Loan Officer Intelligence

Before committing to a pricing structure, I ran a deliberately underpriced beta — unlimited searches for $30/month — with a high-volume refinance office. The goal wasn't revenue, it was data: I needed real usage numbers before locking in a package. The result corrected a real assumption. I had sized the initial tier around 150 searches/month; actual usage came in well below that. That test let me build a smaller, more affordable package that matched real behavior, protected margin, and left explicit room for upsell as usage grew — rather than guessing at a number and hoping it held.

In parallel, I instrumented individual API calls to understand how loan officers actually used property data mid-conversation — which fields they pulled, when, and why — and used that telemetry to rebuild my own cost structure around real usage patterns instead of theoretical worst-case load.

I also mapped distinct LO personas and assigned a hypothesized value to each, then ran direct outreach and discovery to test those assumptions. The value hypothesis largely held — but the exercise surfaced a sharper insight: many of the LOs I assumed were underserved already had access to enterprise-grade tools through their brokerage. That reshaped who I built for and how I positioned the product.

Mortgage origination volume is highly cyclical, expanding and contracting with interest rates. Rather than force growth in a compressed part of that cycle, I'm using this period to build trust and product depth with a core user base — so the product is ready to scale distribution the moment origination volume turns up. The near-term growth plan is a referral program aimed at the existing user base, paired with outreach automation informed by the feedback loop that program generates.

Positioning research also shaped who I'm building for. Tools like CoreLogic, DataTree, FlueidPro, and Fidelity Passport are priced and packaged for large brokerages. A growing segment of smaller, high-volume offices — and the individual LOs inside them — are underserved by anything self-serve. The product is positioned not just to fill that gap, but to offer those individuals the independence of a tool they control themselves, without an enterprise contract standing between them and it.