And so we had a lot of people that were clamoring to talk to us. So we talked to listing agents on what they love about current showing experiences and what they wanted to improve upon to make their lives easier with the seller. We talked to buyers’ agents, who were setting up showings for clients across multiple showing services and multiple channels, just to get the appointments on the books. We talked to buyers, what makes the process as painless and dare even say enjoyable as possible for them as buyers to go in and see a bunch of different homes. We know that’s a heavy process for a lot of buyers to get through. So we talked to sellers and tenants to find out what’s the best way to streamline the messy experience of showing a home that you currently live in and how to make that process as easy as possible with their agent as well. We talked to MLSs to find out what is the new landscape that it’s going to look like if there were all these new listing services in the mix and how do we help provide personalization in the MLS experience, but also provide options. And plus, how do we make sure the tools are where the agents are and where they need them most? And then finally, we talked to brokerages, to uncover how their needs are different from both MLS and the individual agents. So not just parties involved with booking, but the MLS and brokerages have a big hand in what the showing services and what their needs are as well.
So all of that kind of, to come back to the fact that we really did some deep digging into what those pain points were. Moving on to kind of what are those necessary ingredients, right? Let’s break it down into, well, at the end of the day, we need a product that closes deals, right? But it’s not as easy as that. That’s the end goal. So let’s break it down into how we can facilitate that. So we’ve got live data — we need to be able to come hooked up with as much data as possible so agents aren’t doing any manual work. We need customization for agents to be able to, as the listing agent fully customize their listings availability, to make it easier on everyone, property access, approvals, availabilities. We need seller engagement because we know that by getting the seller engaged, we can help facilitate that approval process and make the entire experience better. Guy mentioned that we already have messaging in the beginning, so we needed the communication that luckily we already have most of the bells and whistles there, right? We needed reporting on a listing to make sure that, to guarantee that agents have those key metrics, that help show that they are one performing and show that they are high value to clients. Easy planning for buyers agents to actually book multi-stops, and then just easy booking so that using real time scheduling that works directly with the listing agent and the seller’s schedule so that the buyer’s agent can book quickly and efficiently. So I know that was kind of a lot, but those are those key ingredients and that’s where we came from. And I think we learned a lot through this process and that’s kind of why we ended up with this complex product, but that I’m really proud of and I’m really excited to get in front of the agent.
Gayle Weiswasser:
So did anything surprise either one of you along the way?
Guy Wolcott:
Well, one of the things that we made a priority of here was making sure that we were building this in a way that could work with other showing services, right? So we knew that it wasn’t viable to build something that either everybody used it or nobody could use it, right? And that was the experience that we had with Homesnap Pro itself, right? We needed it to work well for the very first agent in the market that has it. And not only work once everybody has it, right? In business, we call that like a cold start problem, right?
And so, from the beginning we built it so that it could work with other showing services. So that one agent on the buy side could use one service and the listing agent could use another service and you didn’t have to set up an account over there. I’ve been a little surprised at how hard it has been to get all the people that need to play ball, to make a system like that, to work together and get on the same page. And maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised by that because now that I say it out loud, it does actually sound very unlikely and difficult to pull off, but I was idealistic at the beginning that that would be something that we could rally everybody to do. And we are still doing as much as we can to make that happen. But that’s definitely an issue, just trying to make all these different players and companies all across the country, different MLSs, different vendors, different brokers, be able to work together. And I tend to think of it like it should work like scheduling a meeting, right? So when we schedule a meeting with somebody from another company, we don’t really worry about what calendar software they use, right? Do they use Outlook? Do they use Google Calendar? Do they use their Apple Calendar? We just send it to their email to us and the meeting works and they say they’re coming to the meeting and like, we don’t even think about it — this should work like that. And so, that is still something that we’re working towards, but like difficulty in getting everybody to be on the same page about that has maybe surprised me and it shouldn’t have.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Well, part of that could be that people want to keep users in their platform and they feel like they’re going to lose customers or lose market share or lose, somehow they’re going to lose ground if they open up their platform to play nicely with others. Which I think, you’ve built Homesnap over the years, always to play nicely with others because I think you wisely see that by creating an open platform, you can welcome all comers and as people using different devices and using different platforms. Like you said, we’ll use different systems in order to schedule meetings and that’s a much more realistic way of looking at the world and I’m not sure that everybody has that sort of expansive view.
Guy Wolcott:
To an extent we’ve always kind of bet on ourselves to build a better mousetrap. So if we were building calendar software, we’d bet on ourselves that we’ll get a lot of people using ours, not because we’re the only place like you can, we’re the only place you can schedule with a certain group of people, but because we have a better way to schedule and manage your appointment no matter who they’re with. So that’s kind of how we approach it and perhaps you’re right. I’m sure plenty of people also want to bet on themselves, but that there’s an aspect of, kind of not losing control, not wanting to let things get to where you can’t manage them anymore.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Right. Okay, so we announced in February, very quickly, that we were going to be introducing this product. And it was in response to that, like you said, that reaction, the outreach we got from our customers saying, we really want this. Talk about the reaction that we got. How did our MLSs respond? How about other agents and brokers that you guys have talked to along the way?
Guy Wolcott:
I think the response was overall very positive. I think people were excited that a company and a brand that they knew and that had a reputation for building something good, that people actually liked using was actually taking up the mantle of creating something in this space. People were generally interested in the ideas that I just mentioned, that we weren’t trying to say it’s all or nothing. Like either you use our product or you got to use a different product. There’s no in between. But I think that is the direction that a lot of MLSs are trying to move across the board. They’re trying to create vetted choices for their subscribers to where they have more than one option to do certain things and we’ve definitely fit right into that and we made it part of our existing offerings. So we didn’t say, oh, here’s this new charge we’re going to charge you. Or here’s this new package from us, you have to buy. We’re just going to build it right into Homesnap Pro that you’re already offering to your subscribers. So, I think the response was generally pretty positive. How do you do some of those things? Now you start to get into the, a little bit of the messiness of all of it, but in general, people were quite supportive.
Lynn Matthysse:
That may have even been my answer on what surprised me from your last question, because the strength of their reaction from the industry and eagerness to explore new opportunities with us when we came out with our press release back in February was a huge surprise to me in the best way possible! I’ll be honest, it was the easiest research project I have ever worked on because so many people were eager to talk to us about their views, their experiences, their wants for the future. It was really refreshing and it has maintained, right, over the months, that people are still being very vocal and working with us to create this product. So I’m excited and I think the industry is too.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Can you tell us the key ways in which Homesnap Showings will differ from ShowingTime?
Guy Wolcott:
Well, I’ll give a big picture version of that now, but I’ll let Lynn give the details. The things that come to mind for me are one, like I described, kind of built in openness and interest in working with other systems, easy to integrate into your system, whether you’re an MLS or a broker or an agent or another showing service, even. The second is that it’s brand new and I think it’s a lot of benefits to being able to build something from scratch, knowing everything that’s come before it and that once you’ve had a product in the market for 10 or 15 or 20 years, you’re just stuck with a lot of stuff that it’s very hard to change and get away from even if you think it’s the best thing to do. And that leads right into the third thing I’ll say, which is that, Homesnap Pro is mobile first and Homesnap Showing is mobile first. Like we know that the vast majority of people that are interacting with this thing are going to do so on their phone, whether that’s the listing agent who’s managing the listings or the buyer’s agent, who’s trying to set up a tour or the seller who’s got to approve something. And so we could build that right in from scratch on top of our existing app with our existing push notifications and our existing messages and so forth. So those are kind of structural differences that are important and kind of precursors to any of the specific bells and whistles and features that I’m sure Lynn knows a lot more about than even I do.
Lynn Matthysse:
Yeah. So if we get into the nitty gritty, I guess a few things that I wanted to call out is like with the baseline for a showing service, I think we all agree that we are not trying to disrupt the showing service, right? We’re not trying to disrupt agents in what they’re used to doing and how they’re used to working. So we’re not trying to overhaul kind of the entire experience. But, what we are trying to do is improve upon those places that we can automate things, make it easier and faster for agents and be where they are. So, that’s number one, right? Being mobile on the app that they already are on, which Guy was mentioning, like that is a huge differentiator with us. You can’t argue how important that is. Few other things that we have, we’ve set listings to be able to toggle directly on in one click based on default settings. So if I’m a listing agent going in and I just published my listing on the MLS, I can go in toggle that on and you are set. Now of course you can customize that after that, but it’s as easy as toggling something on because we already have all the information directly from the MLS and we have you as the agent. So all you need to do is go into the app, go into the “Showing Center” and toggle it on, it’s that easy! We already have all the communication built in already on our app, so we’ve got the messaging. We throw the agents into messages together when there are key decisions that need to be made and that’s a really streamlined way of doing it as well. And we’re right where the clients are as well, so those buyers agents that are working with their clients already in the app together can easily get them on showing multiple stop itineraries and share that information with them. So it’s just easing the entire process and I think those are some key differentiators.
Gayle Weiswasser:
OK, so what do you want agents to know when they go to use Homesnap Showings for the first time? If you could sort of be sitting on their shoulder and guiding them through the process, what would you want to say to them?
Lynn Matthysse:
Honestly, it’s free so why not give it a try? Like, okay, there’s education that needs to be involved, right? They need to get familiar with the product, but just get your hands dirty, get in there and use the service with your listings and try it out because you can’t go wrong!
Gayle Weiswasser:
How are we going to be rolling this out from a marketing perspective? Like how are agents going to know that this is there and available for them to use and ready for them to try?
Lynn Matthysse:
Yeah, so we’re working with our MLS partners right now. Obviously they’ve been a key ingredient since day one to making sure that this product is a success. So we are relying on them to really help us. We normally rely on them to help us introduce new features into their markets and this is no exception to that playbook, right? We’re going to be communicating through the MLS, there’s going to be materials, there’s going to be emails, they’re going to be communicating with their agents as well as we are going to be communicating with all of the agents that are currently using our platform. So it’s not going to be a secret when we launch, they’re going to be getting it from most sides. So I’m really excited to kind of toggle those switches on and get the ball rolling with all the new things when we come out.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Can you give us any kind of a prediction on when you think this will be live? I know that’s been a moving target and a sensitive question.
Lynn Matthysse:
Absolutely, yeah! Yeah, so we are currently slated for….drum roll, please…for later this month!
Gayle Weiswasser:
Okay. And just to timestamp this episode, because sometimes I record things and they don’t air for a while. So we are recording this on September 10th. So Lynn is saying that she thinks this will be up and ready by the end of the month. So probably this episode will actually be airing after that, so that’s good!
Are there any other Homesnap features that either one of you would like to tease while we have this captive Homesnap fan audience listening?
Guy Wolcott:
I’ll kind of, again sort of, I’ll think a little bit farther down the road and then I’ll let Lynn talk about it a little bit closer. One of the big trends for us that we’ve been trying to deal with is that when Homesnap Pro first launched, frankly, it was very buyer agent centric. Like most of the features were about helping buyers agents find houses and communicate with the listing agent, work with their clients to narrow it down to schedule showings, all that kind of stuff. And since then we’ve been trying to kind of play catch up on the listing agent side. And so, we have a whole program that lets agents advertise their listings and mark them across the internet and that’s been very successful. We introduced last year the ability for agents to look at all of the houses in an area and try to identify which ones are good prospects for their next listing, or to do a listing presentation, who’s likely to sell their house or list their house for sale in the next year. And so more products that are designed for listing agents to help identify and win listings, definitely an area of focus for us in the coming I’ll say years, really. That doesn’t mean that’s the only thing we’re doing, but I’m just trying to give a little bit of a kind of prediction about where are some of the areas of emphasis for us going forward and that’s definitely something that we’ve been working on and we’ll continue to work on to try and help listing agents differentiate themselves and win the next listing.
Lynn Matthysse:
And I think in the little bit of the short term, I can tease something that might be coming by the end of the year. Obviously Guy’s was much more in the long term, but just to give a hat nod, kind of to our Pro+ subscribers, we have a new Pro+ feature coming that is our first external-facing collaboration with the Homes.com team. I’m not going to say too much, but that’s definitely going to be coming by the end of the year. And so I’m really excited to add a new feature kind of to the toolbox that we offer with our Pro+ subscribers.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Great. All right, well, it has been such a treat to have you guys come on the show today! It’s rare that I get to talk to people who are sitting within 20 feet away. So it’s really nice for you guys to get a little view into my world.
Before I let you go though, I’m going to ask you my trademark Snapshot question and I’m so excited to hear your answers. So, I always ask guests who come on the show to share with the audience some apps that they’re using and they can be for productivity, they can be for relaxation, they can be for fun, whatever. And I know you guys are very tech savvy people, so I’m so curious to know what are some of the apps that you would like to share today?
Lynn Matthysse:
Should I take this one first, Guy? What do you think?
Guy Wolcott:
Yeah! I told you, you could go first in case we pick the same apps.
Lynn Matthysse:
Okay. Gayle, I love what you said for the tech savvy people, because while it’s apps, it’s like the opposite of tech savvy. So I actually have two. The first one that I was going to mention, which I don’t know how familiar people are with it, but it’s AllTrails. Are you familiar with this one, Gayle?
Gayle Weiswasser:
No.
Lynn Matthysse:
Okay, so it’s an app that literally has every single hiking trail in the US. And actually, I don’t even know about worldwide, but obviously, you can pay for it to get like downloadable maps and everything. But I hike a lot. I love hiking! Anywhere that I travel, I’m normally looking for places that I can get out into the woods and it has every single trail you could imagine. And it has user generated pictures and reviews so that I can get, you know when you’re looking at a map, you’re like, “oh, that trail might be good! I guess we’ll have to find out.” No, there’s like actual user generated content on pictures of what they are. And so it’s really easy to kind of like pick out that perfect trail. So that’s my first one, definitely recommend anyone that likes the outdoors to go check that one out.
Gayle Weiswasser:
That’s awesome!
Lynn Matthysse:
And the other one. Yeah, my other one is WEMO, which is wireless plugs. It’s a brand and they have these wireless plugs and so you plug it in, it’s Bluetooth connection. So I have them set up at home to turn on my, I’m a plant lady, what can I say…I can’t help it! Probably, I guess, ties into the AllTrails app, but I have like plant lights at home. And so I can time timers to turn on whenever I want to, either from remote, from my phone or just by a timer. And I have used that through the years for plants as well as lots of random other things. You could use it for the Christmas tree lights or whatever, what have you, but I love it — it makes things so easy. Okay, yeah, those are my two.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Nice, love that! And just so everyone knows, I will be linking to the apps and to the products mentioned. So just check the show notes, if you want to find out what Lynn is talking about.
Guy Wolcott:
All right, I also have two, and you’ll see with the second one, Lynn was so close to stepping on my toes and, but technically did not. So, all right. So my first one is called Glass Photo, which is a relatively new, at least it’s new to me, photo sharing app. It’s kind of more reminiscent of like Instagram and its original form. It’s more kind of for photographers. I’m not much, I used to be, but I’m not much of a photographer these days. My wife is. And I think a lot of people kind of bemoan the fact that Instagram has just become like, it’s all about like every third post is an ad essentially. And it kind of breaks your mojo and it’s also become more about stories and less about pictures. And so the idea of Glass Photo is kind of like much more pure about photography. And one of the things I find interesting about it is, it’s a subscription model. So it costs, I don’t know, it’s a couple bucks a month. And so their idea is like, that’s our business model. So it’s not like we’re just going to make this thing popular and then start the ads flowing and run that whole playbook over again. It’s like, no, no, from the beginning we’re a subscription model and you’re kind of deciding this is something you’re willing to spend money on and therefore it self selects for people who are actually interested in this stuff. So a lot of good photographers on there seem to be growing pretty fast. It started off as invitation only, but I think you can just get in right now. But I have two invites left if people want to hit me up and my wife turned me onto that one.
And then the second one is called Hiking Project. This is where Lynn almost stepped on my toes, but I actually like this app better than AllTrails. And it’s very similar to what Lynn said, like I try to get out and hike as much as I can. It has, it does also has user generated content. I like its little maps and elevation projections, and you can get both and see which one you like. So when you look in the show notes, you’ll find two different hiking app options.
Lynn Matthysse:
Comments on which one is best. That’s what I want.
Gayle Weiswasser:
I love that you guys had similar, but like sort of competing apps. That’s very cool!
Guy Wolcott:
We did not coordinate.
Lynn Matthysse:
Yeah, we did not.
Gayle Weiswasser:
Have you guys seen this book where this woman has compiled all these negative user reviews of national parks and they’re just, they’re ridiculous? They’re like people who had completely just ridiculous expectations of what they were going to find when they got to a national park and then they write these terrible reviews.
Guy Wolcott:
Like “why is water shooting out of these holes in the ground? Awful!”
Gayle Weiswasser:
Exactly, exactly! Yes, it seems very entertaining.
Lynn Matthysse:
Ha, yeah I’m not going to cross that one!
Gayle Weiswasser:
Yeah, I’ll try to find a link to that book too. I’ll put that in the show notes.
You guys thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. I’m very excited to have had you and I hope that our listeners are excited for Homesnap Showing and will give it a try. Let us know what you think. Give us your feedback. You’ve got the brains behind the product right here, so feel free to leave a comment or wherever you listen to this podcast or shoot us an email and let us know what you think.
Guys, thank you so much and have a great rest of your day!
Lynn Matthysse:
Thanks Gayle!
Guy Wolcott:
Thanks a lot!
Gayle Weiswasser:
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Snapshot. I hope that you enjoyed what you heard today. If you have a moment, please leave us a review. It really helps us get new listeners. This podcast is part of Industry Syndicate, a curated media network containing the highest-rated real estate and mortgage podcasts. Find other excellent real estate content at industrysyndicate.com, home of real estate’s first media network.