Ep. 80 | Using Interactive 3D software to sell real estate - Dan Burdman

Dan Burdman, co-founder of Hauzd, breaks down how interactive 3D and live inventory shorten the path from curiosity to commitment in new-build real estate. He shares franchising wins and scars the importance of documenting everything, aligning incentives, and how those lessons translate to everyday. The conversation shifts toward leadership over control: listen first, set the context, and teach people how to think so they can work independently without needing constant supervision. Through it all, the theme is disciplined persistence—stay cash-flow responsible, iterate with customers, and optimize for time freedom as a measure of success.

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Transcript

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Welcome to Shakin’ Hands, where we provide the platform for entrepreneurs and thought leaders to share their stories in order to hopefully influence others to get out of the rat race and chase their own dreams. If you have any recommendations for guests or questions that you want to be asked, please don't hesitate to reach out. Anyways, if you enjoy the podcast, please like, comment, subscribe and share in order to keep the podcast growing. Otherwise, I'm your host, Jack Moran and this is Shakin’ Hands. Are you from Panama originally? No. You said you're from. I'm from Argentina, actually. How'd you get to Panama? And how'd you get to Panama? I just came here ten years ago because I had a company in, in in Spain, and, I just, you know, the company when, when really bad. And then I just came here. What was the business? Our business right now, it's, software. It's a 3D software platform for real estate. So we help real estate developers to, you know, to, pre-sell their projects before being built, with all the inventory in real time, with everything in 3D. So it's an interactive sales solution, for new developers, for new developments. So. So, yeah, it's it's about that. That's interesting. I'm doing developments here in Latin America. So, what does that look like? Are you guys doing the master planning or you're taking all those collaterals and then digitalizing it? Exactly. We are creating, digital twins for, for for each project, we basically get all the architectural files, you know, the CAD files and all that stuff, designs and all the stuff. And then with our own 3D engine. Well, the first model in 3D, everything, the whole project, the entire project. And then we digitize, that into, into an interactive a sales like a showroom, the three showroom, let's say. Gotcha. How did you get into that business? I met my and my partner. I say that that's his. My wife actually kind of my wife, you know, and my second wife, maybe, he is, he comes from Electronic Arts, from video gaming, 3D video gaming. He's he's he's amazing. And he was, he just started here in Panama. He's Canadian, but he started here in Panama, doing, the, the the platform and and he, he got married with, an architect and with the woman that is, she's she's architect. From Panama. And that's why, you know, he, he he kind of started to live here. And then I met him, in an inter, like there was some kind of, you know, trainings for entrepreneurs in City of Knowledge, and I'm not sure if you know about them. So, I met I met him there, and then I followed up him during six months. And then we, you know, we we we kind of got to to be partners. You said this wasn't your first business. It wasn't my first business. My first business was in Spain. We we have created with some other partners, a low cost mobile franchise system. You know, we have, shops, low cost mobile shops where we sell, you know, mobile virtual operators. You know, the SIM cards are kind of low cost, price prizes. And, we franchise that, that, that shop that system. And then we got to 20 shops all over Spain. That was in Turin in, in 2014 that we just, you know, during four years we had the company, then we we needed to close the company because, you know, Spain was, was, was doing bad by that time. And then I decided to come to Panama. Yeah. Gotcha. What did you learn from the process of franchising a company that's, an interesting, or a growth path that I'm interested in? Yeah, correct. It's, you basically need to have all the all the, standards, all the procedures or the workflows, the brand, everything needs to be pretty clear for them to execute your ideas, right? Right. So, so the most, important thing, there was to, to kind of establish some, some rules for them to, to, to execute the plan and, and sometimes, we didn't realize that. And that was, the main, I would say maybe one of the main mistakes we did, we make, but yeah, yeah, it was pretty interesting to have a franchise system. Also all the, all the legal staff, all the papers, all the documents, you know, typically French franchises, they want to, you know, take different directions. Sometimes they want, you know, and, try to, to get some other providers, some other products, and you need to be very clear and have some, you know, legal documents that prohibit that. Have you always been an entrepreneur? Did you ever live, this was well, actually, this was my second, second company. First company was, was in Argentina when I was, 18 years old. I started to, you know, to repair computers at home to do some, you know, software maintenance and all that stuff in my neighbor neighborhood. It was like that, and we created a company. We started, importing, you know, and distributing hardware. That was kind of, you know, like a small business that I started. Then I moved back to. Sorry to Spain, to study and and then, to work there. And then I created that company, and then, I lived there for ten years, and then I moved to Panama. Why did you take the entrepreneurial path as opposed to go on the corporate route? Why did I take the Inntrepreneur path? Because I wanted to be someone I wanted to to do something interesting. I wanted to create something that can add value. And I guess that, you know, my my family, they are will they have always been workers, or like, regular employees, their whole life, they work as employees. And then. Well, I saw I saw that and then they said, you know what? I want to create something different. I want to be something different. That's why I made it like this. And what were those early days, like when you first started your first company? Did you have any guidance or any mentorship or you just kind of figuring it out as you went? Well, when I was in Spain, I, I used to have, three partners and they were, you know, older than me. So when you were 18. Now, that was that was, No, when I was 18. And I just have my, my brother and me, we were, you know, doing stuff, like, very basic stuff. But then when I moved to Spain. Yeah, I had this, three partners, and they were older than me. So, you know, I learned a lot. A lot from then. And they used to have their own companies. So I used to be like, you know, the general manager, I work there, but then there they were like, you know, partners, not not in a, in a, in, you know, every day working at the company. Right. So I learned a lot of a lot of stuff from them. And then when, when, when we, when I moved to Panama and then we started housed, you know, we we used to have some mentors at the beginning, but, we definitely, you know, we are kind of missing, that here right now, you know, Central America and specifically Panama. There's not too many startups here, right? So there's not, like a whole startup ecosystem where you can have a lot of mentors and stuff. Right? So, we, we know some people, but one, one, important advisor we have is, actually, he's the CEO of my report, Bill Brown. He's he's he's really good. And, and and, well, he's he's one of our advisors right now. So when you said you were in Spain and you had those two partners that were mentoring you, and you learned a lot from them, what did you learn from them? Well, they were not really mentors. They were partners. You know. So, but they were they were really good, I guess, that I needed to do many things by my, by myself. But, but probably I would say that I learned on, you know, how to, how to manage a team, how to be a leader in that company. But they were they were more, you know, like all of the red cards and this, this, this partners, silent partners. So, like silent partners. Yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Of course, we had board meetings and all that stuff. So, you know, I guess that I learned a lot. I learned a lot of things just, you know, on on myself, to be honest, a lot of, you know, watching a lot of videos. I used to have, 111, important coach. His name is Dan Martel. He comes from the software as a service. He's really, really good. He's Canadian. Actually. And, yeah, we we had him, like, one year. A lot of staff learned from him. A lot of processes, workflows, a lot of marketing tips, strategies. Many, many things very specifically, related to software as a service. And that has, has, helped me a lot, for the, for, for this actual company that that we have. What were those tips and those marketing tricks that he taught you. Oh, or workflows or. I don't know how there's so many the documents that that I've saved. Just simple as, you know, that maybe you don't realize when you are starting a company, but let's say like a weekly thing, you need to have a weekly sync with your with your a weekly what a weekly sync. Sync sync. Like, like a meeting, like a minute ago. We call it weekly sync. Gotcha. That's why I have it down on my head, right? Like this. And, and it was interesting because he has the document on what are the things that you need to discuss with your team, every Monday, let's say, but like this many things, like, for instance, why you should have an executive assistant, when you're inntrepreneur and you are doing many, many things at the same time. So you need someone who can, you know, backup you a little bit, and you can delegate lot of minor tasks that are, you know, taking your time every day and, and, and you need to be focus on, on, on, on, on, you know, on the big picture and strategies on how to grow the company on that start. Right. But like this I have many, many documents and many, workflows saved on my on my, on my, on my Google Drive. We have very there have kind of as a small company, very, very organized. Right. Like for instance, all the analytics like why you should have a dashboard from the beginning, a simple dashboard, but something from the beginning where you can see all your sales, all your costs, what is the ticket price like the average ticket price? Many things like that, right? You said that, and one of those documents you talked about, what are the things that should be discussed with your team? Yeah. Monday meeting. What are those things? Yeah, yeah. First of all, were there, there the obstacles or challenges that, you know, what we do in our company is we, every manager, talks like 1 or 2 minutes in that meeting. And then, you know, they, they, they talk about their challenges, their obstacles. We write down, you know, so everyone can really know what are the, the real problems in our company. That is one one thing that we, we do in this in this report, of course, we have some kind of, like a scorecard, you know, where we go through every department, every manager, like, related to sales, to marketing, to customer success, to tech support. For instance, we announce what we are doing and when it comes to software development, you know, what are the features that we are working on? What are the features that we have just launched last week? But one thing we do is, the production manager, she, she, she mentions what, what are all the projects that we are working on right now? You know, we for as every development is, is one individual project. So what is the status of each project? Where are we? All right. You know, when it comes to the progress of of that project. Right. So it's like a summary of, of what has happened last week and and then and then. Well, it's, it's, it's like a 30 minute, you know, meeting you said that you learned early the importance of leadership. What do you think are the keys to being a good leader? Why is it important? Yeah, to be a leader. I think I think, first of all, you need to be able to listen. Everyone's in the team, right? I have my own problems. I have my own stuff. Personal problems, whatever. But we should. We always try to listen what they have to say and. And try to work with them on those, on those problems for me, that is kind of the difference between a leader and a boss, right? Like I in Panama, it's very common that everyone talks about a boss. I have my boss and my boss wants me to do this, this and that. Okay. Why you are doing this? This and that. What? What is the main reason? Do you understand why? So for me, being a leader is really helping them and explaining, you know, employees on the team on on not how to make things, but how to think about how to make the things right. It's it's it's just it's like developing the criteria, for them to, to kind of, you know, understand how to do it. But, but next time they can do it right away. Right. So I think, being being a leader, that is kind of the most important thing I believe. And then, be always, you know, always nice with people. We try to be not a boss, but a leader. Like being nice, helping them, meeting with them, discussing with them, planning with them. I think that is kind of the main thing. Also, we, we, you know, we we constantly, you know, we try to be flexible sometimes, even if we have some rules in the company, you know, we we of course, as a company, we have we have, you know, our documents and our rules and our employee handbook and all that stuff. But we try to be flexible and and when you are flexible and you become somehow a little bit of, I wouldn't say like a friend of, of your employee or of your team, but but, you know, like a close relationship. Right? And that helps a lot. Like they need to trust on us. We need to trust in them. So you said you had some difficulty with your last company in Spain. What did you learn from that experience that you take in to this newest company? That's helping you to not, encounter those same problems? Yeah, that is a good question. Well, I was back then, I was I think I was I was also very young. So, when you're young, you make you make mistakes. And then as soon as you start growing a little bit, you you kind of, understand more and you're more patient about things, right? You, you do, think twice before doing whatever. I would say that, one of the main things, I've, I've learned is how to somehow, properly, I, I learn how to how to really become a leader at the end because my back then I was, I was very young. So maybe people can kind of see me as, as, as more like a boss than, like a leader. But then in this company, I think I became like like a leader, right now. And, and one of the main things was, how to really structure all the company and all the processes we have, in, in that company in Spain, there's, there was a lot of, you know, a lot of processes that were not clear. And in this company, you know, I have much more clarity on, on on which processes, processes should I have, you know, what is what is every department need? You know, there's there was more communication with the team. Right. So yeah, so many I don't know right now. It's like many things I, I guess I learned many things. What is the biggest challenge that you've encountered to date as an entrepreneur? The biggest challenge is probably how to, you know, sometimes when you don't have, especially I feel like right now in, in Panama, because we are here in Panama, even if we are, you know, a global company, we sell in more than ten countries. But but I feel like talking to someone who can really help you in some specific decisions that you need to make with a bootstrapped company. It's it's hard. So, so I would say that that one of the main challenges is, is how we can grow a company, maybe like a bootstrap company without investment. And, at the same time, you know, keeping the, the, the, the cash flow positive, but without mentorship. So that is kind of our reality, right now in, in Panama, you know, I would say that that is the main challenge we have, and at the same time dealing with, with our personal, problems. Right. Because when you raise funds and when you have a lot of money on the bank, I wouldn't say that everything. It's much more, everything is completely easier. Easy. But it's much more easier. Let's face it, you have money, and then you are not worrying about generating money every month. So, we we had, you know, we survived to many, worldwide problems in the past, you know, the Covid, you know, and now there's a lot of uncertainty with, with all the Trump decisions when it comes to Mexico and Canada. And we sell a lot in Mexico. We have a subsidiary there. So, you know, it's, when, when, when you're a bootstrap company and taking care of of of the cashflow every month. It's like the main challenge to be honest. Right. Especially in the early days. What's your vision for growth with the company? What's our vision for growth? We are about to launch this, hopefully, you know, we are finishing some stuff, but we will launch the full software as a service business model. Because up until now, we have been, you know, selling directly to real estate developers, doing the whole work. So it was it is like a B2B software company, but it's not full software as a service company. So we are launching right now the that business model in parallel. And that is kind of our vision for our growth because we are going to become much more, you know, scalable and global, and we cannot license our technology to every kind of company related to, you know, 3D visualization, rendering companies and all that stuff. So that is what is coming, you know, next, and we believe we are going to do it, very, very good because we have a really nice software, very, very robust software. That, you know, that people love. So are you guys doing the do you guys have a software that the user uses to design that 3D, or they're uploading the, the, CAD drawings and and you guys are doing the design. Correct. Right now, our actual business model, it is we have, 3D designers in our team in-house. So we do the whole work. Well, we basically take the CAD drawings, we we model everything. We, we import those files into our 3D engine, and then we build the interactive sales solution for the real estate developers. So we do the whole work, we sell it, and we charge a set up fee and a subscription fee, for that. Right. But this, new business model, it is like you said, we're going to license our technology to 3D designers, visualization companies. Any kind of company can, you know, use our tech. Like, similar to what Autodesk does with AutoCAD or 3D studio Max or any kind of software they, they sell. So they will be able to create this similar, interactive experience experiences for their clients in their local markets. That is the the main goal. That is the idea. And we will hopefully will launch, early next year. What does, the platform look like from a user experience? Like what are you what does that digital product look like, and how can you use it to market that real estate development? Yeah, the final product is it's basically like a URL per project. Right. So if you're a real estate developer, we we're going to give you a URL that has all the, entire project, in 3D. So you can explore from the exterior up to the interiors, every single unit amenities, everything in 3D with, inventory in real time. So you have the status and the price in real time connected to your CRM. That is the, deliverable that that we, we, we give we give to the to the clients and of course, as a buyer, you can access that link from anywhere. You know, if you if you are here in Panama, you want to buy something in us, will you access the link? And you can actually explore the whole project. You can reserve a unit, you can pay with credit card and all that stuff. You guys take payments on it as well. Yes, yes. I mean we we don't do it ourselves. It's always their, you know, their PayPal account or stripe account like the developer's account. But yes, you can you can do it. I mean you can reserve a unit. Well that's very interesting. Have you guys done anything channeling us investment to Panama. Any projects like that. Or anywhere in Latin America from the US? We well, there's a lot of, a lot of developers here, targeting us. Us and Canadian people. Right. You know, so but that is more like developer strategy. Like, we don't really get into that. We just provide the platform. Then you can use it anywhere. You can embed our platform in any portal, any marketplace, or you can use it in your sales center, in your showroom. You can take it to an expo and put in a big flat screen. So, but but of course, definitely. Well, well, actually this building is, is under our platform now, so, so, yeah, we do this in, in an in for, for for Panama. We do it for us, for Canada, for Dominican Republic. There's a lot of, you know, they they sell a lot of lot of projects to foreigners there. So we are doing this in, in more than ten countries already. Final question. What is your own personal definition of success? That is that is a good one. Of success. Well, I think, for me, it's doing what, what you love. And of course, because for me, it's not really, you know, about the money, but it's doing what you love and, and and and every, every day have time to do what? What you want to do. I love to play tennis. I wish I have more time to play tennis. So for me, you know, being like an entrepreneur and, a successful entrepreneur and hopefully one day having having an ex, it means having free time to do more stuff. For me, the time is, is all. It's really good advice. What would be? Actually, I have one more question. What would be your single biggest piece of advice that you would give to new entrepreneurs, to new entrepreneurs? I would say the, the, the main thing is to be, persistent. I think, to be successful as an entrepreneur, you need to be persistent. You need to have discipline. And, it doesn't matter which which business you are doing. Actually doesn't matter if it's a tech startup or whatever kind of company you're you're building. You need to be very persistent and you need to be, very open to learn stuff every day. You know, I learn a lot just by, you know, doing a lot of research. And now with AI, you can you can, learn much more stuff by yourself, right? So, so, yeah, that is my, my, my big advice, I would say, is being very persistent and and believing in yourself because many people at the beginning will tell you that you are crazy. What are you doing? You know, there's people that still they don't understand what I'm doing at the beginning. My my, my my wife. I think she thought that I was an article or something. What is your what what what what are you doing? What? What is this application for real estate. What does what does that mean? What it like? What? How are you getting money from that? Right. So, like the, like. Well, if you don't come from this world, you know, it's it's, you know, it's a very traditional, country, traditional market. A lot of, you know, small, small companies. So, there's no lot of technology. Right? So, yeah, you I mean, it's I, I would say again, my, my big advice is, is that I believe in yourself and what you're doing, what you're building. And do it every, every single day, every single day of your life and improve, improve, improve, improve. And then being also flexible to iterate because, you know, at the beginning we couldn't really license our technology, but now we are kind of ready to license our technology. So we needed we needed to do something else to be here right now to kind of start licensing our tech. Right. So you need to be flexible for that. Yeah, I agree completely. Also very good advice. Where can people, if they're interested in connecting with you or interested in your services or your company, where can they find you? Yeah, sure. Well of course our website is housed.com, but, they can they can, look at me at, LinkedIn. I use a lot, LinkedIn a lot much more than Instagram and all that stuff. So, definitely they can reach out to us and, and we will, you know, schedule a demo and show them the software in action. More than happy to do that. Awesome. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you. Nice, nice. To.