8. If I Were You: The Next 90 Days
The single most important thing
Get 3 PCA firms paying at least $300/month for one narrow job before you build anything. (At ~15 hrs/week: 2 firms.)
- Segment: US firms with 2–30 assessors that write Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac multifamily PCAs.
- Job: "Turn my site visit into a lender-format report, with the reserve table done and nothing the reviewer will bounce."
- How: start with a hands-on service. The firm sends field notes and photos from a live job. You (with your PCA advisor) return a structured draft in their 4099 layout, a reserve table built from the published useful-life tables and their cost library, and a pre-submission checklist. Charge from week 1. Automate only what you've done by hand at least 10 times.
Week-by-week
| Weeks | Goal | Exit criteria (full-time) | Exit criteria (~15 hrs/week) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Access and count. Sign the PCA advisor (0.5–2% equity or a monthly fee). Build a list of 60 firms from public sample reports, LinkedIn titles, ASTM E50 and the advisor's network. Interview 20 principals or senior assessors: reports per month, hours per report, bounce-backs, tools used, what a report bills. | Advisor signed. 20 interviews. A counted list. The top 3 pains in their words, with hours or dollars attached. | Advisor signed. 10 interviews. |
| 3–4 | Hands-on pilot. Offer 5 firms the service on live reports at $300/month or $60 per report. | 3 firms paying. If fewer than 2 will pay, the pain isn't real at this price. Change firm size or report family, not the pitch. | 2 firms paying. |
| 5–9 | Build the thin v1 (tablet PWA + web): offline structured capture, useful-life and cost tables, reserve schedule, Fannie 4099 output, pre-submission check. Use your pilot reports as test cases. | Pilots move from hands-on to self-serve on at least one live report each. | Same, with v1 built by week 10. |
| 10–11 | Free acquisition hook. A public GSE useful-life lookup, 5 SEO pages on form names, and the first "what changed in the GSE PCA rules" email. | 100 assessors on the email list. | 50 on the list. |
| 12–13 | Measure and decide. | 5 firms running all their GSE PCAs in the app for a month, ≥3 hours saved per report (firm-reported). If you hit it, keep going and add Freddie 1105. If you miss it, go back to interviews. | 3 firms, same rules. |
Kill criteria (write these down now)
If at day 90 you have fewer than 2 paying firms, or no firm runs live reports in the app, the wedge or the access is wrong. Don't respond by adding features. Respond by fixing access or changing report family (HUD capital needs, bank/CMBS PCA) once.
Time budget at ~15 hrs/week (automation-first)
| Hours | Use |
|---|---|
| 5 | Live calls with firms and pilot work, in US business hours |
| 7 | Building, strictly the P0 list in 04 |
| 2 | Content that runs without you: SEO pages, the form-change email |
| 1 | Admin, invoices, metrics |
The one thing to stop doing
Stop modelling the product on Spectora. Scheduling, agreements, payments and Florida forms belong to a market that's already taken. Every hour spent there is an hour not spent getting a PCA principal to pay.
A close second: stop trying to do this without someone who has written the reports. It's the difference between ~8% and ~3% odds of $10k MRR at ~15 hrs/week.
What stays on the long-term roadmap (only after proof)
- Freddie Mac 1105 and plain ASTM E2018 output.
- Senior-engineer review workflow and AI-drafted boilerplate, marked for review.
- HUD capital needs assessment output (second report family).
- Integration with a due-diligence ordering platform, if one has an API and customers ask.
- Anonymized cost benchmarks across firms, with consent.