Building BiggerPockets, One of the World's Top Podcasts & Real Estate Communities, with Josh Dorkin

Josh, welcome to the show, man.

Thank you.

I'm glad you're here. We could take this conversation a lot of ways, man. This is— there's a lot to talk about with the company, with BiggerPockets, with podcasting in general. It could be helping companies, investing in companies now. But what I want to start with is we're going to take it back to the beginning for people who don't have the context. Starting BiggerPockets years ago, why did you start this this in the first place?

So we're going back like 18 years or so ago. Long time. You know, I was trying to find myself. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, who I was. I mean, I had no idea. I really had no idea. When I had started it, I had bounced from being a stock trader, went into the entertainment business, was doing stuff in the entertainment business in New York, brought me to LA. Ended up getting a teaching credential, substitute teaching credential, was doing that. But all along, I'd always been interested in finance and at some point real estate. And so one day I'm teaching and my brother reaches out and it's like, hey, let you know, I want you to learn a little bit more about what I'm doing with some real estate. And I was like, oh yay, somebody I know is, you know, into it. So tell me. And he told me and I was like, oh, this sounds great. You know, he had bought a bunch of apartments and, and it was cool. It was cool. And I was like, all right, I got to learn more. Let me come and see what you've got. And maybe you can show me some properties around the area and we can, we can kind of dive in. So we did that and I ended up leaving with 2 buildings under contract. And, um, the idea of this future BiggerPockets was kind of born. It wasn't really in my head, but, um, you know, this led to it because I realized that there was all this stuff I didn't know. I had no idea what I knew. I had no idea what I didn't know. And I was like, hey, what if I can take all this information that's out there and put it together in one place? That'll be helpful to me. Oh wait, that'll be helpful to other people too. Oh, and by the way, as I'm trying to figure all this stuff out, the only information I'm finding right now online is from these kind of late-night TV get-rich-quick guys. And like, yeah, it just doesn't feel super like good to me. Um, not my style of education, you know, the, the pitch in your face. And so I was like, you know, let me just start building something to help myself out. So totally selfish, start building the site nights, weekends, free periods. And little by little, you know, end up hiring. And at some point I took a bunch of savings and hired a firm out of India to develop. And that was a big disaster because I didn't know what I was doing with that. Lost pretty much everything. was going to shut it down, went back, hustled the next 7 years, got super burnt out, was about to quit. In tears with my wife, and she's like, Josh, don't quit. This thing is— we were living off of it at that point, just the two of us. We had no employees, 8 years in.

Yeah.

8 years in, and not living fat. We were living, but Okay, not great. And I hired a consultant to help me figure out what to do, and he was great. And ultimately, I ended up not quitting and hiring my first employee. And then from there, it started to scale. I was able to kind of get out of the day-to-day grind and really focus on the, you know, 1,000-foot view and start to scale this thing. And In that period, we launched the podcast, we launched our publishing business, we got really good at attracting users even faster, we got good at servicing those users better, and the term growth hacking at some point therein kind of came about, so we were doing that. And little by little grew it into this amazing thing, a huge audience, big business. And went through some family stuff and had to step away to take care of one of my kids full-time. And, you know, in doing that, I got to realize that, you know, I was burning at both ends. You know, I was working 80, 100-hour weeks. I was burnt out. I loved the business, still love the business. But, you know, wasn't loving my job at a company with, you know, 60 or so, 50, 60 people. I just, that wasn't as much fun for me as it was when it was, you know, me or—

You.

Me and 10 other people, right? And then, so ultimately went towards an exit and started a process and ended up exiting to a PE shop. about 3 and a half years ago. And then the last 3 and a half years— I know this is a long answer to a short question— but in the last 3 and a half years, you know, I've learned what it's like to be a board member of a company, which has been just eye-opening and fun in a whole new way. Very, very different than doing the day-to-day.

Yeah.

And I've been angel investing amongst other things, which has been interesting. And then also advising some startups Um, you know, as they, as they come up. So I don't know if I even answered your question, but that's, that's, that's what's up.

Not much is what you're saying. It was easy, straight, smooth sailing from start to finish. Huge acquisition. You knew exactly what you were doing and everything, right, Josh?

Lifestyle business to small family business to actual growth company and on and on and on and on and on.

Anyway, yeah, all stages. A couple things I want to go back to that I've heard before, and obviously from researching this, I've heard things about the story. Eight years without hiring an employee. Why that amount of time? Or like why at that point in time you're like that was enough? Not like six years in, not five years in, four years. You know I mean? I'm curious on the timing on that.

That was really dumb.

It's a learning experience, Josh.

Learning. Well, so look, look. The first two years, it was it wasn't even intended to be a business. It was a hobby, right? I was doing it nights, weekends while teaching. I quit my job. after 2 years. Maybe I was making 10 grand a year, maybe after 2 years.

Yeah.

I doubt I was making that much. Wife supported us. And, um, uh, so I didn't have the money to pay anyone. I didn't want to go into debt and I didn't want to raise money, although I did meet with VCs to talk about it and they all said I was crazy. So, um, anyone listening, by the way, they don't know what they're talking about. Oh yeah, and we also don't know what we're talking about. So trust your instinct because, you know, if you've got an idea and you really believe in it and you're willing to kind of suffer, which I did, to get through it, um, you may actually get there. I've seen a lot of companies not make it because of timing— they were too early. I've seen companies not make it, uh, because of bad investors. I've seen companies not make it for a lot of reasons, and I've seen I've seen people just really work their way through the grind to get through it on companies that everybody said was going to fail. So don't listen to anybody. Um, you know, take everything we say with a grain of salt.

Yeah.

And make your own informed choices. I'm not saying work at something that's clearly failing forever. We were not failing, it was growing. I just— yeah, I waited 8 years because I didn't want to take on debt. I wasn't making enough money at any of those points to really hire somebody. And when I ultimately did hire that first person, we had to figure out how to change our lifestyle in order to afford that employee. By the way, again, we were not living, going out to eat 7 days a week.

Lavish lifestyles.

Yeah, it was not lavish.

At that point in time, so you're 8 years in, you hire this first employee. Not lavish, but it was supporting you. The business was at least, and you had been doing it for then about 6 years or so full-time at that point. 'Cause you quit your job 2 years in. So like that point, hiring that employee, then how did you find them? And like, what did that look like in terms of, okay, this is the first time you brought someone on. What were they gonna do? What were you gonna do? 'Cause this is a whole total shift. I'm curious about that too.

Yeah. So I, to be fair, I had hired contractors prior to that. Those contractors were always developers.

Yeah.

And so this first employee was a member of the community. So BiggerPockets was a social network I had built. They were a member of the community, they were in love with the community, and they were a success, a success story of the community. So I hired my first passionate employee who believed in what I had built, which Which by the way, hire that person. Like if you find somebody and they're milquetoast, man, move on, find the next one. I don't care what the resume says. I don't care if they were Harvard MBA, Yale. I don't care if they came from Uber, Google, it doesn't matter if they're like there for a paycheck and not there because they're passionate, especially in the stages of like 0 to 10, 15, 20 people.

Bye-bye.

You don't need them because they're going to bring trouble. And this is not just from my experience. This is, you know, ultimately I speak to a lot of people. So yeah, just be aware. So yeah, I brought him in and his job was help me take over some of the administration of the community, help create more content because I was producing and running and managing. A team of writers. We were putting out— when I hired him, I was managing, I believe, 25 to 30 articles a week on our blog, along with a community of a couple hundred thousand people, I think, at that time, along with all the support that comes with that, along with dozens of advertisers, and so on and so forth. So on. Oh yeah, and I did that all by myself, thus the 80 to 100 hours a week.

Are you saying it takes time to write these articles and create content?

I'm saying What, what was I doing? What was I thinking?

Well, you were obviously passionate about it.

Anytime somebody— yeah, exactly. Anytime somebody gives me an excuse like, oh, you know, like, I don't have— that's a lot of work. Oh yeah. And you got to do it. You got to do it. Okay.

With that, in that time period. So even just to take a— give us an overview here. So people who aren't familiar, BiggerPockets is massive. There's like 2 million plus members. There's like 100 million downloads of the podcast. Most people should know that. But going back to that point, you mentioned all these articles you were writing in the inception of the site.

I wasn't writing them all.

I was—

yeah, many of them. I was— well, no, I wrote some. No, I, I realized that I was not the expert. And so at no point did I ever want to pretend to be the end-all be-all expert because I wasn't. And so my thesis was, I'm going to bring in the experts. I'm going to I'm gonna be the hub where the experts come in. I'm gonna help manage, edit, and help them shape their content in a way that fits what the people want. Because my goal was democratize information for real estate investors, because it didn't exist. And we did that. So sorry to cut you off. But I just—

No, no, it makes sense. So producing that—

I was a producer.

Yeah, that makes sense. In that, take us through the overview of like, Going from blog posts to podcasts, other media, obviously, even now you have like 900-something thousand YouTube subscribers, for instance, like the progression of that I'd be curious about in terms of BiggerPockets from different media formats.

Everything I ever did was look at something, realize that we needed to be there, and figure it out. I mean, you know, I didn't go to college for this. I was a marketing guy in college. And marketing in college was not online marketing. You know, I figured it out. There was no Pat Flynn, you know, guide to online marketing when I was doing this. At some point when Pat came up, like, he was learning as we were learning with, along with, you know, all the other old school dudes back in the day. Like, we were figuring— ShoeMoney. I don't, I don't, you know, I'd have to think about all these guys' names, but like, We were all figuring it out as we went along. And so, you know, the first marketing I had to do was the community. I had to get users to this community. And that was a pain in the— you know what? That was hard. I think of all the things, that was the hardest thing because that's a chicken and egg. How do you get a thriving community? Well, you need people. How do you get people without other people?

Mm-hmm.

So that was really, really difficult. Um, ultimately then came written content. I wrote the content at first. It was researched content, not firsthand experience content. And then from there it was, hey, let's— I can't do this, you know.

Yeah.

The credibility won't be there unless I build this army of people. So let me do this. We have traffic now. Let's start to get content that we could then promote and help build their brand And that'll excite them, so they'll want to keep producing content for us. And so that, you know, then came that podcast was like a hey podcasts, you know, Will Wheaton back in the day I think was one of the first podcast guys. And you know, I saw what he was doing. I was like, wow, Will, this is I don't know him by the way, but like this is cool. Okay, like what about real estate? Oh wait. You know, same as everything else, the content on real estate feels kind of stale. There is some content out there. How do we create content that is not only informative but also entertaining? So the basis of our show was like, I mean, we literally were like, let's take The Howard Stern Show and turn it into an informative real estate—

Real estate Mm-hmm.

So let's, let's kind of have this relationship where we're kind of Robin and Howard, basically.

Yeah.

We're Brandon and I. And, um, through that, you know, we can bring in third guests and we can actually dive in. So you'll get to know us and our rela— our relationship with one another. And then beyond that, you'll want to learn from these people that we bring on. And, and that proved to be very, very successful. The show's Still one of the top, I think, 10 business shows in the world. Massive, massive show. I did, I think, 250 shows or so. I think we're on 500-something. I don't know where they're at now.

Yeah.

But people love that arc of following the relationship between he and I and our thoughts and who we were, along with learning from these great Teachers. Publishing came about. You know, all of this came about from the idea of we're building a platform designed to inform and educate people, but if we believe that people are only gonna learn in the way we tell them to learn, It's not going to work. And that's, that's what everyone else does, you know. So for us, it was like, hey, you may learn by reading, I may learn by listening, she may learn by watching videos, you know, he may learn by interacting in a community. So what if we can be everywhere that the people are? We, we can produce the types of content that they want in the places that they are. And, you know, at the end of the day, everybody's competing with everyone else right now. I mean, Netflix is competing with Google, is competing with Disney, is competing with Justin, is competing— like, we all want to share a voice. Every one of you has a Twitter or Insta or TikTok account is competing against everyone in content. You're competing with the New York Times, you're competing with, you know, whomever, Pandora, right? Because if I'm listening to Pandora, I'm not on BiggerPockets. If I'm on BiggerPockets, I'm not watching Netflix, right? So with that mindset, I think by, by building a brand and being in all places, you increase the likelihood that you're going to reach people.

Yeah, we've seen that progression over time in different media companies. I think if you look at someone like Morning Brew, The Hustle, they start with newsletters, they are branching out, branching out, branching out, then they have multiple podcasts. You look at someone like HubSpot, for instance, and their content progression. And just like I said, they bought The Hustle, but they have expanded out and you see this kind of playbook played out again and again, which is fascinating. Even to the point of podcasting, like My First Million is the same type of show where you have 2 guys going back and forth. They might bring a guest on eventually, but it is very entertaining more than anything. But it's also educational as you layer in things on top of that, which is fascinating. And one of the things I can't like gloss over is the community side of it, because I'm Fascinated by that. Building a community in the early days, like you mentioned, like it's basically a cold start problem. How are you building this community in the early days, both from bringing users in and keeping them there and engaged with each other? Like, how did that go? I want to see the progression over time. I'm curious in the early days especially.

I mean, with that, so, you know, my, um, the one thing I pride myself on is, is, you know, trying to be a good voice in the community. I think, um, you are who you associate with. You are, you know, I'll get to your question, but, you know, like, for example, um, you know, I would never work with advertisers that I didn't believe in. Um, you know, I, I, I felt like, again, that association. I turned down money. Um, if I, you know, I remember a situation where there was an advertiser And the guy was— well, guy was a dick. You can bleep me out if you need to.

No, you can say it. It's fine. We're good. You can say whatever you want on the show.

And I just was like, I can't work with this dude. And he, at the time, it was a huge contract. It probably would've represented 40%, 50% of company revenue, this contract. I mean, massive. And he was just not the kind of person I wanted to work with. I was like, talked to my wife and I'm like, I can't do this. It's like, if it's just about money, it's gonna suck. So I turned down the money and I realized I felt good. It felt good. Um, community is the same way. I mean, with the community, uh, so first the genesis of the community was really, um, The other— there were other communities and they were all, at least I believed, feeders to the late-night TV guys and gals. And so I never felt like I was getting information without some kind of upsell. So when I created the community, I created this strict set of rules. It's like no pitching, no upselling. You have to use real name. Of course, people broke that, but we wanted it to be that, right? That was the goal of where we were going.

The aspiration. Yeah.

And that created tension amongst people who would show up who were like, I don't have to do that anywhere else, whatever. I'm going to do what I want. And I said, cool. We'll see you later. Bye. And we'd run off. That was never fun because there was always anger and drama. But the beginning was I went to ancillary forums. I never, never went to the other real estate forums because I thought that was shady, going to other forums in the niche and trying to steal users. I thought that was just not our— not the way to go, even though I disagreed with their models. Like, that's not how I operate. Um, so I would go to ancillary communities. Typically they were web— there was webmaster communities, ironically, which is weird, um, and personal finance communities. Um, and by communities, I'm talking forums. There was nothing else besides that. Um, you know, we're talking MySpace days here, people.

We'll explain this to Gen Z later.

It's fine. Yeah, yeah. Um, so, um, I would go to those communities. They always had off-topic areas, and in off-topic areas, people talk off-topic. And in those areas, there was always a question about real estate. And so I'd always go and I'd research the question write a response, and then I created a signature that pointed to BiggerPockets, the real estate investing community, and people started to click through and come, come through. And so I fed some questions and I'd get people to come, they'd eventually answer, um, and then, you know, these dialogues would begin. And so it took time. I mean, think why I worked 80, 100 hours a week. I mean, I was on countless other forums participating Connecting, communicating, waiting for them to come back to our platform. As soon as they did, I would jump on it, Johnny-on-the-spot answer, respond, you know, and then create this dialogue, draw in other people. And it took— it was probably, you know, first I ended up getting moderators, but ultimately it took probably 5 years, maybe more. It was probably 5 years, 6 years before the community actually became self-policing. Um, so at some point—

5 years?

Self-policing. Now before that, we had moderators and me that, that did all that, but like, you know, people got to the point where like, wait, this dude's trying to post this crap in my community? Get out, right? Which was, which was amazing. Like, that was the, that was the day I was like, wow. This is something. This is something. But yeah, so that was, I think, in short, I mean, we could talk about that alone for like 3 days.

Like the growth of the site. Yeah, I'm fascinated by it too.

Yeah.

With that too, so you mentioned the work ethic side of it. I'm always fascinated by people who decide to do that because you said like in different interviews and stuff, basically the site didn't make major money until like a decade in. Obviously you said you were getting revenue, driving growth, but a decade for people like, see, you're startup founders now, like a decade, 10 years in till you made significant money. What fueled you along the way? Even early on, like you're getting this terrible feedback by VCs. You're like, basically like, fuck you guys, whatever. I'm gonna keep doing this. Like what kept you, what kept you doing? I'm just curious on what drove you, man, to continue on.

One of my, I'm gonna go off on another tangent. It's fun. Oh, let's go. One of my good friends who lives in LA, He was a stand-up. He did stand-up. He was an actor, still is. He's immensely talented, creative. He went and wrote a movie. And for years and years and years, he worked on it and worked on the script and pitched it and promoted it and got nowhere. And then we're talking almost 20 years later. He decided he had the resources to do it on his own, and he went and produced this film and put it out, went through the festival circuit, got lots of good play, and was fabulous. 20 years. By the way, he's not alone in that business. There are a lot of people and there's a lot of scripts that kind of go through similar things.

Yeah.

You know, what drives him, what drives me, I think it's probably something similar. You know, in my case, though, I was getting daily feedback from users that this thing that I had built was transforming their life. I think we are in a distinctly unique situation that probably 1% of 1% of 1% of companies or businesses or entities can say that they actually transform people's lives for the better. I can't, I can't think of very many businesses, period, um, whose purpose is that.

Yeah.

And, and so when you get an email that says, you know, Josh, I can't believe it, you know, I've been working fast food for, you know, 10 years, I've been saving every nickel and dime, and I just bought my first, uh, you know, um, duplex to, to rent out the other half. And house hack, like, thank you, you changed my life. I can't believe it. You know, we're off to the races. Like, how can you not let that affect you? Um, by the way, I didn't get one email. It's thousands and thousands and thousands of emails that are just like that.

That's crazy.

Um, yeah, crazy, right? So that, as hard as it was, as stressful as it was, as much as I struggled That's what brought me back. That's what kept me from quitting the probably half dozen, dozen times that I was like, I'm done, I can't, I can't do this.

It wasn't anything to do with the 27 cents in Google AdSense you were making in the early days?

Yeah, that was, that was, that was, that first check was amazing. Do you have— I remember my mother-in-law still will come and talk about that check. She would like it. That was getting that first check changed. Massive.

I remember, so my first business was a personal training business. And I remember I posted an ad on Craigslist to do personal training. And someone signed up for an entire summer. It was only the summer. It was between like my junior and senior year of college. And they signed up for the entire summer to do training. I'm like, I'm going to be gone at the end of summer. Like, you know, I'm gonna be like, it's not even like an ongoing thing. I guess it's like 10 weeks. And they signed up and paid upfront. I was like, I just made money from the internet. Someone paid me to do this thing. Like, this is insane. And then like when I had my first like sale of like a product or a course or something, it was like, wait, what? I was sleeping and then something came in and this sale came in. And like for any entrepreneur who sees that, it becomes real. You're like addicted. You're like, wait, there's impact. Like I did something with people, like money came in. That's crazy to me. Like that, those early wins are so huge. And a lot of people don't even ever get that.

In the entertainment business, we call that mailbox money. You know, it was, you do a commercial or something else, it's residuals. You know, those random checks will just come in, mailbox money. Like, yeah, there's nothing better than that.

My friend mentioned that too, actually, from a movie she did like one time. It was like, yeah, money still comes in every month or whatever, like these royalties years later, which is kind of insane. So you're— it took that much. And then I know like on a podcast you did for, I think it was like Nathan Lockhart's podcast or something, at some point in time in 2015, it was, you were making like, you had like 10,000 paid users. Let's just say 10,000 plus, 10,000 plus. So probably more than that, but you had a lot of paid users in 2015. That period, take me through like that period. Once you were making serious money, how you thought about growth, building the team, like how did it progress? Because you mentioned now earlier, you're like, this is a different business. I didn't really want to run with this many employees and whatever. Not the same as when it's just you.

So I did want to run it. Yeah. Let me let me put it this way.

Yeah.

Everybody warned me that you get to a certain point and. Everything changes. And I was like, ah, what do you know?

Meh.

Yeah. And they were right. You get to a point where you can no longer manage everyone on your team. It just, it, you know, the numbers, the law of big numbers, right? It just, it makes it impossible. And so at some point you have to hire management layer. At some point, you have to put people under other people. That, to me, was the beginning of the end of the fun of building the business. Now, it was still an intellectual challenge because, you know, again, everyone was like, uh, you know, it's totally different. And I was like, I can do this. They're like, you may— you can, you may not want to.

Yeah.

And I did, and I was stressed out, you know, like, yeah.

Yeah, man.

Because no, look, look, ultimately nobody does things the way you want them done. And if you want them done right, you gotta do it yourself, so to speak. You know, management, you know, oh man, I gotta pay somebody to just oversee people. Like, what, what am I—

what?

Like, why are they not just producing? They need to do and create. Like, that's— for people like me, that's hard. I'm not the guy that likes managing managers. I'm not the guy that likes, you know, middle management.

Yeah.

I don't like that. You know, like, it's a necessity, but I don't like it. And so, um, I didn't know I didn't like it until I was doing it. And, and, uh, but I just, I, I didn't like it. You know, I think one of the big key moments was, was bringing in our, our first HR, head of HR. Um, she was— she and I did not see eye to eye on a lot of stuff. However, she was probably one of the most important hires we ever brought in. Infinitely valuable, fantastic at what she did, and really helped to kind of establish infrastructure. And by having her, I also didn't have to deal necessarily with, you know, a lot of the headache stuff that I no longer wanted to deal with, because that stuff tends to come up as you scale and grow. But yeah, you know, I think that tipping point was somewhere in the, like, call it 10 to 14 people where I was like, oh, there's too many people. This is just like, I'm not drafting, creating, working on product, which really was my favorite thing to do. I'm now babysitting in some ways. I'm now overseeing. I'm now whatever it was. And some of that may be due to failings and inexperience on my end, admittedly, for sure. But yeah, I just wanted to be deep in the product like that, you know, and, you know, I liked overseeing the content. I liked overseeing the growth hack stuff. Like that stuff was fun, but like, yeah, I hated dealing with user complaints and customer support. I hated that. I hated dealing with, you know, just like little issues that people were dealing with within the company, which like, it's important. You have to deal with it.

Yeah.

But, you know, we all like different things. And so what you're good at may not be what you like, and what you like may not gel with what you're the best at, and so on and so forth. So, you know, you've got to kind of figure that out. I think I suffered for too long because, like, I had to prove to myself, and somewhere on my shoulder was a chip. From the, you can't do it, from the VCs and a chip from all the people who are like, yeah, you're never— yeah, you'll make it to 10, 12, 15 people, but yeah, that's about— that's a wrap. So like, I almost wanted to grow just to spite people, um, which is again really stupid, but like, I, I am glad we did.

Yeah.

It was good, good for the business, good for the community, good for end users. But me personally, again, I failed to realize the point at which I stopped having fun. And I think when you build a company, it gets to a point where it's doing well enough. If you're not having fun, why are you doing it?

Yeah. You started this thing, you put so much effort into it for years and years and years. If it's not at that point— it does bring up the famous Paul Graham essay, Makers vs. Managers Schedule. It's much different. Makers versus managers. It does change how you operate. Is it a day full of meetings? Is it a day full of deep work? Different things you're working on, creative endeavors. It's much different. And people don't always realize that. And also the type of business you create, like everyone sees this like sexy venture-backed startup, but like, is that what you actually want to— do you know how, you know what happens when those companies get big? You have a lot of employees. Like, and how much do you own? Yeah.

Like, I don't, I don't like meetings. Like, I don't like meetings. I like a lot of people being in my office with my head down working. Like, yeah.

I know we, we don't have a ton of time. And I want to get to some other topics too. But I'm just curious with BiggerPockets, how massive it got. It took a long time to get there. Obviously, a lot of hard work. But like, if you could codify like, like how, like, why has it been successful? Like, what Like is it that you guys have done? hard work went into that, sure. But was it a lot like some timing combined with you did enough like things that don't scale early on? Like just take me through how you at least think about it. If I, if you had to answer around like what made it successful.

I saw dozens and dozens of upstart competitors come up through the years and they all failed. Many of them were funded. So they saw us, they thought, hey, we can just throw money behind this. And a community is not built with capital behind it. Community is built with love. I mean, there's—

Yeah.

You can't commit— you cannot compete with a community if it's built on love, on passion, on support. And so that was one thing too, was I didn't have, call it, a financial gun at my head. Like, I didn't have to make money. You know, I had no expectation of a return, so I had time. I had patience. Time was on my side, so I could outlast everybody else who had a clock, right? Those were huge. I think core values, which is something that I thought was baloney in the early days. I'm like, well, who the hell needs core values? Like, what is that nonsense? I mean, I didn't realize that I had established them, but they just weren't written, right? Yeah. It was, here's how we're gonna live within the community. Here's the kind of company I wanna have. Here's the, hey, the no asshole rule, right?

Yeah.

Hey, here's the, like, you know, family above all. You know, if you see my pinned tweet on my Twitter account, you know, those are our core values, @JRdorkin, that I'm so proud of. It was, you know, family above all else. You know, it was respecting even the janitor, so to speak. The guy lowest on the totem pole at the company is the guy or the gal that may give the single most important idea for the company.

Yeah.

So silos are troublesome, and, you know, everybody's opinion matters. Obviously, at the end of the day, you know, you get to decide. But, you know, ignoring people because of where they are in status or stature is horrible. So I think it was that. I think it was just outlook on who we were going to be, and people just fell in love with that, and they loved the belief and the passion that we created by saying, we're going to help you. We're here to make it so that you, whoever you are, whatever your financial state, whatever your status, your color, your preference, whatever it is, we don't care. We all deserve to be successful. We all deserve financial knowledge because, look, I mean— At the end of the day, I grew up in a world where my parents worked one company or two companies for their whole lives with an expectation of a paycheck at the end from the government and Social Security. I, I'm unlikely to collect a dollar of Social Security myself, right?

Yeah.

Not because I haven't paid a boatload of money into Social Security, but just because it's— it may not be there and my kids may not have it. And so, you know, Yeah. I think we all need to find other streams, and I think we all need to be more knowledgeable in finance and wealth. And I'm pretty passionate about that. And I think it's just so important, particularly in underserved communities, that we hear that this is achievable and it's possible because it is. It doesn't matter who you are. I mean, man, the success stories on our podcast week after week. Prove that none of that matters. All that matters is the grit, the determination, and you know the time and the wisdom.

Yeah, it's something that we're even from doing this podcast for Just Go Grind podcast for the last four years and seeing these stories of why I still do it and why I still enjoy it. It's like every story is inspiration some way for other people who also look like them. If I have like a black founder on, a Latin Latino founder on, like it always showcase like it's possible, and we need to hear these stories. I think it's helpful and beneficial for people to see those and hear them to then know it's possible. They're also like, oh wait, like. They just were a person who decided to take action and did it. Like, it wasn't some crazy thing, just did it. Like, I love hearing that.

And you know what stops the rest of them? It's most of the time, I mean, I've interviewed thousands and thousands of people over and again, it's almost exclusively fear. It's almost exclusively fear. What might happen? What could happen? What if I fail? What are people gonna think of me? Yeah, whatever it is. You know, if you don't fail, if you don't try, you don't fail. But if you don't try, you don't succeed either.

So I was just interviewing Samara Hernandez from Chingona Ventures, venture capital. She's raised like a $52 million fund, investing mostly in like underrepresented founders. And we were talking about how like, yeah, what's the alternative? Like for her raising, like, first one was like $6 million, this one's $52. It's like you just keep going because what's the alternative? You don't have another option really. Same with what we were talking about, Matt Conwell, who had his fund, did like 1,000-some meetings. And it's just like, yeah, I kept having these meetings. That's what I had to do to get it done. Like, if I would've done less meetings if I could, but I couldn't do that because I wasn't going to get it done that way. So it's like there's just no alternative, you know?

Well, unless you're an overnight success. And that's what— but that's what the media pushes. That's what social media pushes. That's what the press pushes. And so, and that's what's sexy and exciting, right? Oh my God, this guy just started a company and he's a billionaire. Oh my God, this person created this Instagram, TikTok account and man, they're famous. Like, yeah, that happens. The rest of us, it takes work.

Yeah, we have billions.

For you listening, it's going to take work.

Yes, it'll definitely take work. I want to get to a question someone had from Twitter. I know we haven't talked much about investing, but when I do a little bit of your startup investing and also this question, They're wondering about your views on real estate investments at a time like this, given this is recording at end of June 2022. Markets are not great. What are your views on real estate investing currently?

So the beauty of BiggerPockets is whether the market's good or bad, people want to know exactly what you asked. And so the beauty is we, you know, we have that platform that allows people to ask and answer those questions. That's what BiggerPockets does, right? My view, you know, we all have views, and most of them are wrong. I think, look, I think the market's fairly toppy. Interest rates have jumped dramatically. They're considerably less than I spent on my first condo. So rates are still relatively low. Although if you're, you know, 20 to 30, you know, you don't know what I'm talking about. This is scary, right? Well, it's not scary. Um, I'm reminded by some, some old-timers who talk about in the '80s when rates were 20%. Imagine interest rates 20%. Yeah. And by the way, deals still got done. Business still happened. So the answer to your question is timing the market like timing the stock market. Yeah, you know, you got to take that out of your head. It's all about finding deals, right? If you're going to buy a stock and you're going to hold it for 20 years, buy a stock that's going to crush it for the next 20 years. Is Apple going to be around in 20 years? Is Disney going to be around doing well in 20 years? Sure they are. Are they going to be growing and doing smart things? I'm pretty sure. Okay, well, those are good companies to put your money in, in Google and so on, right?

Yeah.

You know, are— with real estate, are people going to need housing? Absolutely. Is there a housing shortage? Absolutely. We cannot build— we are not building enough housing for the population. So there's that on the supply-demand scale. That demand is there and it's going to be there. Will we see what happened in '08? I don't think so, because '08, I believe, happened because The banks just took on way too much risk and were lending to people who really had no business borrowing. You know, you just show up and they'd give you money. But I think we'll definitely see a flattening. We're gonna see softening in a bunch of markets. Could we see 10%, 15%, 20% drops? We could on a market-by-market basis. Do I expect it to hold? I mean, again, what is your timeline? Any investment is a— is not just about the investment, it's about the timeline. If you're investing for 2 years or 3 years from now, you should not be investing in real estate unless you're like a house flipper. And that's not an investor, that's a flipper. That's, that's somebody who's proactively taking an action to generate cash versus somebody who's actually a long-term investor. So my question is— my answer is I think it'll be flat to slightly negative over the short term. Over the long term, real estate should continue to rise. And I think everybody should figure out how they can do it. And to those people who are saying, well, I need money to make real estate, the answer is you actually You don't. Um, you hit up Justin here and you say, Justin, let me borrow some money. No, don't do that. Don't do that. No, but like, you can partner with people who, who do have money that you know, um, and go in and take a small piece of a deal instead of the whole thing and make, make those first checks. And then you do it again until you can do it on your own, right? Right? There's ways to do it that are not shady, not scammy, totally legit. And it just takes the education. And I think that's where the company I built, BiggerPockets, does well in helping people out.

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the timeframe. I think it's an important note on that because obviously we think about that a lot at Vitalize with our firm. We're thinking of, oh, it's 10 years, whatever. And even someone I don't know what I read this somewhere, like talking about the rate of return. Like, oh, let's see, you have like a 3x fund or whatever, but does the fund 3x in 8 years or 12 years? Like it matters. The timeline matters. This internal rate of return changes off of a timeframe. So you have to think about that when you're investing. I think that's maybe overlooked sometimes on like this exit potential or when the exits happen. Even as an angel investor, it's the same type of thing. Like how, when, when are those companies you're investing in actually exiting? And that matters as For you, as we have the last few minutes here, just curious on how you got into more startup investing, interest in that, and maybe how you're thinking about that as part of your overall kind of portfolio.

Sure. Um, I— yeah, but before that, I just want to put this out there. You know, I, I think it's— again, we're, we're all in this world of instant gratification and, and Extreme successes are the things that are amplified and things like that. But, you know, if you're listening and you're thinking, hey, I'm working a 9 to 5 and I make, you know, $50K a year, $100K, $150K, whatever it is you make, $25K, you know, we all think, oh man, I want to be rich, right? I want to make a lot of money. I want to be rich. And that number changes, by the way, over time. As you make more money, you want more money. Your lifestyle creeps up. It's called lifestyle creep, right? And you need more money to live the life that you wanna live, for most people. A successful business might be a business that generates a million bucks a year that you have, you know, 40% margins on, and you're making $400K a year off this business. with, let's say, no employees or one employee, right? That's a really— that's a good business.

Yes.

Imagine you have that business and you have very little stress, you know, you work when you want to work, or you work 40 hours a week. That's a hugely successful business. But many of us see that and we're like, well, A million dollars? I want a business that does $5 million. I want a business that's $10 million. I gotta raise, I gotta raise money at a $50 million valuation or it's a complete failure. I gotta raise money at $100 million or it's a failure. But you know what? If you've gone and raised money and own like 3% or 5% or 10% of your own company and it's a $100 million company, you've got a $10 million company. You can create your own $10 million company, build your own, and you're just as successful as the guy with the $100 million company. Just so you know.

Yep.

The math works out. So, you know, so many entrepreneurs are like, I'm gonna build this billion-dollar idea, and when they're making a million bucks, they're like, I'm a failure. And I'm like, you have what so many people want. Stop and get a little perspective. Um, I think it's so easy to get caught up in all that because society again tells us that this is not— this is what success looks like. Well, that's all bullshit. Like, that's not what success looks like. You know, we all have different beliefs on what it is. My belief of success is you're making enough money that you don't have to necessarily worry. It takes care of your bills and you're putting money away for the future that you can then invest and your money makes money for you. And if your goal might be retire at 55 or 45 or 30, Um, or 65. You know, all, all of these are feasible. It just depends on what you want to do, right?

Yeah.

And the kind of lifestyle you want to have. Because I gave up my lifestyle for a long time. I lost my friends, I had no hobbies, and all I did was work. But I got the financial success, right? So, but, but there's a trade-off. I would, I would definitely take back the fun and experiences that I didn't have, the time that I didn't get to spend with my kids that I wanted to spend.

I would take that back.

To your question, I got into the angel investing because, you know, post-exit, I realized how much fun it was when I had, you know, a year or so Post-exit, I was like, when did I have the most fun? Oh, it was in the early years. That was fun. Those were like exciting times, being able to have like a crazy idea and throw stuff against the wall and try it and see what happens and fail. And by the way, not quit when you fail and not give up on what you just failed on, but try a little angle on what you just failed on. Try another angle on what you failed on instead of saying, oh, I failed on this, this sucks, it'll never work. That doesn't mean it'll never work. It just means your current iteration at the current time is not working. But maybe if you try a different approach to that ad that you're running, or maybe if the landing page looks different, or maybe if that product you're building has a different packaging, or maybe, you know, your word of mouth is not correct, or whatever it is, you, you may have something that's amazing. But it may not be working exactly the way you want it. It doesn't mean you should give up on it. Anyway, those early days are super exciting and they're super fun. And I started just talking to other entrepreneurs and like I'd have these conversations where they'd ask me questions and I'd offer my advice, which was always ended with, don't listen to anything I have to say. And Sorry, my phone.

No worries, no worries.

Um, but, uh, it would always end with that. Um, but make your own decisions, of course. And it was just— it was fun, it was exciting. And then suddenly I'm like, you know, what if I just start putting some money in? Um, so I've got— I've done a bunch of direct deals where I invest direct through founders, and then, you know, AngelList, I've done quite a bit more. Um, So AngelList is a little dangerous.

It's too easy.

It's too easy. It's like, exactly.

It's too easy.

You know, oh man, I just invested $1,000 in this. Oh wait, did I want to do that? So, um, but yeah.

It's funny to hear that. Like, yeah, at that point it is interesting to see the companies, but I think the main point you mentioned there with being at work with these early stage startups is like, Just fascinating to hear what they're working on, what they're doing, how they're thinking about it. Oh, how do you think about growth? Oh, okay. Oh, how do you think about this part? Oh, you're gonna go to market with this? Like, it's just fascinating. I love it. So I get the appeal of it.

Well, the other thing is like, I don't know, I'm, I'm, I wanna know where we're going. And by we, I mean like future, this is like human society and, and there's no better place than to see what's next on, on, on what your next toaster is going to look like or the cars of the future or just like how we're going to transport, what healthcare is going to look like, biotech or environment. I mean, then looking at startups, it's a peek into the future.

Yeah. I use, I mean, both like the podcast with interviewing founders to hear that and obviously calls I have with founders anyways, and then Twitter too and having like asking questions to get that feedback. Like, what are people working on? I'm like, oh, this is crazy. Some of the stuff you hear is like ridiculous. And like, even like, uh, the craziest probably I ever heard of is like, uh, mind-controlled bionic arms that like DARPA had some technology and someone's working on it in the back. Like, that, that's just wild. I'm just like, wait, what? And you see that, yeah, you're like, what? People are doing this? And like, that is just fascinating. But I know we're out of time.

Uh, we're 3D printing houses and companies that are 3D printing houses or have the technology to 3D print on Mars and on the moon. I mean, like, yeah, this is 2022. It's, it's as, as, as Mindy would say, bonkerballs.

It is. It's insane. And it's like, people— I'm glad people are working on these things. Let's put it that way. Uh, because it's gonna be fun for everyone. And I know we're out of time, but where's the best place for people to, uh, reach out to you, connect with you if they'd like to?

Definitely Twitter is where I spend my time. So it's @JRdorkin. That's @JRdorkin. And yeah, man, this is fun. And yeah, I mean, I love following this guy here, man. This man is igniting an army of excited founders. It's super cool.

Yeah, it's been fun to progress on that. And to your point of building community, that's how I think about the same with Twitter. So like, how do you help people? How do you connect people where they need? And like, once you, especially once you build an audience, it's just like, why not use that to elevate others in whatever way possible? And I just love doing it. So.

That's great, man. We need more people like you.

Well, Josh, thanks so much for the time today. Really appreciate it.

It's a pleasure, man.