Transcript: WGAN-TV Introduction to Asteroom with Founder and CEO Eric Tsai12613
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| WGAN-TV: Introduction to Asteroom with Founder & CEO Eric Tsai | 23 July 2020 Transcript: WGAN-TV Introduction to Asteroom with Founder and CEO Eric Tsai Hi All, Asteroom Founder and CEO @EricTsai gives us a deep-dive intro - including demo - of the Asteroom virtual tour platform in this WGAN-TV show (above). Highlights include: ✓ how to (easily) shoot an Asteroom virtual tour (examples) of a 2,500 SQ FT listing in 15-20 minutes with a Ricoh Theta Z1 360 camera (compared to 1-2 hours with Matterport) and thus be able to affordably shoot Asteroom virtual tours for houses for sale in the $250,000 (NAR reports medium home price of $284,600 in May 2020.) ✓ Asteroom Pay Per Tour (PPT) Special Pricing for WGAN Members (nicely loaded). - No monthly subscription - create the virtual tour with up to 30 360 photo spheres (likely sufficient for 90 percent of listings) - create the dollhouse view - professionally edit the 360 panoramas - 6 months of hosting - (additional 6 months hosting available for $15) - (additional 360 photo spheres may be added to the tour for $1.50 each) - $60 one-time payment Asteroom Pay Per Tour (PPT) Special Pricing for WGAN Members (nicely loaded) is good through 31 July 2021 and then subject to change. Either join the free WGAN Forum (free) to receive the COUPON CODE or Private Message me (@DanSmigrod) with the subject line: Asteroom Pay Per Tour Pricing for WGAN Members ✓ Coming soon - virtual staging (presently in public beta) - 2D schematic floor plans ✓ Asteroom pairs nicely with WP3D Models, Show & Tour, Rela and other solutions for creating single property websites (branded, unbranded) Best, Dan P.S. @EricTsai thank you for being my guest on WGAN-TV Live at 5 and thank you for the special Pay Per Tour pricing for WGAN Members Video: Tutorial- How to Create a 3D Home Tour with Asteroom | Video courtesy of Asteroom YouTube Channel | 4 March 2020  Screen Grab: Asteroom App LinkedIn: Eric Tsai --- Transcript (Video above) - Hi all, I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network. Today is Thursday, July 23, 2020, and you're watching WGAN-TV Live at 5. Our guest today is Eric Tsai, the founder and CEO of Asteroom, a virtual tour platform. Eric, good to see you. Thanks for being on the show. - Thank you Dan, thanks everybody. - Super excited to learn about Asteroom. Before we jump in to ask questions, why don't we first maybe begin with a tour Eric of what the potential house buyer sees, looking at an Asteroom virtual tour? - Sounds good. So I will share my screen. And what I would go is, I go to www.asteroom.com and that is our homepage. And a couple of tours in the gallery. So I click into gallery and as you can see, there is a filter here for by camera. And we're going to do theta Z1. - Okay, Ricoh theta Z1. And then we can go into the first tour, which is Monte Sereno. It is a $8 million property in Monte Sereno, California. Which is South Bay, on south of San Jose. And so this is what a viewer will see when they first come into the tour. Okay, and then they can click into this view. Not sure why, it's this view, which is the top view. And then the floor plan view. Okay, so I'll go back to, and then go into the tour. And then you can access a dollhouse- - [Dan] And Eric excuse me, it went a little bit fast for me. If you could go back to that dollhouse view and just let me know how you transitioned from that dollhouse view, to a specific location to walk around this $8 million estate. - So you can just click into any of the name tags. So let's say I want to go to tennis court. And then I can move around using the blue arrow. Or I can go back to the dollhouse, and then I can go in somewhere else. Entrance, and if I'm here, I can open up the 2D floor plan. And I can use the hotspots on the floor plan to access different parts of the listing. And then you can toggle on the left side, you can toggle between 2D floor plan and 3D dollhouse. And then, if I go back to dollhouse, there is one bird's eye view. Which is this. And then back to floor plan. - Okay. So how about we walk around. This looks like a pretty amazing space, so maybe, give us a tour of some of the highlights of this particular $8 million property. - Sure, one is one floor. It has a dining room, a formal dining room and a kitchen, that has an island and the family room right next and the breakfast area. And there's one more bedroom in the back and then you have access, to the tennis court from the family room. - And I think I saw a pool too. - That's right, yeah, there's a pool as well. So there's ... jump on to the pool. I don't know how long this pool is. But it looks just standard 25 feet pool. - And I see some thumbnails along the bottom. Can I just click the thumbnail to travel from place to place within the home? - Yep, that's it. So if you want to go to office, you want to check out what office looks like, you can just go into office. Actually, I've never had been to this room before, so let's take a look where I am. Let's go back to the dollhouse view. Office, it's right here. - It's a big house. - Off into bedroom three. Yeah, I even got lost. It's a big house. - Okay. And, I think there's some other places I can click. So what happens at the top left if I click on, in the top left? Is that active there for an app? - No, you cannot. This is a name. This just tells you what listing it is And, what is the name of the room you're in right now? - Name of the room, okay. And then I see some maybe some navigation tools in the top right? - Oh, so this is for you can measure. Yep. So, I know the door is seven foot six, seven foot five. Cancel this and then this is toggle off that automatic measurements, dimensions. So this is, it shows you the dimensions of the room, automatically and if you think it's distracting, you can toggle it off. - Okay, and I see three dots in the top right. Is there something else there for us to? - Yeah, you can do some other settings, auto rotation so that it doesn't rotate if you're not moving. Unless you're moving. And go into full screen. Or you can share the tour, copy the URL and send it somewhere else. To your agents, to your buyers. - Okay, so we've seen the tour from the homeowner's perspective. And there were some other samples that were on your gallery page. And this one just happened to be one level, maybe you had an example to show of two levels of that dollhouse view and maybe how to travel. So you're on Asteroom, asteroom.com ... then went to the gallery page. This is an example of one that's two stories. - Two stories, yeah. And I just want to call out to our new dollhouse, looks a little different. Actually, a little different than what we have on the website. But these are made like a while ago and we continue improving the technology. We just haven't had time. We're doing a revamp of our website, which so we just have replace older example tours altogether. So this you can toggle off using the floor filter. Floor one, Floor two, and all floors. - Okay, so and then I could fly into any one of those rooms? - That's correct. So you may want to go into the kitchen, you can fly into the kitchen. - And then walk around. Okay, cool. And I notice on this tour, the minimap on the left, just has the minimap of the dollhouse view not the floor plan view. - That's right. - Because? Oh, because we didn't make it for this one. The floor plan view is a new feature that we're offering. It is actually starting tomorrow, or on Monday, we'll be offering a floor plan. We're going to offer a service ... to convert your dollhouse into a 2D floor plan for you. So, now we haven't done floor plan for all of the gallery tours. As I said, we're going to be replacing all the tours altogether. So these are just have been there, and that was before we have the floor plan feature. - Okay. Excuse me. So, so sorry. So I can create the floor plans with a third party tool and import them into the platform? - You may. - Or use the solution that you're talking about. - Up to you. Yeah, you can upload your own floor plan. And you will be able to use this end functionality. - Okay, great. Was there other examples to show that are different than these? - Yes this one, I can show a three story one, except this one was created on iPhone 11. But it's the same software. They will look the same. Its just images are a little different. But yeah, this is what a third floor one will look like. - Excuse me, Eric, I'm going to actually take a mint for my throat here. - Oh, yeah, please. And this one will have 2D floor plan. - Terrific. And in the gallery, were there other examples to show any other features that you haven't shown in these first three? - No, that's about it. - Okay, so why don't we take it off screen share. - Okay. - In a moment, I'm going to ask you to do a deep dive, so that we can see how the photographer puts together this tour. - Okay. - But before we do that, Eric tell us about Asteroom maybe a little bit about how you got started? Why you got started? Where you saw a need for Asteroom that you felt was not being served by other virtual tour platforms? - Happy to. So before, I started Asteroom in 2018. That was when I was still working at Facebook as a data scientist. I was a data scientist for this advertising product called the boosted post. And that's how I learned about the real estate industry. Through user research, immersion trips with agents. And this is also when I learned about Matterport. I've always been really interested in 3D Space. Because that was one of the things that was becoming a trend. So as I learned more about Matterport and real estate industry, I quickly realized that there's a need for affordable solution. Because the market is so big right now. Not everybody has lived in the $1 million mentioned, right? There are people, agents were selling $200,000 to $400,000 homes. And those agents are not going to hire a Matterport Pro to spend $250 on the tour. So that was what motivated me is to create a solution for these agents selling everyday home. And then I also realized that, I came to a conclusion that Matterport will be great, Matterport has a great technology but it will have a hard time being ubiquitous because it just is so expensive to use and time consuming. So that was what motivated me to create easy to use, and affordable solutions for agents that sell everyday-home. - So that was just a couple years ago. So you've really accomplished quite a lot in a very short period of time. - Thank you Dan, and I was working part time for the first like a year and a half when I was still at Facebook. So I think the timing helped. It was the right solution to be in the right time. And of course I take ... I'm very sorry for those who have lost family members, friends they love through this pandemic and I just feel that I had one more mission is to help that real estate industry move forward safely, out of this. So this is definitely something that I want to accomplish within the next couple of months. - Yeah, certainly no one wants to benefit from a a pandemic, a disease. That said, I think almost overnight, every real estate agent, every real estate photographer has been researching 24/7 open house virtual tours, and I could imagine that you and your team have been very, very busy, just simply keeping up, either with the questions or with the fulfillment during this pandemic. - Yep, that's right. Yeah, we scaled up quite a bit in the past couple of months. And of course, we're going through some scaling challenges, but I think we're at a much better place. We feel really good about moving forward and we have a lot of interesting partnerships, that are coming up, a lot of features that we're rolling out, so I'm happy to uncover them. The ones I can, with them in the show. - Yes, terrific. You know, I think Eric I mean, my impression is that, the amount of innovation that's taken place in the last three to four months, might have taken four to five years without this pandemic. It's just been, that dramatic in terms of agents, brokers, photographers and people outside of residential real estate saying, "This is the only way that I can show my property. "I got to get the solution." So there's probably some irony right now and that even if you wanted to go buy a Ricoh Theta Z1 to create an Asteroom virtual tour. You can't buy the camera today. It's just on backlog. - Yeah, yeah. I heard that line before. We were feature in the same article together. And that's when I was like, Oh, it makes a lot of sense when [Reporter Erin Hudson] went to you. - Yeah, we're talking about TheRealDeal trade publication that Eric is interviewed for at length talking about Asteroom meets residential real estate listings. And I'm quoted in that article as well, about this innovation that's taking place and yet the challenge, either is the factory can't make enough of the units or have the parts, or the demand exceeds the supply or both. So, even as we're having a conversation about perhaps deciding to buy a Ricoh Theta Z1 camera or an Insta360 One X or yet a different Ricoh camera, or the Insta360 One R, there may be a challenge even as we air this show of actually finding a camera to go buy to pair with Asteroom. So, you don't look like you're pulling your hair out but I could imagine you having a little bit of frustration, that you have demand people are ready to buy and get started with you, but they don't necessarily have a camera to shoot with. - Yep totally. Ricoh Theta Z1 is the camera that we recommend. The 360 camera that we recommend our photographers or agents to use. In fact it's the only camera that we really recommend. But we do have integration with all the Ricoh cameras and all the Insta360 cameras. That being said, like I then mentioned the Ricoh Theta Z1 is out of stock because such a great camera. I can only imagine that all the photographers chasing after it. We do have the solution, that allowing you to use your phone with the rotator. And rotator actually has a decent pretty decent quality too. It will produce up to 32 megapixel and it also has HDR we have in house HDR function. So it's not a bad solution. It's just, for the photographers' needs, it's probably a little slow. Each rotation is about 20 seconds. With a Ricoh Theta Z1 you can come in and out of the home with 15 shots. The photographer that I work with always tell me it takes longer to turn the lights and shut them off than actually taking the shots, but with panel kit, each rotation 20 seconds and so you kind of have to add another 10 minutes, 15 minutes, which is not a lot, right, but consider like, you only need it 15 minutes for Theta. - I guess the way I would say it is for our community professional real estate photographers, you're making the decision to offer a virtual tour solution buy a Ricoh Theta Z1 today, if you can't buy it, then get Eric's rotator, the Asteroom Kit rotator, that will at least let you get started. And then as soon as that camera is available make the transition. I think, Eric, as you mentioned, not because it produces an inferior result, actually the quality of the imagery of that rotation of the smartphone is really good. It just simply from a workflow standpoint, if you're going to do this for a living, you want the fastest workflow possible, and that's today is a 360 camera. Eric again, before we do a deep dive into what the photographer sees while creating a tour, let's talk a little bit maybe about perhaps the three top differentiators of Asteroom virtual tour versus perhaps let's talk maybe a little bit about Matterport and then maybe talk about some other 360 virtual tour solutions. If you're talking to a Matterport Service Provider, and they're, well, even, let's say like this, because our audience is either typically a Matterport Service Provider, or using a different platform, or thinking about which platform is right for them. So let's first really talk about I'm researching buying Matterport, I've just discovered Asteroom, what are the three reasons that I should get Asteroom rather than Matterport? - Sure. So, I think Matterport is great. I give so much credit to the company. I think they have accomplished something truly amazing. It's just there, like I said earlier in the show, it's more for luxurious listings. It takes a long time to shoot. And not everybody can afford a photographer's one hour, an hour and a half of his time. So there needs to be a solution that is they get the job done, and is easy and simple and fast. - Let's stop there, and let's focus on fast. So, let's say we have a 2,500 SQ FT house, do you have a benchmark of what you think that would take to do a Matterport tour? - 2,500 SQ FT, two stories, probably like an hour. - Okay, I would say probably longer. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. So let's call it an hour, an hour and a half. I still got to turn on all the lights, still got to get my camera set up. But I'm someplace probably between, I think an hour and a half, two hours. Some photographers who are presently doing Matterport may shoot fewer scans. But if you really want to do it right, you're probably there for an hour and a half, two hours. How long am I there if I'm shooting with Asteroom? Within 15 minutes, including turning the lights on and off. - It's not possible. - It's not possible? - No. How can I shoot a tour, like you just showed us in 15 minutes? - That's not 2,500 SQ FT, Dan. That was a 5,000 SQ FT home. But 2,500 SQ FT, two stories- - Thank you. But even a 2,500 SQ FT home, how can I shoot that in 15 or 20 minutes? - You just turn on all the lights in the home, and then you use the mobile app and pair to use your Theta and you play hide and go seek 10, 15 times. One panorama per room. One panorama per hallway. And that's it. One minute per panorama. - Boom. You've just identified with the difference with Matterport. So if I'm shooting Matterport, I'm typically shooting every six to 10 feet, if I using your solution, if I'm using Asteroom, I only need to shoot one 360 inside of each room and in the hallways, and I imagine you're going to tell me something else about line of sight and AI. - Yeah, so as long as you keep a line of sight, that means that you can see one other spot that you had shot previously, that is good. You can shoot as many as 100 with little as 15, as long as you cover the line of sight, which means you can see one other spot that you've previously shot. - Okay. So in terms of speed of shooting, this is really actually super significant. If I'm shooting Matterport, and I'm shooting every six to 10 feet, I can't skip around and just move the camera. I have to have contiguous scanning going on. With Asteroom one shot per room, shoot in the hallways in order to provide continuity, so that when the images are uploaded to your platform, your AI can properly align the imagery because it can see the previous shot, the previous shot, the previous shot, and so forth. - That's right. Our AI cannot create something that's not there, right. If you close the door, then our AI would not know how this room in this relationship to other parts of the house. So you have to leave a door open so we can see have a direct line of sight to the hallway, off a hallway at least to another room. That's how it does it. - Okay, so line of sight matched up with your artificial intelligence, AI, enables a photographer literally to shoot in the bedroom, just outside the bedroom in the hall from that hall, maybe down to another hall shot, from that hall into another bedroom, down the stairs and so forth. - That's right. - So this is I think, this is really super powerful to be able to say that the first of three competitive advantages of Asteroom is dramatically reducing how long it takes to be on site to shoot a tour. - That's right. - And that could be the difference of 15 to 20 minutes versus an hour and a half or two hours. - Yup, that's right. - And that means that a photographer can do way many more tours in a day than shooting with Matterport. - That's right, yup. - Okay, time is money. What would be the second competitive advantage that you see versus Matterport? - Yeah, the second one is expansion of the first one. Is the fact that you can do it faster, you can offer it at a lower cost and that way, you can get more, your market's bigger right. You not, traditionally you only get agents who are selling $800,000 or $1 million homes to buy 3D tours. Now you can you can have all solutions. You have people who are selling $200,000; $400,000; $600,000 ... agents that are coming to buy your least expensive, but also cost effective tour. So I think, I think the second advantage is that you can offer it is a solution for everybody. - Yeah. Eric, I'm going to amplify that because the way I view this is a pyramid. And the top of the pyramid, are the the most expensive homes and let's you know, we'll pick a number, and I don't know if it's $500,000 and more, or $400,000. But at some point, the house has to sell for enough in order to pay for the photographer to create the tour. And the challenge is, if you're shooting Matterport and you're going to charge x, it maybe that your price point for houses has to be at the top of this pyramid. But I want to say the National Association of Realtors, NAR, says that the average house sells in America, you might know this number better than I do, I want to say it's it's less than $350,000. - $250,000 [$284,600 May 2020] - $250,000 it's $250,000. So the pyramid gets really big at this $250,000 per house range. So if you want to have a much larger market, to be able to go after you need a price point, that's going to work at that $250,000 the more $250,000 homes, than there are $500,000 there's more $500,000 homes, than million dollar homes and so forth so that the base is way bigger in the lower price homes. And the only way that you're going to get that business, is the be able to have an affordable price that could conceivably be, let's pick a number, half of what you're charging to do a Matterport tour. So someone who's shooting Matterport, couldn't even compete with you on price, even close and you're still able to make a living knowing that you're in the house for that particular service which might be 15 or 20 minutes, call it a half hour tops with set up and shut down. And time is money, you can do a lot more houses in a day and not have to charge as much. So that sounds like the second piece of it, which is first the super-fast. The second is in terms of the price point that they can be sold. What would you say that the third competitive advantage would be for Matterport? - It's compatibility. That means, let me elaborate that. So imagine you're a pro that you have a drone, and you want to integrate your drone footage to your tour. You won't be able to do that with Matterport because it's a closed system. But, with Asteroom, you can actually insert drone 360 and you can take someone from the air and go into the front door and his tour can start there. That being said, I ... would love to show but I currently don't have a drone I have seen a couple photographer that have done it. I would you know once I asked their permission, to get a tour, I will share one on We Get Around Network Forum. But the other part is the fact that we can scan outside. In the dollhouse. Like the $8 million property that you saw had a tennis court and a swimming pool. On the Matterport scan you wouldn't be able to see that. Like on the front dollhouse point. And you will have to physically go into every 360 shot ... and to identify. Oh, there's a swimming pool, oh, there's a tennis court. But you wouldn't know the relationship of those ... ... tennis court swimming pool and two other features of the home and the amenities outside, right. So, that is another advantage that we have. Third, is the fact that you can edit those panels. So, we understand that pros that have the need to perfect their panoramas and that's why they go for the best 360 camera like Ricoh Theta Z1 right. But sometimes the days are just not as bright sometimes you just have the need to brighten it, and with Matterport, you cannot do it. And more importantly is we allow virtual staging, because you can edit those panels, you can actually remove or put new furniture in there. - So that's something new. Do you want to show us a virtually staged Asteroom work? - I'd love to, yeah. So this is a service we'll be getting an offer in August but right now we are already doing right now we're already doing beta test so, if you want to stage your home, you can send those to our customer service and we can stage them for you. So let me open it up. So this one is a home that we staged in San Francisco. So as you can see, from the entrance you can't really see anything. - Empty house, yeah - Empty house, I go in. You can see like all these were virtually staged except the bar stool. Same thing for the bedroom, it's empty. And you will see this bedroom is virtually staged. - Now I imagine Eric, you're showing us the before and after so that we can see the difference but when you turn it over to your client, you're actually not going to put the empty spaces there necessarily. - What do you mean by that? - The 360 panoramas that have no furniture, would you include those in the tour as well? - Yeah, you will have a before after of the same room. - Okay, so a prospective buyer could see this is what it looks like today, this is, imagine what it could look like. - That's right. - Okay, now this looks real. But this is not real. This is actually virtually staged. - Yeah, and I want to call out that, there are a lot of different vendors, offering this kind of service out there. And the most famous one being Box Brownie. And I would like to just inform everybody that we really take pride in getting this right. And I do believe that we have the best virtual stagers we'll have to let everyone in comparing themselves, but we understand the importance of getting this right, not just insert like some furniture then, but really understand like, what is the preference of the seller? And put in the furniture as real as possible. As you can see all these they all look very real to me but these are only fake furniture. - Yeah, actually I also see shadows as well. - Shadows, yeah, you can see the mirror, that stuff in the mirror. Yeah, shadows, lighting. - Right. I know everyone's dying to talk, well, how much, how much, how much? Let's save all the money to the end of the show. We'll talk about where you are on pricing of this as well as on your service in particular as well. - Sure. - Why don't we take it off screen share? That's awesome. How else, today would you describe Asteroom is perhaps being different than if I'm thinking about getting Matterport and I'm looking at Asteroom. What else should I be top of mind? You talked about how long it takes to create the tour, which translates to how much I can charge for that tour. To make it that much more affordable, you've talked about editing of the 360 panoramas. We'll talk more about that later. Professional editing, and then also about the virtual staging. What else comes to mind in terms of helping make a decision about Asteroom versus Matterport? - Sure. There's some other partnerships that I cannot disclose right now, soon to be announced partnership will be one key, I just can't really talk about it right now. And other than that, it's our services. Our virtual staging services, our panel editing services, and our dollhouse services, our floor plan services, right. Is we want to be a one stop shop. You just need to use Asteroom, right. And then you take your panoramas and with a mobile app, controlling your app to controlling your 360 cameras, create a project, upload to us, and it will take care of everything for you. The ease, right. You don't have to leave your mobile app at all. You can get the link on your mobile app, send it to your client, when you're on the go. You don't have to go to your desktop, there's no work that needs to ever needed to be done. You don't have to worry about stitching. You don't have to worry about if we know which panos are where. All you have to do is snap it within that 15 minutes, create a project, upload to us and tell us what exactly you want. Do you want a floor plan? Do you want a dollhouse? Do you want us to edit your photo? Do you want to virtually stage them? And we return the project in around 24 hours with the link, you send a link directly from your mobile. - Terrific. And we'll talk more about that bundle of services coming up in the show. I know you've been kind enough to package together an Asteroom bundle. We'll talk more about that. Stay with us. Very exciting news towards the end of the program. I still want to stay focused a little bit though on that comparison of Matterport. You haven't said it, but I'm going to say it. The quality of your dollhouse is very good. It's not Matterport. So there is a difference there. But I think when you take a look at Matterport and Asteroom, and you start looking at, well, what's the quality of the tour? Okay, I'm walking from 360 to 360 and Matterport. Walking, sort of through the space. I have this dollhouse view maybe it looks more realistic and Matterport maybe not as much in Asteroom. I think sometimes as photographers we get caught up in trying to assess some quality decisions. And in my mind, I kind of described this are you an artist, or are you a business person? If you're an artist, you can have this conversation all day long and you'll probably decide on Matterport because you're an artist. But if you're a business person and you want to make a living, and you want to have this pyramid as large as possible, the potential audience to go shoot for, then you're probably looking for a solution that lets you shoot in 15 or 20 minutes in order to create a tour. And I suspect for most real estate photographers, the first thing that people want that real estate agents want are photos, and maybe second they want video. Maybe, today maybe they actually want a virtual tour 24/7 open house virtual tour. And I think the question is, is Asteroom good enough to check that box versus Matterport. And if it's from that from the homeowners perspective, or actually since the person spending the money is the real estate agent, real estate agent is really the ultimately the client. If the client can use Asteroom as a way to win more and bigger premium listings more often get the listing presentation, win the listing, trade up to get bigger listings over time, if Asteroom is good enough to do that, and it can be accomplished at a lower price point, then that may be is really answering the question, are you an artist or a business person. If you're business person, and you can make the tours that much more affordable for your potential client to still achieve their goal of winning that listing presentation, then, decision made. - So my point of view. It's so interesting that you brought this up, because I think like, for the credit, I give it the Matterport I think the product it's great. The dollhouse is impressive. The walkthrough is so seamless. It really brings out the Wow, right. And that's what, as a real estate photographer, that's what you want to help your agent to achieve, is to bring out the wow, right. But not everybody is selling the home that can't easily bring out the Wow. It doesn't matter what Matterport or Asteroom use right like sellers are living there, they are using that kind of furniture, the home is not the newest, right. It's a $200,000 to $400,000 home, at that price point, even if you use a you use the best Matterport Pro2 3D Camera, it's hard to bring out their Wow. And at that point, I think Asteroom, Matterport, it doesn't make a really real difference. So that is my point of view. - Yeah. So, that's a little bit on Asteroom versus Matterport. There are actually 160 3D/360 3D 360 virtual tour software/platforms today. There's a number of players in the residential real estate space. If someone's looking at Asteroom or another platform, what are your competitive advantages there? - Of course, yeah. Us versus otter 360 platforms, right. We have the 3D dollhouse, which will eliminate 90% of the other players, and I think dollhouse is really important. Because it helps people visualize the layout and that's why real estate agents are all frenzy about floor plans right. Because floor plan is what really brings the layout out to their buyers. So and there are numerous solutions online about creating floor plans. I'm not going to name a few like CubiCasa floor plan online, right. So I think bring it I'm just making a point that layout is important, and the dollhouse gives the layout. So we have the dollhouse and we also have a flour plan. Starting this Friday or next Monday, we'll be launching a floor plan service that will be easily converting your dollhouse into a floor plan, right. So this is the other thing that other 360 solution don't offer. As I said, we want to be a one stop shop. What cannot be missed is the editing part, right. We have in-house photographers that edit your photos for you. So we're trying to really make it easy. So you don't have to go back to your computer and do to edit work, outsource it to us. We'll do it for $1 per panel. Then all you have to do is to take them. - Okay, hold off on price, because we're going to talk about money later. We actually have a special offer. I'm getting a little ahead of myself but free professional editing of your 360 panos is actually included in a special bundle for We Get Around Network Members ... for WGAN Forum Members. So stay tuned for that. So let's hold off even in terms of dollars, but again what I am hearing is that part of your solution is offering professional editing of the 360s. - Yep. - In order to elevate the quality of, in fact, Eric, how about just you have a slider of a 360 on your website. Could you take us there just to take a look at that? - Yeah, yeah. - So again, I'm asking Eric to go back to asteroom.com, Asteroom.com ... And from his website, is an the example, excuse me. Is an example of a slider showing a before and after 360 photosphere edited a 360 panorama. - That's right. Yes. - So you're going up to Add Ons down to panel retouching. And, off to the left might be what you captured, off to the right is what's possible. - That's right. - And it's a difference of night and day. So professionally edited. I don't see an example there. But I would imagine if the camera was in a reflection on that refrigerator or mirror that would be included. - Yeah, Oh, that's right. Yeah. If the camera is yes, yes. You will have to make a request. You have to say, you have to be specific that what you're looking for, because a good portion of our users are real estate agents, and they don't care about that, they just want it to work right. - Okay, so as photographer, I care. I'd prefer not to have the camera show up in the bathroom mirror. And that's something that you all can easily edit out as part of your service. - That's right. - Okay, great. So, how about, so let's go ahead and end the screen share on that. Glad to see that. I still want to hang a little bit on this difference of Asteroom versus other virtual tour platforms. You've identified the dollhouse, the floor plans, the- - Virtual Staging. - Professional editing of 360 photos, what else differentiates Asteroom? - Yeah, feature-wise, we also have virtual staging; which we already discussed, but I think most importantly, is the fact that Asteroom it's, it has its brand. It's building its brand in the real estate agents space. And a lot of our agents, a lot of our users are real estate agents, but we also recently have heard that the needs of high-end professional photographers, right. A lot of agents they want to do it themselves, but a good portion of them are not willing or not confident they can do it themselves. So they come to us be like, hey, we want real estate photographers. And this is also why I came to Dan Smigrod ... some agents are picking up the solution quite well. Some agents require a Pro's help and through our partnership with some brokerages that we're currently working with, the brokers are telling us that, yes a good portion. Half of them pick up their phone and do it. Half of them need a photographer's help and can you recommend some photographers? So another reason to choose Asteroom over other 360 solution is that we may be able to refer you business. And that is the new model that we're going after. - Okay, so I would say potential business. So I don't know anybody buying Asteroom because it has promised leads, but that you are working on helping facilitate in potential introductions, potential referrals, I would say clearly to people don't buy Asteroom if you're expecting to get a lead, I would say buy it because it makes sense for your business. And if you should get a lead on top of that, that's a plus. [Continued] |
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| [Continued] --- - Yeah. - Yeah. - And we are not promising anything, but we're trying right now. Like, I can give an example how we are trying to do this, is where we're setting up this network of photographers, and we do most of our marketing through Facebook. You know, I was a data scientist at Facebook, I use my own product to drive my own gross. And on our landing page, we're going to start having another button, say, hey, you don't want to buy the kit, you don't want to do it yourself. Here are the list of Pros in your zip code. So, we are thinking of implementing that kind of mechanism for agents, because to us, we don't care if agents are doing the tours, a photographer doing a tour, we want to make it easy, affordable for everybody. We're going after the total number of tours, not user count or whatsoever, right. We don't have a specific goal of catering the product to a photographer or agent, we just want as many. So we understand that there are a lot of agents that need a professional ... moving toward done professionally, so we just want to open up this this Network for those agents. But no promises there, it's just a new initiative. So I'm just giving an example. - Awesome. And I would add in one other benefit, it may not, be obvious, you just may be so used to it, it never occurs to you. But the fact that Asteroom assembles the tour is a big deal. And we're going to talk more about that towards the end of the program. But, you could use one platform for hosting your 360s where you have to assemble the tour, and Asteroom actually does the heavy lifting, of assembling the tour, creating the dollhouse, doing the editing of the images, and we have a special offer that we'll talk about later in the program. And I think that's a real differential between Asteroom and other 360 platforms as, you do the heavy lifting in behalf of the photographer. So the photographer is not thinking about, Oh, how am I linking the panoramas ... each panorama to the next to the next to the next, that's done with the Asteroom artificial intelligence as long as you do line-of-sight shooting. It's magic and it just happens. - That's right, yeah. We turn around 24 hours. So the total time that you ever need to spend on the project is 15 minutes. And that is the 15 minutes of shooting. No post editing, all you do is, upload that using your mobile app, and we will take care of everything. And we turn around the finished product to you in 24 hours. - Eric, that's a great segue. Let's go see, you have your app cued up on the screen. Show us, show "I'm a photographer" ... I'm out in the field, I got my Ricoh Theta Z1, I'm shooting room-to-room ... I'm doing my line of sight thing. How does this work in the field? - Yeah, so I'll go to Asteroom app. And the first screen I'll be brought on is my all my projects. As you can see I have a lot of test projects. I also have a couple of tours that I shot. - So pause there just for a second. So I think what we should say here is, we're not going to do a demo of connecting the Ricoh Theta Z1 to the Asteroom app. It's a little bit complex with Zoom to try to do all those pieces of the puzzle, so simply go to Asteroom.com and there's a video you can see. In fact we'll post it in the We Get Around Network Forum when we post this video, a short video on the shooting but, if you would, Eric, even if we don't show the shooting, just talk about the piece of the the power of the Asteroom app paired with a Ricoh Theta Z1 please. - Yeah. So you just tap camera, and you can see the different, it's asking if to go to Bluetooth and turn my Bluetooth I don't have my Bluetooth off. So you can go to Theta, which is where you will go to pair Ricoh Theta Z1 and all you do is pair, I don't have one with me. But if I were to have one, I would just go to WiFi and choose my Theta connection and pair in then use Asteroom camera and come to here to click Theta and this is when you want to use your rotator Insta360 camera. Right, and then we have a floor plan feature that you can draw a floor plan yourself but that is going to be deprecated. We will be converting your floor plan for you. Again we created a product to make this simple, so we rather just do it for you. - And what is the advantage of using an Asteroom app paired with the Ricoh Theta Z1 to do the shooting? What's the magic of why you want to do that? - Well, you get to use our proprietary HDR functionality. And other than that, is just ease of use. Once you've finished shooting you can simply create a project. - I guess the piece I'm looking for here is I don't have to shoot them all to my camera roll on my phone. - Oh yeah, that's right. - And then upload them to a desktop or upload them into a workspace, or somehow transfer them from my phone to my Asteroom app. It's magic. The 360 images are already landing within the Asteroom app. - Yup, you'll just get it right here. - Again, I think you take that for granted. But if I go use a different platform, I got to shoot them on my camera, And then I got to transfer them from my camera into either desktop or into an app to use them. So that workflow saves a ton of time. So that first piece I heard, you get the benefit of Asteroom, running the camera to control the settings. - Yep. - HDR, Okay. And now we're going to assume, okay, we shot a house, and now what happens? - You just select the album, right. It's going to be organized into by the date. Again, the folder will be organized into albums automatically by the date. And that's if you even if you shoot multiple tours, it's going to be organized by time, right. If you have an hour between shooting, it will be automatically split into two albums. And then from there you just select album and create a new project. And it's just going to upload on here. - Okay, it says upload in progress one of one. Is that just one panorama that you're showing? - It's one panorama yeah. This is a new folder I got. - So for the purpose of the demo, you just created a project with one panorama, but that would have been 10, 15, 20. - Yep, sorry. - Okay. - So once you go in, you can just order the services you want. As you can see, we have 3D dollhouse and panel retouch here. And we'll be adding floor plan on Friday or Monday. - Excuse me, let's pause for a moment because you see pricing up there, but again, WGAN, Asteroom, we got special pricing for you. So stay tuned, you don't even need to be looking at the pricing that you're seeing. Got something special for you. - Yup, so you can order, pick what you want or cancel. - Though, essentially this is the time to say, I'd like a dollhouse, I'd like my photos edited, and at some point you'll add, I'd like a floor plan. At some point, I imagine the virtual staging will be there. So what's happening here is Eric's actually running this on his app. He's not back at his computer on the desktop. He's out in the field. And between jobs he's actually doing his, I don't even know if you'd call it post production since it's so minimal, but please. - Just uploading, yeah. This is the uploading. And this is where you transfer the project to us and we do the heavy lifting for you. And you'll get a tour back. Again, using the mobile interface. You can enable sharing here. And you can simply just email it to your client. Say, hey, client, Tom, and this is your tour. And you also get a notification on your phone, say, Hey, your tours ready, and you can review your dollhouse, and you can do everything just send it out and do everything just on your phone. - Okay, so, how do I label the, I saw the thumbnails said living room, dining room, kitchen, tennis court. How do I do that? In what order am I shooting them? And if I didn't shoot them in the right order, how do I change that? - Yeah, the order doesn't matter. we'll organize it for you. We'll properly organizing it in the sequence and in terms of naming, every time you shoot, you just name it on your phone. Here let me do it. - Am I naming the Living Room as I'm shooting? - Yeah, yeah, you name it. If I shoot right now, I can't I don't have data with me. And once I finish shooting, It's just going to ask, what is this room? And it has all the fields are pre populated. And you just click one. - Okay, then I see a lot of different icons all over this image, what are these different things? - Oh, this is to enable, this is to share, this is you can go into tour setting. So it's basically what you will be doing on desktop like we have we have the web client as well. But a lot of important features are here. For example, you can transfer a project. Let's say you want to transfer a project to an Agent or a different person, you can just do it here. And you can go into analytics to see who has browsed on your tour. Let me go into one that actually has some analytics. This one has 200 views, right? So you can go to your analytics and check out, Oh, I got 3,000 visits and what are the most what are the panoramas that they most visited? Where did they come from? So that would be that. - Could I share those statistics? - Oh, yeah, we will. You will be able to. - Not presently though? - Not presently, now you have to take a screenshot. But this is something that we're working on. - Okay. Okay, good. Anything else that I should look at? From the photographers' standpoint of either discussing the shooting or the uploading of the tour. - No, that's about it. - How long is it? So let's take it off screen share. How long does it take for me to get back my tour? - 24 hours. - Okay, so if I upload by 6 pm tonight, by 6 pm tomorrow it'll be ready. - No, overnight. I'm sorry, this what I mean. If you uploaded anything today, you'll get it tomorrow morning as you wake up. - Okay, so is there a cut off? - No cut off. - I'm in Atlanta, if I upload it by midnight, am I going to have it waiting for me when I wake up? - Yup. - I go for a walk with my wife at seven in the morning will it be ready for me to see? - Midnight your time? Yeah, yeah, it depends. We say 24 hours, but right now we are being able to deliver most of the project overnight. But the expectation is 24 hours. So you will get it, something you get it as you wake up, but sometimes it's going to take until the next day. - Okay, so we have an audience. It's in 135 countries. So is that overnight in every time zone around the globe, or is that pretty much based on US. - Pretty much based on US. - US, okay. Majority of our audience is in the US, so that's fine. So whether I'm in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, I will do my best to get the tour uploaded today. And the expectation is, tomorrow morning, I'm going to have it. So if I'm out in the field, I presume I can upload these tours either on 4G or WiFi, or at some point 5G presumably, surely not dependent on you, depending on what device, the smartphone that I'm paired my Ricoh with. - That's right. but you will consume your data. - Okay, so probably best I find some WiFi and upload so I'm not incurring a charge unless it's really important for me to do that. - Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have unlimited plan so I just upload whenever, but just that this image is a JPEG right so it does consume some data. - Okay Is there any I guess it's probably too impossible to ask how long does it take to upload? I'm guessing that just depends on how many panoramas what was the WiFi, what's the speed? - What's the speed yeah. It's probably like three seconds per panorama on 4G for me so it's should be fast. - Okay. How about we, I thought we talked a little bit about pricing. Before we did that, are there other topics that we should cover? - Let me take a look at my notes here. No, I think that's good. - Yeah. Maybe just to kind of frame it, because we've talked a lot about Ricoh Theta Z1. There are a number of cameras that Asteroom pairs with the Ricoh line of cameras, the Insta360 line of cameras. The best-in-class I could imagine at this moment in time Thursday, July 23, 2020, is the Ricoh Theta Z1. There are going to be viewers that say, yeah, but I'm using a different camera to create a 360. Can I do that? - Yup, you can just upload using our website, web client. - Okay, so on a desktop or laptop, simply create the 360s whether you're using a DSLR or you're using any other 360 camera and upload the 360s from the desktop workspace of Asteroom. - Yep. - Okay. But again, today, I guess what I would say, Eric, as a photographer, if you're looking for a super-fast workflow, then use a Ricoh Theta Z1 mashed up with the Asteroom app, because that's a workflow that's designed to make it super-simple, super-easy, super-fast to shoot an Asteroom tour. - Yes, exactly. - Okay. So let's go to the pricing page. I know the pricing is going to be different for We Get Around Network Members WGAN Members, but I think it's at least the starting point to go take a look at this page. - Yes. - Yes and then maybe you could make that full-screen or as large as you can on that. It's going to cut off so, there's a lot of pricing on this page. And I think the easiest way to to say this is if you are a a We Get Around Network Member a - WGAN member a WGAN Forum Member, then Eric has special pricing for you. And all this pricing that you're looking at doesn't apply. Is that correct? - That's right, Yep. - Okay. So, starting this Monday, July 27, 2020, what is the pricing if you are a We Get Around Network Forum Member? - Yeah, it will be $60 per tour. So we call it a We Get Around Network $60 flat rate bundle. So that includes, six months of hosting. - The Asteroom Pay Per Tour Bundle for WGAN Members, the Asteroom Pay Per Tour Bundle for WGAN Members and $60, what do I get for $60? - So you get six months of hosting, you get 3D dollhouse up to 30 panoramas you get image enhancement for all the panoramas and that's it. - And the tour created. - Oh, what do you mean? - Creating the tour. If you use some other platform, that may be a do it yourself solution. So with Asteroom, Asteroom, takes your 360s and converts it into a tour that you can walk around the space. - That's right we do it for you. - You get the tour. - Yup. - The dollhouse view. - Yes. Image enhancement. - The image enhancement. So that's the professional editing of the 360s. Hosted for six months. - Yes. - Up to 30 360s to create the tour. - Yes. - Okay. And what if I want to host it for another six months? - $15. - And what if I have more than 30 panoramas for my tour? - $1.50 per panorama. - Additional? - Additional. Yes. - Okay. So, and 60 panoramas ... how ... I mean, how big a house is that that's a pretty big house. - No 30 panoramas, sorry. - Excuse me. My mistake. 30 panoramas. - Yes. - That's a pretty big house. So is that covering for 2,500; 3,500; 5,000 square feet? - I would say like within four or five of 30 it should cover it. It only depends on how many exterior shots you're taking. - Okay, so for the typical house, it's $60. - Yes. - Okay. So that's the Pay Per Tour. - Pay Per Tour, Yes. - What is the subscription price? - None. There's zero. There's no ongoing subscription. It's all you pay when you have a tour. - So this is really awesome. If you've been looking at tour platforms where you have to pay a monthly subscription, whether you use it or not, for We Get Around Network Forum Members, Pay Per Tour up to six months. So if you're doing residential real estate, that's likely to include every listing that you probably will shoot and it is probably hosted for enough. And if you need more hosting or you need more panoramas you have that option. So the next question is okay, great. How do I identify myself as a We Get Around Network Forum Member? Starting on Monday, July 27, when you join the We Get Around Network Forum. ... Eric please take it off screen share. When you join the We Get Around Network Forum, you will automatically get an email from me that includes 50 plus membership benefits, including the special coupon code for Asteroom in order to get the ... the Asteroom Pay Per Tour Bundle for WGAN Members. And if you are already We Get Around Network Forum Member there's as of today there's about 6,500 registered Members, just simply private message me with the subject line, Asteroom Pay Per Tour Bundle, and I'll private message you back with the promo code. Simple! So awesome. Eric thank you. Because I think what you've done for professional photographers ... is made it super-simple, super-easy. Yes, I want the dollhouse, I don't want to pay separate for that. I want my 360 photospheres to be professionally edited. I don't want to think about making a decision on that. Six months of hosting, nearly every listing I have, three months is probably fine, you've done it for six, that makes sure that 90% of all my potential clients that I'm not going to incur an extra charge. And if I have a bigger house, or I need it to be hosted longer, it's a super-affordable amount. And I'm not committing myself to a monthly amount of whether I use it or don't or whether I'm using two or five or 10 or 15 or 25. It's Pay Per Tour. - That's right. We created this pricing for We Get Around Network Members because we understand that most of the people here probably are using other solutions, but they are open to other solutions as well. And we don't want to put them on a retainer say, you have to pay $60 $100 a month and for five months, right? Because you're going to create a tour for somebody and someone expect the tour to be live in three months, right? So if you end up not liking Asteroom, and you paid the membership, and then that agent it will require you say, demand you to keep the membership for as long as he's listing is still on the market, right? So that's not good. So we don't want to put you on any retainer and you do it if you shoot one tour, you try to give us a try. That is $60. And it's easy for you to calculate how much profit there is for you as well, right? You don't have to think I need to shoot at least 10 tours this month, right? You just you can offer one price $150, $200, however much you want to offer. And you know the cost to you is $60 and 15 minutes of your time, right. So it makes it easy for you to calculate what is the ROI for you. - Okay to make it harder. - No, we've create it, the product's created to be simple and easy to use. - And now the pricing is simple and easy for professional photographers, to know that you have a variable expense, so whatever it is that you're going to charge your client, you have a direct relationship of expense because the cost for Asteroom is a variable expense. It's a fixed expense of your project. If you're charging, $5,000 for the tour, $1,000, $500, $249, whatever it is you're charging, you know your cost is $60. - That's right. That offer is good for any We Get Around Network Forum Member. If you're watching this on our YouTube channel, our Vimeo channel wherever you're watching us, if you're not a We Get Around Network Forum Member, come join us WGANForum.com ... WGANForum.com free to join. And Eric, I think I'll just mention two other things that may be of interest because I know there's a ton of Matterport Service Providers that are using a Ricoh Theta Z1 camera and they might want to kind of compare tours. So first for our WGAN Standard and Premium Members, we actually have an offer where we will pay - WGAN will pay - for downloading all the 360s from up to 10 of your tours at no charge. So if you're a WGAN Standard or Premium Member and you want to say, hey I already shot a Matterport tour whether it was with the Matterport camera or with the Ricoh Theta Z1, and you want to see well what would that tour look like done as an Asteroom tour. Standard and Premium Members asked me for the form. You fill it out, you can put up to 10 tours and WGAN will pay for all your 360s to be downloaded. Then you can pick the ones that logically make sense one per room, in the hallway, line of sight, and then upload it to Asteroom. So you could actually try out Asteroom with your own 360s that you've already created. Second, if you're not a WGAN Standard or Premium Member, and you'd still like to do the side-by-side test, we have a WGAN 3rd Party Service Provider. That will download the 360s for you at a very affordable price. Send me a private message just indicate DOWNLOAD360 for Matterport, and I'll tell you about that vendor. That way you can download one or more of your tours and go try Asteroom with a Matterport tour that you've already created. Obviously, you have line of sight because you had to do that creating the Matterport tour. So you can just cherry-pick the 15 or 20 panos that you need in order to try Asteroom. And then I think the other thing is Matterport's probably done you a favor promoting the Ricoh Theta Z1 camera I would say for nearly two years because, that means there are Matterport Service Providers that already have a Ricoh Theta Z1 or a Ricoh Theta V or Ricoh Theta S2C, let's stick with the Pro version the Z1. So that means if you're a Matterport photographer, and you got some pain points in your life you're happy with your Matterport, but you want to see if you could start shooting tours in the $250,000 range and have a price point that will make sense for an agent, you already have the camera and you're not signing up for a subscription with Asteroom you're just paying per tour. So you don't have that challenge of now having a Matterport subscription and an Asteroom subscription. You can literally try Asteroom and just get charged for that tour. - That's right, and if you end up liking us, you can jump out of the Pay Per Tour plan and you can do the other like, the monthly subscription plan, if you wish, so you'll have that option. - You'll have that option, so this is a way to you have best of both worlds. We haven't talked about other pricing, so virtual tour. - Yes. - Virtual staging. - Yes. $65 per room. - That's $65 per 360? - Yeah, per panorama. - In my mind, if I have a very large living room, and I've shot two 360s for that living room, it's two times $65. - Yup, that's right. But the feedback we have been getting from agents that is they don't really need those panorama to be staged, right. They just want to get a feel of what it will look like. But it doesn't like you can stay empty for the rest of the panorama. - So it may be that I've shot a tour that's got 15 to 20 panoramas, but I only want three I want the bedroom, I want the living room, the kitchen, and maybe a bathroom virtually staged. So I can select just the three that I want virtually staged. - Exactly. You select the ones you want to stage and select the style. - What are my choices of style? - They're different, like modern and contemporary, classic, I can't think of all of them on top of my head. but yeah, it'll be - - So that starts on, when is virtual staging available? Right now it's in beta? - It's in beta, is we're offering now, and you just have to email our customer support and it would it's more of the manual process, but starting late August 2020 we'll roll out the whole platform online. And you'll be able to order virtual staging like, order anything on your mobile app. - So when I'm holding my app and I'm checking the box, I want the dollhouse. And then here are my individual panoramas, on these panoramas, these three, I want virtual staging. - It'll be a very nice experience. It'll being very streamlined. You say I want to order a dollhouse, retouch. And if you want to order retouch and staging is actually going to gray out like staging. So you have to order if you want to order this two service because those are in conflict. So you have to do retouch first by retouching image enhancement, and then after that you can do retouch. Right so yes, it's a sequence and logic into what you can order. - Right. First phase, I really want professional retouching. - Retouching yeah. - Now I've gotten my images back, I'm going to place an additional order for the virtual staging. - Yep, that's right. - Right from my smartphone or from my desktop, presumably as well. - That's right. - Okay. You mentioned that floor plans are coming created from the dollhouse view, I can imagine that part of the secret sauce of being able to create floor plans is knowing the camera height. - That's right. - So this is a good time, if you're taking some tours with Matterport, just make a note that where is the camera height, so that when you do perhaps do what we just discussed, maybe converting the Matterport tour to an Asteroom tour, to look at it, and when you want to order the floor plans, there's going to be a place where it's going to say, camera height four feet six inches. And that's presumably the secret sauce. Because you in the US you already know a standard door jam or other measurements, therefore you can now scale accordingly. - It's kind of like that. We triangulate based on the height of your tripod, we triangulate what is the dimension of the room. So it's kind of is a math equation. You can import the lens of your tripod in our mobile, no sorry, in our web editor. And then once you import once you can save on your profile. So just make sure you always use the same clients. - Awesome. Do you have an example of what the floor plans look like? - Yeah, the ones we show on the website, right? - If we could, let's go back and take a look at the floor plans. You're going back to Asteroom.com ... Asteroom.com. And went a little bit fast for me. Okay, you selected that first tour, that was in the top left. And this is an example of the floor plans that you create. - That's right. - So, I got a lot of questions. Even before I ask you some questions about money. So, will this floor plan live within the virtual tour? When I'm looking down at the floor plan view? - Yeah. Yeah, like- - When I go to the button in the bottom left and I hit floor plan, - Yeah, it's here. - It lives over there. Okay, so it's by the 3D dollhouse. And there's the 2D floor plan. Now, I see a blue circle on that floor plan. Could you pull it back up? - Like this? - Yeah. Ah, you move that blue dot. - Got it here. The blue dot. - I see a couple blue dots. - Yeah. So does that make the floor plan interactive? - Yeah, you can click into it, but you will have to set it up yourself. - Okay, so I get back the floor plan. It's automatically in the tour. And then there will be a way for me to specify where I want the viewer, the user of the tour to be able to fly in from the floor plan. - That's right. - Can I set which way the camera is facing? So if I turn something that I, yeah, right there. - Yeah. - So that's the view that we're looking at now. And I see a dark blue. - Yeah. So right now is doing it. We're thinking of removing this functionality. Yeah, you're seeing this corner, and if I keep rotating it's seeing a different corner. It just makes it complicated. But maybe we'll just hide, somewhat hide a feature. So if you really want it, you'll find it. But again, like some of our users are real estate agents, and we're trying to make the product simple for everybody. - I got you. You know, Eric, I think that would be a great discussion for you in the We Get Around Network Forum. Perhaps once you release version one public, say, hey, this is the version that we've done. We could do this, where you could see which way the camera is setting, it's a little bit more complex to do, is that worth adding that feature? Even if we hide it behind, a button that it's the secret door that unlock some features, because we don't want to overwhelm some of our, - non-tech-savvy agents. - Our non-tech-savvy users. But for those that are tech-savvy, that would like to have this interactive version, where you can see where the cameras facing, is how important is that to you? I think that would be a good discussion for you in We Get Around Network Forum. - I'd love to. - Awesome. I would hold off, and because I know you're busy just getting this out the door. How much are floor plans? - They start at $10. To be honest, we still are exploring that, $10, $18, $27, $36, depending on the number of panoramas. - Okay. - Yes. - All right. I'm going to come back and visit with you at some point regarding the Asteroom pay per tour bundle - take it off the floor plan. I'm going to come back and visit with you about Asteroom Pay Per Tour Bundle, so we can figure out how we add floor plans and not make that overly complex for our- - We could- - We'll figure that one out. So you're still working on pricing. But I think what I heard is it's affordable and it's scalable based on, I'm sorry to jump around here but, you have these measurements in the tour. Is that done in the app or is that done on the desktop where you've done some predefined measurements? - These?. - Yeah, nine feet eight- - The measurements on the wall like nine foot eight? This? - Where'd that come from? - It's automatic generated. - It's automatically generated? - Yes. - So I can either turn on automatic generation of measurements or turn it off. - Yeah, now I just turned off. - Ah, okay, so there's that feature. So, the measurements are actually auto generated. It's a default setting. But if I don't want to see the measurements, I can turn it off. - No, and you can use the tap measure to measure the lengths of the door jam, seven foot eight. - Yeah, that's so awesome. Okay, so Eric, we've covered quite a bit. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that I should ask you about? - Oh, no, that's about it. Yeah. - Gotta be something else. - Can't think of anything right now, yeah. - Okay, well, - There's one thing. I often got asked, are you making a product for real estate agent, or a real estate photographer? I always get asked this question. Realtors they asked me that because they'll be like, oh, like they're so complicated to use. Brokers asked me that, so like, do you want me to give it to our agent or give it to a photographer? Photographer asked me that say, are you making a product for me or are you making it for agent? So I just wanted to clarify, we're making a product for everybody, right. We don't think, we don't see anyone as agent, what their profession is, right. When we design a product, there is not, coming from Facebook, that's actually not the best practice product development, you're supposed to know your user in and out and define personas and define who you want to build a product for. And in this case, we actually are building a product for a human being. A human being is not very tech centric, that's not very tech-savvy, you can be a real estate agent, you can be a photographer, right, but we're making this solutions for everyone that wants to create 3D tours easily and affordably. So I just want to clarify because I ... I imagine that I'll get asked the question by a lot of WGAN Forum Members, and I know there's some bad blood between Matterport and Service Providers going on right now, I want to rest assure everybody that first, we will not be selling to your ... we're not going to take your leads and sell them cameras, whatever. We're going to sell our panorama kits, and we're going to tell them that you can do it yourself, or you can hire a professional photographer, but we're not going to change our position, we are making a solution for anyone that uses a cell phone or with a 360 camera. So that's just want to get out from the beginning. Second is we don't take advantage of your data. We don't claim that your image is ours. We don't do any of that. Compliant to CCPA, we don't want to be any lawsuit that Matterport is currently in. So it's you know, it's a big mess. And so I do not want any of that. So you own the data, when you say delete, it's delete. The brokers own the data. If you shoot for brokers, if you shoot for the brokers that we work with, we refer your business, they own the data. But if you shoot for yourself, then you own the data. We're not going to do anything to the data if we need, if we're going to do something, we'll ask for your consent. And you have a right to opt-in or opt-out, say yes or no. - I'd ask for one clarification on that. So if I'm a photographer shooting for a real estate agent, if I've paid for the tour, and the tour is in my account, then I would say the tour belongs to me, not to the real estate agent. I am either licensing or selling the tour for their use for specific purpose. And once their purpose is done, I still own the copyright unless I have struck a different relationship with my client. - That's right, correct. That's correct. If we go to a real estate broker and their broker comes to you say, can use you for my agent? Then the broker owns the data because that is their deal. Right. So if whatever, if I'm just selling a product to you, you develop your own client, and that's your deal between you and your client and you own the data. If they want to have the data then you have to give it to them. But that is what it is. And if we were going to monetize your data, right, this is a big buzz. I mean, every Matterport Service Provider talks about that. So you know, Matterport claims ownership of my data and they make money from the data, they don't, I don't get a piece of it, and I want to let you know that if you use Asteroom, and if we monetize your data, you will get we'll have to ask for your consent. And if you give us your consent, you will get the revenue on the data. And we haven't figured out how to give it back to you, but we will give it back to you. - I think that's super-important. There are platforms that, that actually say, would you like us to would you like to opt in for us to license your 360 images? We'll do that through a third-party company that licenses photography. First, that's an opt-in, it's not an automatic opt-in, you have to opt-in if you want that. And second, there's a revenue split. And so you decide you're happy with the revenue split, or you're not. And I think that that's, I'd love to see at some point, Eric, that you all have succeeded to the point where you are able to create additional opportunities through critical mass and be able to go back to the content holders and say, "Hey, we've developed this program would you like to opt in?" Here's how we're providing compensation. I don't know it just seems so civilized to me. I don't know why. And a hard concept in some quarters to get. I think what I'd like to end on is, my observation is, I'm going to give you my observation and give you the last chance here. My observation of Asteroom is like, this is so amazing, in just a couple short years, you've created this amazing product. 360 virtual tours, you've addressed the largest addressable market, which is how can you affordably shoot prices in the $250,000 range so that it is both affordable to your client, a real estate agent, and you can make money knowing that it doesn't take a whole lot of time to create the tour. As you described, it might take you 15 or 20 minutes, upload it and boom! You got the tour the next day to share with your client. So I just think what you've done is really amazing. We're excited to share it with the We Get Around Network Community. And as you did at the top of the show, this is how little time it takes to shoot. That makes it totally affordable. We'll create the tour for you, we'll create the dollhouse for you we'll professionally edit the images for you. If you want floor plans; that's coming shortly, if you want virtual staging; that's coming shortly, you've checked a whole lot of boxes to provide a affordable product that's relatively easy for a photographer who's already into 3D/360 to create, there is a workflow that logically that makes sense mashed up with your AI. And I think that's very cool. I had two other thoughts. I think they were are going to escape me. Dang, they were just on the tip of my tongue here on this on tour creation. I think it's actually going to escape me so I'll actually I'll tease then I'll have some new information in the We Get Around Network Forum because as soon as I hang up, I'm sure I'm going to have that, that additional thought. Yeah, literally. Eric, you were going to say. - Yeah, I just want to close this with a remark that ... let me reiterate that I, I know I've been watching the Forum even though I don't actively participate, but I do engage. I do observe what people are saying. Also understand what other companies are doing. I have seen a lot of people discuss right, like their relationship with their tour company, right. So I just want to be honest here and be upfront. It's that we are creating a tour solution for everyone. But we will not go steal your clients intentionally like I know Matterport pick up their phone, call your client and say why don't you buy a camera? Like we don't do anything like that, right. We are going to continue to market to real estate professional, they want to create 3D tours with a camera of their choice. That's what I want to close with and that position will never change and it will just always stay like this. - Awesome. And I do have one of the two things I remembered while you were talking that came to me, and when I think about this solution, that it can be done in 15 or 20 minutes, if there's only one takeaway from today's show, what I would suggest to every real estate photographer, particularly those that already have a Ricoh Theta Z1, maybe you're using it for Matterport, even if a client has not engaged you to shoot a Asteroom tour, take the 15 or 20 minutes, after you get done with you're still pictures, shoot the tour. Go pay the $60. Have the tour to gift to the client. Invest in yourself, invest in your client, give them the $60 tour, and let them know, thank you for your business. And "Oh by the way, if you would like this kind of tour going forward, I charge x." And make sure x is a multiple of that $60. A significant multiple. And I could imagine that you will have many real estate clients who have only engaged you for traditional 2D photography, regular photos, who come back and say, "Wow! That's crazy! I love that!" Let's do that going forward in addition to the 2D photos. And because it only takes 15 or 20 minutes to create, it's a great add-on or up-sell you're already there. Go make that happen. I think that's my two cents is like even if you're not already if you haven't been engaged to shoot the tour, shoot the tour, gift it, but let the client know how much you charge for that going forward if they would like that for other properties. - Yeah there's one story I want to share, just a couple days ago I was looking on Zillow. I live in San Francisco, right, and I'm looking on Zillow, and I needed a listing to shoot some commercials for Facebook ads. So I need I call up an agent, and then there's this guy, I'm pretty sure he doesn't mind for me to tell everybody his name is Joe Velasco. I'll find Joe and I asked Joe, "Hey, I saw that you have an ad for listing, can I go do a tour for you? And can I use your listing to shoot some commercials?" And he was like, "Yeah, why not." Know what, just come over and shoot the tour. And then I turned the tour back to him the next day. And he was really impressed. He asked me like, this is your company? And he asked me how he can do more tours like that. And I lay out to him, say you can buy the kit and do it yourself, or you can order it through our San Francisco photographer, Jerome Vismano. And this is his price. And he said, that's great. And he asked for Jerome's number. So I think a lot of agents like Joe never heard of us, and he never considered anything else besides Matterport. But hey, I gave him a free tour. And he was impressed, and I hope my photographer Jerome won a client at the end of the day. - Yeah, I think that's a great story, because you might not do that with Matterport. If you've been engaged to shoot 2D photos, and then you say, "Well, you know, it only takes me another hour and a half or two hours to shoot a Matterport tour" and I'll gift it to the client, I'm not sure the economics of your time are going to be there, but investing another 15 or 20 minutes to race around the house and get those shots and, create the tour, $60, good for six months; gift it to the client. I mean for that matter, you could say, "hey, if you like it, it's this much." And if they don't want to pay for it, don't give it to them. But frankly, I would highly encourage, just gift it to the client and tell them going forward, this is how you charge. Eric, while you're telling that story, I remembered yet the other thing I wanted. - Okay. - I feel like oh, I can get it all in, so please bear with me. I think this is just, you have iFrame? Yeah. - We have iFrame Yep. iFrame. So that's the secret sauce, that if you want to have single property websites, property websites that are branded and unbranded, you can use solutions like WP3D Models, Show & Tour, and Rela. And all these platforms let you take ... embed an Asteroom created virtual tour and now turn it into a single property website - or some people would call it a property website - that's both branded and unbranded and really kick it up. So we write about these solutions on the We Get Around Network Forum: WP3D Models, Show & Tour, Rela and yet other platforms, I think those kinds of 3rd party solutions - paired with Asteroom - add yet more value. Add Ons that you can be offering your clients and even how you deliver your digital assets. Okay, Eric, I think I'm actually done. Anything else that you wanted to add? - Nope that's it. - All if you've tuned in late, we've been recording today's program, by tomorrow, Friday, July 24, 2020, we'll post it in the We Get Around Network Forum. Eric, thanks so much for being my guest on the show today. - Thank you very much Dan, it's a pleasure to be here. - Thank you, Eric. We've been visiting with Eric Tsai, he's the founder and CEO of Asteroom. Check out their website Asteroom.com ... and remember to either join the Forum to get that special promo code for the Asteroom Pay Per Tour Bundle for WGAN Members, or if you're already a We Get Around Network Forum Member just private message me Asteroom Pay Per Tour Bundle for WGAN Members and I'll send you back that promo code for that $60 bundle. 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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EaglePrecision private msg quote post Address this user | |
| Dan: I have a client very interested in the type of virtually staged tour discussed in this interview. When I go to the Asteroom site, however, there is no mention of virtual staging. He said it was coming out in August so I presume he meant August 31, but right now, it's just vaporware, right? And, knowing how software developers over-promise, it might not actually be available until later this year. Chris |
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WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user | |
| @EaglePrecision Good news... You can order via Asteroom Support, until it is a menu option in September. Dan |
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WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
DanSmigrod private msg quote post Address this user | |
| @EaglePrecision And this related WGAN Forum discussion: ✓ 6 Reasons Asteroom Virtual Tour Virtual Staging ROCKS Residential Listings! Dan |
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