Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. And in this interview my goal is to figure out how to build a profitable community. In fact, how to build a community at all? It’s one of the hardest things to do online, it feels like. And to figure out how to do it I’ve got one of the original Mixergy fans. The guy who’s got over 290,000 members in his community. He’s been building this community for years.
I know because over five years ago he sent me an email asking to be interviewed here and, for some reason, we didn’t make it happen. His community is free, but members can pay to upgrade. He’s a great person for me to learn from. His name is Joshua Dorkin. He is the founder of biggerpockets.com, which helps people learn how to invest in real estate. He also runs a podcast, which allows anyone to learn how to invest in real estate and to hear from those people who are experts at it.
This interview was sponsored by HostGator. If you have an idea for maybe creating your own community or maybe creating a site much like Mixergy or anything else, I want you to go to HostGator and sign up. Later on, I’ll tell you about all the advantages, but for now I’ll tell you if you go to HostGator.com/Mixergy they will give you 30% off your hosting bill. Huge difference. But first, I’ve got to welcome Joshua. Good to have you on here.
Joshua: It’s great to be here, finally.
Andrew: Tell the truth. Did you hold a grudge? Because I went back to look at my emails and I saw emails and emails and tweets from you five years ago and then nothing. And I feel like you said . . . Well, what did you say after that?
Joshua: I think I actually have my brother reach out to you on my behalf. If you go through email you might even find those. But no, I like the show it was great and said, “Let’s see if we can do something about it,” before like podcast were the coolest thing around and I think I was your number one fan at that point.
Andrew: I appreciate it.
Joshua: Yeah, yeah. Listen, I’m excited, it’s great to be here and love the show and you’re doing great things so I’m honored.
Andrew: You know what, I’m such a jerk. Not because I responded to you. But because obviously for five years you’ve been doing this more for 10 years now roughly, right?
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: Your passion, your love, the thing that you’re most excited about is the size in action in your community. I didn’t take your word for it. I started digging around to see, are people really posting? And, sure enough, they’re posting right this second. Two minutes ago someone posted. Two minutes, three minutes ago. Actually, multiple people posted two minutes ago. Multiple people three minutes ago. It’s just very, very active. But can you make money from all this?
Joshua: Yeah, yeah, of course, absolutely. We do okay, we do okay. We make money. I support an amazing staff of folks who help run the community and the various other things that our platform provides. But absolutely, yeah, you can definitely make money.
Andrew: The forum is not on Facebook; it’s on your own site, biggerpockets.com. What’s it built on?
Joshua: We built the site our self.
Andrew: You built your own forum software?
Joshua: Yes, sir.
Andrew: Wow.
Joshua: Why? That’s a stupid thing to do, yes.
Andrew: Why did you do that?
Joshua: I’m an idiot.
Andrew: No, why?
Joshua: Probably wasn’t the smartest thing. But when I started the site, I built it on phpBB. It was this open source forum software and it was great, but I wanted to modify it and do all these hacks. And there were little plugins that you can kind of use back in the day. At the end of the day, I just wanted something that look and felt different that operated the way that I wanted to operate. And I don’t know. I think I probably was fairly stupid and wasted money building something I need to build.
Andrew: And we’ll talk about some of the waste of money that you had to go through as you built this. But let me ask you this, I told you before we started that, I think I need to create a community for my members because I’ve been getting a request for a community just about every day for years. And I’ve been scared of doing. So I started off before we recorded saying to you that I want to learn from you because I’d like to figure out how to build my own community. And do you remember the warning you gave me?
Joshua: Yeah, don’t do it.
Andrew: Why not? Why do you say not?
Joshua: It requires a lot. It requires a lot. Yeah. I probably should have stopped multiple times through the years. I probably should shut the thing down, just because I became obsessed. I became completely attached to this thing. And I was slaving away for countless hours. You know, community never sleeps, so you’ve got this place where people come together 24 hours a day for good and for bad. And if you’re not on top of it and the bad comes out and reigns, well, you’re going to lose everybody.
Andrew: Give me an example of a bad. What’s something that’s going to happen if we don’t listen to the rest of this interview and decide to go off half-cocked and create our own community? What’s one thing that happened to you when you did that?
Joshua: You know whether it’s spammers who come on your site and start posting garbage. No matter how much, how many firewalls, how many tools you used to kind of stop bad people from joining, they’re still going to join and they’ll going to post crap. And if you let that stuff stay there, it becomes an instant turnoff to anybody that’s looking at your community.
I’m sure you’ve done it yourself. You go to a site that you think it’s going to be awesome and all of the sudden you see a bunch of garbage and you’re like, “Oh, this community is dead,” or, “These guys don’t police it,” and you move on to next one. So being on top of the garbage and setting rules and guidelines that you’re going to allow people to participate in and enforcing them is hard. It’s hard to tell people, “No, you can’t do that.” And we’re really strict in what we do and the reason that we are is because I think it builds a stronger community.
Andrew: Okay. Before we get into the strictness of it. I want to be a little inspired here because if all I hear is how tough it is, I’m not going to be able to listen to the rest of it. I’m just going to be worried or thinking about all the other things that I should do instead of a community. So give me on a business level, not like the wishy-washy personal everything is good when people love you level. But on a business level, what’s the best part of having a community?
Joshua: The best part of having a community is, I think, some people would say influence. You become an influential person by virtue of being the head of a large and powerful, so to speak, community. I could speak to people, right? I could say something and get . . . I know that I’ve got a bigger audience of people who are there and I can dictate actions, so to speak.
Andrew: What’s an example of an action that you are able to dictate?
Joshua: An example might be, “Hey, we think this is for you.” You’ve got your sponsors, right? “Hey, these guys are fantastic. Check them out.” Obviously, there’s revenue for you. The sponsor wins because they get promoted by you. And there’s that sense of trust to your audience.
Andrew: What about you? The fact that you just launched a podcast and because you have this community of people who are ready to be your early listeners it starts to take off. Does that help?
Joshua: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. If I want to build a product, the odds of me getting an audience to that product are a lot better than somebody who doesn’t have a big community. So having the community allowed me to launch the podcast. We’ve got a publishing arm. We’ve got three of the top 10, 20 books on Amazon for real estate probably because we have a big community. And so that allows us to build things, sell things, or even just kind of have the power to kind of go and deal with influential people and potentially influence what they do and how they do things.
Andrew: All right. So here’s what I want to do in this conversation. I want to dissect how you got here. Then, I want to get some tips from you about how I or anyone else can build a community. And, specifically, talk a little bit about what to charge for and how you’re able to charge. And then, at some point, run an ad in there.
Joshua: Okay.
Andrew: How’s that? Okay. So you actually got into real estate because your brother, the one who apparently might have had tweeted at me, said what to you about real estate?
Joshua: He had bought some property and he came to me and said, “Josh, I know you got some cash sitting on the side, you should do this.” And I said, “Yeah, okay, sure. I’m a smart guy let me buy some property thousands of miles away with no experience whatsoever. Why not?” And I did it. And it was really stupid of me. Listen, real estate is hands down one of the best investment vehicles there is. That said, you don’t just dive in without knowing these things.
Andrew: What’s the biggest mistake that you made? Because everyone who gets into real estate and tries to get their brother into real estate will often say things like, “They’re not making enough of it. I mean, they’re not going to make more land on the planet, right?”
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: Everyone else is getting rich, it’s the most leverage you can get, etc. So what’s the mistake that you made considering all those positive things that we keep hearing?
Joshua: Well, it’s not understanding the ins and outs of the various niches and strategies that exist within real estate. I became a landlord, but I didn’t know how to be a landlord. I assumed I could just wing it, not realizing . . .
Andrew: So what’s the mistake that you made when you winged it?
Joshua: Hired a property manager without knowing how to vet a property manager.
Andrew: And what did that property manager do?
Joshua: They mismanaged my property.
Andrew: Mismanaged. So what does that mean? Didn’t clean up?
Joshua: Put in bad tenants. I didn’t know how to vet tenants, so I got a management company who is supposed to put in tenants. They put in bad tenants. The tenants who they shouldn’t put into the property. The tenants don’t pay me. I lose money. I’m paying a mortgage. Landlords are horrible people. They’re greedy, rich, horrible people according to renters. But listen, renters, if you’re not paying us money we’re out of business. So we need you to actually survive.
Andrew: I see. And so, you had bad tenants in there. You had a management company that didn’t handle things right. As a result, did you lose money on this property?
Joshua: Oh, I’ve lost lots of money in real estate. Yeah.
Andrew: Okay.
Joshua: At the end of the day, I learned that you need to be prepared. You need to know how to analyze deals. You need to understand. Depending on what you get into. Flipping houses is really cool and sexy on TV. But the average guy who watches a flipped show goes out and flips a house and loses their shirt.
And the reason they lose their shirt is because on TV they tell you, “The cost of the house is $50,000 and you spend $50,000 in materials and you sell it for $110,000, you make $10,000. Congratulations, you’re successful.”
And then they leave out all the actual numbers like the time value of money, holding costs, and other things. And then, all of the sudden, you’re bleeding. And so real estate, it’s not hard, but you got to do the homework and you have to understand what’s involved and I didn’t.
Andrew: All right. So you went online and you started looking around to see who could you learn from. And what happens when you start researching anything about real estate online is the scam artists who were really good at this SEO, really good at buying ads, and really good at making themselves known are the ones who come up at the top of anyone’s search. And so you decided to do what when you saw all those scam artists online?
Joshua: Yeah, as I’d like to say, I’ve got a finely tuned BS meter. And I wasn’t willing to spend money on somebody who I just didn’t trust. And so I didn’t feel like there was anything reputable. There wasn’t really a solid place for me to go and ask questions, or just to hang out, or just to go and learn. So I selfishly created Bigger Pockets as a place for me to go to get answers for myself. So I created an echo chamber for myself, a form of one, and we’re off to the races.
Andrew: This is, what, 2003?
Joshua: This was 2004.
Andrew: 2004. So I’m looking at early versions of the site.
Joshua: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: The early version of the site had Learning Center where I can learn about drip, stock clubs, brokerage firms, etc. Had Tool Center, which has many links that aren’t ready yet. I guess you just put up a bunch of things that . . .
Joshua: Well, you’re on archive man. More of that stuff is dead anyway.
Andrew: I know, but I think it gives me a good indication of where you were and where you wanted to be. So for example, if I look at the International Market Center, only Africa is highlighted because you haven’t at that point built out Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. But I can see that that’s your plan. You were going to build towards that. What I don’t see at that point is a forum. It seems like you launched at first with just a set of links and content. Am I right?
Joshua: I think the archive maybe off a little bit. The forum was launched and I launched a couple of directories. And then what I did was I was like, “Hey, I don’t know what I’m doing here. Let me find some content because I think that might attract people.” So I went out to people who were writing content that I thought knew what they’re talking about and I asked them if I could republish their content. Again, this is pre-Facebook, pre-MySpace. This is a long time ago. We didn’t know what we’re doing. I was just playing around. And so we got some cool content.
And then I went out and I was hanging out on other forums, non real estate related, WebmasterWorld, WebProWorld maybe. I don’t remember. DigitalPoint, I think, was one of them. And I was just chitchatting with people and then I’d link to a real estate article in my signature where I’d have links to different parts of the site in the sig. And, little by little, people would kind of drip in, ask questions. And maybe I knew the answer to that, so I’d answer it.
Andrew: I get that. But I do see that there was one period there where BiggerPockets tagline was, “The entertainment pro’s home online.” It was acting resources for actors and actresses. Right?
Joshua: Yes, sir.
Andrew: And then, within months, it became “BiggerPockets: real estate investing for you.” So at first, you were looking for business idea. Am I right?
Joshua: It was in the entertainment business prior to the real estate business. And I go all the way back to ‘94 when I was a freshman in college. I started building websites for fun and to make some money. And so when I was in the entertainment business, I thought there was in need for some kind of entertainment related platform, decided to play around with it.
And then, when I got into real estate, I was like, “Oh, there’s really a need here.” The entertainment stuff, I’m out of that space. I don’t care about that. My passions aren’t there. I need help in real estate. The name worked BiggerPockets, for crying out loud. It works way better for real estate than it does for entertainment.
Andrew: Oh, yeah.
Joshua: And it was off to the races.
Andrew: I see. And I see the similarity not only in the design, but also in the approach. There was content on both. There was an actors’ message board when you were doing the site towards actors. And then you switched to a real estate brokers message board. So now, I get a sense of where the thinking and the idea came from. It seems like, and tell me if I’m wrong, Joshua, you were doing what a lot of entrepreneurs are doing. You are saying, “Where is the business here?” And just exploring a couple of different ideas, until you found the one that you got excited about.
Joshua: I would say maybe, but not really. So I wasn’t looking for a business. I mean, this was not designed to be a business at all. From the very beginning, I was teaching high school. This was literally like, “Hey, I need a place where I can go and get help.” And there was no profit motive from the beginning. Really, “I need help” communities are good at that. At some point, I slapped on some Google ads and started to make a couple of bucks. It took a while before I really said, “This thing can actually become a viable business.”
Andrew: Okay. All right. So you got your forum. I see where you got your early users. You’re saying you went to other forums, you commented, and your sig file had a link back to your site, and you’re getting people going. One of the hardest things about a forum is getting the initial users to actually go in there and start talking. I’m looking at one of your forums here from December 2007, a section on negotiation. There’s not a single person who commented in there.
That would be my big fear of launching a community. What’s one thing that you did in the early days back before you had hundreds of thousands of people? What did you do to spark a conversation when you had dozens of people?
Joshua: Begged.
Andrew: How did you do that?
Joshua: No, I mean I would find . . . A lot of stuff went unanswered. If I could answer something I would go and do a research and say, “Hey, here’s what I looked up. Here’s what I found. Hopefully someone else can jump on.” I would talk to the people that I knew, the limited number of people that knew. You start with zero, you kind of quickly move up to a few. Especially in the early days you know who’s an expert on what. You know everybody else on the platform at that point. I know John is great at X. So anytime something comes up on X, I’ll personally send an email to John and say, “Hey, John, there’s nothing here on X. Can you jump in?” It takes a lot of work to do that.
And to this day, we have 1,800 – 2,000 posts a day on the community. And now the worry is, “Hey, is something going to slip through?” We know almost everything is going to be answered, but we don’t want an individual to have a question. We don’t want to fall to the cracks because there are enough bodies on the platform to answer anything and everything.
Andrew: I see. So in the early days it was you doing the research to make sure everyone got their answer. And then, it evolved to you figuring out who else on the platform would know the answer and going and asking them to participate.
Joshua: Yep.
Andrew: How would you keep track of who knew what?
Joshua: That’s what I did.
Andrew: That’s what you did. But did you have like a spreadsheet or something? Am I getting too anal about the process? But I’d like to know how you keep track of that because that’s a pretty complex system for me.
Joshua: I’ll meet somebody on the street, and three seconds after I meet them I won’t know their name. I’ll see somebody. I’ll see their face and I’ll never forget it. So for me, once I started doing this, it just kind of became by attachment. So I would see so and so, and I would associate XY with so and so, and then that was it. So for me, there was never a spreadsheet. It was just, “Hey, I know so and so is great at this. So I’m going to hit them up whenever something comes.” And then, little by little, it kind of takes a life of its own and it starts to grow.
Andrew: I remembered Joel Spolsky of Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange. He came on here and one of the things I learned from him was it’s not necessarily about the responses, though it’s important that everyone gets a response. What gets a conversation going are the questions, right? The people who come in there asking for something that allows the others to respond to. What did you do to get that going?
Joshua: I sparked it. I asked a lot of questions.
Andrew: You did.
Joshua: Yeah, definitely. I asked questions that I wanted to know about. And then I would ask questions that I might already know, just to kind of spark a conversation. The cool thing about a community when it really starts to come together is any people who just want to help people out. Innately, people have a need to mentor other people and want to assist other people. And so seeing that, giving them a place where they can do that is great.
What happens is, over time, especially in our world, is as you do that you become the expert. So John, who’s always a guy answering questions on landlording, becomes the landlord expert. And what happens as a result is John actually starts to get business because he’s answering questions. So we transformed from just a community where people are asking and answering questions. Today, people who come on our community, a lot of people have a motive of, “I want to be an expert on BiggerPockets in this vertical because if I go and I help out and I become the expert in this vertical it’s going to build my business.”
Andrew: I see.
Joshua: And it does.
Andrew: In the early days I remember interviewing Erik Bahn of BeattheGMAT. He also had a big, thriving community. And one of the things that he decided was no one would go for, I think it was, more than an hour without getting their question answered, no matter what time of day. Did you have any policy like that internally?
Joshua: No.
Andrew: No.
Joshua: Listen, BiggerPockets, for the first seven years or so, was me and a developer. It was me for the first few year and then it was me the developer after that. So I was doing everything. I was community. I was biz dev. I was advertising. I was management. You name it. I was moderation. And so, I was working 80 hours a week, 100 hours a week for years.
Andrew: Because of this and your full-time job?
Joshua: Well, when I quit my full-time job I was doing this and hanging out with my forum for 80 hours a week.
Andrew: Really?
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: Did you ever get lonely in there, where you just feel like not enough people are responding, I’ve answered everything, I’m done?
Joshua: Are you going to make me cry?
Andrew: Yeah, I love that. That’s good for my podcast.
Joshua: I’m lonely sometimes. Yeah, that’s the truth, that’s the truth. It is lonely sometimes doing this. But, sure, I mean, sometimes there are crickets. The cool thing about our community is, say you’re just randomly curious about X, Y, and Z. You can start a conversation about it.
Or even if you’re not, for us, we’re real estate investing. What’s the coolest house you’ve ever flipped? Tell me the story. And then you have people telling the story. Or what’s the weirdest tenant interaction you’ve ever had? And you get stories. And so it doesn’t have to be questions. It could just be kind of people sharing and bragging or whatever it is and that gets people going too.
Andrew: So what else did you do to bring people in? Because I think commenting on other forums and having a sig line is powerful, but it is not enough. What else did you do to get people to come into the forum?
Joshua: Really, what I did for the first few years, it was that. Now, mind you, I was never in other real estate forums. I felt like it was bad juju if I were to go to “competitor” sites and try and steal users. I thought it was pretty bad so I never did that. I would go to ancillary verticals; I’d be on webmaster site or personal finance sites. Never real estate specific. So I did that. Man, you know, content, this was before we are all kind of writing content for the sake of content, but it just kind of made sense. “Can we produce a content?”
Andrew: Writing content to get people to come in?
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: Do you remember one piece of content in the early days that was especially powerful?
Joshua: I don’t because most of the early stuff was absolute crap.
Andrew: Here’s what I got. I’ve got stuff like “buying foreclosures,” “taxis and rental income expenses,” “fix your how houses, high profits low-risk.” You wrote all these yourself?
Joshua: I don’t remember. You’re pulling out stuff from a decade ago.
Andrew: No. The chapter was contributed in this one case by Gerald Romine. So I guess you went to other writers and you asked them if you could take some of their work and put it up on your site.
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. So that helped you to get people into the forum. Sorry.
Joshua: It did. And I’d say I also collated information that I was looking for. So I’d say one of the early most powerful pages I created was a directory of banks. So this was a directory of REO banks, that’s foreclosure banks that sell properties directly to consumers. And so I created this massive REO bank list, and it was the biggest of the. I would share it with people wherever I could. I’d say, “Hey, check out this REO bank. Check it out.” And that list just was incredibly powerful. It brought a ton and ton of traffic for many, many years.
The platform people came for that. They saw that we had a community and they started to jump in. So creating various directories. It was kind of like Yahoo. Yahoo had built the school directory of everything. And that was the impetus for these sites that says, “Hey, Yahoo was doing this. This makes a lot of sense from a user standpoint. So can we emulate that in some way perform.”
Andrew: I see that there. Where is that? I have so many tabs open. Directory of REO banks and lenders. So you’ve got Bank of America, Bank One country, Countrywide. And it takes me directly to the section of their sites where I could search for, what is it, a real estate owned or what is it?
Joshua: Yeah, so those are . . .
Andrew: So the banks own this real estate because of foreclosures?
Joshua: So you didn’t pay your bills, the bank took back the property and they wipe out all the liens away. And so I can go and buy the property from the bank, free of liens. And so it’s a good way to buy real estate as an investment. And so I figured, “Hey, let’s kind of great resource for people to use.” And little by little created more and more resources like it.
Andrew: I see. And at the very top of it is “Discuss REO in our forums.” So it takes me directly into a section where I can go and talk to other people about it.
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: I’m looking now at 2004. Boy, that looks so sad. Somebody asked a question, zero replies. Someone asked a question, two replies. Someone else, one reply. View count 48. Today you could probably do 48 in a second.
Joshua: Yeah. So why do people stay? I mean, nobody was asking.
Andrew: Why did you stay with it? Why didn’t you look at this and say, “You know what, this is just a lot of work right now. I’ll just go and focus on real estate instead of doing this forum”?
Joshua: Let me see. I was obsessed.
Andrew: Yeah, what got you to be obsessed? I wanted to remember what I should be thinking about and getting excited about in early days of a forum.
Joshua: At first, it was about me. I created this for me. I was selfish, but I just needed some answers to what I wanted. At some point, I saw that this community was actually helping people with their financial lives. I was making a difference. And something about that felt good. Something about it felt really good. And so I don’t know, maybe it was like a drug of choice or something. You know, get out there and help people out and you get this positive interaction, and so you kind of go forward. But listen, I thought about quitting many, many times. It was a labor of love. Maybe I saw the light at the end of the rainbow that, at some point, would be self-perpetuating.
Andrew: And it is today. I want to know how you got to that. The next step was, as you mentioned earlier, you tried some Google ads on there. I think you were experimenting with all kinds of ads. And then Google Ads seems to have been what worked. How much money did you bring in from Google ads in the early days?
Joshua: I remember that first penny that I made. I was very excited about it.
Andrew: Literally the first penny?
Joshua: Literally the first penny. In the early days, I think we’re getting $50, $60 CPMs from Google, which was fantastic.
Andrew: Yeah.
Joshua: And obviously, overtime, that has dwindles drastically. Yeah, I mean, Google Ads. I don’t know. I’d get checks of $25 and I was really excited about it.
Andrew: And you were a substitute teacher before, right?
Joshua: I was a substitute turned full-time teacher by accident.
Andrew: How did you become an accidental full-time teacher?
Joshua: So I was looking. I was in this crazy entertainment world, looking for a little ways to make money. I got a sub teaching credential because I just thought it would be a decent way to make some cash. You can go in and make decent money in single day and not have to work again for a couple of days.
I was dating a girl at the time and her mother started a school for special ed kids. And she had work her way up and she turned to me and said, “Josh, I know you’ve got a sub-credential. Do you want to come work?” And I was like, “Yeah, sure. This is a bad idea, but why not?” And so the first day of class I show up and I come to sub for Algebra, I believe it was. And I walk in. I won’t tell you what one of the kids did. The first second I was there.
Andrew: Tell me.
Joshua: He was humping a water cooler.
Andrew: Ooh. Okay. And this is special ed like as in special needs or special ed as in causing trouble?
Joshua: Both. Everything from kids who caused trouble to kids to have issues, Tourette’s, ADD, ADHD. You name it. And the school was phenomenal and helped so many kids out. And I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, once again. First day, the teacher I sub for quit. I had a job. I was working full time because I couldn’t say no to my new girlfriend and her mother.
Andrew: And leave them in the lurch.
Joshua: Correct.
Andrew: But let me ask you this: if you ended up doing this for years, and I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but I’m just curious.
Joshua: Sure.
Andrew: But I’m the kind of person who constantly evaluates himself and where I am in the world in comparison to where I’d like to be, in comparison to the possibilities. And there are a lot of things frustrate me about, frankly, my whole life. Right? Anytime you’re somewhere and you go, “Why am I not doing more? Why am I not doing that?” Here, you’re a substitute teacher. You’re a guy who, before that, went to school to be stockbroker. Right? You wanted to be like Gordon Gecko. You know you did, right?
Joshua: Yeah, it was all right.
Andrew: Am I pushing too much by saying that?
Joshua: No. I was a stockbroker. I worked for a stockbroker for a little while. I wanted to make money in business. I read Forbes. Yeah, I know how.
Andrew: You read Forbes back when it was good.
Joshua: Yeah. Ouch.
Andrew: So when you go in you’re a substitute teacher. God bless the kids and I want them all to do well. But when you look at yourself and your dreams, do you at that point say to yourself, “I’m not matching my dreams. I’m not where I want to be. This stinks.”
Joshua: Yeah, I probably said it once or twice. But there were some guilt there. I’m working for this girl that I’m in love with.
Andrew: Yeah, you ended up marrying her.
Joshua: I ended up marrying her. Yeah, and it was fascinating. I’m a study of people, which is why communities make sense. I like people watching. I like looking at what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, what makes them tick, and what better population of people to just kind of analyze and study than kids who have issues and figuring out what’s behind this, and how can we help change that, and how can we better them?
And so I guess BiggerPockets is probably a good follow up to that because I think we do the same thing. Not that my community is a world of special needs folks. We’re all have needs, right? And we all have wants and we all have positives and negatives. And so I don’t know. At no point I was I like, “Hey, I’m stuck teaching. This sucks. I wanted to be a big business magnate.” But I did say, “Hey, how long am I going to be doing this? I don’t want to be doing this forever. And what’s next and where do I go?” And I was very unsure.
Andrew: All right. Let me do a quick sponsorship message because I know there are people who are listening to this who are saying, “I’m a little fired up. I have an idea. I want to start some website.” Here’s what you do when you want to get started. Don’t go to those freebie things that are offered online because you can’t really build a company on that. My suggestion to you is you go and you build on a platform on a server that it can scale with you, but that can launch you quickly and inexpensively.
For me, the one that I recommend is hostgator.com. If you go to hostgator.com/Mixergy you get a big discount. Let me say that slower. hostgator.com/Mixergy. I tend to really talk fast. I’m a New Yorker. I shove people verbally, not physically, and I talk fast. But here’s what happens. You come up with an idea, you go to HostGator. Maybe you decided, “You know, I want to build a forum. I have an idea. Let’s see if it catches on.”
Maybe you decide that you want to build a membership site. Maybe you decide that you want to quickly throw up a blog. Whatever it is, you can go to HostGator to make it super easy. Look, I’m looking at hostgator.com/Mixergy. Free forums, free membership scripts, they have tech support 24/7. In a past interview, I called them up to see could I really speak to a human being. And yes, within about a minute, I got through to a real human being. And you can too.
They’ve got over 4,500 website templates. You can start beautifully, quickly, and fast. Unlimited disk space, bandwidth and email. And they have a 45-day money back guarantee, which means within 45 days you’ll know whether your idea works. You’ll know whether HostGator can support you. And, as I said earlier, when times are tough is when the service you get from your hosting company matters most. When times are tough and you have to figure out why your site is down, I see Joshua is nodding. Everyone who’s had an online business knows. I’ve had my site go down.
When that site goes down, suddenly the people who had all this easy way for you to sign up disappear on you, except the HostGator where they give you a phone number. Dial and there’s a human being there who can help you. That’s what I like about HostGator. One of many things and one of many reasons why I suggest you go to hostgator.com.
And if you go to hostgator.com/Mixergy, you add that little Mixergy at the end, A, I get some credit for sending you over; and, B, you get a big discount, 30% off, which means that it starts at $3.47 a month to host your site. Easy peasy and dependable. hostgator.com/Mixergy. I’m grateful to them for sponsoring.
All right. Joshua, you were running ads when we last left the story. And then, you got into paid accounts. How did you figure out paid accounts and how did you know what to charge for?
Joshua: So the ads were dripping in money. I was running Networks. I tried Chitika. I used different ad platforms. I was selling ads direct. I was experimenting with direct sponsorships, forum specific sponsorships, you name it. And I realized that this wasn’t a viable model over the long term because ad rates were dropping. Every year, we saw ad rates falling, and falling, and falling. And so how can I possibly sustain this over the long haul? I wanted a business model that was going to last me for next 10, 20 years.
And so my thought was not only do I want to be diversified in revenue, but also I want to be diversified in how I attract people, which is why we have things like the podcast and our publishing and of our content is kind of all over the place. The [Inaudible 00:27:29], be everywhere, so to speak. But financially, I don’t want to be stuck with one revenue stream. And I think it all kind of hit me from Google. Because when Google finally became this powerhouse and started crushing everybody else, one day I was getting ad money from something called text link ads and everybody was doing it back then. It was cool. It was great. It’s a good way to make some money. And Google was creeping up in power. And, all of a sudden, Google like lifted its backhand and smacked us all down.
Andrew: Said anyone who runs an ad from this company now is going to get dinged with their page rank.
Joshua: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: Which means Google traffic.
Joshua: Yeah. I got beat up, man, really bad. I think I was a PR five or six and got knocked down to like two or three. And suddenly, I was like, “Oh God, the Google gods control this world. And so I need to play by their rules.” But I also need to do everything in my power to be diversified, so that if they come and smack me again I’m not going to get hit as hard. And so from that point forward, I realized I had to diversify revenue streams. I realized I had to diversify how I attracted users. I realized that I couldn’t be 1000% relying upon this monster that is Google for everything and anything in my business. And so I set forward to changing things.
Andrew: So most people would, at that point, say, “You know, my number one asset is my forum. I’m going to charge for it. By charging for it I’m going to make some money. I’ll exclude people who really aren’t passionate about it, not enough to pay,” and so on. You didn’t decide to charge for the whole thing. What’s the first thing you charge for?
Joshua: Let me give you some background. The reason that we never charged for it was it came from the impetus for the creation of the site. I don’t think it’s bad to charge for things. I don’t want anyone to misread me, but in our business there is a group of people who I’d say a lot of them prey on folks who are unaware maybe. The entire model for making money in the real estate education space is based upon sell to upsell to upsell to upsell to upsell. And listen, a lot of businesses, there are upsells. We have upsells. But we don’t go from, “Hey, you got this free thing.”
That really is nothing free there. They don’t give you anything. It really is just a get-you-excited, rah-rah pitch fest for the next thing, which is really the rah-rah pitch fest for the next thing. And suddenly, you just spent $50,000, $75,000 to some guy, a salesmen, a pitchman and you’re like, “What did I do? What did I do?”
And so I said from the beginning we would never sell content within our platform. Now granted, we have published books. But I think books are very different. We’re not selling $800 books; we’re selling books that you get on the bookstore.
And we tell people, “You don’t have to buy our books. Just go on our platform and you’ll get everything else for free.” And they still go and by the book because the book is organized. They kind of take information in a minute. But I never wanted to sell access . . .
Andrew: So how did you figure out what to sell? Considering that you said, “I’m not going to sell access to this community. I’m not going to go the way of these other guys who are overcharging and constantly under delivering.” You want to find something that felt authentic to you ethical and it wouldn’t get you in trouble with your community of people who loved you.
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: What the first thing that you decided to sell?
Joshua: It was more the LinkedIn model. So LinkedIn, you can access your community, you can connect, you can interact. But if you want to connect to more people you have to spend a little money. So we said, “All right . . .”
Andrew: By connecting meaning email them directly?
Joshua: Some private message or become colleagues with, things like that. So we said, “All right. You know what, we’re going to let people connect with anyone they want.” But we’re going to set a cap; and anything above that cap, you need to be a paid member to be able to do.
Andrew: How did that go over?
Joshua: Yeah, probably we got a few hate emails. But I get hate emails when I sneeze, so it doesn’t change anything.
Andrew: I hate that. Okay. It’s a hard way to live. The people who you’re working so hard for are some of the people who are obsessed.
Joshua: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: . . . and hate you. I mean obsessed with their hatred for you.
Joshua: Oh, yeah, yeah. That is not a fun part of doing what we do.
Andrew: All right. So did that actually work out? Was selling interaction the answer?
Joshua: Not really.
Andrew: No.
Joshua: Over time it did. It did, over time, because we got better at explaining what we’re offering. Again, we don’t know what we were doing. One of my good friends is in the entertainment business and as he is kind of moving up the scale, the ladder, the corporate ladder, we’d always have these funny conversations and I’d say, “Oh my god, man, you guys just merge with some big company. How’d you do it?” And he’s like, “I have no idea. We figured it out.”
And that’s the story of my life and my business. You figure things out. You work through it. And so if you fail and you keep trying until you succeed. And if you keep failing then maybe at some point you give up. I go back years ago, seven or eight years ago, I talked to some big VCs in town here and they said, “What are you doing? Why are you still doing this? You should shut this down. This is not a viable business.” And I said, “Yeah, don’t worry about it.”
Andrew: And maybe they were right, but you were in love at that point. So here are some of the things that you were selling in the early days. And this is just like two or three years ago. From what I can see, you were doing, “Why upgrade to BiggerPockets Pro? Number one, you get to post ads, opportunities and solicitations in the real estate marketplace. Number two, promote your brand via our enhanced forum signature.” You have that to this day. Right? That’s a signature where people can actually put links to their sites, phone numbers, emails, etc.
Joshua: Logos.
Andrew: Logos, yes. “Number three, prospect warm leads. See who visits your profile.” So I can actually see who is checking me out. “Number four, follow more of your favorite topics with keyword alerts.” Is that still effective?
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: Okay. “Number five, better networking with more colleague requests.” That means more people emailing you when connecting with you the way on LinkedIn you could connect. “Expand your ability to privately message other members.” That’s what you mentioned earlier. “Download important real estate documents.” And the price was $50 a year or $150 year for the even bigger package.
Joshua: $5 a month or $14.95, I think it was.
Andrew: Okay.
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: Do you remember the first year you were selling, how much revenue you were making from it?
Joshua: I don’t. It was probably inconsequential. I did not make a lot of money.
Andrew: Okay.
Joshua: We did really poorly at it. Again, it took awhile to figure out how to do a good job of it. And we added features. We added benefits until we got to a point where people really started to love everything.
Andrew: What’s the one feature that helped you take off?
Joshua: There’s no one feature that helped us.
Andrew: There wasn’t? It was a bunch? What’s the worst feature you added?
Joshua: Oh, man. The worst feature I ever added to the site or just added for the purpose of revenue?
Andrew: For the membership paid access?
Joshua: Oh, man. Is there a worst? I’d say is there a least effective. I think it’s stuff that people like, but it’s something that they take for granted. Probably the ability to message people that they weren’t connected to and nobody cared about it. I mean we’ve done a lot of things. We had a meet-up type platform on BiggerPockets for a while. We killed that off. We had a property directory, we killed that off. We build stuff, we killed it. We test, we try, and we kill if it doesn’t work and we move on. And sometimes it comes back where, you know what, we were just a little too early.
Andrew: Like what? What did you come back with?
Joshua: They meet-up type thing. Today there are thousands and thousands of meet-ups around the country and world of members of BiggerPockets. They love our platform, they love each other, and they all get together.
Andrew: One of the advantages of paying for a higher membership level is to be able to do a search for people locally, which members are within 5 miles, 10 miles, etc. Right?
Joshua: Yep.
Andrew: One of the things that you did that I thought was interesting was you called up people to find out what they would pay for. Do you remember doing that in the early days?
Joshua: No.
Andrew: No? Here’s what I got. I started interviewing people to see what would make them want to pay.
Joshua: Oh, yeah. That wasn’t over the phone. That was emails.
Andrew: It was.
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: How did you do it?
Joshua: “Hey, we’ve got this stuff. Do you think it’s worth this? Do you think it’s worth that?” And yeah, I think at some point . . . I don’t know if it was then, before or after. I realized that I can ask people a million times what they’re willing to pay and I can ask people a million times what they want us to build, and you’re always going to get different answers.
There are people who are always going to yes you. And just because somebody says yes, they’re willing to pay for it, doesn’t mean that they’re actually willing to pay for it. I would say to anyone who’s thinking about using their users as a focus group, take it with a grain of salt. Your users will always going to want the stuff that you’re kind of proposing.
Andrew: Did you learn anything from those emails to users or was it just not useful enough?
Joshua: I think at some point we learned enough that we have a platform that people are paying us for. So, yeah.
Andrew: So what have you learned from those conversations, from the emails that you send out?
Joshua: I’d say that it took time for us to learn. And I guess what we learned was the things that people found were valuable are the things that we have today, the advertising in the signature, by having a place where they can actually advertise because one of the things that we do is we’re extremely strict on our forums.
So an example would be you go on most other forums and somebody says, “Hey, can somebody explain to me what an ARM mortgage is? How does that work?” And you would have 15 mortgage brokers saying, “Oh, I can get you an ARM mortgage.” “I can help you out.” “I can help you out.” And I hated that. There’s nothing I hated more. The guy asked you a question. He didn’t ask you to solicit him; he didn’t ask you to sell him. He wants an answer to his question.
Andrew: So do paid members get to do that?
Joshua: They do not get to do that in the community. They can only do it in the marketplace.
Andrew: Marketplace.
Joshua: So we have one place where you can solicit, one place where you can solicit to be solicited. That’s it. Everywhere else, if you go and you promote, advertise, solicit within the community it’s going to be moderated and removed, and you potentially will be kicked off of our platform.
Andrew: Here’s what worked really well for you. You said, “Hiring a consultant was really powerful.” What kind of consultant did you get and what did you learn?
Joshua: So about two and a half years ago, I hired a guy to come in and look at the business. I was running a lifestyle business. I was working 80 to 100 hours a week. My wife was getting mad at me and I was getting mad at myself for slaving away at this business where, at this point, I was doing okay. But I wasn’t rich and I was turning gray and stressed out and exhausted all the time. And I would travel and I would work. My kids were born and I would work. My kids are in the hospital and I would work.
Andrew: You missed your child’s birth?
Joshua: No, are you out of your mind?
Andrew: Are you saying you went to the hospital and then you have to come back to work?
Joshua: No, I worked from the hospital. The beauty of having an Internet company is I can work anywhere.
Andrew: In some ways that’s even worse. That really takes you out of the moment.
Joshua: Oh, it was horrible. Oh yeah, man. You really want to make me cry. But yeah, that was terrible. Yeah, you have a kid, that kid is born, that kid is sleeping and you work when that kid is sleeping. And when the kid is awake you work some more. Well, you play with them and then when they fall sleep . . .
Andrew: Are you and your wife still together?
Joshua: Absolutely.
Andrew: You are. All right.
Joshua: Oh, yeah. She’s amazing.
Andrew: She wasn’t pissed at you for doing that?
Joshua: Well, at that point, I was making all the money.
Andrew: So there’s nothing else that you can do. You both knew, “We’re all-in on this. We have to make it work.” Who’s the consultant?
Joshua: I’m not going to give his name. But yeah, he was great. He was in the real estate business. I hired him. He was fantastic. And so what we did was we looked over the business. “What are you doing? How are you making money? What is this community? How are you going to attract?” We looked at every aspect of the business over the period of a few weeks and phone calls. And then I went down to Texas and, for three days, pretty much all day, we ripped into it some more and made some big decisions, like getting rid of some of these things that I was kind of attached to. I know it’s scary, but go out and start hiring. You can’t do everything. You’re going to burn out. It’s not going to work forever. You need to either shit or get off the pot. Pardon me if you have to bleep that. But it was time to get people on board and actually turn this thing from a lifestyle business to a real company. And that was a decision that I made and within a week or so, I started interviewing for somebody to come on. That first hire was somebody to help with content and help manage the community. And that was Brandon Turner, and he’s still with me today. And he’s the co-host of the podcast. And he still produces tons of content for us. And that led to the next and to the next and to the next.
Andrew: Let’s break that down. So, when you say to someone else, “You have to start moderating this community for me,” that’s a big transition because now someone else is going to enforce the rules. You have to really be clear with them about what they’re enforcing, what the rules are. What did you lie down? What are some of the systems and rules that you put in place for them?
Joshua: I didn’t have to. So the nice thing was the guy I hired was a member of the community. The guy I hired was a writer for us. And then the guy I hired became independently wealthy as a result of our platform. So he didn’t need a job; he wanted to work for me.
Andrew: Okay.
Joshua: It’s kind of cool. He had built up this portfolio of real estate and lived in a small town in western Washington. And basically could have retired and kind of hangout at 27. Instead, he was passionate about the Internet, passionate about BiggerPockets.
Andrew: What do you pay someone like that? Imagine it’s not a full time job. You have to pay them for . . . What do you pay him?
Joshua: It was a full-time job.
Andrew: It was. It was a full time job for someone who you are saying doesn’t even need it. How do you figure out what’s the payment for that?
Joshua: We dated. I mean we literally did weeks of Skype interviews and hung out on the Internet pretty much together. Again, I’d known him. He had been writing for our blog for a while. We liked each other. We were cool and it was, “Let’s kind of feel this out. Let’s feel each other out and see if this makes sense.” And so it was just hour and hours and hours of conversations. I didn’t have a process. Again, figure it out. And so that’s what we do.
Andrew: Are you just talking to him or are you giving him some more and more control over the weeks while you are having this conversation and dating?
Joshua: No, when we were “dating” he didn’t work for me. Our blog, which was about nine and a half, maybe 10 years old now, we had all these contributors who are writing for us. We weren’t paying them at all. They were writing for us because they knew we had an audience. So they would get exposure and they would write for us, and build their name, and their brand, and their business as a result of it. He was one of these guys who were doing that. Really it was, “Here’s what we want. Here’s what this job looks like. Do we like it or do we not? Okay.”
Andrew: So give me some advice if I were going to hire a community manager. One thing I’m learning from you is to try to get someone from within the community because you’re going to get it more. What else do I need to know about hiring someone who’s going to be a community manager?
Joshua: I mean, I think that’s probably the single most important thing. They need to speak the language of the community.
Andrew: They need rules for how often they need to . . . I know Stu McLaren told me, the guy from WishList Member, said that, “You need to have a certain time of day that that person has to go in there and clear everything out.” At least one time a day. Even if they live there, there needs to be one time. Does that help?
Joshua: Yeah, absolutely. I can’t have one community manager with almost 2,000 posts a day. That’s crazy. We’ve got a team of 10 moderators. I’ve got multiple support people who are 24/7 clearing out. People can report stuff. They clear it out, ideally, within minutes of when it’s posted. If something’s out there for an hour or multiple hours that’s really bad.
Andrew: I see. So you have somebody at least go in and make sure . . . kind of a deletion team.
Joshua: Yeah. Well, what you need to do with the community is it needs to be self-policing. It doesn’t start there, but it has to get there. If the community is not self-policing then the community isn’t invested in the community. And so you go on Reddit, you go and post some junk, they’re going to beat you up and throw you out in about six seconds. The same thing on our site. You start breaking the rules, the community’s going to spank you around and let you know it and take care of you.
Andrew: So I was going to go through the rules with you as you have on the site.
Joshua: Sure.
Andrew: But this is nuts. This is like this giant legal document here. What I’m looking at, here are the five rules and the fifth one is be good to everyone. The way it was for [Haru] or something like that. We’re talking about pages and pages and pages. Several points about no abusive behavior, no pornography, and no goodbye posts.
Joshua: That’s the, “Hey, you guys all suck and I’m out of here.”
Andrew: Right.
Joshua: Those were fun.
Andrew: So you actually have to go and write those and write all this down? It’s not enough to just say, “Hey, look, just be a good member. If we don’t like what you’re doing will delete it.”
Joshua: Yeah, good luck with that.
Andrew: So if someone says goodbye you and you don’t like it, you have to delete their comment and then come back here to the rules and add a note here, “No goodbye posts”?
Joshua: Well, I think it’s a grandstanding, make-everybody-look-bad post. “Our intent is to piss on the community, piss on everybody, and basically throw vinegar in the eyes of everybody,” and, at the end of the day, that’s not a good thing for community.
Andrew: Give me more advice. I need to make this more actionable for me and for anyone else who wants to build a community online.
Joshua: Sure.
Andrew: What else do we need to know?
Joshua: People want to feel good. So you’ve got to keep the trolls out. If people show up and their only purpose is to cause trouble, you’ve got to get rid of them. You can’t allow . . . debate is okay. “Hey, let’s get a topic,” but starting debates with the purpose of starting debates and then really crapping on people is bad. The whole idea in our community is there are no stupid questions. So you’ll have people who come on the community. I’m new at real estate, for example, and I say, “Hey, I don’t understand a mortgage. Can somebody explain it to me?” You go on a lot of communities and people will piss on them. And people will just be mean and . . .
Andrew: I do know that. There are two things that people will say. Number one is, “Go Google it,” and, “Why don’t you Google it first?” And number two is, “Why didn’t you do a search?”
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: That should have been in there. All right. Which, to me, felt like, if search is so important why don’t you just automatically search people’s comment before you allow them to post it the way Stack Exchange does? Don’t be upset. If people are doing it’s, not their fault.
Joshua: Be nice. Be nice.
Andrew: All right. So that’s it. Lets talk about less of the troll-y stuff.
Joshua: Sure.
Andrew: We don’t have enough time with this, with some of these community members. Lets talk about more of what do you do to get people engaged. So you ask questions. What else did you do? What else do you do today? What else do you advise us to do?
Joshua: I mean, early on, again, I asked questions. I’d invite people. I’d talk to as many people. I’d tell everybody and anybody that I knew that this is here and jump on and ask your questions and help people out.
Andrew: Ask questions. Like here are some techniques that I notice a lot of communities are using now. Like inbound.org seems to rely heavily on it today. “Ask me anything” posts. So they get someone who’s impressive, they say he’s going to be doing and ask me anything, and then they get that person in to help promote and all his followers will start asking questions. Does that work too?
Joshua: We don’t really do that.
Andrew: What else? What has worked for you? There are no silly questions. I’m asking you a question because I want to learn.
Joshua: No, I’m not saying it’s a stupid question. I’m saying I’m sitting here, I’m thinking through it. We didn’t have specific strategies on what content should we ask people to create in the forum. Now, we did in other parts of our written content. You’re focused on the community side. We strategized like crazy on our blog content. We strategized like crazy on our podcast. On the forums, it was very organic and when it began to kind of have a life of its own, we let the community figure itself out. Let the community get itself engaged. And let the community tell us what they want and what they don’t want.
And so we listened to most of what they want. Communities are organic. Things are going to change and leaders emerge and leaders disappear and things like that happen. And so it’s flexible, but the strategies we have, “Hey, make sure to welcome everybody. Make sure anyone who introduces himself feels good. “Hey, community, let’s try and answer these unanswered questions.
Andrew: How do you welcome everyone? When someone joins, what do you do? Do you have someone on the team go in and welcome them or do you encourage others to do it?
Joshua: We do both.
Andrew: Both.
Joshua: We have a new member area. We ask our support people to jump in there. And our moderators will jump in. Now there’s this organic welcome squad, these people who realize that if I jump in and I welcome people I’m going to be seen. I’m going to get visibility for myself, my brand. Many of these guys are paid users. And so they’re not soliciting, they’re not promoting, they’re not advertising; they’re being helpful. And by so doing they get visibility for their branding. It’s brilliant.
Andrew: I do see a lot here for . . . I do see that your posts do really well. For example, according to buzzsumo15, “Hilarious Autocompletes from Real Estate Searches.” That one did a lot. It got something like 2.9 thousand shares. “Breaking Tax Law Changes and Year-End Planning for Investors,” 2.2 thousand shares. “The Book on Investing in Real Estate with No and Low Money Down,” that one got 1.7 thousand shares. What’s your process? So it seems what you’re saying is . . . No, that one actually is a sale.
Joshua: It’s a book.
Andrew: It’s a book.
Joshua: It’s a book. So what’s the process for what?
Andrew: I guess what you do then is you create content that gets people to join the community, and when they join the community some of them are going to buy a membership, that’s the funnel.
Joshua: The funnel is give them free, free, free. And hopefully, in time, they realize that we’ve given them so much value that they see the other tools that we offer. We’ve got calculators. If you want to analyze a flip deal, if you want to analyze a buy and hold deal, we’ve got these great calculators that not only help analyze a deal but print out these reports, which you can then take them to your lender and look professional. You’ve got the ability to search and network better. You’ve got the ability to market your business and brand.
So within our community . . . and every company’s funnel is going to be different. Right? So within our community, we found that the more engaged people become, the more likely they are to realize that this is a valuable platform to connect on, a valuable platform that has tools that they need and they end up upgrading. We also have things. We’ve got webinars. We put out newsletters three times a week to a hundred thousand people . . .
Andrew: I should have subscribed to the newsletter in preparation. So I’m going to ask a question that should be obvious.
Joshua: It really should have been, Andrew.
Andrew: Yeah, it should. The newsletter also promotes the forum by linking to . . . How does a newsletter promote the forum?
Joshua: So the newsletter, we put out three newsletters a week. The newsletter promotes our most recent episodes of our BiggerPockets podcast. We actually just launched the second podcast, so one day a week it promotes the five episodes that podcast had during the week. We promote our top blog posts within there from our BiggerPockets blog. And we promote a bunch of marketplace posts. So posts within where people are promoting opportunities and things, just because people are looking for them, A, and B, it’s another kind of wink, wink, “Hey, guys we actually have this.” And then we promote some hot forum topics, topics that are getting a lot of buzz within the community.
Andrew: Okay. And that brings people in.
Joshua: Yeah.
Andrew: I asked you before the interview started, what was your lowest moment? And it feels like one of the lowest moments was going through developers. In fact, your lead developer left. You went through 14 developers in one year. One of them lied to you. You, at one point, spent, what is it, $15,000 on a MySpace-like platform?
Joshua: Yes, like 15, 20 grand, somewhere around there. Yeah.
Andrew: Right. So all of that to build this platform. It’s really tough to build something from scratch, especially something like chat. What advice for forums, I should say. What advice do you have for us about that? Should we do the path that you took, which is to create your own forum, or should we just use an off the shelf solution?
Joshua: Use an off the shelf solution.
Andrew: Really?
Joshua: Yeah. Don’t do what I did. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. Listen, I made mistakes and yet I’m here thriving. So were those mistakes actually mistakes or were they things that I just need to learn? I think I could’ve made things a lot easier had I used off the shelf solutions. But, at the time, they didn’t exist. When MySpace was hot and I said, “Let me turn this forum to a social network,” there wasn’t a social network software that I could go and plugin. I had to build it.
I guess you get the hand that you’re dealt and you kind of work with it. For me, “no” is never an answer. So I’m going to find a way to figure out how to do it. And sometimes I go and built something when I could have just used off the shelf. But for the average guy listening, they certainly shouldn’t do that. Use what’s out there. Use the tools that exist and build off that. Make your life a whole heck of a lot easier.
Andrew: All right. Before we close, I want to read one thing off the forum here. This is just minutes before we started recording. I would look to see what was one of most active posts and here it is. It’s from BrieSchmidt, who says, “Last week we hit our investment goal of $35,000 a month gross rental income. We bought our first investment property in August 2011 and a vast majority of our growth has happened in the past 10 months. We, meaning my husband and I, now own 21 buildings and 41 units in Chicago and Milwaukee.” And she continues to talk about how people have been able to follow her and her husband’s progress here on the forums. And now I see a lot of people congratulating her. And that’s one of the coolest things to see. That what’s happening to your community you built up.
Joshua: She goes on and says, “BP has been a huge part of my success. I gain the confidence I needed to go into this full-time. I’ve met amazing friends who’ve helped me so much a long the way.” That’s why I do what I do. I mean, this community is amazing. We really help people change their own financial destinies and support each other and give them the tools they need to be successful. What is there not to love about that?
Andrew: No, I can’t see anything. I love seeing that kind of action. I want to be able to do that for myself and I also would love my audience to come back and say, “Because I heard this interview with Joshua and Andrew, I built community and here’s what it’s doing.” So for us, what’s one piece of advice that you can give us, the guy’s who’s built communities?
Joshua: I would say, “Get out there and do it.” I mean, you can talk about all day, Andrew, but stop thinking about it.
Andrew: By saying don’t do it and now I think by tapping into what’s exciting about it you realized, “Hey, you know, you should do it. It is fun.”
Joshua: Well, let me put a caveat in there. Building a community is incredibly challenging, probably the hardest thing you can do, period. You can build a niche site. You can do all sorts of other stuff. Building a community is incredibly time consuming and incredibly difficult. And, frankly, I think 99% of people considering it should not do it.
That said, if you’ve built up an audience, which you have, whether that’s through a blog or podcast, I think it becomes infinitely easier. And so what I would tell somebody who’s thinking about creating a community is to go build an audience first. Go create a podcast, create a blog, build up a readership, get people to know who you are, get them to know your brand, get them to fall in love with you, and then launch the community. And when you do that you’re already going to have that tribe that follows you and loves you. And they already want to be part of something. So you’ve got that. So, Andrew, build your community, absolutely. Go out and do it, man.
Andrew: All right. I’m a going to have a couple more discussions. No, I’m actually then doing not what you’re telling me to do.
Joshua: Whom do you need to talk to?
Andrew: Do it for the premium members, say we’re creating this community. All right. I want to talk to them a little bit and see what kind of community they want, but I’m going to test the waters and see what it looks like. See what they feel and see what works for them. All right. I’ve done it a little bit for some of the other sites that we have. We’ve got one for interviewers on Interview Your Heroes. But I want one for . . . actually, I don’t want one. They are asking for one and demanding one for the main Mixergy site.
All right. So, everyone out there, if you’re interested in giving me some feedback, let me know what you think. What kind of community should I build? What should it look like? I’m not going to create my own software. We’ve customized other software to do it. But I’m also open to, frankly, even using Facebook. I’m not attached to anything. What I care about is what are we trying to do with it. So, guys, give me your feedback on that. Joshua, congratulations on all the success with biggerpockets.com.
Joshua: Thank you, thank you. I hope the listeners got some value out of it and definitely appreciate the opportunity. It’s been a lot of fun and I guess let’s not make it five years before we chat again.
Andrew: I would love it. And I will say, to anyone who is listening, one more thing. Joshua has got so many of his fans that go and leave reviews on his podcast. I’ve never asked for people to leave reviews until recently when I saw how powerful it could be. I can see that his podcast is taking off already, not just now, but it has. I’m asking you guys, if you like my work, I could use your help. Go into the iTunes store and review this podcast. In fact, any kind of review, so that other people can discover it.
And if you don’t know by now, you could subscribe to Mixergy on whatever podcast app you like, even if it’s that piece of garbage that they include with your iPhone. That thing is horrible. You should get a better one than that. But, whichever one you like, Mixergy is in there. Just do a search for M-I-X-E-R-G-Y. And, of course, check out biggerpockets.com. Thanks so much for doing this interview.
Joshua: Thanks, Andrew.
Andrew: Thank you all for being a part of it. Bye, everyone.
