Distressedpro.com was my first foray into the software space. Prior to this project I worked almost exclusively on websites that were more, just, well… websites. Distressedpro.com was born from my own needs that arose from my work as a real estate auctioneer.
In 2006 I was in the real estate business and just starting to work with banks selling bank owned real estate or foreclosures as an auctioneer. In 2008 I got the idea to automate a lot of the very tedious research that was required to find the right banks and the right contacts with the right assets to sell.
At first I tested the business concept of selling this data with a very simple PDF for sale and a single email. I broadcasted an email to a list of people in the business that I was affiliated with professionally and I listed the PDF bank list for sale for almost $200. To my amazement several people bought.
Over the coming months (2009) I developed the idea further and determined that I’d move towards a legitimate software product. The first version was not good… it required a quarterly manual upload of the bank data and had the simplest of Linkedin plugins as a source of contacts. Still, I sold it for $97 per month and I started having sales my first month.
Today BankProspector from distressedpro.com continues to thrive and grow every month. It’s currently in Version 2.1. BankProspector pulls quarterly bank data updates from the federal repository known as the FFIEC every night guaranteeing the freshest bank data available. The application also plugins into 2 powerful contact databases including Jigsaw.com and Linkedin. Members pay monthly or annual subscription rates. The site’s success is built entirely upon organic search and social sharing primarily on Linkedin.
After the most recent rebuild, and adding a money back guarantee, the site became reliably profitable and sustained by an automated sales and follow up process.
Technologies used for this project are:
- LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) hosted on a Mediatemple DV
- SOAP
- RESTful Apis
- Javascript
- JQuery
- JQueryUI
- DataTables.net
- Highcharts
- HTML
- CSS
- WordPress (front end)
- Amember
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