REISift + DataFlik: Smarter Leads, Better Deals Using AI

Ty Garrett (00:00)
What we found out now through all of these years of kinda R &D, only about 20 to 30 % of the total amount of people who sell to an investor actually have a big distressor that you would think of whenever I say list stacking. So that’s basically saying 70 % of the people just have a free and clear or a high equity.

paired with an absentee list. And most people just don’t even reach out to them. And you need AI to be able to discern, there’s a lot more that goes into it besides just distress flags.

Dylan Silver (02:02)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is based in Knoxville, Tennessee, and works with DataFlik and REISift, combining AI data-driven marketing CRM tools to help investors analyze, acquire, and more effectively market. Please welcome Ty Garrett. Ty, welcome to the show.

Ty Garrett (02:24)
Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. Excited to get going.

Dylan Silver (02:27)
Absolutely. always like to start off at the top tie by asking folks, how did you personally get involved or introduced to the real estate space?

Ty Garrett (02:37)
Yeah, so back in like 2017, 2018, I don’t know how long you’ve been in the game personally, but we were, I got really into Fortune Builders. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them, but they were like one of the OG educational companies. But we got into Fortune Builders and realized like, oh wow, we don’t really know much about anything as far as real estate goes. And you needed a lot of money at the time we thought to really run the business.

Dylan Silver (02:47)
I’m not.

Ty Garrett (03:01)
So about a year and a half into that, so we’re like right at that 2018, 2019 mark, we actually joined a really big wholesaling company in the Midwest in Columbus, Ohio, and we joined them. We’re there for about a year, learned so much so fast, and right at about 2020, we’re like, hey, you we think we want to do this ourselves, but we’re going to go back and go back to Knoxville, Tennessee, which is where I’m from, and the other co-founder of DataFlik. And from there, we…

pretty much realized very, very quickly that like there was a huge marketing problem because we were trying to do all this ourselves and like structure it, like, you know, exactly how we learned at this other company. And that was kind of the birth of DataFlik. So we started to build our own like data systems, our own databases, scraping a lot of data. And then we were like, hey, we know that you guys are also like needing data, a couple of friends of ours, they use it, they loved it. And that was kind of like the birth. So basically a year and a half of R &D till right at about the end of 2021, 2022.

That was when we completely fully launched DataFlik in an event. And that was where we also had a lot of our AI models come in, kind of like the earlier versions of them. Fast forward to today, we obviously have like 1000 plus users on the platform and we also just acquired our AI SIFT. Originally we were just DataFlik and in the past couple months, we acquired our AI SIFT, merged it in, and we plan to rebrand to DataSift in the next few months, just to kind of consolidate them.

And the entire goal and like thesis of what we’re trying to do now is like data was like all we did for five years. And we felt like that was a very, very small part of the process. Maybe like 10, 15 % of like the entire journey of having a successful business. And we really wanted to plug in RASIF to make it where we cover 10 % of it. Like how can we cover it from the day that we get raw information to the day it’s a close deal? And yeah, that’s what we’re moving towards.

Dylan Silver (04:52)
So the AI space is an interesting and ever developing space. In 2021, I was not involved in real

Ty Garrett (04:58)
yes.

Dylan Silver (05:47)
at all. It was a dream really. And I was trying to figure out how to be. And I remember someone had showed me and it was chat GPT I believe at the time. I just seemed like, well, that’s cool. know, is that like an app? Like what does it do? Like you can talk to it. That’s neat. And then fast forward today and it’s like basically.

Ty Garrett (05:58)
Yep.

Dylan Silver (06:08)
changed my life and anybody who is in real estate who’s adopting AI is able to see just how unbelievably more organized you can be and that’s just cutting like that’s the the sliver of the surface you know what I mean it’s not even we’re not even peeling back the first layer it doesn’t feel like it’s really I’m almost grasping for at straws and for words because we’re just

right there and there’s so much more that you can kind of see and envision. To give you an example that you’re probably familiar with, Ty, I don’t know how many months ago was that you couldn’t generate images with words?

Ty Garrett (06:50)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (06:51)
But now you can.

Ty Garrett (06:53)
And now you can. it’s like Google and Chachpiti, like Gemini and Chachpiti, like they have come so far. And they’re like, I mean, I remember when it first came out and you would just ask, like, you know, write me a poem or something like that. And that would be like kind of the use case. Like, this is cool. And now it’s like, can you do this like McKinsey level consulting, deep research prompt, and then make me like all these graphs and all of these like marketing images?

It’s incredible. It’s incredible.

Dylan Silver (07:22)
there’s there’s two applications I’m not going to say that the names of them because I actually want to keep them inside the vest because they’re so useful to me but they’ve changed the way that I think about marketing change the way that I think about time management change the way that I think about budgeting and cash flow and it is just so remarkable and in your business when you started it did you know from the beginning that AI was going to have a huge play in your business.

Ty Garrett (07:31)
Yeah.

You know, I’d love to say like I had all this incredible foresight and I was like brilliant, but no, no, no, no, no, no. When we first like started it, we were like, there has to be like a better way to do this. Cause like whenever we first started DataFlik, this is at the time where it was like really batch and like Propstream were like the only kind of like data marketing tools that you had for investors from a data perspective, right? And there was not really a way to like prioritize like the people that you’re reaching out to. And the only way you can do it is like,

taking a list and list stacking them in a software and it’s like if there are more lists attached to this, you do that marketing first. But

what we found out now through all of these years of kinda R &D, only about 20 to 30 % of the total amount of people who sell to an investor actually have a big distressor that you would think of whenever I say list stacking. So that’s basically saying 70 % of the people just have a free and clear or a high equity.

paired with an absentee list. And most people just don’t even reach out to them. And you need AI to be able to discern, there’s a lot more that goes into it besides just distress flags.

So the whole reason we started it was almost kind of betting on the future indirectly. Where were like, you have to be able to do this in a better way, and I’m sure technology’s gonna catch up with it. And really, the difference in version one of our model compared to now, all the technology that’s available.

is just like laughable to be. Like if you’re like a user, yeah, like if you were someone who used DataFlik in like 21 and that’s the only impression of us, like I’m so sorry in comparison to like what it is now. Like I think AI is like a huge thing too with like what makes AI really stand out for companies that use it heavily. There’s like kind of the folks who do like AI wrappers. So think about like a tool that does copywriting that you can probably do in Chatch VT.

Dylan Silver (09:23)
It’s laughable, right?

Yeah.

Ty Garrett (09:50)
And then what makes them unique is like you have a unique systematic, very beautiful process or workflow. And then the other element is like your data and like, it unique?

like, does it have access to things that Chatch VT would not? Those are the two things. When you blend them together, that’s what makes like these incredible processes. And that’s what we’re trying to do. Cause obviously we’re a data company and we have a lot of infrastructure with SIF now.

Dylan Silver (10:39)
Exactly.

I’ve seen a lot of AI companies that look like they are just white labeled chat GPT and even the way that they’re laid out, they’ll be like, yeah, no, this is our own thing. I’m not going to say any names, but I

some of them. And it’s basically just the same. And I have others that are doing something totally different. And then I have others that will utilize chat GPT and be very upfront about that. Hey, this is chat GPT.

But this is in a way that you cannot get through the application itself. We’re doing something different. And then, you know, then there’s people who are doing something totally on their own, like outside of the realm of it completely. And that’s super hard. Like that’s impressive.

Ty Garrett (11:26)
Correct. Yes.

Dylan Silver (11:37)
you’re at that point almost competing with chat GPT in some ways, because then they’re going to say, hey, this thing can generate X, Y and Z. We need to go ahead and do that. Like there was actually within chat GPT here recently.

there was another platform that was generating images and then it would direct you to it. And I don’t know if chat bought it out or if it integrated with it, but now it just said, Oh yeah, we no longer use or it no longer points to that. You can just do it directly. And this was not that long ago. It was like a handful of months. And then a couple of months later it’s gone.

Ty Garrett (12:06)
Yeah, it makes it’s crazy. Have you you know a company called perplexity? Have you ever heard of them?

Dylan Silver (12:11)
I have not, but I’m sure I’ll find it now, now that our phones are listening to us. It’ll, you know, pop up in my stream.

Ty Garrett (12:17)
And I always said it. They’re basically like a search engine that is just powered by like Chat2BT or Gemini or kind of all these companies that license or let you use their models through an API. And that’s like a good example of like, yes, it’s kind of a wrapper, but like, it just feels better to use perplexity in comparison to like Chat2BT for like the internet or like Google and things like that. So it’s interesting to see how like companies like use the different pieces of it.

Dylan Silver (12:42)
Yeah.

I want to pivot a bit here, Ty, and ask you about working with investors. Investors can be, I’d say, more open-minded. And we were talking about this before hopping onto the podcast here, know, kind of

versus realtors and kind of the applications for data and AI within both spaces. You know, it’s almost, I was saying my take on it is it’s almost the opposite types of perspective. Investors want to be the only one using something. They may want some…

Ty Garrett (13:06)
Yep.

Dylan Silver (13:16)
proof of concept but they don’t want everyone to know about this thing that they’re using and then realtors I feel like are the opposite they kind of want to feel like hey who else is using it that way I know that I’m not the only one standing out on a ledge and I’m curious as someone running a sales organization in addition the sales arm of it how do you feel working with investors and scaling a company in that space and what were kind of the pivot points along the way for you?

Ty Garrett (13:44)
So we kind of felt like, well, one, we were like

the investing space like first. So that is like the pivotal point of like, it makes sense to start here because we just know more about it. But the big reason that it’s easier for investors to like do this kind of marketing, and just in my opinion, it’s like the spreads and like the upside of what they can generate from a revenue perspective is far wider whenever you’re talking about like the return on ad spend for a marketing campaign.

Now on the flip side of this, when you’re talking about it not being as transactional for the realtor side, it’s like you have that network effect and that brand that can really be built on it. So a lot of the marketing that you would use for data for realtors is everything that would compound and build on that brand. So the most common example would be taking data and doing a ton of marketing into a farm, or a community-owned area and saturating the people that are the most likely to sell. And if you get a listing there,

Now you tell everyone, your neighbor’s selling, you also wanna sell, but you know they have that higher intent to sell just based on our data. And on the opposite side for investors, it’s very, very transactional in nature and this marketing works because the potential upside that they have is so much bigger on a 50K flip.

They can pay 10 grand in marketing to acquire that because it makes sense from a monetary perspective. the marketing is very, very different in how you approach that.

Dylan Silver (15:51)
It’s

a totally different world, feels like. It’s funny because it’s in the same kind of ballpark, but it feels like two totally different worlds. I want to ask you to kind of get a little bit granular, but don’t give away all the gold necessarily, In scaling the business, you mentioned a large user base right now and where you’re trying to get to before hopping onto the podcast here. For people who may be starting out in a tech or software application and

Ty Garrett (16:03)
don’t know if we can.

Dylan Silver (16:20)
you know they’re trying to get their first 10 2050 users. What was your process like for that and what would you recommend to other folks?

Ty Garrett (16:29)
So we’re in a unique place as far as like the sector, right? Like I’m talking about like the real estate, the REI sector or real estate industry in totality. And I’ve talked a lot about this to other people kind of in like the SaaS world, but we’re in a sector where affiliates and educational companies like partnerships are very prominent because if there are so many educators like in our sector.

So that’s how we started. So we went to like all of really big companies at the time and we were like, Hey, we know, you know, we know you have this huge audience. Like what do you guys want? Like, what do you hate? And we really didn’t have like an incredible product at this point. This is like 2021, 2020. And we worked with a lot of people who essentially like needed our service, but it maybe wasn’t as good as our competitors. But the big thing that we could offer is like a level of support that our competitors would never give. So an example would be like,

we’re gonna give you this data product, but if you guys need any help in setting it up, using it, optimizing it, finding the bottlenecks in your marketing, call me, call the founder and I will hand in hand help you at 2 a.m. And that’s a very, very powerful pitch when you’re pitching against the giants in the space, because most people aren’t willing to do that. So we did that and we’re bootstrapped because of it. And once we got a lot more, a lot of traction that way.

Dylan Silver (17:43)
Yeah.

Ty Garrett (17:52)
we hit a very, very, very hard ceiling of like, hey, we no longer can like support this. And that’s when we started to invest more in products and started to hire people and just build it from there. But that’s kind of like the bootstrapping hack that we had where we didn’t need to like scale this huge ad spend on like, you know, marketing dollars. So we just partner with people that already have the existing audience, which would be affiliate marketing in this case. And not every industry is going to have that, but there’s a lot more now because the…

educational space across all industries has grown so much over the years. I would do that because you’re going to get really good feedback loops on like, these people, their students or their audience is saying we need this thing and you build that thing next. And just do that until it scales up.

Dylan Silver (18:36)
Ty, we

coming up on time here. Where can folks go if maybe they’re in the Knoxville area or ⁓ if they are potentially looking at some of these types of solutions and would like to reach out to you, get in contact with you, maybe be the next ⁓ user for DataFlik and REISift.

Ty Garrett (18:53)
Yeah, you can just go to, we’ll put a link in the chat, it is art, not the chat, but like the description I would say. And you can just go ahead and schedule a demo or watch any of our free resources on YouTube or any of that stuff.

Dylan Silver (18:59)
podcast. Yeah.

Ty, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Ty Garrett (19:09)
Thank you so much.