Serious AI with Chris Duff
August 26, 2026
The SLC Deal Engine is the internal tool Serious Land Capital uses to underwrite parcels, and by late August 2026 it had reached production. This episode is the build log for what came next: putting an entire public launch around it inside a single day, from the offer structure and a side by side proof video through to the sales page, payments and the install flow.
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(Podcast transcript below)
I’ll walk you through exactly how I turned my dream into reality, so further updates on the SLC deal engine which was our land AI underwriting automated project all built within Claude Code here. Previous week I went over a lot of updates on how we handled the build and solve various bugs and so forth to make it much more reliable and efficient and so forth. But once we got it to a place where it was production ready, hey, let’s utilize this firmly within our company and get this out and serve the rest of the industry with what, in our opinion, my opinion specifically, is a tool unlike any other built by technology that honestly didn’t even exist like a month ago and is on the absolute cutting edge for making land underwriting as simple as possible. And so it’s one thing to just say that really quickly, but when it comes down to executing how do you get in front of people, especially for a premium product like this, which again, we’re pricing the initial install at 2500 bucks. Get people past the initial sticker shock and show them, okay, why is it worth their time and money for them to invest in something like this and how do you build up that proof to show that something is actually worthwhile.
And so to me, the number one thing I wanted to convey was showing a manual deal review of mine versus what the SLC deal engine came up with on the exact same deal run in real time, side by side. There isn’t a proof point better than that, especially on a deal that I’ve never run before, we’re coming in blind here and demonstrating our manual expertise in relation to the engine there. So it’s like, okay, I know that is going to be, that’s possible proof point. There’s a whole bunch of other features that we could go into, but people really only care about, hey, does this thing work at a base level. And so how do we even package this and, you know, we have to be aware of attention spans, right? So like, you know, even if I put this together, you know, assuming a deal review could take, you know, somewhere between like 30 to 60 some odd minutes, like no one wants to sit through that whole thing plus like, you know, can be a little bit boring to watch or, you know, quiet, hey, just watching machine, which isn’t going to be speaking at all or me kind of go over various comps. So I’m like, hey, I’m going to need to have, you know, that speed up editing video tool in, but, you know, I still want voiceovers to show certain key features along the way here.
So like, how would I set something like that up? And if we’re trying to build out like a video sales letter to really qualify our prospects and handle a whole bunch of objections along the way so that any conversations that we’re actually having for an install, like all of that’s been addressed and people are just ready to go. So I’m like, okay, how do I handle all this in like a relatively concise package and, you know, not have to put in a whole bunch of time for, you know, video editing and so forth to like it was like a big mental hurdle. And so I’m pushing off this task, even as the excitement came in for, you know, actually producing the, the deal engine is like, yeah, you still have to execute, you still have to get this in front of people, you have to get a website up and so forth. Specific sales page, you know, offer, etc. You can be able to take payments, all of that, all of that requires some type of work. And also just like, okay, how do you orient the video sales letter as well, too? Like we have our steel man marketing package, okay, like come up with all of the various objections that people might have about this.
How do we list these off? Like, how do we even manage our proof point within the video? And, you know, can we follow framing like from Alex or Mozi about, you know, his value equation, which, you know, he has four, four pieces to it. So in the numerator, right, if you can remember your elementary math, you know, if we’re talking about value here, then the numerator, whatever is on the top, you want that as big as possible and then anything in the divisor, whatever it’s being divided by. You want as low as possible, right? So that would equate to the highest value since you’re going to be overweighted in the numerator. So he has two factors up there that you want as much as possible. One is the dream outcome. Like, are you able to show people that they can actually achieve their dreams with this particular product or service that you’re building? My dream within my business that I’ve had for years at this point and really any business that I’d want to work within is like, how do I just keep automating workflows, right? Like everybody talks about, you know, the passive income dream, right? Yeah, you’re just earning, you know, untold sums of money while you sleep and don’t do anything, right?
But that’s all that’s like everybody’s dream outcome. Is that an actual reality when it comes to like the best or the biggest financial goals possible? Yeah, generally not. You’re going to have to do some active here, but, you know, most people are like, okay, how can I just automate, you know, not feel as locked into my business here? And I’ve always felt that as well, too. So in this case, like the dream for a land business, right, I think for most land operators, and I’ve had this confirmed, like I have screenshots of various quotes. I want to remove myself from the day to day of the business, like all I need to do is produce content. So I can earn money by, you know, replicating my brain effectively to handle the, you know, actual operations in the guts of the business. And I can just, you know, produce and share thoughts and try to educate the community. A lot of people resonate with that dream. I’m sure, you know, as I mentioned that, you know, maybe not the content piece necessarily, not everybody wants to do that. But certainly, like the operation side of the business, or maybe it frees you up to do something else that is more engaging for you personally, whether that’s still professionally oriented within that business, or in another direction, or even, you know, personally and so forth, like take your pick, doesn’t matter.
And so for me, like, okay, this tool doesn’t hit that dream outcome. And when I show, hey, like, what is like, what’s actually the core constraint? What’s the core workflow of land business? You know, you have certain leads that come in, okay, you know, we can really break everything down, you have to find leads first, and then you have certain land leads that come in, or maybe you source them on your own, like through on market listings and so forth. You have to be able to review whether the deal is good enough or not, and then potentially pull the trigger funding a property with your own capital or somebody else’s capital and then sell it like that. That’s the business, right? So a huge chunk of that in the middle is being able to review the underlying asset. I mean, I’d argue like that is the most important part of the business and why it’s so hard to succeed in this market because land market and land valuations are complex. They’ve lost their shirts or, you know, gone out of business by not doing that well. And so how can we, you know, take our capability that we’ve built up, you know, over years of, you know, a profitable multimillion dollar track record with, you know, industry leading profit margins and one of the hardest land markets in US history.
Hey, let’s let’s automate all of that, you know, track record that we’ve built up underwriting into a process. And so that outcome where I can just plug in a property, I don’t even need to work on it. It gets, it gets a result spit out for me on the other end. You know, maybe I have to confirm a couple things here. But yeah, compared to the demands on my attention, if I’m doing everything manually or my team’s doing it manually and then have to bring me into review after. This is massive free up right like that. That’s the dream, right? Like if I don’t have to do that, or maybe I can just point it towards leads that are automatically coming in, I get a little sheet that shows me, hey, invest in this and this and this. That’s what I really need to do. I can just move capital around handle the actual wires, you know, produce content right like that, that is the dream that I’m trying to do and try to service the dreams of others within that space so you know trying to maximize that dream outcome. And I have the accuracy where I don’t need to double check it all the time. The other piece is the perceived likelihood of success so it’s like one thing to have that dream. The other is like okay how likely is this going to, you know, realistically,
you know, happen here so that to me was like the whole proof point within the video is like okay hey here’s my manual review which again is backed by a multimillion dollar profitable track record, versus what the SLC deal engine spits out. It’s like effectively a match or if the deal engine even outperforms my manual review, then hey, that is pretty darn likely. If not, you know, the best proof possible that it’s handling that part of the deal engine. But again, like if I was just, you know, random person hadn’t been in the land industry for years had no track record. And if I went through the same exercise like it wouldn’t hold the same weight right it’s like how can I really trust this guy’s manual read in the first place, you know, let alone what he built out of the deal engine even if it does match his read here so like you need the receipts in order to have that perceived less, you know, be a larger number in this value equation, so to speak, to combine that with that dream outcome so you know, that’s what I was trying to match up with that. And then on the divisor okay the parts that I want to minimize as much as possible.
So, one being okay like what’s the length of time to actually get results here and I might be butchering like some of the actual phrases here you know just look up or mostly how you equation but this is effectively it right. So, you know, is it going to take a, you know, days to achieve a result here is going to take weeks, months, years potentially. For a period of time as possible like speed is king for, you know, converting any, any sales or getting, you know, people to want to buy your product I mean that’s that’s been like a whole key concept within the land industry right is like, how are you able to find off market deals is because you cannot offer speed of capital, you know, it’s become less of a reliable play over the past few years now and especially like higher price properties but nevertheless like that’s that’s never going to go away because you know speed is king in any market here versus you know how long might it take for you know seller to actually move their property on the market and so forth like we take that risk as the buyer right so in the case of the SLC deal engine.
The time to actually get this thing working is the way that I set up the whole installs like okay. You’re seeing the proof points here that it works on deals that I’ve done here hey we set up a boutique install you get everything set up you don’t have to worry about getting confused you know what your technical expertise need to be like, I will take care of it for you, you know hand holding you through the entire process and by the way we’re going to run a deal through this to ensure that it is all working smoothly according to your expectations, and that you don’t have any remaining open questions in order to get your first result off the ground so hey you could sign up for this today we could set up a call get this thing installed and you are off to the races getting automation of your entire land lead in flow handled. The day of if you wanted so trying to reduce that time as much as possible to get real results here, and then the extra piece that you want to minimize as much as possible is also like the effort and the sacrifice related to achieving that result. The other one where, you know, and this is a piece that I struggled with for, you know, arguably more than anything else is like how you know to do land underwriting properly even when you’re using technology was just how much back and forth you’d have to go with
providing certain pieces of information and you know do you have to connect it to, or you know have to go back and forth like certain redfin and zilla listings you have to provide some like initial diligence prior in order to get like the best results possible and you know as the consumer expectations have just continue to evolve I think I mentioned this last week and my own as well too is just like everybody wants to simple the easy answer for this and so critical to building this version of the deal engine is like, what is the absolute minimum that is required to get a get this automated service working on the property with as little input as necessary from the user behind the screen something that they could just walk away and was able to get it down to where all you need is the city the state and county. That’s it. Yeah, in fact, you could even build in more automations where again it’s like connected to your serum your lead flow and so forth and just automatically processing doesn’t even need you. So you can just come back at the end of the day see what the actual results are. And be able to determine okay what whether anything is worth purchasing or not so you know, even that initial input, you could theoretically eliminate that and that wouldn’t be that hard to set up either for this particular project so like almost
no time needed on behalf of the user in order to get the results that you’re looking for so trying to minimize that as much as possible so really trying to nail that value equation. You have all those pieces. It’s like okay how do I weave this in concisely into this video sales letter and any other place that it might be, you know, sharing this particular product toward and so this I worked, you know, with Claude Code back and forth. So here’s our arguments here’s the value equation. Here’s a, you know, the game plan as far as setting up the website and all that like let’s let’s create, you know, the pathway in order to get this done we want to like model what hormones and so forth. So I was able to come up with, okay, here’s the pieces of how we’re going to handle the sales letter here like the initial hey here’s kind of the intro, what we’re going to get into right away this is all handled within like two or three minutes. Then okay you got to shoot like the entire side by side proof here like that was the most time consuming obviously right so I had to do like a full loom video. My Deal Engine right next to me running a split screen manual review.
And then, you know, the follow up after that of like, you know, additional kind of objection handling and a restating parts of the value equation and then hey here’s the call to action plus all like the guaranteed language where it’s like hey you just saw this in action it worked. This is the first demo that I even tried. And where it was a guarantee of like hey, show up for the install call. And if it doesn’t work like exactly like you just saw in this video here, you don’t pay anything you get full refund, but move on. Making it as the risks as possible, plus a secondary guarantee of like hey over the first three deals that you don’t do or that you do over this like if it doesn’t personally save you over half the time, you or your team would put into reviewing land deals like that will be refunded as well too. And again, by the way, like I will personally install all of this we will run the first deal together to ensure that it’s all working to your liking here. So, you know, trying to ease the purchase threshold is as much as possible again not never to trick anybody but trying to be the best value add possible and to make it as much of a no brainer like as much as, you know, Grand Slam offer to use
framing is well here to like 100 million dollar offer strategy that he wrote about a number of years ago. And then hey here’s the call to action and you know anticipating this is going to be on a separate landing page and click this link and you know you can sign up for a call accordingly. So I recorded all of that and but then it was also like, okay, you know, that this is that part of the inertia or hey what type of editing tools am I going to have to do to like speed up the video in certain places like I would have loved to have, you know, certain things potentially like showing certain proof points are making things more clear, while people are watching the video and I would love to have this like, well, I’ll get into that but also like, you know, timers that are attached to video on both the manual read as well as the SLC deal engine. I threw that all in Claude Code I’m like, you know, I have all the Riverside and, you know, other potential other tools here I’m not sure what’s on my Mac you know I have iMovie all that type of stuff is there anything that we might be able to use that could accomplish all of this.
And again, like just presenting that framing for it to consider like these tools just continue to blow me away week over week, and Claude Code is like hey yeah you know your Mac actually has all these tools. It’s like it’s FFmpeg I want to say which is like through the Homebrew application on the Mac but yeah I can handle speeding up certain frames in order to do this and by the way it has the full transcript for the entire talk here and it’ll be able to recognize okay which pieces are going to be the most relevant to slow down for the user to point out more specifically about the deal engine, and then be able to speed up more, you know, past the points again kind of like constrain the total sales letter but make sure like the key points are conveyed as carefully as possible, and it was able to do all of this. There were a couple of hiccups on the first cut of it but as I’m watching it you know taking, you know, close to an hour and a half total footage down to roughly 20 minutes or so. Then I went back with some knits hey here fix this that this cut off my voice a little bit more here let’s expand that out.
You know, burner timers at the top and like some of the captions at the bottom like it looked it fades into the framing too much like hey can you just pull in our Serious Land Capital branding that you have through Claude Design and switch up the captions and the and the timers at the top to fit that oh yeah no problem and it’s able to pull in Claude Design and you know make some of these other adjustments and so like within two. Well within one edit session after that it was able to handle all of that like absolutely remarkable like I’ve built video sales letters in the past before that you know 10 years ago like this took like a couple weeks to do. Just absolutely crazy like to set up you know the whole transcript and write it all out personally and then have to edit it like even a year ago if I would have tried to you know. Let’s say hire somebody out you know professional who would do this all the time like all these speed ups and you know branded title cards and all that type of stuff would take at least a few days plus like I mean for a cost at least a grand probably more than that to do you know 90 minutes of footage down to like 20 ish.
Like no question to do that and I mean you can check you can check out the video for yourself here like look at Serious Land Capital slash install. It’ll show you exactly what it was able to produce again with my like fine eye detail to you know check this out of course. Just absolutely remarkable how many tools it has on hand in order to craft this as long as you know how to direct the right request for what you want to see and of course like it built out that website as well according to our branded direction you know hey build out in FTP direct install on the site so you don’t have to work through WordPress or anything just make it easier. You just drag and drop this into a certain folder boom you’re off to the races you can only link is in there it’s all connected to stripe account like all of that click by click instructions on how to set this up so all of a sudden I could handle you know the public side of a launch for a new product like a premium product within a day. Whereas again like normally this would be such a high inertia item to work through you know tremendous amounts of effort like handling just a lot of nasty little details.
You know especially like time lapse video editing and so forth to like not a lot of people are going to want to invest time into that skill or even finding somebody who would do that. And Claude Code is able to just handle all of that again just truly remarkable and again like building the script for all of the value equation of course like that has to come through my ingenuity my expertise as far as how we should position something. What actually determines value for the user like it requires human attention towards that like I have to be my own consumer and view it from. You know the stance of a in end user like it given like I’m my number one own customer here so like it is a bit easier to do this from that standpoint and then be able to go deliver and then you know I had a backlog of folks who were already looking for updates here already been engaged in some more serious conversations and you know early feedback and excitement here and this is exactly what I was hoping is just like okay finally we’ve created a product that actually fits the needs of the industry here made it simply enough.
And you know hits all four elements of that value equation to make a truly grand slam offer you know maybe I eat my words over time and this becomes like you know not as much of a hit as I might have. Yeah, initially thought or what the initial feedback is getting to you but like I can’t always control like no one can ultimately control like pure outcomes of the market. You can only control the efforts you put into your day to day and keep learning and adjusting over time here but I know that I can always take it home with me that you know two plus years of working on this particular product or many iterations of like it finally cracked it to like what that initial dream was looking like so even if it just solves my own dream. That’s fine. I think it’s going to be a lot more than that because you know most people dream of the same thing. It’s just you know how many people actually you know act on what’s required to achieve those dreams like that. That’s the ultimate difference there. But we’re all pretty similar as far as far as we want. So hopefully that this was really interesting to all behind the scenes and again all these tools are at your fingertips as well you can create anything you absolutely want.
And I am living proof of that week over week here. So again if you’re ever looking for funding serious land dot capital you can check out the SLC deal engine and serious land dot capital slash install check out that video me racing my own SLC deal engine seeing what the result was see that proof for yourself. And if it’s interesting for you I would love to set up a call and get that again no risk install set up on your machine and like for your own business if you’re interested in getting you know full AI implementation across workflows. For whatever you’re working on like this is what we specialize in like hey here’s the proof point of what we did with the SLC deal engine. This is all businesses are now like how do you automate these workflows with these incredible tools in front of us. For our services in a more boutique setting to tackle your business specifically so that is that serious land capital slash AI so multiple different options depending on where you’re at in your business journey here subscribe and share everybody looking forward to next time take care.
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