THEREANDISHOW 009 - Interviewing PermitGuard AI co-Founder & Investor, Sam Doan!

In this episode of The REAL Estate and Investment Show, host Daniel Clavijo welcomes Sam Doan, a tech innovator and real estate investor, to discuss the future of the construction industry.

The interview highlights Sam’s latest venture, PermitGuard AI, an innovative application designed to streamline the notoriously slow and complex building permit process. By leveraging artificial intelligence to cross-reference national and local building codes, the tool aims to reduce costly idle time and project delays for homeowners, builders, and municipalities alike.

Key Topics Covered:

• Revolutionizing Permitting: A deep dive into how PermitGuard AI can cut down cycle times by performing automated code compliance reviews in minutes rather than weeks
• Investment Insights: Sam shares his journey in the affordable housing sector, emphasizing the importance of building a strong team and mastering fundamentals before scaling
• Live Walkthrough: A detailed demonstration of the Permit Guard AI interface, showing how users can upload drawings, use "smart annotations," and generate comprehensive project reports
• The Power of Mentorship: Discussions on the role of mentorship in success and Sam’s personal philosophy on leadership and investing in oneself

Connect with the Sam Doan:

• Website: permitguard.ai
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samdoan/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samdoanofficial/

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Transcript

0:10

Alright, hello, and thank you for tuning in to the real estate and investment show with Daniel Clavijo. I am Daniel Clavijo, coming to you from Beautiful, Sunny, Palm Beach, Florida. What is the Real Estate and Investment Show, and who am I, you may ask? Well, our show wants to focus on the experience of amazing people in the real estate and investment space and share their knowledge with you, our wonderful audience. I truly hope that together we can spark some inspiration and ideas for you wherever that may be. And who am I? Well, I'm an architect grad from University of Miami, MBA grad from NYU Stern, and I've been designing homes in Palm Beach and the surrounding areas for over a decade. I now also get to share the stories of such talented individuals with you. Questions or suggestions about our show, write to us at infotherreandishow.com. That also spells theirandishow.com, the abbreviated name for our show. Find us on YouTube, Spotify, and wherever you enjoy your podcasts. We'd appreciate your help. Like, comment, follow, and above all, share with your friends and family. It is thanks to you that we will be able to grow and bring you high quality content and guests in the real estate and investment space. Speaking of which, we have an amazing guest with us today. He is the co-founder of PermitGuard AI, a recently launched AI app aiming to tackle and ease some of the biggest challenges in the permitting process. A Harvard grad with nearly two decades of experience, working in some of corporate America's most famous names like Microsoft and Google, he's also an IT and real estate investor. If you're not impressed yet, wait till you find out he's also an avid cook, a musician, a paintballer, competing at national levels. He is the man, the myth, the legend, the one and only. Stick him down. Well, uh, Dan, thank you so much for that introduction. But before we get started, I too have something for you. Oh, do you do? I have a present for you. Oh my goodness. Dan, thank you. First of all, thank you for giving me the opportunity and the platform to share with your audience and the broader viewers in terms of what I do and the cool AI tech that I've co-founded and launched with my partners. Again, shout out to Ashishharma along with John Mather. They are my co-founders. Without them, this wouldn't exist. Okay, so this is a joint effort, and guys out there, you need a great team. Look for that great team first before you launch a great idea to a successful company. That's awesome. Well, Sam, thank you so much for being on the show, and thank you for taking the time. Now, when our mutual connection and previous guest on the podcast, Laura Mayer, told me about your app, I was intrigued, to say the least, because of course I'm an architect. I work in this permitting process, I know what the issues sometimes are. We work with the contractors, building departments, it's a it's an issue. Um and this AI technology could definitely speed up the process. Now, before we get into that, we want to know a little bit more about you. Absolutely. So, as we say cheers, cheers, please tell the audience a little bit about your background, your bio, and please take it away. Well, you basically summed it up extremely well. Um, to add on top what Dan already mentioned, I I am an autodidact. I love learning, I love discovering new things, and most importantly, I love to build. I love to build people, I love to build friendship, and most importantly, I like to build solutions that can stress a problem at much broader scale. Um So this this whole company came about when I met Ash, whom worked at we worked at another idea previously, and we just became really, really close friends. We're both real estate investors, okay? And one of the challenges that we face was the permitting issue. Right, man, for example, this to build something, you're gonna need a permit, and it takes forever. What can we do to address that? That's how the app came about. It came from the pain that we got, and we just put our mind together and created this app. Very nice. Now, tell us a little bit about the real estate investments that you have done, just to give our clients a general background of that. So I am also a real estate investor. I have a pretty big and significant portfolio in single-family homes, and I primarily focus on uh affordable housing. Again, shout out to my mentor, Tom Cruise. He's been a extreme he's been an extremely helpful mentor, a close friend, and without him, I wouldn't even imagine where I'd be in terms of my real estate investment uh journey. And shout out to Chris too, Chris Short's awesome lender. All right. Tom Cruise, are we talking about the real Tom Cruise or another Tom Cruise? Well, there's a bunch of Tom Cruises, right? But the Tom Cruise in uh in in you know, investment in the investment world. I'd love to meet the real Tom Cruise, too, the actor, but no, not that one. All right. So what was, let's just say, to give people an idea, what was kind of like your first deal, your inspiration to start in that real estate investment? What motivated you to start that? Yeah, so what motivated me was, you know, as as trite as it may sound, it's basically struggle. Really, man. Um I saw how hard my parents worked. And for me, one of the things, one of my aspirations in life when I quote made it is I want to be able to take care of them financially. And it's it's hard because inflation is absolutely out of control. You know, AI is replaying jobs, and I just gotta figure away uh a way to make some sort of income passively, right? And for those that may not be aware of the concept of passive and active, passive income simply means the type of income you make without traying in your time, and there are a lot of businesses out there, and to me the best return would be real estate because that is the fastest way and the most proven way for a lot of people to become successful and create generational wealth. So that's how I got started. And I actually met Tom playing paintball of all things, and and and John playing paintball. That's how we all became really, really good friends, and we just have a normal conversation like any friends would have. And he told me, Hey, this is what I do, and I told him, Hey, I also do this as well. And he was like, No, I I really do this. I'm like, okay, cool. And then the next thing we know, I I had a conversation with him, learned from him, and then just took that risk and really doubled down on on um investing in affordable housing. And the next thing you know, I'm I'm scaling significantly. I'm closing between five to eight homes per month. And I successfully and recently closed two rounds of capital. Congratulations. Well, thank you, man. And and again, this is not a one-man show. Right. This is a team effort. You've got to master the process, right? You can scale with process a lot faster. And the next phase would be you've got to find the right people, the right team, to implement the process, to take it at an exponential level. Again, shout out to my real estate team, you know, Ryan, Eileen, um, Shana, property management team, you guys have done fantastic. And of course, Ali, the admin, could not have done this without you guys, and I truly mean that from the bottom of my heart. That's great. So, in this process, I guess you could say, as you were mentioning, you see the pitfalls of the permitting process and the delays. So, is that what mainly motivated you to create permit guard AI? Or what was the initial spark that said the world needs this? Great question. Um well, first and foremost, AI is the next evolution of what we're seeing in society, right? Like it doesn't just touch business, but also personal as well. And what leveraging the latest technology, I mean, I I came from a technology background, so leveraging my knowledge, my expertise with my partners, that's a no-brainer, but to address the common issue with permanent, because it was preventing us from building or renovating homes, right? That's delaying a lot of uh there there are costs associated with that, right? So that's how we came about. We saw a discrepancy, a need in the market, and how the current work system is operating. We experienced that on our own, and we figured out, hey, why not create a solution that can address that that could only not only benefit homeowners, you know, builders, as well as the local municipalities. So, for example, there are about 38 million submissions a year in the US for permitting. Okay. And do you know on average how long it would it it takes? Or I guess the cost associated with delays? You're you're in the engineering firm. Share your experience. Like, what's been going on? Sure. So at least what I can share from my experience is, for example, and to for the people who may not be familiar with the process, um, only about like a very minor percentage of people use architects. You know, most people will buy a home and they'll go into direct it, so maybe people don't understand. But basically, you know, you have a client, it could be Sam, and he comes to me as an architect and he says, Oh, I need these plans for a house. It could be a new house, it could be a renovation. And you think about a larger scale, and you go to these big skyscrapers and development projects, which you see in all the major cities, smaller cities as well, you know how it goes. And so you create the drawings, and then you have to submit all those drawings to the building department. Now, the building department is going to obviously take their time to review it because they're charge as well as the architect, they want to make sure the life safety and welfare of the inhabitants as well. Based on what, though? Well, they're using it based off of the code that they have. Bingo. And this is, and I'm sure we're gonna get to, but they have to base it off of a code which is public information, international building code. You get to local municipalities and they have their own zoning code as well. And those things are they're usually unique to each municipality, but the international building code is pretty standard, and then each state has, of course, their own code as well for um, and then you've got ADA regulations, all these other things, right? So the building department, they will review this, or you can also get a permit expediter, which I know we'll talk about a little bit as well, who will review these drawings to make sure that your plans are code compliant. They may not be necessarily be reviewing it for the beauty of the architecture, that's what other commissions are made for, but the building department is going to take their time to review that it is code compliant for the life safety and welfare of the individuals. Now that process can of course take time because one, people are human, and two, Mr. Bureaucracy and bureaucracy. So um what is the the obviously, again, just for my experience, a it takes time. I would say that as things have progressed, things have taken a short amount of time, but I remember in the not too distant past that reviews for you know a standard home could be in between 2,500, 4,000 square feet, and of course you've got larger homes, larger time, but that could take um months, up to months, depending on here. Uh now we've got an a quicker turnaround time, at least anecdotal evidence here in the town of Palm Beach. I would say it could take between uh four to six weeks to at least get an initial review, but then you have to go create the changes, resubmit, and then you're back in the same thing. Yep. You're looking at again kicking the can down the road, and yeah, and it can take months to the point where, you know, I was talking to um a real estate agent that I interviewed um recently, David Cook, he's he's also a guest, and he was telling me, you know, he's also he also does that. He also invests in properties, and it was a historic property in West Palm Beach. And he closed on the property, I believe, in August of last year, and only recently in um in May of this year, did he get approvals from the town? And that's not even submitting the permit, it's just the approvals for the design. So now you've got to figure out so much more to do, right? The permitting process changes every year, if applicable. Right. So that's the value that we provide, right? So the question now is to you, what are you willing to pay to expedite the process? That's a good question. And I think that or or hold on. Yes. What are you willing to pay to save time, to get the most value resource of all back, which is time. Imagine if you have a beautiful home, you just bought it for your family, and you want to build your kids a deck, right? So you can see them grow up enjoying summer barbecues. Right. But for whatsoever reason, that whole process has been delayed for like some of the mentioned like reasons that you mentioned above, and the time passing, they sort of grew out of it. Like you would miss that opportunity, that window of time to spend with your family, right? What are we willing to pay to have all of that back? The answer is if I'm a dad, everything. But for a fraction of that, we give you so much more. So let me tackle on the value of permit card, why it's important. Okay. So first and foremost, we are not just a tool, we are an AI compliance catalyst, part of the required workflow. So that's the difference, right? If you take a look at, and I'm gonna give you a real example, okay? My buddy, he he wanna build a deck. Right. Took him 42 days to get a to to get a feedback. Not approval feedback, right? Okay, and get this 99.7% of the time of that 42 days were idle time. Of course. Okay? Well that means that 0.3%, about an hour, 42 minutes, or actual real work time between 12 different you know, departments. And that's just for a deck. Right. Can you imagine the cost for like a I don't know, a multi-family? And you can completely forget about when it comes to like a commercial building, right? Sure. So on on average, we actually did did quick math and based on our research, it it costs about five thousand dollars a day for carrying cost. Just for a small, like, you know, little project. Imagine like how many buildings are going up in brick hole. They're they're multi-billion dollar projects, imagine the carrying costs per day as people are continuing moving down to the South Florida area. Yep. Okay. So that's that's that's where the idea started. And then we also did what's called an efficiency test to see, all right, if this took me 42 days to the traditional route, how much time can I cut it down to? And we found that on average, we were able to reduce the cycle time down to about 20 days. We cut we cut it down to 20. We cut 20 days worth of idle time up that 42 days. Gotcha. And we ran it across multiple scenarios, okay? Number one is resubmission. Okay, because the traditional route is you give you submit your your permit through the city site, or you submit through a permit runner expediter. As you mentioned, they're not looking at the design, they're looking, hey, are you meeting the required code at the national level, the local municipality level, so on and so forth. If it's ADA, are you within compliant? You don't know how long that's gonna take for them to tell you, hey, you've been approved or not approved. Right. Right? So we essentially move that review process from the back end to the front end for you to eliminate a lot of hurdles and to compress time, part of your application process, if that makes sense. Of course, yeah. Yep. So so how long did that take us, right? Um, we did single family, multi single family, single family resubmission. That's the key part. Multifamily, large commercial spot, right? Take a wild guess how long that that took. In terms of the processing to to to tell you, hey, here are the codes and but that you violated. Here's what you need to do to correct. Well, I'm sure the part of the question or part of the answer is it took a long time to teach the thing to to come out. But it took probably minutes. Minutes. You're right, you're right. So, and and to to give you in you know, in deeper, deeper details, we have multiple PDFs, right? And we have multiple pages. Sure. So on average, you're looking at about and and I'm just estimating diff due to the complexity between a minute and a half to three minutes per page. Okay. Gotcha. Yep, makes sense. And again, think of the think of the time that it saved you. So again, on average, 5K carrying costs from a small project, you've saved 20 days. How much is that worth to you? Just from a financial standpoint alone. 5K times 20, you're looking at $100,000 saved? Right. Just for a fraction of the time. It's an impressive model. It is, you know. Um, and the model it's it's continually learning, right? Continuity training, and we were able to aggregate not only the national code but local municipality code as well across the country at the moment. Right. And bird's eye view. Yep. What was challenging about teaching this model to work properly? Uh just this is the sample size and the data. Yeah, we've got to fine-tune it. And that quad that and from a technical question, I'll defer it to Ash, but at a high level, um we just gather like the data. Right. We're continuing to work with local municipalities and engineering firms to give us, hey, give us some samples of some submission so that way we can train our model, and hopefully we can provide you a deterministic um result. I know that hallucination is part of that, right? So, what are some of the things we're doing to really improve our accuracy rate um within our application? We give you the ability to annotate and be more specific and concise in a layer of instruction of certain things you want as an outcome so that our model can really learn, train, and give you the feedback required. And again, keep in mind that this is a catalyst, a tool for you to expedite the process, but ultimately the final approval it's gonna need that human touch. Right. That's why it's important for us to engage with the contractors, the engineering firms, as well as the city municipality, so that way everyone can work in unison and make this process easy and efficient for everyone involved. Right. Well, now you've created a walkthrough for for users, so I'm gonna play it now. And for our listening audience, I would suggest migrating to our YouTube page so you can see it in action because it is pretty impressive. So let's roll clip. Using PermitGuard is a login. We have federated options here, Microsoft and Google. Or users can log in with any email, really. Um they can register with Yahoo different emails. So we're gonna use Google to log in. Now we're gonna use a new project. We're gonna create a new project. You can choose residential commercial next year. You can choose different scopes of work, we're gonna do new construction, you can choose specific IDC, IRC category types. You can utilize one of the generic codes. Um but typically you would want to do this every single time because you know we DC has its own codes. So and if we don't have it embedded, then we will sort of fall back into the um generic ones. And there you go. This is the dashboard. This is the first step to get in the frame card and use it. Now that the project is created, we can go ahead and upload some drawings for it. So we're gonna go ahead and get our drawings. And this is getting loaded to AWSS3. Now that the drawings are here, you can see that you cannot run a review just yet. And the reason being that we need to add annotations, some annotations to our drawing to help our genetic engine out. Um drawings are very variable, and without annotations, you're gonna get a lot of hallucinations. And we're gonna get into the annotation layer next. Next step is to annotate. Our drawings. So if we go here, we get into our annotation view. Our annotation view is a canvas-like system that allows you to draw on specific drawings, uh, provide overlays that will give our agentic solution more insight into the you know how well it can actually do its analysis. So one cool aspect of it is, you know, it's a pain in the butt to try and annotate every single drawing, right? So we provided the ability for some level of some level of auto annotations. Okay. Now you can manually choose the ability to annotate your drawings, right? And we'll do our best to try and cover it. We can see that this is bedroom two. Right here, and we can see that it's on the second floor. See the second floor plan right here, and it's able to detect that this is a bedroom on the second floor by studying the drawing. Now, just with the bat, just we're gonna cancel this out, and we're gonna now show the next level of annotation, which is we're gonna try to annotate the whole drawing. So we're gonna go to auto. And what this'll do is try to provide overlays where we can. Okay. And we do our best to give you a nice little foundation. You can choose to save it, and then once you save it, you can go to the edit mode and you can tweak your annotations. Now, in specific sections, you know, uh we don't have boxes, right? Uh I'll give you an example. Let's move this up. This is the bathroom one, so we're just gonna make it nice and annotated there. You can see that this mechanical room is not a square. Alright? Not all rooms are square. So you have the ability to draw polylines that have a level of snap capability to it. Right. And the system is able to see that this is a mechanical room utility in the cellar level. It is able to analyze this. Okay. And that is our annotation layer. Once you go ahead and get your annotations nice and crisp and accurate on the drawings, um, you don't really have to redo it for the other plan sets for the plan drawings. Right? We have a nice little button here that will allow you to copy your current current annotations to other sheets. So what we're gonna typically go for are the we're gonna typically go for the plan views. And typically those are the mechanical floor plans, drainage plans, electrical floor plans, we're not gonna go penetrations, not the door schedules, not the building sections, not elevations, and we're not really gonna care about the existing floor plans. Okay? So we have a handful handful of selections. We're gonna copy the annotations. Now, if you reload the page, you should be able to see the same annotations in the same locations relative to the architectural set in each individual sheet. We also provide the ability so that if you missed something, right? If you missed um any specific, you know, sheet, you have the option to import it directly. The system understands that you have annotation rooms that were decided within the architectural set, and you should be able to move them into here. Now that the annotations are here, you can see that we have 26 drawings, we have 114 pages, we can run the full project review. Okay. And while this is running, I want to point out that you have the ability to leave the page, come back, and this is running async. So you can go grab a cup of coffee, um, you can run it in the morning, it shouldn't take too long, and we have different phases. We'll first get the jurisdiction and the codes based on the address. We are using drawing extraction using deterministic uh vector math and geometry along with our annotations, along with LLM vision models. It will move it to the specialist discipline reviews. There's uh discipline reviews for uh electrical, mechanical, plumbing, zoning, um, life and safety, and then based on the reviews, we'll get we'll do some local code research and some cross-referencing, and we'll finish it off with a report compilation. So we're gonna wait, let this run, and that's how you run it. We'll be back. Once the analysis is finished, you'll get the results. It doesn't look like this one passed. It doesn't look like we approve this one. Let's see what it talks about. Talks about a smoke alarm must be 10 feet from the kitchen and cooking appliances. Okay. Now, we give a snapshot of the drawing that this was found in, so let's take a look. And sure enough, we have a smoke detector right here in the kitchen. We have another smoke detector right here in the kitchen. In addition, you can see that we provide some advisor advisory notes. We discuss inspections that are needed, accessibility inspections throughout the framing process, throughout the entire construction process, fit-ins and final inspections. And these are all valid notes. You will have a third-party inspection multiple times through the construction process, through the rough in, the final. You have inconsistencies that are found out in between drawings from the notes along with uh uh uh different sheets. It will analyze inconsistencies between the different sheets and even give you a snapshot of both the sheets. It'll talk about the code references. You can see that we looked at the 2017 DC building code here, and even gives you tips on improving the analysis. Now, in addition to viewing the report here, we provide the ability for you to view the full report, for you to print it out. Yeah, the critical issues right there. References, recommended actions. Or you can download the report. Now, a part of the permitting process is you get denied. It is what it is, you may get denied for whatever reason. Um and in that situation, we need a flow for you to create a new submission. So, just like the permitting process, we do have a new submission flow. And we can provide specific comments. The walls need to be purple for this specific. Now you can scope it to revision clouds, and there's something special about doing it this way. So we're gonna create the submission. Well, before that, let's point out that you may have some drawings that are accepted. In this situation, all these drawings are revised drawings, so the accepted ones are not even included. We deleted the old state and incorporated just the new state with the new drawings. Now, just like the plan annotation, where we automate the annotations in specific senses with some level of smart annotations, we have smart annotations with revision clouds as well. We do our best to try to annotate the revision clouds. And for those that aren't, you have the ability to modify it yourself. So we'll go through, and you can see in specific avenues where the revision clouds are, our smart annotation has automatically annotated it. It understood that the cloud was there and annotated it for you. Annotations are a way of life. In order for the model to really work well, it needs to understand needs a little bit of help in this early stage. Once we get more data and we make our annotation layer more precise, we can do this in the background and feed it directly into the agentic engine. So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna clean these up and get ready for another review. You can see even on some pretty dense drawings with a lot of lines, our smart annotation layer is still able to find revision clouds. This is pretty impressive. And for what it's worth, you can have a new submission many ways. You can have it uh if things get sent back to you from the initial permit review, but more than likely, more than likely, you have made changes in the process of construction. Things always happen during construction. And when things happen during construction, you might have as-built changes that aren't reflected within your drawings. And in those situations, you need to go ahead and update the drawings because this is the permit of record, this is what's going to be on the document control for the city 10 years from time, 20 years from now. Like it's very important that your drawings that they eventually have are the most accurate, and that's why you know, even if you get the permit at the on the first submission before construction, there's a chance that you might have to do a resubmit permit afterwards. Scoped review, right? We have revision clouds. Our agentic engine will focus on these 43 clouded regions, it'll focus on what's in there, right? Plus, there'll be some related building context within it. You know, we'll expand, we'll see kind of what's around this specific clouded region. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead. Now that we got this, we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna run a full project review. Okay, and this will run. This will be a little bit quicker than the past one. We aren't running 113 sheets here. So let's see what comes up. We can see that we have one advisory, okay? And what is it? Well, it's the fact that the walls are not specified to be finished in purple. The architectural floor plans and elevations do not indicate that anything, any walls need to be finished as purple. And this was an actual comment from the reviewer. So we have flagged that as an advisory note uh so that the user realizes okay, I need to put this in because the reviewer asked for it. Okay. Uh, and on that note, you don't need to wait for the reviewer uh comments to provide any sort of specific custom context to this. We actually give the user the ability to add their own project instructions. So you can add here, the walls need to be purple. Flag and advisory finding if they aren't there. Alright. And there you go. And that's the second review. Alright, well, a lot of cool stuff there, Sam. So let's see if you can break it down for us in some questions that I have. And you were mentioning this before we rolled the clip about the annotation and the revision cloud, how the model needs help and it's going to be more precise in the future. But those revision those annotations, that's myself as the user adding it, or the the building department, for example? Great question. So for now, anyone who have access to it, but our use case for now is geared towards the user. Okay. We do have a product roadmap, and I'm um, you know, I'm working with my co-founder in terms of what's next in terms of what sort of features do we want to release as part of the next iteration. So for those whom are not too familiar with the project management and release management capacity from the IT side, here's here's a little like insider scoop, okay? You're gonna have a lot of feedback. User A is gonna want XYZ feature. User B is gonna want ABC feature. Your job as the product manager or as an owner of a tech company is you're gonna compile a list of that. You're gonna calculate based on a couple things, right? The impact, the scale of impact, and the criticality of that. And of course, tech debt, the time to release, all into consideration, right? And ultimately, that's from a technical aspect. Do you have the right capability to deliver that in XYZ amount of time? We call that sprints. Okay? Now, from the CEO and CEO and the revenue standpoint, are these features gonna help me scale and grow revenue? Okay? And from the operational standpoint, do I have the right technical, like you know, training for my staff to support these new features coming out? Right? And are these new features how would that impact the overall user experience and the integration with my product stack? So you've got to take all of that into consideration and you've gotta make choices. You know, you've got you just gotta wait out your options, and then you released it. So high-level product management there, but yes, we definitely took that in consideration and um integration with major um enterprise software and and tools as we as we grow. Right. And of course, as the video showed, it was you know, clip to show, but I've I've seen it, and it takes minutes compared to as what we had mentioned, so many days, months to to get there. Um and talk to us a little bit more about what you're mentioning as well in there. Well you've got the changes in construction, so you're doing the as or the as builds once everything once you're at the tail end of it, and you have to go back so that the building department has the correct uh record of everything that's been done. Um that's just also the same thing. Another iteration that you input into your model and it creates and comes out with the responsive items that need to be revised, and then you revise them, and then the model will say, Okay, you checked it off, and now it seems good, right? That's that's the general idea for for people who want to have this program, right? Yeah, correct. So uh again, we're not just a tool, we we are part of a critical workflow when AI compliance, you know, that intelligence that's gonna expedite and ensure that you cross-reference all the codes available, right? And again, ultimately, the final touches are still gonna be in the hands of the local municipality, right? And that's the final touch where my team and I are working diligently and aggressively, excuse me, aggressively is not the right word, but you know, proactively with with the cities, with local municipalities to do a few things. One, inform and educate them of the solution and how it can really help ease the burden of workload on on some of the human resources and public servants. Number two, what we can collectively do together. So that way, again, the the whole idea is solving problem, a a unified or a common problem or problems for everyone involved, from the builder, the owner, the engineering, and the city. And three, what can we do to integrate this as part of the critical workflow and and help just educate the mass of this solution? Right. To that effect, uh, and in this process where you've gone and you've reached out to the building department, and I know that you know was able to you're gonna be having the meeting here as well with the Palm Beach Building Department. What's some of the feedback that you've received so far in the process from building department and then professionals themselves who who would use this? It's a great tool, right? But everyone's kind of wait and see. Yeah. We we wanna we wanna, you know, just wanna tread carefully. We want to make sure this thing does what it's supposed to do, and you know, so to answer your question, awesome thing, great technology, phenomenal idea. Would love to see a pilot or a proof of concept, right? Right, and couple feedback is you know, how can this help the current um you know, the the current status quo, like the permit runners, the cities? That's the that's the nuance where we're continuing learning and to inform them that this is a tool to help you with your day-to-day roles and responsibilities, right? It it couples with you to expedite that process. Um that's been the feedback. We're just waiting, they're just wanting to see, hey, which city or which municipality would be the first to do this pilot, you know, proof of concept the pilot. Gotcha. Love to learn from that and uh and and collaborate with them and provide additional feedback. Gotcha. And of course, you're based here in in South Florida. For now, you've been focused in here, but it as you've shown in the walkthrough, it's you've got so many different codes that are already built in that people will be able to eventually use this throughout the country. And then who knows beyond that, right? That is correct. Um we want to focus on big markets, and all of the founders, including myself, are based in the East Coast, right? DC, New York, Atlanta, Boston, Atlanta, of course, Miami, are some of the some of the first major markets that we launched, right? Because if we're closed, we have connections and we have a uh we have a we have knowledge, just in the market, right? I live in Florida, my partners live in, he lives in DC, right? We just we just have the connection, understanding the nuances, the local municipality, and that's that's where we want to start. But we are also scaling rapidly. I think we we are in most of the country at the moment, and if possible, hopefully, I mean I'm I'm I'm just thinking like a couple years ahead, right? Maybe the globe, but who knows? But right now, our focus. Because it's going to be the East Coast and then in the US. Terrific. Yep. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and miles two, right? Yes, and you've gone quite a few steps, which is great. How extensive in terms of uh drawing output size have you been able to get so far with the program in terms of you know what what's the largest drawing set or what's the largest building size that you've been able to test with it so far? Yeah, so that's a great question. Um I do have my notes here. I think we part of the efficiency test, we were able to do large commercial of about a thousand pages, okay, which is about what, twenty two, twenty-three PDF formats. Sure. That's in terms of the large sample side that we were able to run from our back end. Very nice. Yep. And what are some of the other fine details or or fun facts that you can tell us about the program that you've that you've enjoyed in this process so far? Oh man, just understanding the nuances, like this is completely something that I never imagined I'd get into, but just have a deeper understanding of how bureaucracy work, right? Yeah, and understanding what it takes to overcome some of the hurdles, and really understand and develop key relationships with folks. I think that's extremely important. And of course, just just the daily grind with my co-founders. Right? We we all just put our heads together, work on this app day and night, you know, right. Let's just see where how far we can take this thing. And hopefully we we're able to take it as far as possible and just come down to you know it what can we build? Right. And can we build something that can actually solve problems for a lot of people? I'm confident we could. And let's see. Awesome. Well that's great. You can build the better mousetrap, and the world will come knocking down to your door, right? And I think this could be the better mousetrap. I would hope so. And again, um, we're continue learning, we're continue developing, and we're always open to feedback. And that's that's also a big takeaway. It's when we first started to now, after several iterations, completely different product than what we had imagined. Well, that's awesome, Sam. So going back a little bit, because again, it was your initial source of inspiration, and you've got this with with your real estate investment. We are the real estate and investment show. What are some of the things that you've seen that are challenges, pitfalls, and then solutions that you've been able to come up with in your investment journey and that you would like to give a recommendation to the audience? Yeah, so you're gonna make a lot of mistakes. I did, and I'm sure I'll make a lot more mistakes, but just don't make the same mistakes. It's better for you to make mistakes early on in your journey and at a smaller scale. Okay, so I want people to focus in on learning the process, the sound fundamentals before they start scaling. Okay. Understanding the process, what it takes to be disciplined, right? All the nuances, all the key players, and all of the potential pitfall or just real estate in general. Learn as much as you can, get the right team involved, get yourself a good accountant, a good lawyer, good property management team, a good real estate agent, because this is not a one-man or one-woman show. This is a team effort. Okay? So focus on the fundamentals, do the homework, do the diligence, scale slowly but surely, because real estate is not a fast money game, it is a long-term game. And that's how you win. You win slowly, steadily, and there will come a point of inflection where okay, I'm ready to grow at an exponential rate or whatever the next rate is. And that's when you should take in consideration what can I do now to really scale, right? So if you think in terms of debt, and this is this is important, okay? Debt is a wonderful thing. Because you need debt as leverage to scale. And I think a lot of people, including myself, early on, were miseducated about debt. It's always been viewed as a bad thing, but if you can leverage it correctly and buy assets, it's a wonderful thing because you need debt to build wealth. Okay. Understanding debt, understanding what it takes to get debt, and how to use it correctly. Okay, because then eventually your next evolution or next journey would be how do I raise capital, how do I partner with X, with O Y and Z to really, really scale? Okay. And that's really what I found has been some of the challenges, some of the learnings during my real estate investment journey per se. Excellent. What's uh did you have a specific uh book or person in mind that people can like gravitate towards if they're in this initial process and they want to start, you know, building up the confidence that they and knowledge about this that you would suggest to people? Oh yeah. Rich poor rich dad, poor dad. That's Robert Kiyosaki. That's a classic. Yep. You gotta read that to understand the difference between assets, liabilities, being an investor, being a business owner, and being an employee. Right? Um modern portfolio theory at a high level. Because that's gonna help you understand how to invest. Learn basic accounting 101. Because as a business owner, it doesn't matter if you're in real estate, engineering, or tech, you just gotta understand your numbers. Right? Just know debit, credit, assets, liability, but you just gotta know that. Um accounting, just find a good accounting book is the rules, and they're all it's all been the same. Um How to Win Fr, you know, uh Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Right. Great read. Right? You just gotta want it. That's literally his first paragraph or first page. You gotta start with a want. That's a great book. How to win friends and influence people. Yep. In the modern age, right? There's been a lot of revision. So read the one with the modern age by Carnegie. Yep. And look up the people who've been successful in the field that you're in and just follow them. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Right? In a way that's that's your digital mentor, right? It's important to have a mentor, a guidance to help you so that way you can learn from their mistakes. Right. Sounds like great advice. Now you had mentioned that um you had met your your co-founders, but also your your mentor through your hobby through paintball. Yeah, so from PermitGuard, we met to a mutual friend, you know, for our love with jujitsu, right? That's when I met Ash back in uh Atlanta, right? And we both came from the tech world. Nice. Um, John, whom I've met playing paintball, because that's something that we love doing. We play every weekend. Great. Right, and Tom, I did the same. I I just met him randomly on a Sunday afternoon playing paintball. Right, and then just that's how we developed a friendship, and that ultimately led to to us having that progression of conversation to hey man, what do you do? And then you just want to learn from one another, and that's how I got to my uh to my journey. Terrific. And I also understand that you uh wrote a book, uh Driven Beyond Purpose, Reasons Within. Do you want to share a little bit about that? How did you find that? That's that is that is impressive. How did you how did you find that? Oh, I do I do I try to do my research for for for our show. Yeah, so I wrote that book um during a very interesting period of my life. Um I'd lost a significant other, and it was it's probably some of the toughest times of my life, probably was the toughest time of my life, and it was more of a self-discovery period of my life life where I want to figure out, hey, what is my purpose? What am I here to do? And instead of going down the rabbit hole of negativity, how can I turn this thing around and use this time or this pain into something positive? So every year, okay, I would take my dog away to a retreat, up in the mountains, the lakes, wherever, for about two weeks and just to re-examine my life and figure out what's working, what's not working. And that's essentially what I did um when I wrote the book. I took my dog, I crossed country the US for four months and would live out of my car. Yes, I have the whole setup, camper, everything, and just see what's out there. And I've met a lot of people from different walks of life in the country, and that just gave me a much deeper appreciation for life, a deeper appreciation for myself, for my situation, and a sense of clarity for what's next. And that's how the book came about. I did, I became the number one seller for a short period of time. Excellent. However, the book is no longer available. I sold out. So if you have a copy of my book, let me know. I would love to sign it for you. That's excellent. That's great, Sam. Thank you for sharing with that. Of course. Now, here's something I ask all the guests on the show. To date, what has been your best investment personally and professionally? Personally and professionally, it's gonna be one single answer. That is myself. Terrific. Yep. I don't know what other guests have told you, but to me, the best investment that I've made and continue making will be in me. I'm glad you uh you asked this question because this morning I made a video to my audience addressing this as well. Coincidentally, it's complete coincident. But I am the common denominator. I am the asset for everything, every venture, personally and personally my whole life. My personal relationships, along with my professional relationships, my business ventures, so on and so forth. Right? And you define a an asset, something that generates additional asset or some sorts of value, why wouldn't you invest in the most important thing in your life, which is yourself, right? Continue learning something new every day, continue developing new relationships every day. So, for example, I'd love to stay in touch with you, Dan, because we met through an amazing person. Shout out to you, Laura. This would not have been possible without you. Yep. Right? Um eat right, exercise right, and just be in that state of mind that, hey, the probability of winning the lottery is what? One out of 350 million? Yep, depending on which one. Whatever, right? Mega million, jackpot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the odds of you winning are very, very small. Mm-hmm. What are the odds of you winning if you bet it on yourself? Because you are one of one. What what are the odds? 100%. Boom. Is that a bet at this point? Nope. It's a proven statement. So mathematically, what are you know, what path should I take? Bet on yourself. So the question is, what are you gonna do? When are you gonna get started? Mm-hmm. The best thing to start something was yesterday. And the next best time is today. It's now, correct. That's awesome. Thanks, Sam. Um now I've asked you a lot of questions, but now you get to ask yourself one. Do you know how that's gonna work? No, I'd love to hear it from you. All right. I believe you found my book. You get a pick a question out of the fishbowl. They're all random questions. Okay. Some of them are deep, some of them are fun. All right. Alright, please read it into the microphone. Alright, so here's my question. What do you think makes a great leader? So what a what a question. So it's a good one. Man, great leaders. I think I mean there are several factors, right? Right. Great leaders to me, or I mean, the person that came to my mind, man, what what a gem. A great leader to me means the last to eat, the first to serve. A great leader is gonna be someone who's gonna push you, it's gonna elevate you, and others around. Right. And most, you know, most importantly, creating new leaders for the next generation. Someone who inspires, someone that's gonna make you take a charge and heads towards your greatness. Um because leadership is you're in a position you can influence, you're in a position that you can change lives and help others. And there's nothing more rewarding than a great leader that makes you feel that you too are also a leader. That's awesome. Right. And here's a follow-up question to this question that just came up to my mind. Okay When do you know when a job is done? It's a tough question. To me, it's when the followers, the people that inspire, stop following you and create more leaders from themselves. Very nice. Right? So it's a branch off. There you go. Because at that point, you know, man, I've learned as much as I can from you. I want to start leading and create more impact for other people. True. Um Why? What about you? What do you think makes a great leader? Um, well, I ask the questions around here, but I'll but I'll but I'll but I'll get I'll I'll indulge you. Um I definitely think that a leader is that somebody who who inspires others to be their best self, as you mentioned. If if it's a leader has to be there, they have to be present, they have to be honest, and they have to instill that loyalty, that desire to achieve a common goal. We look at, for example, and this is slightly off-tangent, but we look at, for example, our political leaders, and there is um a level of distrust which has always existed in one form of another, but I think more so in today's day and age. And that is, you know, it's it it calls into question um the thing of leadership. Uh doesn't matter at what level of government you are, doesn't matter what level of a business you're in. If you're not instilling loyalty and honesty into the practice that you're charged with, then nobody's going to want to follow you. In a day and age where I think that so much of the world and politics is a popularity contest, that's only the first rung of the ladder. You can get into office, but if you're not inspiring people and you're not leading with the truth, then um, well then we know what happened to the Roman Empire. So that's my that's my take on it. And if I could add my spin. Sure. That question made me reflect on my style of leadership. And I I often tell people that I mentor the past and in Perm, and I told them this, okay? If you want to be good, I am not for you. Because that's a table stakes, that's that's the bare minimum. If you want to be great, I am that guy that's gonna take you to greenness. That's because I expect greatness out of you, and you should expect that out of yourself and me as someone who's mentoring you. Right. But if you want to be the absolute best in the world, what you do, that is entirely up to you. Because greenness is expected, but being the best at what you do, that's a choice. Yep. It's a conscious choice that you've got to make and no one else. Yes, indeed. Yeah. Alright. Well, just about to wrap up, but let me ask, do you have a suggestion for a future guest on the real estate and investment show that you could suggest? I do, but if I tell you, you've got to take my advice to the T, okay? Okay. You should interview yourself. I've thought about that. Because come up with questions to ask yourself. Yeah. Very challenging. Okay. Alright? Would you wouldn't you agree? Uh I agree with that, yeah. What's harder than that? Answering those questions honestly. Mm-hmm. Okay. So you should do uh an interview of yourself. I it's it's an interesting concept. Yeah. So I I've thought about doing that, and uh who knows, maybe it'll happen towards the end of the season or maybe in a future season, but uh but that's good. I I do have one guy. Okay, sure. Uh shout out to Tom Cruise, man. You changed my life. You mean more to me than you probably know it, and I appreciate you greatly, man. Tom Cruise Man, that's that's my mentor. Terrific. I love to have him on your podcast, if possible, and vice versa. What a guy. Awesome. Well, thanks. That's a good one. We'll definitely look to adding him to the list. And it's time for the shameless plug, Sam. So we know about Permiguard AI, but what is it else that you're working on right now that everybody ought to know? Where can they follow and find you and learn more about Permiguard and your other uh endeavors that you're working on? Yeah, so permiguard.ai. Um permit guard.ai, pretty straightforward. That's gonna take you to the link to the to the app. Take a look at it, play with it, check it out, and most importantly, love to get your feedback, any feedback, we we'd see that as a gift. Uh where you can find me, you can find me on LinkedIn. That's the professional way, linkedin.com slash in slash samdone, D-O-A-N. And if you want to follow my real estate journey, you can find me on Instagram, Sam Done Official. Terrific. And again, I'll I I will say that I see the potential of Permiguard AI. It's as any new technology, there's always going to be a learning curve, and you know, there's the adoption phase, but I truly can't wait to see how it takes off. It's I'm sure that it's going to be awesome. I see the the solution that it gives for a challenging and time-intensive problem. So I can't wait to hear about the you know the feedback that you're getting from local business businesses, building departments, and everything. And Sam, congratulations again. I think that it's going to be a huge hit, and I'm glad that I was the first person to get an interview about this. This is an honor for me. Yeah, but you uh yeah, man. Also, congratulating to you with your success with building your business along with this podcast. Man, just the same prosperity back, same exchange back to you. Love to see you grow, man. Love to see you succeed. And I'm gonna be rooting for you, man. Appreciate it, Sam. Well, I want to thank you again so much for your time. We're gonna give you one big last round of applause. Thank you for sharing your journey, your experience, and being such a wonderful guest, I Sam. And thank you so much for being here with us. Join me again next time with another amazing interview on the Real Estate and Investment Show with Daniel Clovijo. I'm Daniel Clovijo. Till then, say awesome, everyone, uh, and God bless America.