Doorstep

I built Doorstep as a free home affordability calculator for buyers who have no idea what they can truly afford when looking to buy a home. Anyone can use it right now, no signup required. Instead of a guess, it runs live mortgage rates and real numbers through a system I built from scratch.

The initial idea was a tool to prep home buyers, but the monetization opportunity there is nearly nonexistent. A pivot was required.

The same buyer tool, with insight granted to an agent by the buyer, is something completely different. An agent already has a relationship with a buyer. What they don't usually have is a real, current picture of that buyer's affordability, readiness, or whether they've gone quiet for a reason worth knowing about. That's the actual product now: buyer affordability as a tool agents use to nurture and understand their own leads, not a calculator I'm hoping buyers stumble into on their own.

So the agent side is what I'm building toward. A QR code at an open house turns a visitor into a real buyer profile: payment range, readiness, timeline. The buyer can download the app on their own, and when they do it at their agent's request, it gives that agent a great deal of clarity. The kind of clarity that prevents wasted time.

Plenty of buyers get a rude wake-up call once their agent finally works out what they can actually afford. A buyer who thinks they're financially ready when they aren't ends up costing that agent weeks.

Doorstep prevents that time sink. It also lets agents nurture buyers who aren't ready yet and keep them in the pipeline with minimal effort. Agents get a pipeline ranked by who's actually worth calling instead of a spreadsheet full of guesses, plus a system that automates follow-up and nurturing. Buyers get an app that coaches them on exactly what they need to do to afford their ideal home, and shows them listings both inside and outside their price band along with what it would take to reach the one they want.

Open houses aren't the only way a buyer ends up in the pipeline. Every agent already has a list of leads that went cold: people who filled out a form a year ago and never turned into anything. Doorstep can bulk-import that spreadsheet and turn it back into a real, working pipeline, ranked the same way as everyone else, by who's actually worth a call right now instead of who happened to fill out a form first. And when an agent meets someone the old-fashioned way, at a showing, over coffee, wherever, adding them takes seconds: a name and a number, and Doorstep handles the rest.

If you're an agent, or know one, I'd like to talk. The platform is free for now. We've exited heavy development and moved into marketing and growth.

I'm a self-taught engineer who went to Galvanize in 2017 to solidify my skills, and a combat-wounded Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan at the height of the GWOT.