PMF. Product market fit. A term I wish I had thought about months before I filed my LLC.
When I started AutomateRE with my cofounder, we had a vision and we saw a gap in the market. Real estate agents and brokerages deal with a ton of manual tasks that could be automated with AI. That way agents could spend their time on fee-generating work and let AI handle the rest. We had a website, a logo, a handful of automations. We had a name. We had momentum.
We did not have customers.
What we had instead were a lot of conversations that ended with "this is really cool." A few that ended with "I'd love to see a demo." Zero that ended with a check. I learned later that "this is cool" is not a buying signal. Pain is. We were selling a vitamin in a market full of people looking for a painkiller.
The thing we missed: real estate agents are not losing deals because they are invisible on ChatGPT. They are losing deals because the buyer ghosted them, the deal fell out of escrow, the listing went stale. AI visibility was solving a problem nobody was actively bleeding from. We had built something interesting. Interesting does not pay rent.
The pivot
So I stopped building and started talking to people. Not pitching. Just listening.
The pattern showed up fast. The people who lit up when I described what I was working on were not real estate agents. They were the people I used to sit next to. PE analysts. Family office deal teams. Fund managers. People drowning in CIMs and rent rolls and broker emails who had spent their last weekend rebuilding the same Excel model they had built ten times that quarter.
I speak that language because I have lived it. I built CIMs at TD Cowen covering Payments and FinTech. I sat through IC meetings. I have an MS in Real Estate from Florida and ran investment underwriting through grad school. When I pitch a family office now, I am not explaining their problem to them. I am describing their Tuesday.
That changes everything about a sales conversation. The prospect stops nodding politely and starts leaning forward. Stops thinking about whether they understand what you are selling and starts thinking about whether you can ship it on the timeline they need it.
The shortcut to PMF, in my experience: sell to the people you understand at a cellular level. The people whose pain you have personally felt. Your tribe.
The build
I rebuilt the company around that ICP. Renamed it Antonine. Stripped the real estate agent positioning. Started showing up where investment professionals actually are.
The product followed the customer. DealFilter screens inbound deal flow. Diligence handles underwriting. The Vault stores everything your firm has ever decided in a structured graph instead of letting it leak into inboxes and DMS folders. The Assistant lets your team query that graph in natural language.
None of that is what AutomateRE was. AutomateRE was a marketing automation tool with a real estate skin. Antonine is investment management infrastructure. The pivot was not a pivot to a new feature. It was a pivot to a different company.
What I would tell my eight-months-ago self
Two things.
The first is that "talk to your customers" is real and you have to actually do it. Not a survey. Not a Calendly link with a 15-minute slot. Sit across from them, ask what they did this week, watch where they get frustrated. The answer to what to build is in the third question, not the first.
The second is that being early is not a substitute for being right. I was early to AI in real estate. Being early did not save me from being wrong about the buyer. The market gives you no credit for being eight months ahead of a thing nobody wants to buy.
Antonine is the company I should have started in the first place. The work is harder, the customers are sharper, the standard is higher. That is exactly what makes it the right thing to be building.
What is next
We are picking the next ten investment firms to build with. The platform is live. The Palantir Fellowship runs through June. The conviction is the same as it was the day I rebranded.
Lean investment teams are massively underserved by AI. The firm that ships the right infrastructure first compounds on every firm that does not. We are that infrastructure.
If you run a lean deal team and want to see it, my email is at the bottom of the page.
Zach