How NeuralState began: a team, a lab and too many spreadsheets

Every year, each agent on our team sat down for 4-1-1 goal setting. Every week after that, they sent us their numbers, and the numbers went into a spreadsheet. Each agent had their own spreadsheet, kept up by hand, with its own charts and graphs. When we had time, we'd sit down with an agent and go through it: you're on track here, you're off track there, and here's what your conversion ratios are telling you.

The weak spot was "when we had time". As the team grew, the spreadsheets took more of our time and the conversations got fewer. Eventually it was too much, so Bill wrote a program to do it. That program became BILL Machine, and the company that grew out of it is NeuralState.

It started with a team

We started The Olson Group in 2017 because we wanted to build a better kind of team and a fairer way to run the business. From day one the mission was to make agents stronger, and every decision got the same test: does this make the agent more profitable, more productive and more professional? If the answer was yes to all three, it was a good bet it would work out.

Inside the team we had Olson Labs, which was our R&D shop. Mostly it existed to scratch Bill's itch, because he's a software guy who ended up in real estate, and he couldn't watch a manual process for long without wanting to automate it. The systems and software the team runs on came out of Olson Labs.

Built because we needed it

BILL Machine wasn't a product idea that went looking for customers. It was built because our team needed it and nothing we could buy did the job. That's been true of most of what we've built. We see something on the team that's slow, clumsy or getting in the way of a conversation with an agent, and we work out how to do it better.

The Olson Group still runs on BILL Machine, so every feature gets tried on real deals before anyone else sees it. If something doesn't help our own agents, we find out quickly, and so does Bill, because he sits with them.

Reticle came from the same itch

Reticle started with a question Bill figured any tool should be able to answer: what's the median sales price today? None of them could. Getting the answer meant exporting data from the MLS, dropping it into another Excel spreadsheet (yes, another one) and running reports until the statistics the team needed came out the other end.

That matters every time a client asks how the market is doing. You can't answer them with numbers from last month that are already three weeks old. So Bill worked out a way to connect to the MLS, pull the actual MLS data and write a program that shows real-time stats on a map. That program is where Reticle came from: a better way to measure the market.

Why NeuralState

We love real estate agents, and NeuralState carries the same test we've always used on the team. We want to make agents better, and we can have the biggest impact through software.

You've probably noticed that agents don't have a shortage of software. Your inbox is full of tool pitches and lead gen programs, and now a wave of AI products that promise to change everything. We don't think AI belongs in front of the client. Buyers and sellers hire an agent, and they want to work with that agent, not a chatbot using the agent's name. Where AI helps is behind the agent: doing the tracking, the math and the busywork so you can spend your time on clients.

Bill puts it like this:

Software should show up when you need to solve a problem, then disappear into the background when you don't need it anymore.

Bill Nelson, co-founder and CEO

What you'll find here

This space is where we'll write about our products, and also about ideas we're kicking around, things we've learned on the team and where the products end up taking us. If you're an agent or broker, an investor looking at where we're headed, or an MLS deciding what belongs in your catalogue, this is the best place to see how we think. If you want to talk sooner, write to us at hello@neuralstate.ai.