Best software and web applications for flippers?

Question

What are the most useful software applications or web applications you've used in the course of your business?

They could range from applications for marketing, purchasing, planning, controlling inventory, tracking different aspects of the business, etc.

I'm currently sold on using QuickBooks and Docusign, and I'm considering using Mail Chimp for email marketing.

What applications have you found to be most useful?

Account Closed · Answer

I develop all my own software. Search BLPREI on youtube for an example and my software does much more than what you asked for.

Mailchimp is useless because Mailchimp requires that your email list has only opted-in email addresses. So, you cannot use mailchimp to send tens of thousands of emails.  Even if you can get email to send your email list that is not opted-in you have to pay a hefty price and working with mailchimp is time-consuming and more cumbersome than sending your email with your own software Atomic Mail Sender.

The best place to get a list of foreclosures is auction.com and this is in the youtube video.

The best place to get email lists is datazapp.com, but there is no good foreclosure list you can buy from any source for foreclosures with the exception of auction.com (that is free) because 95% of all the pre-foreclosures on other lists are cancelled. That means 95% of your time, cost and effort is 100% waste.  Auction.com gives you a list of pre-foreclosures that have an actual auction date and even 90% of those get cancelled before and on the day of the auction, but, at least, you have a better chance.

For sending tens of thousands of emails every month for free, I use Atomic Mail Sender. I think the software costs about $79. Combined with my own software, I send 4,000 emails every morning between 6 am and 7 am and it does not cost me a penny with the exception of purchasing the email lists.

At first, about 25% of the email lists I purchased had had email addresses. I purchased 150,00 email addresses. That means about 35,000 email addresses were rejected and returned. So, I paid girls in the Philippines 3 cents per email address to remove the bad email addresses from my database. Now, when I send 150,000 emails I may have only 10 or 15 rejected.

Quickbooks sucks and I run several businesses with software I developed, myself. Someday, I will post a video showing my bookkeeping system that is so simple it can be set up in less than 1 minute and so accurate my records are never off by one penny. But, I've been really lazy about posting it.

Tim H. · Answer

@Devin Bost I messed with 6-8 CRMs before I settled on FollowUpBoss. It’s the shit.

Kuba F. · Answer

Really depends on how much volume you're doing and where your problems are.  A lot of times people focus  on finding software to solve aspirational problems, instead of the ones that they actually have.

For example I watch people focus on having the best project management process, while in the meantime the low volume of deals that they're doing means that their business is dying.

In my opinion, there are really only 2 problems that most people should focus on for their business to be successful: leads and financing.

If you have enough leads, then you're going to run out of financing and so you should be going out there networking and pitching your deals to get deals funded, and if you have enough financing then you probably haven't filled your lead pipeline enough to take advantage of it.

So your software should at least help you with those 2 problems.

Mailchimp definitely falls into those categories, arguably Quickbooks and Docusign do as well.

You'll certainly need a source of leads be it a website and a paid marketing strategy or lists of leads, a CRM to manage all of them, some way to communicate with your leads, data supporting your deal, and some way to pitch hard or private money.