How I Used Instagram to Build a $7,000,000 Airbnb Business | 059

I woke up one day and all of our listings were suspended. I just spent $2.3 million on this. It was a really bad feeling. And then 18 months after opening, $7 million exit.

That's wild. One of the most powerful combinations in the world is when you combine online and offline. My guest today is Isaac French, who has done exactly this.

We had 5,000 followers on Instagram. We went all in with that and built an audience of around 150,000 people driving 80% direct bookings. The buyers pretty much explicitly told me the big reason that they Bought it. That audience is so valuable.

How have you brought storytelling into all of this?

Twitter is basically the petri dish for stories. Like, if it does well there, it's probably worth the mainstream media picking it up. We had stories published in Vice, the New York Post, Business Insider, and like 4 or 5 other podcasts. So a combined probably 100 million views. As a creator, I've done like all the hard work that the big brands can't figure out. If you really want to maximize shareability, maximize your chance for virality, then that's, that's the secret sauce.

Isaac, have you ever heard about the Motel Patel Cartel?

I have not. It sounds familiar, but okay, tell me.

In like the '50s and '60s, these members of the Patel family in India would pool money together And some of them, and then they would move to the United States and they would use some of that money they'd pooled together to buy a motel. So they'd like get this little business going. And most families would be like, cool, we have this, we'll save up and do something else. But they would pay it forward to like other family members and help them move over. And then you fast forward, you know, 30, 40, 50 years and more than half of all the motels in the United States are owned by, you know, are owned by Patels. Which is just absolutely wild. So when I look at your story and what you've done, I see you and your brothers doing this, basically the same thing where you're building these projects that are so much bigger than what would be possible alone. So I just want to start, maybe let's dive into an example of you doing that with your family. And then we can get into Live Oak Lake and all the other amazing stuff that you've done.

I've always been quite entrepreneurial, as have several of my siblings. And, you know, with starting businesses like typewriter, everything from a typewriter repair shop, like, as one does, sourcing 1900s typewriters on eBay, figuring out how to repair them and then reselling them. I don't know where that infatuation came from. To, of course, the lemonade snack stand out on our road, to a a family bank where I was taking deposits from my siblings. The authorities had to shut that down because it was getting a little out of hand.

It wasn't FDIC insured.

It was not FDIC insured, up to $15. But yeah, exactly. But all of those, being homeschooled, being in that setting, like having animals, saving up to buy animals was so valuable because like we were learning business skills, but also like interpersonal skills and just how to be well-rounded humans from from the time we were very young. And so that naturally transitioned into the family businesses. But all that was like, little did I know, was setting a very strong business foundation for me to go on, 'cause I definitely didn't realize quickly I did not want to spend my entire career in an office crunching numbers. But anyway, when I was 17 or 18, graduated high school, had already been working summers in the construction business for 3 or 4 years, learned a ton of trades, and then, I ran my first project when I was 19. So I was project managing a commercial construction project. And you can imagine like the kind of sneering and raised eyebrows from the other subcontractors that I was their boss and, you know, from the building inspector. And that was, it was good for me. I've always kind of even looked a little younger than I am and kind of sounded like that too. So it was good to overcome all of those insecurities, but Simultaneous to that, we lived in this little town called Derry, which is like 550 people, 2 hours from an interstate, right on the border of like the rolling wheat fields of the Palouse region, which are just beautiful, like the most productive wheat country in the world and the most expansive forested mountainous area in the lower 48. Derry sits like right at the border. And so it's beautiful. And this town was originally a logging town, but, you know, the industry had sort of moved on. Young people had moved away and there were several old brick buildings, and they were just— one of them was about to collapse. It had just been sitting vacant with like full of cars for decades. And so it wasn't just us. We had some friends, but together we just, you know, over a few years befriended the owner of that property as well as the other locals. Of course, like, we weren't just doing it. So like, yes, we wanted to buy it eventually, but we were just trying to be good neighbors. One day he was like, okay, I'm ready to sell. and he had never considered selling to anyone in like 40 years of owning it. And so we bought this old building, like 10,000 square feet, huge thing about to collapse, and then came in literally as a team, my older brothers, myself, a couple of our closest friends, first structurally reinforced the whole thing, poured a new concrete slab throughout the whole thing, developed a commercial kitchen. We'd never run a restaurant or a bakery, but my sister had started a little pop-up stand baking, and we had a dream to open a restaurant. And we opened up this bakery called the Pie Safe. And this was really like the first breath of fresh air in this town in, you know, probably half of a century. We were always like tackling, you know, and biting off probably more than we could chew, but the locals loved it. And within a couple years, we had, you know, people coming there from all over, like several hours away, just driving there to eat lunch there. And so that was pretty fun. And that incorporated our entire family. And then it kind of flowed from there. We bought other buildings. My mom, is into like quilting and fiber crafts. And so she opened like this amazing old-fashioned quilting shop down the street, which we also, you know, we renovated that building. We did a butcher shop that just now opened, an old mercantile. And then the best of all of that, and I'll just end with this, was this train car. So my dad is this train aficionado. And one day we got a call from one of our neighbors and he's like, hey, can you come help me shovel my barn? It's about to collapse. It was in the winter. So he gets over there and the first thing he sees is like this old hunk of rotting wood. And honestly, most people probably wouldn't have even recognized this as a train car, but he knew exactly what it was. He'd already studied all the history in that area, and he was— I mean, his eyes lit up like, what in the world? How in the world did this thing get here? There were 20 cats living inside of it.

Oh, that's not good.

And, uh, so he, he was like, hey, would you ever sell this to the farmer? Sure. $3,000, we bought it. Took us 2 years to find someone who would move it because it's 61 feet long. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Like, do you have to crane it onto something?

Or like, they used it like a, just an 18-wheeler and like a bulldozer. Okay. And we had to, you know, this is North Idaho, windy roads.

Oh yeah.

And this was in January when we finally moved it. Like the worst time. The snow's melting, it's muddy, but they got it over. And then this was March. No, this was like February of 2020. Well, guess what happened a couple of weeks later? Yeah. The entire world shut down and everybody was cooped up. Perfect opportunity for, again, us as a family to come together. And literally, my brothers and I, we went out there for 4 or 5 months as a team and top to bottom completely restored this train car. And we turned it into this one-of-a-kind stay on this piece of property we had where we, where we moved it to. Anyway, so now the guests that came to Deary had a place to stay, which was just incredible because all of these businesses together started to complement you know, one another. And then as a family, we were running these. So my sister's cleaning some of them. We're helping design and host and learning to market then. And that ended up sowing the seeds for Live Oak Lake and the other stuff. But hopefully that was a really long answer of showing you like how we worked together.

No, but that's exactly what I wanted to get into because people say you should never do business with the family. And there's all these clichés and there's probably lots of cases where that's true. But I believe so much that like, if you can pull people together and like achieve that together, it's gonna be huge.

Surround yourself with other people, find ways to partner with them. And families are just such a great opportunity. If there's any way you can make it work. I know that sounds, that's really like counterintuitive advice, but there's a certain level of trust that's just built in and understanding that's unspoken, that's unbelievably rare and valuable if you can tap into that.

Well, the thing that I really want to talk about is the blend of like online and offline, which we'll get to so much of that. But what was the process of building Live Oak Lake? I guess first, what is Live Oak Lake?

So Live Oak Lake, I had no term for it at the time, but it's essentially what I would call a micro resort. So it's 7 cabins. They're individual cabins, but they're very cohesively designed. They're all like Nordic inspired. This is in Texas. So right after the train car project, I ended up moving to Texas. Where I married my wife and we settled down there. And I had this dream. A lot of it was spawned from the train car, creating this one-of-a-kind hospitality experience that I had never experienced. But it was like this. It's like building for the audience of one, right? Kind of phenomenon. I was like, this is what I would want to stay at if I was coming to travel, creating an environment too that was just magical and transportive. So I found this 5-acre piece of land that was just overgrown, but it had this little cow pond in the middle and it had these beautiful live oak trees. And when I, first walked on— I'd been looking for like 3 months. When I first walked on that piece of property, I literally got chills. Like, I just felt, this is it, this is the place. And with the help of friends and subcontractors and a local bank and family, was able to buy that. Um, and, uh, in 9 and a half months, design and build this 7-cabin resort with a commons area and trails and just like every detail. I totally geeked out on like the front, everything from like the first impressions in the front gate to the, you know, the way that the lights were positioned and reflected on the water, the way every single window and every single cabin was framing a specific view. It was just a blast. And we opened in January of 2022. I had broken my pelvis during the project. I had built a $750,000 spec home at the same time as the project to help fund this project because it went way over budget, right? And sold that, had done well with that. So it was a whirlwind and we opened. And then 2 weeks later, I woke up one day and our entire account, all of our listings on Airbnb were suspended indefinitely. No warning, no explanation.

So you have 7 listings, 7 listings, accounts gone.

It's 24 years old. I just spent $2.3 million on this of other people's money. And it was a really bad feeling. They say don't build your house on someone else's land. I love this now with email. We'll get to that because this is the perfect example of owning your audience. But I didn't know anything about that. And so, I mean, I was just totally scrambling and there was no, there was no word from Airbnb on what was going on or if it would ever even come back. So long story short, found a local travel influencer, ran a giveaway for under $1,000 that brought in $40 grand of direct bookings in a week's time and about 5,000 followers on Instagram from scratch, which just kind of blew my mind in every way. And then we went all in with that and built an audience of around 150,000 people in like the first 12 to 15 months.

That's wild.

Driving 80% direct bookings, which are amazing in their own right. You make a lot more money. You own the— you have the email so you can retarget the guest. And through that process, I just came to absolutely be convicted. I mean, the power of building an audience as a brand, as a creator, and I hadn't done any of this in the process. Thankfully, I had taken a few pictures. People ask me now, like, what's your number one piece of advice? What's the one thing you'd do different? And the number one thing I would have done different is like document that in and build that in public, right? Because the storytelling is absolute gold from a, you know, from a marketing standpoint. And what I realized is like this dream of creating this, whatever you want to call it, micro resort retreat. So many people actually have that dream. I think it's hardwired in all of us to connect and even to host and to serve and to be served. And so this new genre of hospitality with the micro resort landscape hotel model, if you're building something like that or plenty of other things that are interesting, you need to share that publicly. And I've always been a perfectionist, so it bothered me like, well, I don't wanna show it until it's perfect, until it's done. But I've since learned just through everything I've done.

Work in public. Yeah, you have to. That's such a huge thing 'cause everyone wants to follow a journey. Like there's an Instagram account that I follow right now, two different ones I'm thinking about. One is this couple who are driving the Pan America Highway from, so they like flew way up into Alaska, drove as far as the highway would take them, and then they're going all the way down to the tip of South America. And like, it's a super fun journey to follow. Another one is this guy who bought a little tiny island in Finland, and he is building a cabin and like this winter get or a summer getaway place there. So it's like him and his girlfriend and they, each video is like, hey, we, We're gonna build a platform that our tent sits on. You know, the next one they're like, okay, we built our outhouse and now we're building our sauna cabin and like all of this stuff. And it's just a journey. Like the best way to be interesting as a creator, I think, is to do interesting things offline and then just tell that journey. So you're absolutely right that like, you know, you can learn. It worked out fine, but that was a huge mistake to not document it along the way. But only what you know in hindsight.

Well, you learn like the principles of storytelling, but I think you don't want to approach your life or your business as how can I just learn to tell stories when I've actually never done anything?

Correct.

So it actually worked in my benefit because I probably would have been distracted, like trying to create content when I should have been building something. But since then it's been, I mean, so rewarding. And even once I figured that out, something that's been tricky to understand is like how much personally do I show up in this content? So with Live Oak Lake, My story, my wife and I together, like, we're very central to the entire guest experience. So I handcrafted this guestbook and our welcome note and the website and the marketing. It's very much like from us personally, you want the guests to feel that direct connection. And that's what big brands can do. That's why you have such— that's our opportunity as hospitality entrepreneurs and hosts. But at the same time, you know, you do have to scale, you want to scale to a certain point where it's like, operationally not 24/7 for you and you've got a team and you've got automations through smart home hardware and software and but how do you— and then but on the like, specifically on the marketing side, how do you thread that needle of showing up personally, but also not being— not the brand not being completely dependent on you as the founder? Because if you ever want to sell that, if you ever want to take a break from that, What do you do? And so there is a way, I think, where they can work together. And what I would say now is if I had to do it all over again, you want to have a personal brand and like this, probably pretty basic advice, but like learning this myself, you want to have a totally separate account personally and especially on Instagram. You can collab on posts now. And so there's actually zero downside of separating the account out one for your business or your product or your property, whatever it is. One for your personal. And people trust people. They don't trust companies. They'll come to trust brands and sometimes even love them. But that takes a long time before you become a Nike or an Apple or a Tesla. And so your biggest asset is your unique personality, your unique story, your experience, the mistakes you make, the vulnerability that you're willing to share. And so you're leveraging that to build in public your property. So I would like, for instance, have posted a ton of content of the entire journey from first ideas to concept to planning to acquiring the property to building it to hosting the entire thing from my personal account, but collaborating and tagging with and running giveaways to my brand account and build that up. So you're leveraging the one audience and then you have two very valuable but very, very separate assets.

Right.

And so to close the loop on Live Oak Lake, we ended up exiting to private equity. There's a ton of institutional capital that is just eager and hungry to buy up properties like this that especially have a brand because that's very powerful. And we— so we sold it with the brand and the email, and we'd also been building an email list and all of that. And the buyers pretty much explicitly told me, I mean, the big reason that they bought it, yeah, the property is amazing. Cool. It's, it's all set up. Guests love it. But that audience is so valuable because now they're going to take that and leverage that to a bunch of other properties.

Right.

And so as a creator, I've done like all the hard work that the big brands can't figure out, most of them. Like, how do you build this? And, you know, I've been able to build a personal brand on the side now, but sort of like in spite of it, which has been awesome.

So, so talking about Live Oak Lake, can you share some of the numbers of what you put in, what you exited for and all that?

So $2.3 million all in.

To build it. Yeah.

Most of that was a construction loan from a local bank and then some equity and some short-term loans from friends and family. And then basically 18 months after opening, $7 million exit. So $1 million per key. And then what was revenue? So revenue was—

you don't even have that much, that long of a trail.

We have like barely 12.

What's the 3-year trailing EBITDA?

And you're like, about 18 months.

Yeah.

So it was $1.1 million top line.

Okay.

And then about $560,000 EBITDA before our debt. One thing that's cool is we were able to refinance that whole property 4 months after finishing it and pull every drop of equity out, plus $400,000 because the appraisal was so much higher than when we built it.

So what did it appraise for?

So it appraised for $3.1 million and we sold it for $7 million only a year later. But at that $3.1 million, you know, we got an 80% LTV. Loan on that. So we pulled out all of the initial $2.3 million, paid off the bank, and had $400,000 to reinvest.

Right.

And had, because of cost segregation, $1 million of, of bonus depreciation that we could write off. So it's like crazy how you can structure that financially. So yeah, $1.1 million, $560,000 net. And the audience, I can't give specific numbers, but like the audience alone was a substantial portion. So is that, you know, that's an 8% cap rate. You would traditionally be buying or selling an asset like that at like a 12% cap rate.

Okay.

If you use the multiple way, you know, that's what, like a 12x multiple, 13x multiple. And, you know, traditionally it would be most properties apples to apples. If you could even recreate that would be, you know, you'd be selling that without the audience for probably like an 8x multiple, maybe 10.

Okay.

So that, that audience added probably millions into the overall enterprise value.

And how many subs— like, what was the Instagram audience versus email? Like, where was the audience broken down?

Yeah. So the Instagram was around 145,000. Email was around 35,000, which actually wasn't that valuable because I had learned— I had just been radically experimenting with all the marketing, including email. I didn't know anything about email, and we had acquired probably about half of those were organic from a pop-up on our website, which was extremely high converting. We ran a giveaway basically. So it was like a rolling quarterly giveaway and we would get probably 50 emails a day from that. And then I had like—

Most of that traffic was coming from social to your website?

Social. And I mean, I just pounded the pavement with a PR campaign, self-generated. So I mean, went on local TV shows, found actually like a big TV show that did a little segment on it, a national cabin show. And but Then we built out like automations for the emails. So we had like a welcome sequence, a nurture to booking sequence that was entirely automated. So 10 emails would go out over, you know, 2 months' time when someone first signed up, because most people, especially if like you're trying to acquire leads through Facebook, which we then experimented with, most people are not just going to see you cold and then just book a stay immediately. Yeah, much like they're not going to see you through an influencer collaboration, which we did a lot of those to grow our Instagram following and just book immediately.

But it's going to go on their, their dream list and get on their radar, ideally with the email, but first as just a follower on social.

And then you just post really great content. Or in the email case, we have these great, you know, sequences that introduced us as hosts, introduced the property, and then like a personal newsletter for the property that was sent out. And then you just become top of mind. And, you know, over 6 months, when that person then wants to take a getaway and they're in your target area. And that's the other thing, like with this kind of property, you want to target geographically like that 2-3 hour radius for the most part, right?

Which you have— is it like 20 million people?

22 million people within 2.5 hours. And Waco is like smack dab in the middle. So, right, market-wise, that's a, that's a great strategy. And but yeah, then you just nurture them over time. And the cool thing is once they come and stay, The— so getting to your, like, interesting question on, like, online versus offline, it's all about setting expectations. So from first impressions, first impressions are going to be a reel on social media, maybe an email, maybe that came through an ad that we ran on Facebook to acquire leads. And so to get their attention in the day, you know, everybody has short attention spans. You need a really great hook. You need beautiful visuals. Assuming you have a beautiful property, that should be pretty easy. Assuming you understand some, some storytelling elements. But then, you know, you need to nurture them, but not oversell the property. Because when they come, the whole point is like, this is the way I'm thinking about it. They need to arrive to the front gate and be like, wow, this is— I feel something like this is, this is cool. But not even at the front gate be like blown away. They need to like progressively drive through, pull up to their cabin. I mean, everything from the messaging to the signage to everything. And walk in the door and then have that moment. And like, literally, this is how I was trying to think of it, where it's like, takes your breath away. And countless people said this over and over, like, timing is everything here. This feels like I'm in a different world. And again, this is like a little 5-acre, you know, carve-out in, in Texas, which isn't that beautiful. So I think that online, you can sort of first like hook people like through beautiful wild imagery that's just Awesome. We could talk all about content. Yeah. But, and then it's like, okay, now they're hooked. Now we just need to like set expectations, but keep them low enough and then build, especially like once they book and they get messaging and whatnot. And ultimately when they come on site, when they experience the handwritten note and the guest book and the fresh baked cookies and the views and the architecture, collectively, all these things are gonna add up to this unbelievable, like wow factor, you know, magical experience. And they're going to feel hospitality even if it's very low touch, which is like ultimately about the art of being cared for, caring for other people. They're going to feel that. And when they do, they become addicted for life. So a lot of our guests, they came back 3 or 4 times a year, not at least some of them did. And bringing friends and family with them because we had been so thoughtful about how do we build this as a relationship. And that ties in perfectly to owning the audience with the email. Because then we can retarget them. And so it's easy for them to come back.

The way that you've blended offline and online, like, it's so, so powerful. Like, if you were to do this entirely as an offline business, one, it would absolutely work. Like, you, you could build— plenty of people have done it over time. Or if you were to build an entirely digital business, that's quite possible as well, right? Obviously, this podcast is all about people who have done that. But I'm just fascinated by the blend. Like, it's a compounding effect when you combine those two. You know, you're getting exponential results compared to like linear. So I'm curious, what lessons would you take from that? Like the experiential hospitality, if you were building an entirely digital experience for, you know, let's say that, you know, a course or Instagram content or whatever, you know, Maybe we're talking about business or quilting or anything else, but we're building an audience online. How would you apply similar concepts?

I think that ultimately, um, there's a great saying. Do you know Hans Luray, by the way?

I do.

Yeah. Okay.

So he's a Kit customer.

Oh yeah. Yeah, that's right. Amazing newsletter. Um, shout out Hans. He's incredible.

He's killed it on Instagram.

I think it's like 550,000 followers in less than a year just by being consistent with these reels.

He came to, uh, We hosted a mastermind in Nashville.

Actually, he told me that you inspired him because he had just actually been let go from a startup that he'd been working for. And he was at this critical juncture. And he said that Nathan inspired him to go all in on his newsletter and content. And he's become like this icon in interior design.

Oh, it's amazing what he's done.

So he had this great phrase. He said, design— this is my spin on it— design is the biggest lever that you can pull in the way other people feel and the way that you make people feel. So this certainly applies to the, you know, the built environment, like the physical environment, brick and mortar realm. And of course, it applies to the branding, to the design, to the online, to the content, to the storytelling medium. So taste is in major short supply, and taste is a broad term. But I guess if I had to define taste, I would say it's the ability to discern, like, beauty. That's whether this is in, you know, music, whether this is in art, whether this is in writing, whether this is in the way that you treat people or the way people treat you. You need to have, like, be an intentional observer. See other people that you admire in the way they do things. Maybe it's fashion, the way they dress, and then start just, like, trying to follow and copy. It's almost like, um, you know, Sam Parr talks about— he has Copy That, which is an amazing copywriting course. And the whole concept there is like the way that we learn things is by mimicking. And so you literally handwrite this amazing copywriting and over time that develops the skill inside of you. You internalize it, you internalize it. And so taste and design are the same way. I think anyone, whether you're creative or not, can be— can get better taste and can become a better designer. And design ultimately, like in the end of the day, is the deciding factor. So especially when you can marry— and taste sort of straddles both of them in my mind— but when you can marry like the beautiful, um, elements of proportion and design— and this is very broad, obviously, I mean, it depends on how we're applying it— but proportion design with, um, a sense of hospitality, which like I said is serving other people And everybody wants to feel that way. So almost every brand, have you read "Unreasonable Hospitality"?

I have, yeah.

Such a great book.

It's so good.

It's like one of my favorite books. But I think the reason that book became so popular is because, or one of the reasons, he's a great writer, but is because so many industries, so many businesses, so many people realized, okay, this concept, this core concept of being unreasonably hospitable, going out of your way, You know, he was the— he took one of— he took a great restaurant, but he made it the number one restaurant in the world for several years and went to the most crazy lengths, you know. Yeah, we don't have to get into the examples, read the book, but it's incredible to delight each and every single one of his guests and ultimately create these raving fans. And so all of these industries realized, look, we can apply the exact same principles here in acquiring, in building relationships with and ultimately becoming better companies, better people. And the same applies to, you know, again, experiential hospitality and everything I've done. Of course, it's hospitality, but it's really that marriage of like great design and fantastic hospitality, even if it's very low touch, but where people genuinely feel cared for, where they feel empathized with. And so we're being theoretical here, but I think those two lessons when they come together, it's so powerful and taste encapsulates that. Relates both. Yeah.

So when you're talking about taste, it really starts with the notice and like observing things. Uh, like Clay Abar was on the show a few episodes ago and he was talking about Seth Godin and Seth describes what he does. You know, he says, I notice things, right? He's a very observant person. And so I think everyone's like, well, how do you develop taste? It's like, well, start noticing things, start copying it down and be like, hey, I read something that works. Why does it And then as you apply it to different creators, when people value design and production quality, you notice a huge, huge difference. Like we had a customer who came out here to Kit Studios and his name's Mike, he's an amazing guy. He flew out across the country to record his course here. He had an email list of I think about 5,000 people and he'd launched some things in the past to the list. And based on those expectations, he thought, I'm gonna do about $15,000 on this course launch. But he recorded it, this new course and all his marketing materials here in super high production quality, everything. He launches it and he could have stayed home, bought some equipment, but he came to the world-class studios and he ended up selling $50,000 worth of the course, not $15,000. And I think that that taste really matters. Another example is I came across this Instagram account the other day. They have like 600,000 followers. They're called the Sensory Sisters. So these two women who talk about like kids with sensory processing issues and how you teach them to speak and all of these early childhood development type stuff. And lots of people talk about that. The barrier to entry is very, very low, right? But everything they do looks so good. You, like, pull it up and, you know, their video production is fantastic. What's happening behind the scenes, like, all of this, you're just like, they have taste and there's quality in it. And I think that even in this world where content is becoming crowded, you can still stand out when you're like, look, I'm going to bring this level of quality to everything.

You know, as AI is rapidly dominating so many art forms, whether that's writing or now video, audio. People are so worried. Content creators are worried. I've seen this online. And yet I think that one thing AI is not going to be able to do for a very long time— this is my prediction, I may be completely wrong— but is ultimately have that sense of taste. Like, they can recreate the Mona Lisa, they can recreate, you know, Steve Jobs, they can recreate so many things, but it's I don't know, it's really hard to articulate, but it's that sense of beauty and proportion that, and ultimately in like a generative capacity that, um, you know, whether it's writing, you can get the best trained model in the world and you can say, hey, write such and such a thing. And I, at least I haven't seen this, and I don't think we're going to see this. We're not going to see a finished product that is anywhere close, in my opinion, in terms of the soul, in terms of the overarching beauty and the ability to move someone else as what, you know, an incredible author could do. So taste is something that cannot be outsourced to AI. I think you should use AI as a tool in some of these ways. But I think it goes back to as well, just we're talking so much about beauty and design and really a pursuit of excellence, I would say, in everything that you do. And this is for me, like, become a guiding principle for me. Like, everything that I touch, I want to, I want to do well. I may not be like an expert at, you know, more than 3 or 4 things, but whatever I do, I want it, want it to be really, really well. And there's this quote, I read it in James Clear's newsletter the other day, and I love this. So, um, is it Jim Simmons? Jim Simmons. He was like a mathematician investor. I think he actually just passed away recently. Okay. Actually, James is quoting Jim. He says, be guided by beauty. I really mean that. I think pretty much everything I've done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. This guy's a mathematician. Now, you might think building a company, that's trading bonds. What's so aesthetic about that? What's aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, approaching the problem, and doing it right. And if you feel that you're the first one to do it right, that's a terrific feeling. It's a beautiful thing to do something right. I know it's sort of tangentially related, but I think having that really sense of care at the end of the day in everything that you're doing I think Steve Jobs actually is the one who talked about when he was designing one of the original Macs that like the way that they built the, the motherboard or whatever it was, like basically the back end of the computer had to be perfect. Like he was maniacal about these little details. But what it did is I think that translated, infused the entire product, infused the team, the entire culture around that, and ultimately the brand with this incredible sense of pride, of excellence, and a sense of taste like Steve Jobs had. Pretty great taste.

Oh yeah.

And so anyway, I think there's a lot there that can be used and applied, whether it's content creation, whether you're a real estate developer, whether you're an author, an artist, filmmaker, so many different ways we can apply that.

Those standards are noticed. Like even if people don't understand why something is so great, they notice that it's great. Did you ever watch the behind the scenes for The Lord of the Rings? Like the extended? Okay, I was the kid who at 12 years old had read the Lord of the Rings cover to cover 3 times and all of that, so I loved it. But have you ever watched the behind the scenes footage? So each movie's 3 hours long and then they have an extended edition and they have another 6 hours of content that they released of how they made the movies and all of this. And there's this moment where Bernard Hill, who's the actor who plays one of the kings, King Théoden, he's talking about the armor that he went to put on. And Weta Workshop is this, you know, movie production events, uh, thing that was basically founded to create the Lord of the Rings movies. And they were such craftsmen, you know, they made like thousands of pieces of chainmail and all this armor and all this crazy, crazy stuff. But Bernard Hill talks about the armor they made for him and how impressive it was, and it It was not a movie prop. Like, it was real in every way. And he goes to put it on, and the inside of the breastplate is engraved with, like, the things that an actual king in this mythological world would have. And he's, like, looking at this and going, no one is ever— there's no shot of, like, no one is ever going to see it. And the guys at Weta Workshop were like, look, you're giving everything you have as an actor. To bring this character to life in a huge way. And we need to do our part. And I had, Steve Jobs has this thing where he talked about finishing the back of a dresser. Nobody ever sees it. And actually I had a dresser custom made. It was for my wife, Hillary, for her birthday, I don't know, 10 years ago or something. It's this beautiful piece, African mahogany, They absolutely nailed it. And I was really disappointed because they didn't finish the back. And I remember saying like, oh, you didn't, I'm not a confrontational person in any way. So I was like, oh, you didn't finish the back. And they're like, no, why would you ever do that? And I had it so locked into my head from the Steve Jobs quote and this like Bernard Hill talking about this breastplate that I was like, well, you always finish the back. And I think that's even your approach.

That's a fantastic story. Yeah.

And so just that level of detail.

And that's the opportunity for people. If you're a woodworker, it doesn't matter what you're doing. 95% of people just— it's that 80/20 rule. They don't want to spend the extra 20% effort or time or money, but they don't realize that that extra 20% yields 80% or 800% more value, impression, and ultimately like sense of pride for the person creating that, that to me has been revolutionary because if people just did like a little less but spent a little more, like one of my favorite sayings when people ask about like, again, going back to the micro resort thing, how do you build it? Like what's the secret? There's so many elements to try to tell them. But like one thing, one way that I like to boil this down and I think it makes this point well is here's my advice in 6 words to build a wildly successful micro resort. Okay, ready? Yep. Build less units, spend more money. That's way oversimplified. But if people would just like— that sounds counterintuitive. It's like, oh no, no, no, I want to get more. I want to do—

right. If we had 20 doors or 50 doors, it'd be—

it's like an American thing. It's a Texan thing.

Yeah. Bigger is better.

Yeah, bigger is better. It's like, no, no, no. Just like shave down a little bit of what you're focusing on here, but do it excellently. And the results are, you know, so many times better. And that's our opportunity as creators, as business owners, because customers, like you said, will notice. They may not be able to articulate it, they may not be able to pinpoint what it is, but they will sense that care and that passion that you have for it.

I love that. Something that you've done so well is the storytelling. And one thing that I actually thought that when you first started dropping these threads on X, I thought that you were almost doing it in real time. Project finished. I didn't realize, you know, until a few threads in there, I was like, oh no, this happened, you know, you know, a few years ago and you're, you're like telling these stories. How have you brought storytelling into all of this? And then what, like, what has come from that?

Yeah, I think I took a lot of it for granted because for, you know, I was on Twitter or X for 2 years without sharing any of these stories that we talked about earlier as far as the town of Deary and some of our projects. And I shared a lot about Live Oak Lake, which was great. But then I was like, okay, I'm kind of, you know, becoming a clinging symbol. It's talking about the same thing.

Oh, like you've, you've now, you've built Live Oak Lake, you've told the whole story, you've sold it, sold it.

And then I was like, okay, now where do I go from here? I have a lot going on. I mean, it's not that I, I think as a creator, you always wonder like, what are the fences as far as what I talk about too? Because we're all, at least I'm, you know, again, very curious and very interested and involved in a lot of different things. And so I just thought, well, okay, this experiential hospitality tagline, I keep going on. Oh, I guess that sort of is kind of what was going on in Deary. And maybe that was actually kind of what shaped me. And so maybe I should reexamine some of that. So it's sometimes like the most obvious things in retrospect, you know, in the moment, they don't seem obvious. So it's helpful just to take a step back. I actually think that like selling Live Oak Lake and having— actually took like an 8-month break from Twitter. Social media. And that was actually very helpful as a creator just to recharge. Sometimes you just need some, some white space there, cut the noise. But I got back on and made this thread about the train car, which kind of was the first one. And 20 million people saw that in like 2 days. And like Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, was interacting and Paul Graham and all these crazy people.

There were so many people. It was so funny because like you came to Craft and Commerce a few years ago. Like, you know, I've known you for a few years and so like you would put out great content and so I saw it and was like, oh yeah, oh, that's a cool story. I read the whole thing to the end and then it was like 24 hours later I saw the thread again and maybe it was like Brian Chesky or Paul Graham or someone on that level sharing it and it was just like, oh whoa, this is, this has spread to a ridiculous level.

So the story behind that was awesome though because kind of to illustrate the earlier point, you know, you get lucky with social media, obviously. So no one can predict virality, but you can perfect your skills. So I realized like a couple of months before this, I need to learn storytelling because I'm not a great storyteller. I mean, I wouldn't consider myself— I'm maybe average. And so I just started like voraciously consuming books and podcasts. There's a great podcast that Sean Perry does with David Perell on storytelling. And really my favorite resource here was this interview that Aaron Sorkin did at the Aspen Institute, you know, so one of like the greatest screenwriters. And he talked about storytelling and it really just like pumped me up. And this, this idea that you can like move people so much just with the power of words and really less is more. But learning, like, again, like having a sense of taste, learning what to say and how to say it. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to really try this. And so the thread on the train car was one of the first things that I did, but it took me 8 hours to write that and I stayed up like almost all night. So again, like having a sense of like, I am going to get this right. 'Cause every character mattered, every word mattered. And the way that like I was trying to tie, you know, little threads at the beginning and into the ending. And there's just all these little elements that go into a great story to where first of all, you need to hook them so they've gotta read it. And then once they get to the end, they have that payoff, that sense of, wow, that was amazing. I'm gonna share that. That's the secret sauce, you know, very, very boiled down. But what was funny is, It's a great story. I used visuals, which is, you know, always helpful as well.

Well, on that, something that you said to me earlier when we were hanging out with Sibling Furniture earlier today is about the importance of visuals on a platform like X that is not, you know, it's by default text-based. They've made it much more like picture and video focused recently. But when you come out with, I think two things that make a huge difference. One is a real-life story. That's you, right? Can't be written by AI. It's not copy and paste from Wikipedia. It's like, here is something that I did or I had firsthand knowledge or experience of. And then the second thing is, and here's the visual journey that you can follow. Here's these beautiful photos. And so it's not just the text or the headline. It's like you get to hook them with so much more.

The idea is you're storytelling through two mediums at the same time and there's a compounding effect. So you've got like the text, which needs to be bulletproof. So like, I always write the script without even really thinking. Sometimes I'll think about like the first image, but I know all along that my visual hook needs to be absolutely as powerful as my text hook. And so in this case, it was two photos that I chose side by side, and I literally like had to tweak one in like Photoshop to get it lined up just right so that the train car appears the exact same position. It's like the— it's kind of like the thumbnail thing with YouTube. And one of them, it's like this decrepit, old, barely recognizable hunk of wood. And the other one, it's like magical hour at night, completely restored. I mean, like, wow, what, what exactly happened?

So people love transformation stories. Exactly. You told the transformation story in one second. Yeah, right there. And then you're like, click to see more.

What was crazy about that particular one, I didn't realize at the time how how provocative this would be, but I said, my dad bought this, you know, 100-year-old train car for $2,000. It was a cat-infested wreck. And, you know, then we, my brothers and I restored it for X amount of money. This is what it looks like today. Here's what we did, you know, something like that. But that line, it was a cat-infested wreck. I'm on the record saying I actually love cats. I am not a cat hater, despite what tens of thousands of people on the internet think about me. But that word, especially infested, like the way I got lucky choosing that, 'cause you would not, I got hundreds of comments. What in the world does cat infested mean? The cats were the landlords here and they should have kicked you out. And I have never seen, the vast majority of people were like, the takeaway was not the cats. It was, this is an amazing story. But there were just enough people, especially in that early 2 or 3 hours of the lifetime of that tweet on the algorithm that they just poured jet fuel on the fire there. And I mean, 'cause comments are so important for the X algorithm. And there were literally hundreds of comments about the cats. What happened to the cats? What happened? And it also made them read the entire thing, which was like, you know, 700 words.

'Cause they're determined to find out what happened to the cats.

Yeah, exactly. And so that ended up being like a nice little cherry on top.

That's an interesting thing of having these two audiences. Like Nick Huber is someone who's a master at this because what he'll do is he'll write some perfectly engineered post about how he hired 20 people in the Philippines at $6 an hour to run his business. And he'll have just a little bit of a hook that's gonna piss off one demographic. Like, I can't believe you're outsourcing jobs overseas or whatever else. But it has the meat of it is all about, like an entrepreneur is gonna be like, actually I'm having a terrible time hiring right now.

And it's a win-win for those overseas.

Oh yeah, it's fantastic, right? And so they're going to be like, oh, what's happening? So he gets this little bit of rage that he's not like, well, actually he's stirring the pot.

You're like, he stirs the pot a little more than I do.

You have two words.

But he's a master of it.

Like, well, and so they'll amplify all of this. And then people, like one group will be like, that's horrible. And they'll reply a whole bunch. And another group will be like, honestly, I could really use some help to run my business. You know? And so they'll click through and they'll, to, you know, use his business somewhere to hire those people. And, you know, and so he's just making hundreds of thousands of dollars off of this. But it's finding something that upsets just that certain— yeah, polarizes.

Yeah, yeah. And the first group doesn't matter. Like, you know, people take this too far, I think. Sometimes they'll say things that are factually incorrect or, or worse on purpose, just because they want people to chime in in the comments. I don't know. I'm not here to judge other people. Everybody has a different standard. I didn't engineer that tweet on purpose because most of my threads are actually not as polarizing.

All of your stuff is just like feel-good stories kind of thing.

But I have reposted a few of like my— so in the last like 3 or 4 months, it's been crazy. I mean, I've doubled my following and it's pretty much every thread has popped off and I haven't reposted any of those because those were all in the last 3 or 4 months. But then before that, I had probably like 4 or 5 threads that did really well. And I think in all those cases, I reposted them within about 10 to 12 months. Yeah, once. But I've seen other people doing this like 3 times, 4 times, and every time they do it, and both times that I did it, they did exactly what you said. They popped off. You just don't want to do it too much. Do you have any thoughts on like the frequency?

Yeah, some people do it as often as 90 days. I think that's too often. So the correct answer is somewhere between once a year and 90 days. So like if you're waiting more than a year, like you have this amazing asset, like put it out in the world. And then anything more often than 90 days and it's like, dude, we just saw this. So I do 6 to 12 months is, you know, right where I'm at. Because the other thing is you can build up a library of all of this. And if you got to the point that you had 50 great threads that you built up over, 4 years or something, you could recycle them and you could never write a new original word and still grow your audience like this.

So here's the fun part for me. This is where it really gets fun. I started on Twitter, which I absolutely recommend and love because it teaches you to write so concisely, which is something I didn't know how to do previously and teaches you storytelling if you want to learn it. Then I transitioned to email, which is by far my most valuable channel. And I, we could talk all about, like, suffice it to say, like, there's such an art to figuring out how to convert those eyeballs that you're getting for free to a newsletter and give it, you know, whether it's some kind of ideally you want some kind of seamlessly integrating lead magnet, like you're telling a story and it's like, hey, I'm going to break down exactly how much they spent X, Y, and Z, or exactly how such and such happened particular to this story in Monday's newsletter. And then that's like You know, it's not just sign up for my free this or sign up for my newsletter where I talk about X. It's you've— they've invested their energy and their time, their attention into a story, and then you're promising another benefit, another layer of benefits of results.

Like a version of this is you could say, hey, we restored this, this whole train car and everything like that. Here's a story that I can tell you. Tell a great story about it on X. And you could say if you want to see the financials Yeah, behind everything that costs, including the mistake that costs us an extra $100,000. I love it. I'm going to send that out in Tuesday's email, Tuesday's newsletter. Sign up here.

Yeah, right.

Like that.

Totally love it.

You know, the, the bridge between one piece of content and the email signup is like perfect.

The disparity between the results that would drive versus just a generic, right? You know, CDA, you know, sign up for my weekly newsletter is huge. And especially when you're thinking about the value, when you come to understand, like I have now that I'm selling other products and like building a membership, when you understand the true value of an engaged, you know, email subscriber, like exponentially more valuable than a follower on any platform, you want to obviously optimize that bottleneck right there more than anything else. Of course, you need eyeballs at the top of the funnel, which is what we've been talking about. But this is like where the rubber really hits the road. So what I was saying earlier about starting on Twitter and one of the benefits there, you learn to write, you learn to storytell. I invested so much time into these threads and now the way I look at it, that's the heavy lifting that's been done. I can easily convert that into so many other mediums. So short-form video is a frontier I'm now tackling. My first short-form video just got 160,000 views, the first one I've ever made. And all I did was take a thread that I'd already spent so much time working the kinks out of, including the visuals, and then did like a green screen style. And I had to boil down the script because of course you got to be even more concise than a thread.

Yep.

And then literally just recorded it using the same visuals. And that story was entirely, you know, was reaching an entirely new and much bigger platform and audience in Instagram. And I'm just figuring that part out. But that really excites me because when you're talking about like a content operating system, in my mind, you want to be writing at the very top of that because that clarifies your thinking. Actually, I got this from you and I've quoted it several times. This— there's two main buckets of writing. There's writing that clarifies your thinking and there's writing that amplifies your thinking.

Yep.

I remember when you said it, it's like stuck with me. And so I'm definitely like through this Twitter process, been in the clarifying for the most part. And as a side benefit, it's been amplifying recently.

Right.

But I've been learning to tell these stories and really boil down what matters. And so that's the heavy lifting because the story is really what's valuable. And then it's easy just to, you know, to do video editing, whether that's you or you're outsourcing that. So that's pretty exciting.

I love examples of getting a deal done. This is like a total aside, but getting a deal done with like a non-monetary value. So I'll tee it up. I have a friend of mine who, very well-known creator, has done quite well. And he bought a big piece of land. And he is trying to buy up the neighboring land. So over time, he wants to buy all of them. And there's this one that he's been trying to buy for a long time. And the lady is in her, I think, 70s. She's just not interested. And then sometime, you know, he follows up every 6 to 12 months. And one time she mentioned that her grandson was turning either 16 or 18. And he goes, if you're ready to sell me the property, I'll buy your grandson a $50,000 truck. And she's like, done. And like, this is a $700,000 property. Like, he would have happily gone to $750,000. Like, it was totally, totally fair. But he found something that she cared about more than like an extra $50,000 in the purchase price. And so you have a story of, I think, trying to buy one of these buildings and it was filled with cars.

Yeah.

Yeah. Tell that.

Yeah. So I was hinting at it earlier, but this gentleman owned this kind of keystone brick building in the town of Deary for like 40 or 50 years. And countless people had tried to buy this building from him because it was pretty valuable. It's like at the main intersection and one of the only original ones. And he would never sell it. And he was like, you know, Everybody has their thing. His thing was collecting old cars, but these weren't like nice collectible cars. These were rusted out, worthless cars. There were like 20 of them at least in this, in this building. And so we befriended him over a process of a couple years, just trying to be a good neighbor genuinely. And then that one day he called us up, he said, well, you know, I'm thinking about selling. And so as part of the negotiation, we realized that money was less of an issue to him as caring for these cars. So we preemptively offered to build him— of course, we already had the skills, we were in construction— to build him a shop, a covered structure, very easy for us out at his property outside of town as part of the, you know, as part of the purchase price. And that, like, you know, lit his eyes up and he was so thrilled. And so that made like the We ended up— we bought the building for a very good deal. But again, that had such a massive value to him. And I think also the fact that we cared about it enough to even suggest it.

But you figured out what the actual bottleneck to the deal was and said, oh, we'll build you a much better place to store your cars.

And he's 85-plus years old. He doesn't really want to go out and coordinate a project even if he was to do that. So the fact, again, that we took the initiative there we'll manage this for you. We'll come out there. And we did. And then we moved the cars for him. I mean, it was like a white glove service, but we got the building for a steal, especially compared to what it's now worth. And yeah, I think that comes down to like empathizing and being willing to— like being able to really, again, observe and notice like—

but that's what hospitality is.

Hospitality.

It's so because it's like, hey, what is— what actually matters here?

Yeah. The paradox of hospitality is, is that in giving, you actually receive so much more in like actually turning out and doing it for the right reasons. You always get back, in my experience, like 10x everything. And I would compare that even just to this whole storytelling and sharing. I have peeled back the curtains on the finances, on the mistakes, on everything, on the lessons learned. Now I do have a course, but I shared so much for free without ever selling anything. And it was a little bit scary to just open myself up on social media, but the rewards that came from that and the connections I made, uh, you were one of the very first, have been so exponentially greater than the cost of, for me, of sharing that information. I tell people that all the time, like, be more transparent, be vulnerable. Everybody has a different line and whatnot. But again, it's about serving other people and you can even do it in the content that you, that you share.

Oh yeah. There's so much of that. Okay.

So.

As you write these threads, like, stories are incredible. You've gotten— what's the combined number of views across these threads now at this point?

Um, about 40 million in the last 4 months or so.

That is absolutely wild. And then, uh, you're out here in Idaho, you know, we're recording right now in Boise because you were back in Deary to, to do an episode with CNBC.

So here's the craziest part. I love this so much. Twitter is full of journalists and producers that are lurking that don't have a following.

You look through their accounts and they have like 112 followers.

And they don't even have it in their bio, most likely. And they're simply searching for stories. So Twitter is basically the petri dish for stories. Like if it does well there, it's probably worth the mainstream media picking it up. So when I did that train car thread, in one week's time after that, which, you know, got the 20 million views, we had, well, it was two weeks to publishing. Within two weeks' time, we had stories published in Vice, The New York Post, Daily Mail, Business Insider, McClatchy News, which is like 30 main newspapers, and like 4 or 5 other podcasts and smaller stuff. So a combined literally probably 100 million views. That story like absolutely blew up and it all came from that, that thread. And then it still is paying dividends. A couple of weeks ago, I get an email from a producer at CNBC who's like, hey, He hadn't seen the thread. He had seen one of those stories in Business Insider. So it's, you know, it's derivative.

It gets traded further.

It's traded. He's like, oh, this would make a perfect mini documentary for CNBC Make It, which is huge. It's a massive YouTube channel and it airs on cable too. So sure enough, yeah, that's what I— that's why I'm in Idaho. I flew up for one day. We recorded a ton of footage. He's going to edit it down into a like a 10-minute documentary on the town of Deary centered around the train car. But all of those stories, they're driving tourism. People are coming more than ever to Deary. They're booking stays. That makes me so happy because we made such an investment financially, effort-wise, time-wise, love into that, into that local area. But because we cared about it and now, you know, there's the phrase build it and they'll come. I want to modify that slightly. Build it, share it, and they'll come.

Right. You have to have that step.

You've got to have that share it step. And now people are literally coming out of the woodwork from all over the world and like 15 different foreign countries have now booked stays there. And 40 out of 50 states are coming to the train car, booked out like 90% of the year.

So you have— is it 3 short-term rentals in, in Derry?

4. So then the other tiny part on that is while we were building the train car, the local train depot in the town of Derry that that car would have parked at like countless times came up for sale. We bought that for a song and a dance, totally renovated it. And then one day, this sounds crazy, but like a month after that, my dad's driving along in like Bonners Ferry, like way north Idaho, 3 hours away, and sees a caboose in the trees, like a few hundred yards off the side of the road, calls some people up, figure out who owns it, buys that for $8,000. We moved that to Deary, set that up, completely converted it too. So now we have 4 train stays and then this old farmhouse and the barn that you mentioned. Also nearby. So 5 accommodations, and we're filling them up. People are coming. I mean, Derry is way off the beaten path, right? People are coming out there.

So there's a flywheel here that's really fascinating of the blend between digital and the physical world. You know, you build these amazing experiences, and then you tell a story of building it, which then gets people interested in it, which, you know, makes this money. And there's a story in that, it gets more people there so that you can you know, buy and build more. And now when someone's coming to Deerey, the amount of money flowing into that, you know, local economy, you know, a lot of which is owned by your family, is huge. And that just compounds and you roll it into the next thing. It's like the, you know, the Patels with their motels where they're like, they're taking that money and putting it into the very next thing. There's two examples of this flywheel that I've seen play out on a big scale. One is, do you know Al Doan?

Oh yeah.

Al and his family have the Disneyland for quilting, Hamilton, Missouri. And they've taken, you know what, I think it's a 500,000 subscriber YouTube channel and they've built it. Like, it's just insane what they've built. They have hundreds of thousands of people every year coming to Hamilton to like experience this amazing quilting. And then, and so they like, as they talk about, you know, the quilting and they're buying up more restaurants and they're building more things and they've turned around this in a huge way. And it compounds. But then the other one is Cerro Gordo, which is the ghost town that I own 10% of. And that project would not work without content. You're talking about, let's spend $1.3 million to buy 100 acres or 300 acres on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere in California. It has no running water. You have to drive 7 miles up a dirt road to get there. Like it is a disaster of a project. Oh, and the main historical piece, like the hotel, you know, from the 1870s burns down, you know? So you're just like, what are you doing? But from a content perspective, as a set, it's insane. Like Brent has built that YouTube channel to 1.7 million subscribers. Anytime he does something, you know, like we need to, like we're rebuilding this hotel and it's just, as you can imagine, every, you know, like try to pour concrete for the foundation. $200 grand. You know, like just this, even if you could get people up there, it's ridiculous. But content pays for the entire thing. That town does $20,000, $30,000 a month in merchandise sales because people love Cerro Gordo. And so you get this like reclaim history, like build this cool thing, share that story, which gives you the money to further fuel it. And it's just absolutely—

Virtuous cycle.

Yeah.

I love that. There's one other story and several of these other threads I've posted in the last couple months have been highlighting other of these like experiential hospitality entrepreneurs and hosts that have created unique stays and landscape hotels. But one of my favorites is this couple that he was a pastor of a small church in rural Ohio. I don't know if you saw this one.

I don't think so.

And they, the, his wife got cancer. They're in their 30s. They go to— she has like a year's worth of treatment. They've got 3 little kids, and she finally overcomes her battle, and they go to Bali for 2 months to like, just, I mean, like, yeah, rest and rejuvenate. And they are so inspired by the hospitality, speaking of, in Bali. They come back to the US and also just like feeling like they have a new lease on life that they want to dedicate themselves. He's already serving in a church setting, but they want be hosts. They want to give themselves to hospitality. So they, but they have no money. And he's making $40,000 a year. And literally, like, I think he had like $10,000 saved up, but almost nothing when it comes to like buying a piece of property. But he starts searching, he finds a guy on Craigslist. He looks at a piece of property, it's not the right one. They drive around all day. And finally, the guy's like, I got one on the property, but you wouldn't be interested in it. Classic story. They go and look, It's this old Boy Scout lodge that had been totally abandoned. There's so many stories like this in the middle of nowhere. And he's like, again, he gets like this feeling when he goes there, like, this is the place, but it's $500,000. He gets a friend to agree to like finance most of the money. The day before closing, the whole thing falls through. So he had to deal with a ton of adversity. Finally was able to like creatively engineer a seller note on the back end, a construction loan through a local bank, some friends and family family maxed out every credit card they had and bought this place. They have great taste. They're redoing the design. And one day, he's— they literally decided, let's build a little stairway down this hill behind the lodge. And it was, you know, it's rural Ohio. There's a lot of like hills. They'd never been down there. It was so hilly. And they're building the stairway down. And all of a sudden, his eye catches this little cliff. Like there's just this little mini rock cliff. And this light bulb just went off in his head. That should be a waterfall. So over the process of 2 months, they hand-dig out the stone. It's like sandstone. They add a pond liner, a heater, and a pump. And you got to check this place out. It's called the Cliffs at Hocking Hills. They built their own private heated swimming hole waterfall. It's unlike anything I've seen. It cost them about $25,000.

Yeah.

So it doesn't always cost a lot of money, but the content they created during that, especially when it was done, They list the place for $2,100 a night and book out an entire year, like solid. And this is 2,100 nights. This is a seasonal market. This is like rural Ohio. And they did so well with that that they, you know, the first year they generated so much in profit and guests. I mean, it wasn't like guests were hemming and hawing. They were— I mean, any opening you have, we want to book it. I mean, immediately they built up 600,000 Instagram followers, 80,000 email followers. Year 2, built 3 more bungalows on the property. Same thing. Crazy. While they're out excavating for these, these cabins, they realize, oh, here's another sandstone formation. They hand-dig that one out, pour some concrete walls. Of course, there's a lot of work here I'm glossing over. Put in another waterfall feature that's incredible and have this other beautiful pool with a waterfall. These are like key landscape and architectural features that sell this place, and they're booking out almost 100% occupancy. They plan to pass it on to their kids, right? They have way more demand than they can ever meet. And it's like this cycle on steroids. It's like they're fulfilled as hosts because they found their calling. They're serving other people. People feel like they're, you know, in the coolest place on earth because it truly is amazing. So I guess the takeaway there is like the adversity, right? And the sometimes even just like the, you know, relatability And certainly the hardships of any one of our stories can become part of the asset. Oh yeah. If you're creative, if you're curious, if you're willing to put in some good old-fashioned hard work as well.

Well, and that's the thing. So many people on the internet are like, how do I build an audience from my living room? From like without doing anything? And it's like, oh, if you go on a journey, if you go take on a hard problem where people are like, I don't know if that's going to work or that's going to take— that's so much effort. That's a ridiculous thing. Rebuilding a hotel on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere in California. Like, no. Yeah, but people will talk about it. And, and so it's like, if you want to build an audience, do something worth talking about.

Yeah.

And I cannot preach that enough.

Completely agree.

Oh man, there's so many things in there. We're going to have to do a second episode to dive into all of the digital side of things you've done, because not only are you driving a huge amount of revenue for these in-person destinations, but you've built your own personal brand, an email list. Give like the, the 30-second teaser of some numbers and all of that from the course launch, any of those things, and we'll dive into it in a part 2.

With an email list last year of about 1,800 people, I had a $330,000 launch. In 7 days on my masterclass that I built. And since then, it's continued to sell very well. And now we've actually built a membership, which is awesome because it's like an elite peer group for all of these hosts. So once they graduate from the masterclass program, or if they're already operating at a high enough level, we'll let them in application only. But yeah, we've got hundreds of thousands in recurring revenue now and the high-ticket masterclass. So selling online is a powerful thing.

That's amazing. So I think as we wrap up this episode, the thing that stands out to me the most is doing really interesting things, having like really emphasizing taste and design, telling the story along the way, especially the struggles and the hard parts about it. And then putting that time in to find the things. It could be things you're doing right now today, or it could be something that you did 10 years ago where it's like, oh, what are the, what are the things that I've experienced that maybe no one else has experienced? And like, how do I tell that story? And then putting the time in to craft it. Like you're talking about sitting 8 hours to write a thread, but then it compounds into, you know, a TV show, like all of these different things. And then really rolling it all forward, you know, both the skills, the money, the relationships into the next project that you can tell stories about. Is there anything that I missed in there?

No, and I mean, I guess the final thing is like, find other people, find friends, family that you can do this with. It's so much more fun, so much more fulfilling, so much easier if you're doing this with a group of people that you love and trust.

Yeah, do life in community. Absolutely. I love it. Okay, where should people go if they wanna check out the things you're working on, read some of these threads, or subscribe to your newsletter?

I'm on Twitter, Instagram @isaacfrench_, but the number one place I hope that people will go is my newsletter on Kit, which I write every single week, and you can sign up at isaacjfrench.com.

Awesome. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Nathan.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show, then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.