Danilo Ortolani

Real Estate: Turning property search into a competitive advantage. In just 14 days → From concept to live MVP • Instant MLS data from multiple providers • Smart search + filtering users love • Premium UX with @shadcn UI, mapbox • Light & Dark themes • Built on @nextjs

The best business advice I ever got came from a stranger at a surf class. 2 years ago I was 20, pale, and after not leaving my desk for what felt like forever, I had finally made my first money online. So I made a decision that scared me a little: I bought a no-refund ticket to Floripa, a Brazilian island known for its paradise beaches, hikes and nomadic life. Money was tight, so I booked a hostel. Little did I know that would be the best “downgrade” of my life. I met people from everywhere and spoke English in person for the first time. Every day I was up at 6am, worked until lunch at a beachfront coworking space, then went for a walk by the sea. I’d go hiking with my new friends. Hanging at cafés. Ping pong at night. The kind of conversations that stretch your worldview. The morning I signed up for a surf class, everything changed. Not because of the waves (I fell, a lot.) But because of a random compliment. Guy from the class walks up to me after: "You're big for your size, man. You train?" We got talking. Turns out he ran a 7-figure e-commerce brand. Next thing I know, we're eating açai and talking business strategy for hours. Then he told me one thing I never forgot: "If you really want to grow in life and business, find a mentor." So that's what I did. And I have had countless mentors since. It saved me from mistakes that would've cost me years of trial and error. The funny thing is, that advice was never going to find me in my room. I had to book the flight first.

@BasedBiohacker true high iq is regressing to pen & paper as we did in middle school

98% of real estate teams are losing deals to old systems. They just don't know it yet. That's the worst ICP you can have. Selling to people who don't know they have a problem. This means you're paying to educate the market. Find the 2% who are already bleeding. They close themselves.

I just got called by the owner of a $2.7M/year real estate agency. He described the exact product I built 2 years ago that he didn't know existed. The problem he described starts with the typical day for anyone trying to buy a home right now. They go on big portals. Scroll through filters for 2 hrs, find something they "almost" like, and save it for later. When they finally reach out, the first response is an automated message. Then silence. 3 days later an agent responds with 10 properties they never asked for. And keep in mind this is happening across 5, 10, 20 different chats at once. Their WhatsApp doesn't stop. Everyone is trying to sell them something and optimizing for commissions. But nobody is trying to understand what they actually want. And that's the part that kills sales. The video below shows what I built almost 2 years ago. Instead of dropping the buyer into a wall of listings, it onboards you, asking about your preferences, lifestyle, and where you actually want to live. Then it shows only the signal: properties that fit that specific buyer. No noise or "here's 10 random homes." Just relevance, from the first click. And yes, this one uses AI to guide the conversation, understand their preferences and match them to the right property. Now the point is agencies that win in 2026 won't be the ones selling the hardest. But the ones that actually listen and understand buyers before trying to close anything. Everyone else? Left on read.

@inloadingstate Real estate is highly fragmented, each operator needs a specific tool, not something generic. It helps with quality and data privacy Everyone says it's about AI but I beg to differ: the value is in where and how you implement the system

@danilocoding Thoughts on a solution that could service multiple teams. Or so far have you found bespoke solutions works best when leveraging AI and workflow improvements

SpaceX just paid $60 billion for two things your business already has. Everyone says SpaceX just wanted Cursor's app. Their agentic code editor workflows. A way to make Grok smarter. But here's what they actually wrote the check for: Cursor has 2M developers, over 1M daily users, and 1M paying customers. Every single one of NVIDIA's engineers builds inside it. And it's already crossed $4 billion in annual revenue. SpaceX is buying something 100x more valuable than Cursor’s platform. They’re buying the proprietary code data and the rights to a distribution channel that Anthropic and OpenAI will never have. Those are the only two assets that stay defensible in the AI gold rush: owning data no competitor has and a way to reach your users directly. And if you've run a real business for years, you already own both. That's the exact thing SpaceX just valued at $60 billion, and you're sitting on it doing nothing. Here's the part that should scare you: someone in your industry is going to build it first. And when they do, you don't catch up.

@tomelias10 yes, realistically you'll need onboarding, nurturing and follow-up workflows

@danilocoding If a lead gets an instant text but no one owns the next step, it still dies. For RE teams I’d track: speed-to-first-response, next action owner, and leads with no follow-up date.

Real estate teams are losing $200k/year because they don’t reply fast enough. After studying the average KPIs for a medium-sized RE team. I was shocked to learn that the average agent takes ~15h to respond to a lead’s first contact. And I don't blame them. Leads often reach out during their off hours, when they're showing, or on weekends. It gets to be a chore really fast to reply, follow up, and nurture everyone in time. But here's the part most agents don't know: 78% of buyers work with the first agent who responds Replying within 5min makes an agent 21x more likely to qualify that lead. Wait only 30mins, the chance of closing that lead drops to 5%. And it doesn’t stop there. 44% of agents give up after the first follow-up. It can be frustrating when leads go quiet. But it’s not that the leads are bad. The response time is. Most real estate leads take at least 5 contact points to close. Now for a small team. Recovering even 3 deals a month is an extra $30k in the bank. At scale that’s easily $200K to $1M a year, depending on team size and how many leads they’re working. And real estate agencies are paying good money for those lost leads. That's why a system for lead follow-up can pay for itself in the first month. Because without one, they'll keep handing deals to whoever answers first.

I've built a system for real estate investors that finds below-market deals, saves 52hr/week and doesn't need AI. I built this 2.5 years ago, before everyone was shoving AI down your throat. As an internal product for a property investment company in South Florida. First, I found the workflow that used to take them 40h/week to run. They had to sit on Zillow, analyzing 1,000s of properties to find deals. Hunting for the ones priced below market. Then we pulled their entire market into one place, instead of going house by house, they can now scan every listing at once and highlight every opportunity in seconds. Then there was sending offers, the kind of work that takes another 12h/week or you hire a VA for, now it runs on autopilot. They just pick the homes and click “send”. Now you might be asking, why didn’t you add AI? The honest answer is we didn't have to. See, everyone’s chasing keywords: "AI-first”, “agentic” but aside from stroking your ego and making you feel innovative. That stuff doesn’t always move the money. My approach with clients is built around their no. 1 bottleneck. And here’s a $100k/mo app idea I don’t care if you steal: Sure, you could add an AI layer that looks at the home photos, pulls up info on the owner, highlights red flags, and even makes the call for you. It’s a cool feature that feels like magic. But it wasn’t their bottleneck. And if it ever became one, we could always add it on later, the foundation was built to handle it. So sit with this for a second. While everyone races to automate with AI, most people aren't actually solving the problems they need to solve. They're solving the ones that sound impressive. The moment you understand this, you start pulling ahead of everyone else.

@inloadingstate There are too many people adventuring in the automation space. they don't know how to fulfil and try slapping AI into everything

@danilocoding Preach! I’ve spoken with a few realtors trying to force fit AI into their workflows when actually all they need is better systems that bring the right information to help them make quicker decisions. Realtors have many inefficient cobbled setups that are prime for optimisation

most people spend 85% of their time executing and 15% understanding who they're selling to. to win, you need the opposite: 85% research. 15% execution. you're not slow because you're lazy. you're slow because you're building for the wrong person.

If you’re still building an MVP in 2026, your startup is going to fail. AI made coding 10x easier. You prompt Claude, give it your offer, a few hours later it’s done. And that used to be the best way to validate: a foundation that proves the core idea and “just works”. What no one told you is that the good old MVP is being completely rejected in today’s market. And I don’t care how good your idea is, unless you’re building an SLC, you’re 100% invisible to users. With today’s agentic coding, you can build a product 10x more desirable, robust and competitive than what was possible a year ago. An SLC does that by going beyond the minimum foundation. It doesn’t waste time on creating 20 different features. Instead, it keeps a lean scope in a way that’s both functional but also extremely reliable and exciting. It FORCES you to validate with a shockingly good product that won’t break in users hands. Or embarrass you in front of investors. And that’s the highest leverage differentiator today. The market awards SLC founders with users, revenue and funding, while MVP founders are going obsolete.