PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Ian R:  Welcome back to Inspector Toolbelt Talk you have Beon DeNood here. How are you Beon?

Beon D: Good? How are you doing, Ian?

Ian R:  I always like doing our podcast together. I think we have a good dynamic, or maybe you have a good dynamic and I’m just riding your coattails. I don’t know.

Beon D:  Well, it works, whatever it is, if we have chemistry,

Ian R:  yeah, no, we need to cut that part out.

Beon D:  Cut.

Ian R: So we wanted to have this podcast, it’s going to be a relatively quick one, we’re going to call it our state of the app address, because we’ve had a lot going on with the Inspector Toolbelt. We haven’t had really a lot of time to sit down and talk about the features that we’ve released over the past couple of months since our new version of our app came out. And we’ve just had huge growth. We were just talking about the numbers right beyond.

Beon D: Yeah, no, our numbers are looking really, really good. And we’re happy. It’s taken us a long time to get to this point. It’s been a long journey, let’s say. But we finally have some momentum and some really good stuff happening on our platform. So we’re excited about that.

Ian R: Yeah, we’re getting inspectors left and right emailing us asking us questions about how things work and signing up for the app. And it’s just been really great. The feedback has been awesome. We’re, we’re supporting guys who were working out in the field, saying, Oh, wow, this goes way faster. My favorite comment is, we’ve heard this so many times, it’s “cut my reporting time in half.” I had a Facebook post with that quote because so many guys said that.

Beon D: Yeah. And it is very good feedback. You know, and it’s funny hearing that I think home inspectors looking at software and trying to compare software, it’s a phrase you almost get tired of hearing because everybody says that. Everybody says “We’re the fastest”, everybody is always I cut my reporting time in half, blah, blah, blah. But really, I think one needs to quantify that, whoever saying that, what are you comparing it against? In our case, we really are the fastest in many ways. And we’ve been able to quantify it against other top competitors out there. So yeah, we feel pretty good when we hear that feedback. Because these guys are coming from other software. They’re not, you know, coming from pen and paper or Word documents to our platform. So that makes us feel good.

Ian R: So we’ve been working on this version of the Inspector Toolbelt for years now. And I remember the first time you came out with the beta, and you said, Ian, try this. So I’ve been using the same inspection software for over 15 years. And I considered myself very fast on it. So I picked a set number of points on my own house. And I inspected it, I would take a picture, make a note, and then go on to the next item. It took me because it was my own house, I already knew the points I was going to it took me an hour and 15 minutes, I timed it. So then I said, Okay, let me try this new app, our Inspector Toolbelt app that I had never used before. So alright, let’s do this. Less than 45 minutes for the same data points. And it wasn’t even fully functional, then it was just, hey, here’s the rough framework of what we have. Now it is so much better. It really kind of blows my mind because you literally tap less.

 

Beon D: Yeah, it was a brilliant idea you had, I remember, we use Trello a lot, you know, for our projects and keeping track of tasks and everything. You came to me one day; you were so excited. You’re like I’ve got it, I’ve got this idea, we need to make a home inspection app like Trello. And I was like, what are you talking about? I remember we expect it out. And that’s essentially what we’ve come out with is if you’ve ever used Trello, basically, you can view your whole inspection report all on one board, and you’re just swiping back and forth, you can see all the items as you’re moving back and forth. And that’s really what slows went down a lot with other apps is that you know, you’re looking at a list, you got to scroll down the list, you got to tap into the list. Now you see the items, now you got to scroll down the items to find the one you want. Some have implemented global searches to speed it up, which it does work a lot faster that way. But still, all these taps to get in and out of an item. Whereas with our UI, it’s all just there on the same plane, you swiping back and forth, you find it three columns over, you know, four rows down, boom, you tap right on it, and it saves you so many taps.

 

Ian R: It’s really beautiful, just from the perspective of a home inspector. A lot of times, for instance, I’d be on a roof taking a picture of a chimney issue. While I’m on the roof, I see the detached garage as a sighting issue and I’m like, oh, man, I’m going to forget that if I by the time I get down and get to that section. And in my old software, I’d have to click on the category click out of where I was going back in, and it was just a lot of work. Now I can just slide right over, click on the garage section. I need to take a picture, make a note and then there’s no going back to the main List View it’s just all right there. On average. Bridge, we tested every home inspection software that we could find. We spent oh man, I don’t know how many 1000s of dollars in man-hours. Plus, my own time was your time beyond plus, we had about, I think it was four testers at the time. And we went through everyone, we could find the average number of clicks was 12, to 16. So on average, 14 clicks to be able to get to where you’re going, take a picture and make a note, and then get back out to where you were. It was a lot. Ours is four to six clicks, on average, literally the lowest number of taps on your phone, Inspector Toolbelt saves if you have 100 items in your report, but then perspective, it saves you 10 clicks. That is, I just lost my math. So take 10 clicks times 100 items that save you 1000 taps on your phone, stand there on your phone, and tap it 1000 times. And tell me how long that takes you. That is huge. That’s a big deal.

 

Beon D: Yeah, there’s the mental energy as well. I mean, you were just saying like you’re at one point, you want to go to another but now in another piece of software, you have to create the sort of don’t forget, you know, so in that way, it doesn’t interflow you literally can just capture your data as you inspect it. It’s designed to do it the way that you are.

 

Ian R: Yeah. So let’s go back in time, just a little bit, to way back in November of 2021. If we get us some tingling music right here that would be pretty fantastic. Remember way back in 2021, Beon, but that’s when we released the Inspector Toolbelt. And it was late in November. And that’s pretty intense, you’re going to switch over your entire app. But then right from the get-go, we started adding additional features that inspectors wanted, like what were a couple of them, that we added Beon?

 

Beon D: Well, one of the ones we added was notifications, because client communication is so pivotal to any home inspection business, any business but home inspectors especially. So being able to take control of your communication, when you’re sending out emails, texts, what the content is, what links you sending, based on the app is for payment for agreement is this a follow up to send a review. So we added custom notifications where you can set up a schedule basically, of when you want to send messages to your clients around your inspection,

 

Ian R: yeah, and Beon magnanimously provided that even to our free users, because our scheduler is free, you can use it and just you don’t have to use our report writing app to use the scheduler. It’s all one app but that was fantastic, even for the free users.

Beon D: Yeah, that’s actually a good point. You know, at the moment, our free offering is the most comprehensive free offering of any apps in the inspection market, you can do more with our app for longer for free. So I know that’s been very popular with home inspectors who are just starting out, they want to start out but you know, it may be a while before they see their first paying inspection. No problem. You can do that.

 

Ian R: Yeah, it’s been fantastic. And I think probably my two favorite features that we’ve added recently, is we do the TREC 7-6 form the REI, that that was fantastic. It looks beautiful. It looks great. But in that same vein, when we released that, we also released two different types of reports. So now we have two different styles of PDF report covers because we tried to listen to you guys as home inspectors, somebody actually on one of the Facebook groups said he didn’t like our PDF version of our report, we focus on the web version, but he’s like, I don’t like that. Okay, let’s come up with a new design. And we came up with something that he liked a lot better. I mean, it’s a lot of work. And we don’t want to say hey, we just threw it in there. It was a lot of work. But we listened to you guys. The number of counters, we’re able to remove those now we have a different header style for the web reports. I mean, that was fantastic. What did you guys do with that on the dev team.

 

Beon D: Yeah. And what’s, you know, something that you may not know, just from using it is not only made a change, but internally, we created a way of being able to easily add more. So that is our goal to be able to add a bunch of designs and improve the ones that are there. And that’s something we can promise to our users is every month that goes by you’re going to see more value-added to our app because our dev team has designed it with expandability in mind.

 

Ian R: Yeah, looking ahead, it’s going to be really awesome. We’re going to have multiple report styles that you can choose from because ultimately, that’s the end product to your client. That’s the impression that you give them a couple of other features that you might not have noticed that were actually big ads. Where being able to move the cards we call them on your inspection board that Beon talked about. Being able to clone cards and move them. Clone columns. Right in the field, you can say, oh man, there’s a second garage, I didn’t know about and you go “click”, and now you have a whole other garage setup. You can just write in the field adapt, you can do it in your templates. Also, very soon Beon, I don’t know how soon, we’re going to be able to clone the templates too, Right?

 

Beon D: Yeah, we continue asking the question, how do inspectors want to work with this data, what they want to be able to do with it in the field. So you know, you’ve worked on an inspection and you’re really proud of it, you want to save it as a template? Well, we’ll be putting that in there. You know, even just navigation, we’ve got a basic UI going with a new concept, but we got a lot more we want to add on to it to make it even easier. So we constantly using the app ourselves. And, man, I feel like I tapped one too many times over there, or I keep doing this thing over and over, or I’d like to navigate differently. So we keep asking those questions. And we’ll keep including those updates as well.

 

Ian R: Yeah, and I mean, we could go on and on about the features that we’ve already added in just the first few months here. But I’d like to talk about what we’re going to add in the future, I think the most asked-for feature is the Team schedule. That’s a big one. I don’t think people realize how big of a task that really is to be able to schedule for multiple inspectors and multiple accounts for a company. We’ve been working on that for years.

 

Beon D: Yeah. And we understand why it’s so important. So we are working on it, we actually, you know, the whole time we’ve been designing with it in mind. So with teams, we are looking at shortly being able to put that in. But we wanted to make sure that we were stable for individual users as well because let’s face it teams is really just extending the individual functionality, you know, so we want to make sure we are stable with that, which I think we finally are, so we can move ahead. But the cool thing about our platform is when it comes to Team inspections, well, there are team inspections. And then team schedule, they really are two different features, but they both relate to teams. When it comes to Team inspections, our platform will allow, we’ve actually tested some of the sorts of beta versions of the concept, we have a couple of inspectors inspecting the same property. And the cool thing about our platform is literally another guy takes a picture. And you know, the other guys see it pop up on theirs in real-time. You know, you add a rating and you see it just going one by one. So that’s looking very promising. And I think once it comes out, it’ll be one of the best leading team inspections out there.

 

Ian R: Yeah. So on our current app, as it stands right now, I think Beon might be talking about, I did a commercial inspection. And I’m up on the roof, taking pictures of a roofing issue. And I hear the other guy down there and I hear him say what the heck. And I’m like, Oh, great, what’s going on? So I scurry down from the roof? And I’m like, what’s going on? What’s going on? And he goes, how am I seeing pictures that I didn’t take? I’m like, you’re in the roofing section. He goes, Yeah, I’m like, those are mine. And he is just like, this is stinking amazing. And we’re just taking pictures doing our sections. And we had this giant commercial building. And we had two of us planned for the whole day. And then another half a day of report writing, we were done by two, with his giant report with hundreds of photos 10s of 1000s of dollars in repairs, and we’re done by two eating pancakes in a diner. And he’s just sat down he goes, this is the greatest thing. He’s a user now, by the way. He was sold on everything in there.

 

Beon D: Yeah, no, I would be too. But yeah, so we got that part of teams will be coming out reasonably, shortly in the next few months. Then, of course, team schedule, that’s the one that is going to take a bit more work in. It’s complex, obviously managing different calendars. But what we’re also finding is different inspection companies all work slightly differently when it comes to how they schedule their teams. So we want to make sure we cover all the most commonly used cases first. And then we’ll be able to include some other more specialized ways of scheduling your teams as well.

Ian R: Yeah. And then there are also other features that are coming around the corner, we try to have at least a new feature every month or so. Just to make sure that you know that we’re giving you what you want and that we’re listening to you. Some features are bigger than others. It’s not going to be always every month. Hey, here’s a great big new feature that changes your life. Sometimes it might be Oh, hey, cool. There’s a button there that does what I needed to do. Great. And sometimes it’s mind-blowing. But we try to listen to everything that you say and work it all in there because like Beon said, we need to keep it stable. We don’t want to introduce bugs. So we release a feature. We make sure everything works because no matter how much we test, there’s always going to be somebody out there that works completely differently and finds a way to break it. So I could do 10 Inspections on it and works fine. And somebody says, Hey, I’m doing this upside down and a water tank. How do I get it to do this? You know, we’re going to find bugs that way. But we want to make sure things are stable.

Beon D: Yeah, really, the app has been up for the last four years, we first had scheduling only. And now as you say, since November, we’ve had inspections and scheduling all in one unified app. But in those four years, our app has never gone down. We’ve never had to send that message to our users to say, we’re going to have downtime for maintenance or, you know, there’s an unexpected issue. And that is just because of all the checks and balances before we put out a release and the technology we’re built on. So we’re pretty proud of that and want to continue it. So we’ll continue to add features, but we want to do it in a safe and measured way.

Ian R: Yeah, so let’s talk roadmap Beon not to have this be too long, because it’s a state of app address, as we called it. But roadmap, what are some things that we can look forward to down the road, not necessarily in the next couple of months?

Beon D: Yeah, one of the big ones is, guys have been asking about being able to create a report from their report that acts as a sort of like a repair request, you know, that they can hand to the homeowner. So we’re looking at being able to include something like that, at least an initial version of that. Another one that comes up quite a bit is being able to manage your inspections and calendar view, we’d like to definitely put that in a sort of dashboard include some inspection company stats as well, on that. Another big one that comes up a lot is having a good way of being able to add standards, to reports. Now, we have a way to do it right now. But we’re not quite happy with it, we want to make it a little better. So we’re going to be actually introducing a feature where you can have a section allocated to adding, you know, standards, imagery, and text to your reports and have that automated. And then on the report front, as I said, we’re going to be concentrating a lot on reports, that’s the showcase of your business, the product of your work. So we’re going to be spending a lot of time there to offer more options, improve what is already there. And then, of course, some of the specialty reports that we haven’t included yet, we’re looking to really get those out probably sooner than later. Things like wind mitigation, four-point inspection, WDIs, we want to make sure we got those in there and that you can just be able to generate them from the app. So that gets a little bit of an idea. As far as what we’ve gotten our roadmap for the next few months.

 

Ian R: And talking about the specialty reports that don’t get asked for a lot, we just want to provide so that inspectors have it, you can actually fill out the forms and send them from the Inspector Toolbelt, you just upload them into the inspection order form. But those are going to be important so that you can say, Oh, they need the NPMA-33 form. Now I can just do it right at the end of my inspection, and it all goes out to the client and everybody’s happy. Those are going to be some amazing features that maybe you didn’t think about, oh, that would be nice to have WIND MIT citizens form and right built into it. Those are great things, we’re looking forward to all of them Beon, I got to say, from the ITB team, you have been a great lead on this project, you’ve done a fantastic job. There’s a reason you have built inspection apps and other software for many years and been very successful at it. So you’ve done a great job with ours.

 

Beon D: Well, thank you. And I think it really has been a fantastic team effort because you can have great developers, but if the direction being given to them, as far as information to build your spec from is not complete. That is an issue. And you’ve been great on that front. And then as far as the dev team as well, I’ve really just had to manage and get into the code every now and again. But our dev team has carried the bulk of the work and they’ve done really, really well.

 

Ian R: Yeah, we got to send some special shout-out to you probably listening to this don’t know who any of these are. But unless you’re David, you probably know who he is. You probably chatted with him but we have David and Chilwe and Juergen and Kim and Jason and Desmond and I’m forgetting a whole bunch of people.

Beon D: We had Leif on us as an intern for a little while he’s moved on but he added some great stuff while he was here.

Ian R: I miss Leif he was a great guy. I’m happy for him in his new life. But I miss Leif. We have a whole bunch; we have a pretty decent-sized team here on the backend working for you guys getting things to where they should be.

Beon D: All right now everybody knows probably more than what they ever cared to know about Inspector Toolbelt.

 

Ian R: We had to do it eventually. I told Beon yesterday. I’m like, we have to do a podcast about the app. Because a lot of people are asking questions, now we can say hey, listen to the podcast and you’ll know exactly where we stand.

Beon D: Yeah, you know, because I mean, as we’re doing this episode, I really can’t help but think back because, you know we look at all these new apps coming out. and some of them, you know, have some big companies behind them and all this funding and everything. We started what was it? It was five years ago in a diner, right?

Ian R: Yeah. Not even a good diner.

Beon D: Uh, no, it wasn’t, I can’t even remember it. There must have been a drawing on a napkin at some point, I think. But that’s pretty much where this whole thing started. And we’ve just kept at it. It’s been really grassroots. And, man, we’re finally at a point where we are seeing some traction and movement with this concept, and I couldn’t be prouder or happier of what we’ve built.

Ian R: Yeah, the reaction from the home inspection industry. And guys, we’ve been talking to that are using our app. It’s been fantastic. I’m very thrilled. And I’m really excited to see what comes out of all this.

Beon D: Yeah, no, for sure. But yeah, if you are a user, we got your back. If you’re not a user, why not? Come on?

Ian R: Yeah Come on, get on! Listening to our podcast and you’re not a user. I’m just kidding.

Beon D: We like all our listeners,

Ian R: Even the ones who don’t use our software,

Beon D: But we’d like the others more. All right, this is getting weird. Let’s end it here. 

Ian R: Thanks, Beon. It was great doing the podcast with you again.

Beon D: Thanks, buddy. Take care. 

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].

If you’re enjoying the conversation, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. Our podcast is available on all major podcast platforms. For more information on our services and our brand-new inspection app, please visit our website at Inspectortoolbelt.com.