Mortly
Create Mortgage Scenarios in Seconds
I tried to make this a quick intro that I could use in advertisements to loan officers. We've had zero churn since my last update, but zero growth as well. ☹️
This tells me I need to dedicate more time to my growth strategy (starting by defining one), and then consistently putting that plan to work.
Some ideas...
- Homepage redesign
- Weekly writing on the blog (hiring a writer or doing this myself)
- More social media outreach
- Instructional videos to loan officers to build a following (I love to teach)
Today was a big day for Mortly. We had a user who offered to do a video testimonial for Mortly and it went great! (I was a nervous wreck, first time doing this!). 😅
The second demo went great, and his feedback was interesting. He said he was referred by someone who said Mortly was amazing, and that he needed to take a look. Organic growth! I love it.
The demo went amazing. I was able to showcase all the awesome time-saving features I built into Mortly. He could instantly see the value and not only that, how the simplification that Mortly does automatically can also help his conversion ratios.
I never considered that the higher conversion ratios was another way to pitch Mortly. One extra loan closed will pay for it for the entire year! Coupled together with the time, savings?...icing on the cake. Both are great opportunities to help my fellow loan officers.
The last demo is coming up in about 20 minutes. This is to a team of 5 who all are curious on how to use Mortly to the fullest. I'm excited to show them and answer questions, and this is my biggest demo yet.
I love to see Mortly growing like this. I never considered 2020 would be the year it really started to catch on. I suppose I've had my head down, swimming in code, building every day. Now here I am, a year and a half later, and I realize I have other people swimming with me.
❤️
We showcased Mortly on a company video to about 170 loan officers, and immediately had 5 folks sign up. I booked 2 demos for this morning and they both loved it!
Had a great opportunity to get feedback, some feature requests as well, and both will be joining us. Overall, seems that they were able to understand how to use Mortly very quickly. It was already saving them a bunch of time, and my demos were mostly just going over the tools that Mortly offers to help quote and convert new customers.
Mortly's vision is to save as much time in the quoting process as possible for Mortgage loan officers. I can't describe how exciting it is to see that vision come to fruition with other loan officers in the industry. 😊
After about 6 months of waiting, "Mortly" was officially granted a trademark by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
We're official now! 👏
I really thought that getting a trademark was going to be a huge hassle, but it was pretty painless.
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@SteveIsIn292 thanks for sharing, can you talk a bit more about the application process, did you use an attorney or a company such as legalzoom? Thanks again!
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I just went straight to the uspto.gov website (https://www.uspto.gov/trademark) and followed the instructions there. The forms were a little intimidating to fill out initially, but it wasn't terrible.
The initial application was over 6 months ago. There was a long while that I didn't hear back (that was expected). Then I started to receive status updates, such as:
- Attorney assigned for review (by the uspto)
- Attorney submitted a request for revisions and clarification
- Submitted those clarifications (they wanted some screenshots of the product in production)
- Another few weeks went by and it was accepted
- Then I received a certificate by mail (which the post office kindly folded for me) that was the final - You've got it!
You could hire an attorney, but it really wasn't all that difficult for a simple name patent (like in my case, "Mortly"). If you have a much more complicated product, then an attorney may be more suitable.
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Got it, thanks very much @stevisin292 for the detailed information, really appreciated it.
My case is quite simple, a product name and a domain, think I am gonna go ahead and submit it myself using USPTO's application form.
Great to know it's gonna take around 6 months, now I got the rough timeline and really helps me with expectations.
Super useful information, thanks again for your quick response!
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I have a new loan officer on a free trial on Mortly, and he shared some feedback that I found was really vindicating. I've worked my tail off to learn, build, and market Mortly over this last 2 years and seeing comments like this really makes my day.
One of the most underestimated rewards of building products is when you solve someone's problem, and you sense the relief in their feedback. It makes all the long nights coding completely worth it.
Verbatim feedback copied from a chat...
- Also, digging the property tax lookup 👍
- It's really impressive, but not surprised that you've built this from ground up
- Your work truly shines through the product; good shit
- I was able to price out a super fast new quote by copying a scenario from the original quote and just changing the term/rate and getting a new payment instantly
- So much faster than retyping everything in
- And making the fees worksheets are simpler and that copy/paste feature for the 'chart' is super easy
❤️❤️❤️
We signed our 2nd branch today! So excited to see Mortly growing organically. I've done very little in the form of advertising; this has mostly been word of mouth and personal product demos I've given to folks in the industry in my own network.
I have a meeting with Thoughtbot tomorrow to talk about taking Mortly to the next level. Now that I've fleshed out the MVP, it's time to really look into having a solid dev team ensure that:
- Refactoring the code base to eliminate any mistakes (I consider myself a junior dev coder as far as experience goes)
- Making the existing features bullet proof
- Free me up to do more advertising, writing, and product demos
We discussed why I built Mortly and how we brought it to our branch, and it was a great way to spread awareness to other loan officers in the parent company.
Shortly after releasing that video, we have a few sign ups. I'm a little bummed because they didn't seem to progress past the intro tour, but I did identify some bugs there and it should be fixed going forward.
Today, after a few product demos, trial extensions, I landed my first customer that I didn't directly know. Met off of Linkedin, and he decided to join today. I found that most of my users require an introduction to the app, so I am going to change my advertising a bit.
I will probably focus on videos more, but I want to do more in-person demos at places. I think the face to face introduction I can give is much better than a cold ad on social media.
I'm learning a lot, and I'm excited that my first real start-up is already earning an income.
So I signed a big customer last week, and now they're asking if we could do a pitch to the rest of the company. This is huge! Over 500 employees and dozens of branches, which means lots of new accounts.
We just wrapped up a video with the VP of the company. 🤞It'll go out to their entire employee base in the next day or so. I was really nervous but think I did a good job, so let's see if we get some adoption next week.
Exciting times!
SLA signed, and happy to share that we've signed our first major branch with a 30 user account. I'm really looking forward to having the additional users for feedback, and the income will help support some part time development and UI work I've been wanting to do.
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