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WGAN-TV eBook | Intro HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform for Photographers19486

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WGAN-TV | Intro to HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers | Guest: HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks @Herb_HDPhotoHub | www.HDPhotoHub.com | Episode: 209 | Thursday, 8 February 2024


WGAN-TV Podcast | WGAN Forum Podcast


WGAN-TV Podcast | Intro to HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers | Guest: HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks @Herb_HDPhotoHub | www.HDPhotoHub.com | Episode: 209 | Thursday, 8 February 2024

WGAN-TV Podcast | Intro to HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers | Guest: HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks @Herb_HDPhotoHub | www.HDPhotoHub.com | Episode: 209 | Thursday, 8 February 2024

WGAN-TV Podcast| WGAN Forum Podcast | Intro to HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers | Guest: HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks @Herb_HDPhotoHub | www.HDPhotoHub.com | Episode: 209 | Thursday, 8 February 2024

WGAN-TV eBook | Intro to HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers | Guest: HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks @Herb_HDPhotoHub | www.HDPhotoHub.com | Episode: 209 | Thursday, 8 February 2024


WGAN-TV Training Academy


WGAN-TV Training Academy | Intro to HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers | Guest: HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks @Herb_HDPhotoHub | www.HDPhotoHub.com | Episode: 209 | Thursday, 8 February 2024

WGAN-TV | Intro to HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers | Guest: HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks @Herb_HDPhotoHub | www.HDPhotoHub.com | Episode: 209 | Thursday, 8 February 2024

WGAN-TV | Intro to HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers | Guest: HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks @Herb_HDPhotoHub | www.HDPhotoHub.com | Episode: 209 | Thursday, 8 February 2024


www.HDPhotoHub.com


www.HDPhotoHub.com

Video: The Marketing Kit from HDPhotoHub | Video courtesy of HDPhotoHub YouTube Channel | 3 July 2023

Video: Your White Label App from HDPhotoHub | Video courtesy of HDPhotoHub YouTube Channel | 3 July 2023

WGAN-TV eBook | Intro to HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers

Hi All,

[WGAN-TV eBook (above) ... WGAN-TV Podcast (above) ... Transcript below]

Why does your real estate photography business need an all-in-one platform and a white-label app?

Stay tuned!

On WGAN-TV Live at 5 on Thursday, 8 February 2024, my guest is HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks (@Herb_HDPhotoHub). Our topic:

WGAN-TV | Intro to HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers

Herb will show and tell us about HDPhotoHub, including:

✓ Why is HDPhotoHub the platform real estate photographers can trust?

✓ What services are included in the HDPhotoHub all-in-one platform?

✓ A deeper dive into Ordering and scheduling
-- customizable shopping cart and order form
-- Stripe or Square payment processing integration
-- custom pricing features
-- service areas
-- automate your workflows
-- sales and payment reports
-- smart scheduling and appointment management
-- drive times and shoot duration
-- mileage tracking
-- Google Calendar integration
-- special invoicing

✓ A deeper dive into your white-label app
-- book new shoots
-- reschedule existing shoots
-- pay an order balance
-- download media to phone camera roll, no zip files
-- edit marketing kit materials
-- directly share photos and marketing materials via social, SMS and email

✓ A deeper dive into The Marketing Kit

-- automatically enhance your media deliveries
-- fully automated
-- branded to your business
-- editable and shareable
-- property websites
-- videos
-- social media graphics
-- teaser videos
-- property flyers
-- analytics

Contact HDPhotoHub

1. Book a HDPhotoHub Demo
2. Create a HDPhotoHub Account
3. Email: Support@HDPhotoHub.com
4. Phone: 509-515-3338

Questions I should ask Herb on WGAN-TV Live at 5?

Best,

Dan

HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers | Guest: HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks @Herb_HDPhotoHub | www.HDPhotoHub.com | Episode: 209 | Thursday, 8 February 2024

Transcript

- Why does your real estate photography business need an All-in-One platform and white-label app?

Stay tuned.

Hi, all! I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the [www.WeGetAroundNetworkForum.com] Today is Thursday, February 8th, 2024. You're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5: a podcast for digital twin creators shaping the future of real estate today.

We have an awesome show for you today: Introduction to HDPhotoHub All-in-One Platform and White-Label App for Real Estate Photographers. Our subject matter expert is HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks. Herb, thanks for being my guest on the show today.

- Thanks, Dan. I appreciate being here.

- Herb, tell us about HDPhotoHub.

- Well, so HDPhotoHub got started about seven years ago when I saw there was kind of a shift occurring in the market where, I think the way a lot of people would describe it would be hyper localization.

So it used to be that, if you go back 20 years or more in real estate, everyone trusted those big brands, big companies, and about 10, 15 years ago, we started to see that shift into a more local focus where people tended to trust and prefer to work with people that were very local in nature.

And as a result of that, I saw a great opportunity to serve a market of local real estate photographers.

People who are the backbone of the economy, are small business owners, and people that love to run or have a real estate photography business, a lot of them needed support they weren't able to get, and so I saw a great opportunity to build a tool set that would help that demographic, that niche.

- And what is that tool set? All-in-One, what does that mean?

- Yeah, so HDPhotoHub is, as a platform, it endeavors to be sort of the center of the universe for a real estate photographer's business. So it does a lot of things, hence the All-in-One nomenclature.

But it's a place for you to upload your photos, upload your videos, attach 3D things. It's a place for real estate agents to place orders on a white-labeled website.

It's a place to manage those orders, whether you're by yourself and you've got a busy schedule or you're trying to manage a team of photographers, just being coordinated and organized around what your schedule looks like each day, and who you have deliverables that you owe, and ...

Then of course the billing system is all tied into that, where we, when photos are delivered or videos are delivered, any kind of media, we hold those things behind a paywall so that your clients have to pay so you don't have to chase them for invoicing.

Like, all of the things. Basically, what we try to do is identify all of the parts of a real estate photographer's day that are not fun and make computers do that so that the photographers can do the creative work that only they can do.

- If we go to your website, www.HDPhotoHub.com the first thing that we're going to see is, in big print, "The Platform Photography Businesses Trust." Tell us about that.

- Yeah, so... Gosh, there's so many angles that we could have this conversation from. I think one of the things that-

- Or from a photographer standpoint, "The Platform Photography Businesses Trust."

- Yeah, I think that if you're going to put your business, any business, if it's going to be put on a platform so that all of your money flows through it, and all of your schedule flows through it, and all of the media flows through it, you really need to, it needs to be trustworthy, right? It needs to be something that you can trust.

And I think there's actually several things loaded into that. So part of what it is, I mean, when, part of what we mean by trust is you can trust us not to use your intellectual property for any purpose that doesn't benefit you.

It's your intellectual property; it's for your benefit, not ours. So we're not taking that intellectual property and mining it and selling it off to banks or whoever. Whoever would be interested in that information.

But it also means that you can trust us to be up, right? A website needs to stay up if it's the center of your universe.

And you need to be able to access it, your customers need to be able to access it. So we've made significant investments in the enterprise grade infrastructure that we run on in the cloud.

And so that, I think, is a big part of it. And the third component, and I think this one is ... So the third one is trust us to be there to support you. So we invest heavily in our customer service team.

About half of our employees work with our customers directly. And the reason that that's so important is because if you have a problem, if you have a question, if you need help, we actually answer our phone. We don't offshore that, we don't...

We do it in-house, right? So we aim to be very responsive. We've actually seen a huge growth in the use of our chat widget on our website.

That's the way most people like to interact with us. But real estate photographer is out in the field most of their day and the schedule is kind of spotty when you're available or when you're in the car, and when you're not, when you're at a shoot. And so to be trusted means to be there to help and support.

And that's one of the things that we actually, you look at our Google reviews, that's actually the thing that people notice and comment on the most is that we're real people and we're there to help, so.

- On these three pillars of trust, there are other competitors in this space that provide All-in-One. Is it reasonable to think that they offer the same three pillars?

- Well, I think everybody tries to. I mean, if I look at the competitive landscape, ...

When you and I met, Dan, it was at the PMRE Conference in November [2023] in Las Vegas, and this theme of trust was something I was getting a lot of questions about, and sort of the elephant in the room was, the fact that one of our chief competitors, Aryeo, was acquired by Zillow last August.

And a lot of people have questions about what that means if they're using Aryeo. Branick, Brendan and Matt and the guys over at Aryeo are good guys. We've talked to them several times. They have a platform that is good.

But there are questions when you get into the terms of use about how some of that intellectual property could potentially be used.

And I don't know what they're doing over there, but I know that our approach is that the photos belong to the photographer and any benefit of the use of those photos, those videos, those 3D tours has to reward the photographer and serve the photographer, and that's just our philosophy. We see ourselves as a host.

And I think that maybe that's similar at Zillow; maybe not; I don't know. And maybe over time there will be more details there, but we're so committed to this that we modified our terms of use to be very, very clear about this, that we do not have the rights to use those photos.

And one of the things that I was told as we were making those changes by friends of mine in the industry were, "Are you sure you want to close the door?"

Because that's one of the things that gives the company, HDPhotoHub, a lot of value if we were to be acquired.

And I'm okay with updating those terms of use, and we did, because that's not my goal. The goal is not to grow and then sell. It's to create a platform, an ecosystem, that people can use to help grow their businesses.

I'm really just passionate about making sure that small businesses are supported, because we're a small business too, and I understand what it's like.

And I think if you, getting back to the competitive landscape, so when Aryeo launched, they got a bunch of investment capital. It was all very public, they bragged about it on their website, and that's a very common path.

That's the way most software startups get launched, because it's really tough to launch a software company. You have to invest a lot of money for a long time before you get your very first sale and your first dollar of revenue.

And so... But when you have investors, you kind of are serving two masters, right? You're serving the investors, who have certain expectations, and you have customers, who have certain expectations.

And when those expectations come into conflict, it's hard to know what decision business leaders will make. But we simplified it by, we don't have investors. This company is bootstrapped. I started it by myself.

Sort of the fable of starting yourself in a garage, and building it up, and so on. And so as a consequence of not having investors, we really only have one constituency, which is our users. When you look at other companies that are endeavoring to be an All-in-One platform, there's kind of two other categories.

Companies that have been around for a very long time, 15 years or so, those companies have, for the most part, not made many updates. And for a while, really, for five, seven years, a lot of them have really made no substantial updates.

And can we get into why that is, but I think at the end of the day, they're not making updates, they're not investing. I think that some of it is that they price themselves too cheaply to be able to keep up the momentum.

And then there's this other group, which is pretty new companies that are trying to get off the ground.

They don't have the rich feature set at sort of this tier, but they're working on it and they're trying to get there, but the problem that they have is that they're funding their growth by also running a photography company and having that photography company fund the growth of the software company.

And that has two, in my opinion, two pretty big problems. One of them is a significant conflict of interest in that you essentially would be, if you as a photography company use one of those platforms, your data is being stored in a database for one of your competitors. That seems like a big liability to me, especially if that competitor has the ambition to grow. And several of them do.

And then the other problem is that they built their platform around their photography business. And one of the things that I've definitely learned in doing this is there is a wide range of ways to set up a real estate photography company. And it's not just the products.

The products and services are part of it, but policies on when you pay and policies on how you schedule and when it... Just, there's a myriad of decisions, hundreds of them, that you make that define your rule set for how your business runs.

And when a platform is built in the sort of shadow of a photography company, all of their rules get adopted. And because we started off really with the intention of being completely neutral, we sort of built radical configurability, and it baked it in from the very beginning.

So it's actually one of the things that is one of our biggest upsides, but also one of our biggest downsides in that you can configure the heck out of our platform. certainly, design elements, colors, and fonts, and a lot of that, which goes a lot of way to help with the white labeling, but even the rule set for how it functions and the modular way in which the shopping cart is built, all of that stuff is really at its core. We're trying to make it so that the platform conforms to how you run your business.

- Herb, before we jump into kind of a deeper dive on each of the different kinds of services that are part of All-in-One, if you could add some clarification about the ownership of the images-

- Oh, sure.

- and both why... Yeah, if you could just expand on that. Who owns the images? The photographers are uploading images, what is it that HDPhotoHub can and cannot do with those images?

- Yeah so, well, first of all, most platforms ... there's two categories of things that have to be considered. One of them is the media itself, so images, videos, and that type of thing. The second group is data.

So that's the aggregate of your customers, their order history, who your photographers are, if you have subcontractors, and all of that.

And on our platform, both of those sets are 100% owned by the photographer, and that is not the case on all of the others, on other platforms. They each take their own sort of tack on what it is that they're, how they approach it.

Well, now, every platform where you upload, there's some form of a license that's granted, right?

So you own the photos, but where you can get into some sticky territory is if a license to that media is granted to somebody else, where they have the ability to turn around and resell those photos or use them for any purpose that they want, then you've essentially, you still may retain ownership, but you've essentially given away the value.

And so our use license of the photos, the videos, and the data is that we are granted a license for use on the platform only, not any other use. And, that's one, it's only on your platform.

And number two, it's only uses you authorize through the UI of the platform, which means that if we add other features, those images have the ability to be used in those new features, and we'll get into some of those new, some of the newer features that we've added along the way, which are kind of fun, but as we add new features, you have the ability, the license extends to those.

But as we do that, we will add a configuration so that you can disable access, and then that is an implicit revoke of the rights to use. So anyway, does that make sense?

- Well, it does, but I think it seems like it's an important thing, particularly the data. So real estate photographers are uploading their client list of real estate agents, I mean, should photographers have angst when thinking about using other platforms?

- Well, I would. I mean, I... You know what is it that Warren Buffett says is that trust is that thing that takes 20 years to establish and 10 minutes to destroy. I don't know that anything bad will ever happen, but if it does, the impact is so catastrophic.

I think it's worth knowing what your liability is. Most people accept the terms of use on a platform that they're using without really reading a lot of the details of it. And that's understandable. There's so many legal words on all these, on all the different pieces of software we install and all the places that we go.

But in this one in particular, if you're building your entire business on this platform, the terms of use really do matter. And particularly with some of the other companies out there, having that sort of conflict of interest of having a photography company that's associated with the parent company.

I mean, I don't know. Is it a risk you want to take? Everyone's got to make that decision for themselves. But I think at least go in with your eyes wide open, you know?

- So is "The Platform Photography Businesses Trust," it sounds like that's super-important to you. It's so important, it's the first thing you see when you go to: www.HDPhotoHub.com

- Yeah, well, I mean, without trust, you know what they say, right? If with trust, what else matters, but without trust, what else matters? Like in a certain sense, if you can't trust us, everything else we have to say is irrelevant.

- Okay. I think that's helpful to understand because there are other All-in-One platforms, and perhaps that's your unique business proposition to differentiate you from other platforms is that all the data, whether it's the photography, photos, video, images, and then the client data, you've taken a very hard stance on HDPhotoHub does not own any of it and only has a license to use it with permission in the way the photographers grant.

- Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

- All right. And there's one other piece that I would add to that. It's a little bit of an offshoot, but it's kind of related, and that is that we also only work with real estate photographers. So this is another differentiator compared to some of our, some of the other options that exist out there.

We don't work with real estate agents, we don't work with brokers. And when they sign up, there's a check mark, "I am a professional real estate photographer, this is what I do for a living," and the reason for that is our entire mission, as I said at the beginning, is to support the real estate photographer community.

And so operating a platform that an agent can bypass the photographer and use doesn't support that mission. And so it's all, again, that's just one more way you can, that we're trying to cultivate trust, right? We're trying to be trustworthy by always putting ourselves in the mindset of what benefits the photography company, and that's the path that we take.

- All right, great. Let's jump into the HDPhotoHub All-in-One platform. Can you speak to client ordering, client scheduling? So a real estate agent goes to a photographer's website or goes to the photographer's white-label app, what happens?

- Yeah, so in both the website and the app, we have a pretty radical white-labeling approach that we've applied. So to the real estate agent, you never see HDPhotoHub. Like we do everything we can to eliminate any reference to our brand name and everything is the photographer. And so this is a couple of things, right?

So you get a URL that you use; it can be a subdomain that we provide, or you can set up a subdomain under your own domain that becomes that platform domain, and all of the links that get shared with real estate agents, whether that's the order form or the property websites, all the links that go out contain the photographer's name in them.

So we're always trying to refer business back to the photographer that did the work where people are seeing it. So from the agent's perspective, it looks like a custom built website by the photographer for the photographer's company, and we do our best to maintain that visual, I guess.

- And are you building out a website, or are you building out a widget that gets inserted into the photographer's website, or both?

- Well, so it's a standalone website, but it is not intended to be a marketing website. Most of our customers will get Wix or Squarespace or something like that for the marketing web presence.

But then they'll put a button on that webpage that says, Place an Order, and when you click that link, you get transferred over to our platform. And that platform, we designed it so that you can make them look very similar so that, at minimum, they look complimentary. In some cases, it's not even obvious to the user that you've even gone to a different place.

But from there, the agent can place an order, they can log in and view past orders, they can do rescheduling, they can download the media from past orders, pay their invoice, all of the things that you would expect in a white-labeled experience that the agent could use.

- Okay. So let's actually go a little bit slower, a little bit more detailed.

So our community may be a little bit different. [www.WeGetAroundNetwork.com] our community may have started as a Matterport photographer, an iGUIDE photographer, doing Zillow 3D tours, probably quickly learned that they immediately needed to start offering photos and video in probably aerial. And so, all of a sudden, they started out as a service provider offering 3D or 360 virtual tours, but quickly added all these other services and perhaps have never experienced an All-in-One platform.

So if we could just break it down a little bit more in terms of ordering, is there a bundle that the photographer's offering? Is it individual services? Is it add-ons? How does all that work?

- Well, like I mentioned earlier, it's hyper configurable.

So there's a place for the photographer to go into their admin panel and set up individual products, set up packages, and set a price for each of those products, and that becomes items for the agent to choose on the shopping cart.

So, and what's interesting, and we go, I mean, we can go really deep into the details real quick here, but when you're setting up products, you also set up service areas.

So you get to draw a map of all the places that you'll drive to, and then you can put points on the map and put in a second tier, and that's where you add a travel fee. You can set up discounts for certain customers, you can... There's a ton of stuff in that process.

But we've been working on this for several years now and evolving it. It's interesting. When we first started, I wasn't expecting that order form experience to be that complex or that big of a deal, but it's turned out to be one of the areas where we get the most feature requests and we have added the most features over in the last several years. I think scheduling is a big one that we added several years ago.

So when the photographer is doing their setup, they can figure what days of the week they work, and what hours they work, and all of that, and then we integrate with the Google Calendar.

And so when an agent is going to place an order, they actually see availability based on a rule set for how you've structured it and can actually book right on the order form. And once the agent has completed their order, it actually places that appointment directly on the photographer's schedule.

And then there's a bunch of stuff in there about optimizing the route, where it recommends appointments if you're already on that side of town, and... Anyway, there's a whole like scoring algorithm that we've built into it. And what we've found is, what we've heard from a bunch of our users is that on average, they get about one additional photo shoot a day because of how the system is recommending photo shoot appointments to the agents.

And you end up with a more efficient route, you end up with... And the system just does it. Like you don't have to... An agent, when they're placing the order, they get to know exactly when the appointment is, which is great from the agent's perspective because most of them are coordinating with that home seller, right?

And so if they place an order and then an hour later, the photographer calls to schedule, well now they got to go back and forth between two parties, the home seller and the photographer, to find a mutually available time.

When we added the real-time online scheduling, the agent just goes online, sees all the availability while they're on the phone or sitting with the home seller, and picks a time and schedules it, and it blocks it out on the schedule, and adds it to the photographer's daily route sheet, and all of that stuff is all automatic.

- So here in Atlanta, Roswell, and Alpharetta, during the day, these could be a 45 minute drive.

So I think what I'm hearing is that if I already have a shoot scheduled for 9:00 AM in Atlanta, and I have a shoot scheduled for 3:00 PM in Roswell, which could be an hour away during traffic, when the agent requests the shoot who's also in Roswell, it's going to present times around that Roswell scheduled, not in Atlanta, so the photographer is not going to do a shoot in Atlanta, drive an hour to Roswell, then drive back an hour to Atlanta, then drive back to an hour ...

So is it something like that in terms of the optimization that's taken?

- Yeah, exactly. So when you set up the products, one of the things that, in addition to setting the price, you set how long it takes to do that service.

So if you're doing photos and a Matterport, then you say, okay, well, for a home of that size, it's going to be 30 minutes for the photos and 30 minutes for the Matterport. Whatever it ends up being, you need an hour appointment.

So if it knows that you've got a 3 PM appointment that's already out there and it computes at that time of day how long does it take to get from this perspective appointment to that one. If it's a 15 minute drive, then it backs up 15 minutes for travel, an hour for the appointment, and it'll recommend a time that is, 1.45 so that you can complete that one hour job, and then have 15 minutes, and then complete the job that's already on the calendar.

So it'll recommend this time slot before and the time slot after because those will get the highest score because they're the shortest drive time.

So there's a whole bunch of stuff like that, a bunch of the magic behind the scenes that makes it work. But it's one of those things that, again, we started off, we thought it was going to be pretty simple, and as we've evolved, it's gotten quite complicated but it ends up really working well, so.

- It's complicated for you to develop it from a technology standpoint, but I imagine, from the photographer standpoint, from the real estate agent's perspective, it's super-easy and it just works.

- Yeah, that's what we're aiming at, right? So, yeah, for sure.

- Yeah. And just that or clarification, I thought I heard you mention, let's say, travel time. So are you taking into account real-time traffic?

- We are.

- And that's based on historical or, literally, you're looking at, "oh, in Atlanta at three o'clock on a weekday, on a Monday-

- Yeah.

- this is what traffic typically is."

- Yep. They have the week and hour of the day and are historic for that location.

- Okay. And then I think that ... I think perhaps what I was hearing was a couple benefits from the photographer's standpoint.

First, is not going back and forth unnecessarily, so being efficient with the time, that second is resulting in photographers being able to add one additional shoot on average based on your feedback that you're receiving from your real estate photographer clients.

- Yeah, so for those photographers that have a packed schedule and they're going pretty quick, the average move from six to seven, so, shoots in a day. If you're bundling a lot of services, you probably aren't doing that many shoots in a day.

So, it'll vary. But the idea is that you want to be gone for the same amount of time, but make 15% more money that day. That's the goal.

- And from the real estate agent's perspective, if a photographer offers a ton of services, are they being bombarded immediately with this whole menu, or is it only, "oh, you added photos, would you like a twilight?" "Oh, you added Matterport," would you like something else that logically comes with; floor plans, perhaps.

- Yeah, so this is one of those areas where you can make it as simple or as complicated as you want to.

The platform supports a whole bunch of interesting things where you can have product dependencies so that if you pick one thing, then it adds some other options to the cart and takes some others away.

And so it's sort of dynamic in the way that it will build. And so a lot of people have... It takes a little time to get it all dialed in, but you can do a big a la carte menu of services or you can have it sort of build as you go.

There's also, we have filters so that you can set ranges around the square footage of the home, or other arbitrary filters. Some people use those for parts of town, other peoples use them for separating residential real estate for sale, resale, commercial, rentals, and just offer different products for those different groups.

So the configurability is, like I said, it's one of the best things and it can be one of the worst things because you can make a mess if you're not careful. But it's just like any sort of open-ended tool, it's how you set it up.

- Okay. And if I'm a photographer that has clients...

So let's say I've never used an All-in-One solution platform that included the client online ordering, that included client online scheduling, but instead have been used to getting emails, texts, clients like that, what's the advantage, from a photographer's standpoint, about why you really want to train your clients to go either online or go through the white-label app to place an order?

- Yeah, so, I mean, the first one, and sort of obvious one, is just the amount of time to spend on the phone and playing phone tag, going back and forth, even if it's texting. Just to have all of that to them, from the photographer's perspective, to get all that time back, we do often hear people say, "I had no idea how much time I was spending on that until I wasn't doing it anymore." It doesn't seem like a lot, but it's all throughout the day.

And to just have that go away is pretty liberating. But the more subtle reason, and I think this is one of my more favorites, we didn't know this was going to happen, but it was feedback we got from customers, is that by having agents go through the order form instead of just saying, "Oh, I need another shoot. Schedule me for Wednesday, as usual."

As some of those better clients often would do, by having them go through the website, the agent sees all of the products, and so somebody who ordinarily would just order photos or maybe just order a Matterport has to go through the list again and see all of the features or all the services that are offered. And as a result of that, we actually have seen an uptick in the average order value.

So the amount of average services ordered be... an agent's just doing, usually just wants to do what's easy and quick.

And so if their normal process is just to send you an email or a text message or call and just say, "Hey, just do whatever I normally do, and I don't want to think about what's in it," breaking that cycle and having them go reexamine the service offerings does result in bigger average ticket.

Especially if you're adding things as you go or if you have some kind of a, if you're trying to boost up your Matterports, for example, you might run a special during the slow months. And so somebody who maybe hasn't done it in the past, you can get them to try it and hopefully hook 'em.

- And why is it important to have a white-label app? Photographers have not had an app, have used the website, maybe have had an order form. What's the benefit of actually getting a white-label app?

- Yeah, so the app is interesting on a few levels. So one of the obvious things is it puts your name, your logo, right on the icon, right on their phone. And agents live and die by their phones, right?

So we're even seeing agents moving away from using laptops to the point that they're really, the phone is their central tool for business.

So having that on their screen and them being able to just swipe and click to place an order sort of takes the thinking out of placing new orders. But the really cool part comes after you do a delivery.

So after somebody's placed an order and the photos are complete, they've paid for it, and they go to retrieve it, they do that from their phone. There's a bunch of things that you can do on the phone because it's an app that doesn't work from the link from a webpage.

So one of them is all the social media pieces that are part of our Marketing Kit, I mean, hopefully we'll get to show what that looks like in a little bit, but all those pieces are available to be shared from the phone. But when you share from the phone, it actually goes directly into the app that you're sharing it with.

And so Instagram, for example, if you've got a video or a social media tile that you've used as like a flier to promote the listing, the agent can open up the app in their phone, go find that listing that you shot for them in your white-labeled app where your name, your brand is re-imprinting in their mind, and click on that, and then, choose one of the social media tiles, make any modifications if they want, and then when they hit Share, it goes directly in Instagram.

So if using a webpage, even a mobile-ready webpage, it can't go directly to the app. What it does is you have to download it to your camera roll, and then you go into the app, and then you have to dig it out, and share it. And it's just extra steps. And as we all know, agents are not often very technically strong.
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And so the more steps we can take out of that process for them and so help them be effective, the better. And of course we want agents using those social media tools because every time they do, they're broadcasting your media out to the world, right? And it carries your link, carries your white-labeled URL.

So when they share those things out, they're really sort of marketing you at the same time, right? A bunch of agents... So agents see other agents' social media posts too, and so the more you can get your brand out there, the better.

The other thing that's cool about the mobile app is when you download the photos, there's no zip file.

You don't have to deal with any of that nonsense. When they hit Download to download the whole set, it actually creates an album on the phone, downloads them all into that one album. And so then many MLSs now are moving towards being able to upload photos from a phone also. So that provides a clean and organized way to get all the media onto the phone so it can be turned around and uploaded to the MLS and again, not having to mess around with zip files or any of that nonsense that always confuses them.

- So the real estate agent can place an order, do scheduling, receive the media-

- Uh-huh.

- and share it,

- Uh-huh.

- and have somewhat of a seamless experience with how that interacts either with their phone or with their sharing experience.

- Yeah.

- Does the photographer get paid when that media gets delivered?

- Yeah, so, I guess I didn't, we kind of blazed over this earlier. So even though we're at the hub of the universe for the white-labeled platform, payment is actually all directly from the agent to the photographer. So the business, right?

So the way that that works is you get a Stripe account or a Square account, and you connect it, and so then when they make a credit card payment, you're getting that deposit a couple days later. So we do not act as intermediary for the money either, we just host a page that facilitates it, right?

So you can actually configure if you want money upfront when they place the order, if you want to make them pay before they can download, or you just invoice them later. And all those things are options. We even have the ability to require a deposit to be paid when they place the order if they don't want to pay the whole balance upfront.

Or if you're concerned that the square footage that they reported isn't the actual square footage, so the final price may differ a little bit once you actually get to the home, you can have them put down a deposit, $50 or $100 whatever, and then have them pay the balance when they go to retrieve.

The great thing about collecting the deposit is most people that use that feature use it to collect a deposit amount that's the same as their no-show fee, and that way, you're making sure that the agent has at least a little bit of skin in the game before they block a section on your schedule. And if they, for whatever reason, don't show, the house isn't ready, whatever, you've got some recourse for that.

- And I think what I'm hearing is all those different payment options features are at the individual agent level.

- Yeah. So you can set up your-

- Client, client. Yeah.

- business by default, and then you can set up offices to behave differently, and you can set up individual agents differently still. S

So yeah, so you can allow most agents to pay on delivery, but if you've got somebody who's particularly onerous with staying current, you can put them on a cash only basis so that they've got to pay just to place the order.

- Alright. You mentioned The Marketing Kit, what's that?

- Yeah, so The Marketing Kit is a whole bundle of marketing tools that the agent can use to promote the property. And The Marketing Kit is I think one of the coolest and maybe least understood elements of our whole platform. So a lot of people treat it as like this, oh, nice to have something in the background, but, you know...

So what does it include? It includes social media videos, it includes reels, it includes social media tiles, static images, it includes flyers and a property website. And you can... All of these things are configurable, there's a whole bunch of options in any of these categories, but the flyers alone are often worth the cost of admission for the agent because they don't have to pay an admin. And there's a WYSIWYG editor.

It does work on the mobile, but it's definitely a better experience on a desktop where you've got a bigger screen and all of that, where you can go in and make edits so you can change which photos are displayed, you can change the size, you can edit the text. It's sort of, it works a little bit like Canva, I guess, if you're familiar with that tool.

But it gives the agent the ability to just pick a template, make some tweaks, and print that flier or publish that social media tile. And recently we've added reels. So we've got these videos that you can choose from, where...

Anyway, it's pretty cool. I get kind of excited about this stuff. But here's the thing about it. When you're a photographer, you don't have to do anything. The Marketing Kit is available to the agent just because you uploaded the media into that order, right? So all the photos, the videos that you've recorded, all that stuff is already there. And so what we're doing is taking those pieces and dynamically building out, filling up these templates that they can use. So... But here's the part that people tend to miss. We wholesale The Marketing Kit to the photographer.

The photographer gets to turn around and market up when they sell it to the agent. So most of our clients, based on the pricing tier that they're on, pay about $10 to deliver photos with The Marketing Kit. But The Marketing Kit is often sold for $20, $25, $30. In some markets, it's even as high as $50. So in...

And so then everything above that $10 is profit. So what ends up being is if somewhere between a quarter and a third of the agents choose to buy The Marketing Kit upgrade after the photos have been delivered, it becomes a new passive income profit center, and most of our users end up making more money from agents buying The Marketing Kit upgrade, which they had to do nothing to do.

They make enough money from that to cover the cost of the whole platform. So one of the things that we often hear is people say, "Oh, your platform is the most expensive one out there," and looking at all of our competitors, it is.

However, it's the only one that also offers a revenue, a passive revenue channel along with it, that more than often more than compensates for that. Now some photography companies will set that up as an upsell where they just deliver the photos and the agent has the option to add afterwards The Marketing Kit.

Other businesses will actually include it, and they make that part of their differentiation and say, "When you order with us, you get all the tools." So it's really kind of, is your real estate photography philosophy very a la carte and piecemeal or is it sort of a high service concierge approach?

If it's concierge, then most of those people are just including it. And what we've seen is people will switch to our platform right around this time, right around the beginning of the year, and what they'll do is they'll raise their prices, but then they'll say, "But you're getting The Marketing Kit now."

And so if you raise your price by $20, you take on a new $10 cost, you're netting $10, but your clients are getting way more than $20 worth of value and they're more than happy with the enhancement, so.

- And you mentioned a property website, single property website. Are there different templates, and the agent has a choice?

- Yep. Yeah, there's several that you can choose from. Several different layouts and styles and then color variance of each of those.

- And who's making that choice? Is it the photographer making a choice of which one to deliver, or is there a client portal and the real estate agent signs into the portal and then picks which template, or changes templates, or configures colors, logos?

- Yeah. So the photography company sets up a default, and that's just the one that goes by default, they can always change it. And sometimes we have...

Sometimes you'll have circumstances where you'll want to use a different one based on what they've bought. So, for example, if they're doing video, some of the templates emphasize video better than others, and so that might be a reason to change.

You can also set the default for a particular agent so that if there's an agent that says, "Oh, I always want this particular one," then you can configure that. So it doesn't require any manual touch. Every time you do it, you deliver. But then also, once it's delivered, the real estate agent gets to choose.

They can take whatever's selected and change which one they want displayed, and they can make adjustments to it, colors and stuff like that, for sure, but also like how fast the photos flip through in the gallery, you know? A whole bunch of other settings like that.

- So there's a portal for the real estate agent to receive all their digital assets, photo, video. If the photographer is delivering Matterport, or iGUIDE, or Zillow 3D tours, or yet some other 3D/360 virtual tour platform, will they embed in that property website?

- Hundred percent. Yeah, they absolutely do. And, yeah. And you can actually choose which ones you want to include. There's both a branded and an unbranded, right, because some MLSs require there to be an unbranded solution.

You can choose which pieces or which versions are included in the branded and unbranded modes. You can also deliver links that are included in that delivery experience that aren't actually part of the property website also. So if you have other links that you want to include, those can also be held hostage -- behind the paywall -- and then released.

And then one of the other things, this is just a real quick little detail, but when the agent gets the email, there is a portal they can log in and do all kinds of things in there, but we actually have a simplified no login required landing page that the agent gets where they can download all their assets and make some simple modifications to what property website they're looking at thus give them a place to upload their photo and logo without requiring going through password and all of that stuff.

So we're just trying to make it as simple and smooth as possible for agents. And so that's actually something people really love is there's actually a lot of configurability and a lot of things you can access from the special link in the email without having to actually be fully logged in.

- So I'm hearing there's email notifications, are there text notifications as well? Is that an option?

- Yup. Oh yeah, a hundred percent.

- And email text notifications that I presume are also when you place an order, when you schedule, when you make a change in schedule, when you get your assets are available, when everything is delivered.

- Yep. All that stuff can be done. There's also reminders, you can do email and text reminders, you can configure how long before the appointment that you get reminded. There's also...

Another really cool thing is there's a text message that goes out every day to the photographer on a day where they have orders, and it's got their daily route sheet, and it's all mobile-friendly. So it has what time your first shoot is, and how long it's going to take you to drive there, and what the break time is between your photo shoots in addition to the drive time, how much extra time you have so you can figure out where lunch is going to be or what your day looks like.

But every morning, which, if you're a sole operator, you probably have a pretty good sense of all of that. But if you've got subcontractor photographers, super beneficial to those subcontractors that aren't fully plugged into what's going on.

They just roll out of bed, check their phone, "All right, here's what I'm doing today," and they go to work.

- So all that notifications even for subcontractors or other employees of a photography agency. It supports teams, not just the individual photographer, but multiple photographers.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Referral program.

- Yeah.

- How does that work?

- Well, so there's two different referral programs that I should mention. One of them is for photographers. If you refer another photography business to us, there's a referral benefit to you who did the referring, and that's something people really like because they end up spreading the good news and the result is that they get free credits on the platform as a result.

But really, the better referral program is the one that's agent facing. So you can actually... Every agent gets a referral code.

There's a spot in the portal where they see, when they log right in on their dashboard, it shows what their referral code is, and it gives them a QR code in the app. So for any agent that's got the white-labeled app, there's a spot in there where they can bring up that QR code to share with another agent, and you can configure the reward that the agent receives for doing the referral.

So if I was to refer you and you just signed up and placed your first order, once that payment has processed for your first order, then whatever referral credit that you have configured would go to me. So as the person spreading the good news about this great photographer I found, I-

- We're assuming now that you're a real estate agent, and you have other real estate agent friends, and you tell your other real estate agents about your photographer that you're going to be rewarded by the photographer.

Now, this is an optional program that the real estate photographer can decide whether they want to offer this or not, and then assuming the photographer can decide how much to pay the other, pay for the referral, is there also, is there tied in with a, perhaps, a special offer related to new customers, or that's actually yet another piece of the platform of how the photographer can configure new client may get something different?

- Yeah, so there's promo codes which can be configured for first time customers or one-time use, which is the most common way that most people set that up.

- And, Herb, does that tie into the referral program so that the-

- They're actually totally separate. So. Yeah.

- Totally separate, okay. But yes, you can, you, to go back to the referral program, you can configure the reward, it's a monetary amount, and what it does is it goes on account as a credit applied to the next order.

So if agent A refers Agent B, you might say, "Give them a $20 thank you," a $20 discount on their next order is how essentially it works out. So then agent B places an order, pays for the order.

At the moment that it's paid for, Agent A gets a $20 credit that goes on their account. The next time agent A, after that, goes to place an order, it'll say, "Oh, we've got a, you've got a credit on account, would you like to use it?" And then it just discounts the purchase by that amount.

- Okay. Great. Business analytics. I imagine that there's a lot of information that's being collected about orders, dollars, et cetera. What is it that you can help your real estate photographers do, may perhaps do better because... Is there an analytics dashboard?

- Yeah, for sure. So right on the, when you first log in as a real estate photographer, as the business owner, the owner of the account, there is an analytics section that displays, it shows how many orders, how many clients, how much revenue. And for each of these metrics, you can actually set...

For each of those three metrics, you can set how many, set a goal, right? So, how many new customers making their first purchase are you aiming at for this month? How many total customers do you want to have placing an order with you this month? How much do you want to have in revenue?

And so there's a bunch of cool things that you can do with that. We actually just did a webinar recently where we did a deep dive on all this, and people can get that link on [www.HDPhotoHub.com] if they want, but that's...

What we're trying to do is help photographers run their business more like a business where they have KPIs, right? Those key performance indicators that are going to drive their success towards what they're trying to accomplish. And so you get what you measure, so we measure it, and we put it right up front where it's easy to see as part of your daily routine. And-

- Oh, so for those who have not used an All-in-One platform before, you're able to collect all this information and push it back in a useful way to help photographers perhaps have insight into their business that perhaps they didn't have before about how did January look this year compared to January last year, or this year compared to last year, or...

- Yeah, for sure. Retrospectively, they can see what's happened in the past months. But I think maybe the better use is where are we at so far in this month for halfway through? And I had a goal of five new clients and I've only gotten one. Well, I got two weeks to go get those other four. I need to double down on those activities that will help me stay on track to hit my objectives.

- Okay, awesome. Anything else on business analytics?

- Oh, man. I mean, there's a whole area, so there's a lot we can go into.

- So All-in-One platform, how much? How do you charge?

- Yeah, so our philosophy is we charge when... We make money when you make money. So our philosophy is when you do a delivery and you've gotten paid, well, by golly, that's when we want to get paid.

And if you sell The Marketing Kit and you make some money off of that, that's when we want to make some money too. So because of that, it's not a monthly subscription. There's no flat monthly fee.

There's no... And this works out great because there are busy times and there are slow times, and you don't want to be paying the same in slow times as you are in the busy times. So the cost for a delivery is five credits. And we have a credit system, I'll get back to that in just a second. So there's really two main things.

A delivery is 5 credits, a Marketing Kit is 15 credits. So the easiest way to think of that is if you're buying them one at a time, it's $5 for a delivery and it's $15 for The Marketing Kit. If you've already bought the delivery, then The Marketing Kit is, at least at this time, The Marketing Kit, you only pay the difference. So the way that that works is by credits, as I said. And so the reason-

- I'm sorry, Herb, I lost you. So it's $15, or I'm going to say credits, but for the moment, if you're just buying one, we'll explain buying in bulk in a moment, but on the two products, delivery of digital assets and The Marketing Kit, if you buy The Marketing Kit, is delivery included?

- It is, yeah. Marketing-

- You're either ordering, paying for only delivery of digital assets, or you're paying for The Marketing Kit, which includes delivery.

- Correct.

- $5, $15.

- Right. Yep.

- Okay. No subscription.

- Yep. And you were about to say something about buying credits.

- Yeah, so we use credits so that there's an opportunity for people that are doing volume to buy in bulk. So if you're just buying one off, it's one for one. Dollars for credits. US dollars. So the first package that people can buy is 150 credits for $120. So that gives you a 20% discount.

Easy way to think of it is if you're going to do 10 Marketing Kits and the price comes down to $12. From $15 each to $12 each. The next package, which is actually the most common, it's what most people do, is 750 credits for $500. And so at that price, you get 50 Marketing Kits, and they're $10 each. So why do we do it this way? Oh, go ahead,

- Oh, please. Sorry.

- Well, so why do we do it this way? The main reason is because we want to reward people that are doing a volume. And this is to discourage people from using the platform that are trying to do onesie twosie kind of things.

And so we want to make sure that people that are doing a decent amount of volume ... Most people can do 50 shoots in a, in a month or two, and so that keeps them at a good price point.

- Okay. And there's a schedule, pricing schedule, super-easy to find. www.HDPhotoHub.com www.HDPhotoHub.com

- Yup.

- There's a pricing tab so you can go see all this. What other things do you charge for? Do you charge for your app?

- So we do. There's a one-time fee for the app. And that's 1,500 credits, so it ends up being roughly $1,000; less if you buy even larger bulk. But conceptually, $1,000 is the way to think of it. And what that includes...

So that's how much it costs for us. But when you do purchase the app, you also need to get an Apple developer account and a Google developer account. And those are our registration fees that you'll pay directly to Apple and to Google. So for Google, it's a one-time fee of $25, for Apple, it's $100 a year. And that's so that you can get your own developer account, and then we feed the app into that.

This is how we accomplish white-labeling on the app itself. Some of the... So there's other people that are trying to do apps that are in our space, and they often will use their developer account. Their Apple developer account, their Google account.

The problem with that is when you go to download the app and you scroll down, it tells you who it is that wrote it, and it also says, "Other apps by this company," and lists other photography companies. So, we felt like it was not exactly in keeping with the philosophy of white-labeling if your competitors were being recommended on your app install page. That just didn't seem like a good idea.

- So I've heard three components of cost. Delivery only, The Marketing Kit, which includes delivery, the app, the white-label app, for the photographer. Is there anything else to use my credits on?

- Yeah, there's one other thing, which is buying domains. So that's if you want to have a .com for a particular single property listing. And, again, this is a situation where you get to set the price and mark it up.

So they cost 25 credits. So what is that? Normally, it's like $18 for the actual hard cost. Most people will sell them for $25, $30, whatever. When you buy that domain, it links directly to that single property website. We take care of all the registration. There's an SSL certificate, so it works securely, and all that stuff is just included.

- Cool. What about photo editing?

- Yeah, we don't do that.

- Do you have an integration for photo editing?

- Yeah, for sure. So we do have a few partners that we work with. So the first one that we did, and the one that most independent editors will use, is Dropbox so ... And...

The way that works is, when orders are placed, it builds out empty folders, then the editor can... So you upload your raw images in it, when the editor uploads the edited images, the system detects it and automatically imports them.

So there's no download and re-upload process. We also have a Google Drive integration that works very similarly. And then recently, we've been working, we did an integration with eSoft. So eSoft is a great photo editing company.

They tend to only work with larger real estate photography businesses. You have to have about five or so more photographers before you're doing enough volume to work with them. But we have an integration to just make the workflow super-easy for getting photos uploaded and then back from the editors automatically into that delivery system.

- Okay. So if you're a real estate photographer, you edit your own images, there's a workflow with integrations with Google Drive, Dropbox. If you're using eSoft, there's an integration. You could go to: www.HDPhotoHub.com and check out all the other integrations. There's other integrations that may be appropriate for your individual business. Did you want to show us The Marketing Kit to take us through that?

- Sure. Yeah, let me share my screen here.

- Okay. And while Herb is getting set up, you can go to: www.HDPhotoHub.com you can book a demo there. There's a Contact Us form. Contact Us form. You can create a free HDPhotoHub account. All set for your demo there?

- Yeah. Can you see my screen okay?

- I can.

- Okay, good. So this is kind of a landing page of a sample site that has some photos just thrown into it. So it's for a Marketing Kit. So as you scroll down, you can see that there's a place for you to add, for the agent to add. Now, let me backup.

This is a page that the agent sees. They've received an email, they've already done the payment, right? So whether it was paid for on the front-end or the back-end, the payment is complete, now they're ready to download their media and use it for marketing purposes.

So we've got a place for them to enter some of the basic information if they didn't when they placed the order, and there's a place to upload photos and to set some of the other profile data.

So then further down is where we get into the fun stuff. So we've got social media videos up top. This is our newest thing, and the thing that agents are just, just falling all over themselves about. They absolutely love these reels, these videos.

So this... You can see, you can hit play, and you can see that it's animating. But what's fascinating is you can actually pause it, you can edit, and you've got this whole Canva editor. So you can come in here and adjust the size of things to make it fit just perfectly. You can, I don't know, edit the text and so on, right?

So... And then... So then it's broken up into these pages, which are different scenes. And so you can see what all that's going to look like anyway. Don't want to go too far down that road, but what it does is it builds a video that you can then download and upload directly into social media. And again, from me-

- So... So if I may, Herb, just for clarification, the real estate photographer is simply uploading their digital assets, photos, their video, and then all these video posts, reels, et cetera.

That's the secret sauce, the magic of HDPhotoHub, of taking the photos, taking the videos and the information of the real estate agents info, the real estate agents photo, et cetera, and all magically creating that and pushing that through The Marketing Kit. So the photographer's not having to, like this is a whole nother production for the photographer. No, not at all!

- Yeah, no.

- Yeah. That's all... The templates are already all there and all they do is... Yeah, we just pull in all the information from the photos, and from the property, and from the agent's profile, and generate these things automatically.

Yeah. I mean, some of our agents, some of our, not agents, some of our photographer customers will go in and make tweaks and make adjustments. so for example, on some of these, further down, if you go edit, you can actually change like, oh, well I don't want the front shot, I want this photo.

And I want to frame it in slightly differently, based on the composition of the photo. But it's definitely not something... We've tried to keep them generic enough that they will look good 99% of the time with just default.

- Okay. And anything else on The Marketing Kit? So now you're showing-

- There's so much detail here.

- Yeah. But I think, as you were scrolling down, just say, "Oh, well, that's where you could pick a different template."

- Yes. Yes.

- And if the real estate agent is just interested in grabbing the single property website, branded, unbranded.

- Yeah, they've got the, they can click here to get the links and edit the design. There's pre, you know... So anyway, that's all, there's a lot. There's a lot.

- It's a lot. Okay. Okay. In fact, for those of our viewers that would just like a deep-dive on The Marketing Kit, certainly, there's a Marketing Kit video on: www.HDPhotoHub.com but you could also schedule a demo just on The Marketing Kit if you want it. The app, do you want to perhaps dial in? I see that it's dropped off of our... Yeah.

So while Herb is getting set up to dial into WGAN-TV Live at 5 here, again, you can go to: www.HDPhotoHub.com

The site's very robust. Awesome videos on everything that we've talked about so if you're particularly interested in a particular topic, there's a video for it, and get a description as well. And also you can book a demo, you can create an HDPhotoHub account, there's a Contact Us form, so if you have a specific question that we didn't have an addressed on today's show, you can send that question right to HDPhotoHub. And I'm waiting for Herb to...

- Looks like it's dialed back in, and if that shows up.

- Okay. Let's try. Okay. And... Actually, I don't see it. It says standby. Yep, now I see it. Okay. Now you see it, now you don't. Okay. Alright.

- Oh it's technology.

- I do see it. So Herb's going to give us a demo of the white-label app from a real estate agent's perspective to see what they see.

- Yeah, one thing that's really important is the app, the way that it's set up, let me get into the right spot here, is it really is designed for the real estate agent themselves. It's not designed for the photographer or any subcontractors. We do have some mobile-ready tools for that, but the app itself, the primary audience that we're focusing on is the real estate agent because we're really just trying to get that loyalty by getting the agent to install that on their phone. So I'm just-

- Okay, we're going to enable it so that a real estate agent can place an order, can do the scheduling, can get delivery of digital assets, can download their assets, can buy their assets, pay to download. Take us through what you'd like to show, Herb.

- Yeah. So right off the bat, when you log in, the first thing is, Order A Photo Shoot. So the agent can click that button and place an order right from here so they can look at all the products that are available and get that order started, because, of course, that's one of the key things we want them to do is place that next order.

But they can also manage orders that are in progress. So you can see here this sample that is scheduled for next week. And there's actually a button on the side here, the calendar, that they can click to reschedule if they need to change the appointment.

But it also just gives them a dashboard of what their appointments are. For the projects that are completed, we have this first one, has The Marketing Kit purchased on it so it has a bunch of tools. So it's got a place for them to edit the listing and download the... Snag the links for the branded and unbranded websites, change the status.

But then we get into the really fun stuff. So you can see all the photos that were delivered. And of course, you can tap into those, you can zoom in and see the photos. You can swipe through them so that you can look at the different photos.

And on any individual photo, you can download either the print quality or the MLS resolution. Again, something that you can configure is what's the resolution your MLS uses.

But up at the top, you've got the All Photos. So you can click the Print Quality, which is the original size you uploaded, or you can click MLS Files and it will, again, it will create an album on the camera roll and download all of the photos into that camera roll all at once. When we go over to Social, the next menu option on the bottom, you can see those same reels that we were looking at on The Marketing Kit page are also available here.

And so for any of these, you can hit the play and you can watch it as it plays. You can see a preview of what that video will look like.

And then... But also you can edit and you can share. So if you hit share, it downloads the video as an actual video file, and you get your standard share experience on your phone, but it actually looks through the apps that are installed, and it sees that we have Facebook and Instagram on here.

So if I tap Instagram, then it asks me, do I want to take that video, and is it going to be a reel, a post, a story? And so you can basically just goes directly in, passes directly into the app, which is pretty doggone cool. I was talking to a photographer. She was telling me that an agent downloaded and installed her app.

And got a call from a home seller while she was at her daughter's softball game. And the home seller was just on the edge of her seat. Like, "What are you doing? We haven't had any showings in the last week. What's going on with my listing?"

And she's like, "All right, let me see what I can do."

She hung up the phone, opened up the app, pulled up the listing, made a couple tweaks to one of the reels, posted it to her social media channel, excuse me, tagged the homeowner so they would see it, pardon me, and the homeowner was just thrilled, right, because they saw that activity. And 10 minutes later, back to watching the softball game.

Didn't have to drop everything and run home and get on the computer or any of that stuff. It was all just right there in the palm of her hand. So this is the power of this app. The last tab on here is the, so sorry about that, is print, and this is actually for the flyers.

And if you've got a wireless printer, you can actually even print flyers right from your phone. So you don't even have to pull up your computer or anything. You can just, literally, on your phone, print those flyers right out, so.

Oh, so that's the experience with The Marketing Kit. If we go back to the dashboard list, we've also got a property here that's just a delivery.

You can see, this one's a simpler experience. It just has the details, which has the timeline of the order from order place to delivered. And there's a place to snag the invoice, but there's also just the download page. So when you do delivery, you don't get the social media, you don't get the flier stuff in the app. That's a feature of The Marketing Kit.

- Okay. So two separate products. Digital delivery.

- Yep.

- The Marketing Kit, which includes digital delivery.

- Uh-huh.

- Awesome. Herb, was there anything that we didn't cover today, you felt "oh" but we haven't talked about?

- Nothing that's coming to mind. I've just enjoyed the conversation. As you can tell, this is a big passion of mine. Obviously, the platform, but the industry really, the niche that we serve and people that are working in this space, it's very important to me and it's important to our whole team.

And, yeah, I mean, if people want to learn more, we've got a bunch of resources, as you've mentioned, on: [www.HDPhotoHub.com] The way that most people are reaching out to us lately has been through the little chat widget that we've got on our website.

So don't be afraid to use that. There's real humans, it's not AI that's responding to that. And we'd love to figure out... We're meeting new friends every day, and learning about their business, and what makes them unique, and figuring out ways that our platform can help achieve their goals because it matters.

- Awesome. You've been working at this for seven plus years. Congratulations. What's been the reaction by HDPhotoHub clients? What do they tell you?

You're at the... We did meet at the PMRE Conference, Photo Media Real Estate Conference in Las Vegas in November 2023. You hosted a luncheon for customers. What was the feedback that you were hearing from your customers about HDPhotoHub?

- Well... It's, frankly, a little embarrassing, but we hear people all the time say that the adoption of our platform has completely changed their lives.

That prior to using our platform, particularly people that were trying to do Dropbox and then like Acuity Scheduling, or trying to cobble together four or five separate things, that bringing it all in one place, it just eliminated the chaos and the stress by having everything in that kind of one place.

We often hear that people were chasing money before, where they had clients that would say, "Oh, I'll pay you when you deliver," and they just wouldn't.

And just the fact that all of those things just go away and, frankly, that we make them look good, we hear that all the time.

That is because of the way the white-labeling works, their customers just think they're geniuses for all the things that they have on their platform. And so the number of people that I've, that particularly when you're in...

And we're spread out all over the country and all over the continent, all over the world. We've got customers in, a bunch in Canada, a bunch in Australia, and kind of all over the place. And so we don't often get face-to-face.

And so at that conference, it's a particularly gratifying thing to get face-to-face with a bunch of people that do use the platform, and... Yeah, it's... They tell us that it has made all the difference in the world for them.

- Herb, thanks for being my guest on the show today.

- Thanks, Dan. I enjoyed it. It's great.

- We've been visiting with HDPhotoHub Founder and CEO Herb Dierks, based in the greater Spokane, Washington area.

For Herb, I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum, and you've been watching WGAN-TV Live at 5.
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