How Your Creator Business Can Change the World

A lot of us have started creator businesses because we want to create freedom. But then that begs the question, how do we create that meaningful impact and freedom for other people?

If you're a creator listening, if you can attach some type of cause or impact that you care about to your business, it's going to make the work more meaningful.

Brett Hagler is the CEO of New Story. They help vulnerable families become land and homeowners.

Last year, the amount of philanthropy that was given to all international causes was which sounds like a big number, but you need trillions of dollars. What if there's another way? We built close to 6,000 houses. We would have never thought that was possible. You don't have to be this perfect social impact creator. It's just imagining what could and should be better and then having the courage to do it.

What advice do you give to someone who in their creator business is thinking about how can we have a bigger impact? So if you actually wanted to get involved in some way, Brad, thanks for coming out.

It's great to be here. Quite an impressive, uh, studio you got.

It's a lot of fun. Okay, so I want to start, uh, you and I have known each other for a long time. I've been involved with New Story for a long time, but for anyone who doesn't know, what is New Story and how'd you get into this world?

Yeah, New Story focuses on the global housing crisis, so quite a big problem. Um, yes, there's about 1.8 billion people that don't have adequate housing in the year 2024, which is obviously crazy. And we are trying to come up with innovative solutions to solve more of that problem. And we got started almost 10 years ago. It was after a trip that I took to Haiti a couple of years out of college, went on a trip, saw the problem, and was only 24 but wanted to do something about it. And we started small. So a little saying we have at New Story now for really any goal is to dream big but to start small. And so we got started really small.

You know, I just imagine the scenario that I've found myself in at times of, you know, you set out to build an online business to have like income and freedom and replace your job. And so you're like, all right, wow, I'm making $100,000 a year. And then you realize that, wait, the same thing, the same leverage that got me to $100,000 now has me at $250,000 or more in income. And then you get into like, okay, yeah, I'm now funding my lifestyle beyond what I ever expected. Maybe I'm donating to causes that I care about. But I think a lot of people want to find a cause, you know, or something, an area to have an impact that's very aligned with their business.

Yeah.

Like for example, for Kit.

Yeah, what about you guys?

And what we do is our mission as we exist to help creators earn a living. And we really only help you once you have a computer, Wi-Fi, you know, like you have to be fairly far along in that journey, all things considered from a global perspective for it to be in our wheelhouse. And so our donations go to primarily 3 organizations, New Story, Charity: Water, and then Earth Mission 8, Earth Mission Asia. And it's all about like housing, clean water, medical care, you know, so that you're at the point that then, you know, like—

You can unlock your creative potential. Yeah.

And so what I'm curious about is what advice you'd give to someone who in their creator business is thinking about, okay, I wanna find that organization that has that aligned impact. Maybe we won't quite get like Tom's shoes of like donating. Like that's a true one-to-one connection. But yeah, how do you think about finding one or two organizations to go deep with?

Such an awesome, um, question to think about. The first thing that comes to my mind is just having— like, if you're a creator listening or an entrepreneur listening, and you just begin a journey of imagining what that could look like for you and your business, um, I think that keep going down that journey. Like, you will not regret it. Like, you won't regret trying to align the work you're doing that is probably, like, really working and you know there's a lot of potential. If you can attach some type of genuine cause or impact that you care about to it, it's gonna make the work more meaningful. It's gonna bring you, I think, more joy. And I would also imagine that I actually don't think Genuinely, this is the main reason to do it. Um, but I think probably a lot of people that follow you, if it's authentic, are going to respect it. Right. And so I think just starting there is like awesome. And I think, I think it's just spending some time imagining, thinking, taking notes, et cetera. And then as far as finding something, um, I think it, I think it needs to be something that, that you, that is authentic and that you're genuinely excited about. Yeah, right. And that could be— it could be a lot of reasons why, right? It could be because of the— because of the mission. Maybe the mission has something to do with what you've experienced or your family or I don't know, something just catches your heart and you're like, oh, that shouldn't be like that, you know? And so, so that's the first place is like, is making it just authentic to something that you're excited about and you're passionate about. And then trying to think about how you can how that probably relates to, to your business in some way, you know. And then, and then like not being afraid to, to try things or to talk about stuff. Like you don't have to be this perfect social impact creator. I think just trying to start small in something and, you know, find something that, that you care about. Yeah, be awesome.

And I think tying it to maybe particular projects. Like I've seen, there's a mastermind that I go to every year in the creator space where it's for an organization called Village Impact. And they, you know, bring together 25 entrepreneurs, they host a mastermind, and they do this big fundraiser as part of it. And they raise a few hundred thousand dollars every time. And so it's like, there's a huge amount of value in going to the event based on who's there and what you learn. And then you feel even better about it because like, oh, we're going to go build this school in Kenya, right? As part of it. It's like, wait, this group actually, like right now raised enough money to go and do that. But you can, I've seen creators like tie it to a launch in some way where they're saying, hey, here's this new course that I'm coming out with. I'm super excited about it. And, you know, 1% or 5% or something of all the sales from this are going to it or—

Or I'm gonna go there after and just like, even if we're not donating to it, I'm gonna show I'm gonna show the content.

Yeah. One of my favorite examples is anytime a creator is going on a journey and wanting to tell that story, 'cause ultimately that's what we're doing as creators. Like we're teaching and we're living life and we're doing it in public. So like Joel Runyon has a brand called Impossible and he did, he's an endurance athlete. And so he did something called the 777 Project. And it was that he ran 7 ultramarathons on 7 continents in order to raise money to build 7 schools with Pencils of Promise.

Yeah. Awesome.

And so, you know, he was able to make all of this content about it. So good.

So creative.

A bunch of people donated, you know, and they succeeded in their goal. And so you watched him, like, achieve something incredibly difficult. Like, there he is running an ultramarathon in Antarctica. And you're like, I didn't know there was an ultramarathon in Antarctica, but here we are. Yeah. And he just packaged it up really, really well.

Yeah, that's incredible. There's so many opportunities like that. And I think the other thing for creators, like, and I'm just imagining, you know, New Story Neighborhoods, but there's so many other causes like going there and seeing things firsthand so that you can storytell about it and you could storytell about it and you're, you know, on kit, on social, make videos. Like, I just think it's, it's such it's such impactful and engaging content. And if you ideally, you could figure out a way to, to tie it to what you're doing. So I'll give one example. Maybe we can end with, with the, the, this topic like, and I'll just use News Story, shameless plug. But like, so like, for example, if you are teaching about, I don't know, financial literacy or, you know, money or whatever, That's what you do as an entrepreneur, something around, something around money or ownership, right? Well, you could say with New Story, like they're helping families not just, not just get a house. They're helping families have financial literacy to increase their net worth, to save, right? To have ownership in an asset, how to get loans, when they should or shouldn't. Like that's a whole, process that in this example relates to the thing that I care about, that I know, that I know more people should learn financial literacy, right? And so I could then go on a trip, meet families that have gone through that process, talk to them about their savings, talk to them about these things, and probably make an incredible video or piece that's shared. And you're going to love that as an entrepreneur and a creator. And I would imagine your audience, like, that's going to be a nice deposit in the, in the brand bank account. Yeah.

And so the way you're talking about it, obviously anyone who's creating real estate investing, personal finance, economics, like there's a whole bunch of content niches that you're focused on is like a 1-to-1 overlap with, with New Story. And so that's really interesting of the way you could approach it. One other thing I was thinking about is just the trips.

Yeah.

And something else that, that comes up for me as a, as a creator who's had more success than expected.

Yeah.

Is you realize that you're going to raise— I'm going to raise my kids in— I'm currently raising my kids in an environment that's very different than how I grew up.

Yeah.

And so I had a conversation with actually a mutual friend of ours about like, oh, what do you do of Do you splurge money and spend money on this? Are the kids gonna grow up entitled? And he was talking about a friend of his who said, look, when you're trying to decide on family vacation, if we're staying at the Hampton Inn or the Four Seasons, you're trying to decide, should I expose my kids to the 95th percentile of global wealth or the 99th percentile of global wealth?

So true.

And like, you know, this is the equation that we're having. And he was like, what you should do is make sure to go and expose them to the 50th percentile or the 30th percentile of global wealth. And like, that's what's actually going to help anchor, hey, this is what we have in life. These are the opportunities that we have. And that was such a cool experience.

So book the Four Seasons.

Yeah. So, so book the Four Seasons and go on a trip with a new story, you know, and be able to Like, I think about, you know, my son Oliver loves soccer. And when we were in that community in Mexico playing soccer with kids and having a great time, he was like, Dad, their soccer field isn't level.

Yeah.

You know? And it was like, yeah, actually, even, you know, because they're just playing soccer in the space in between the houses that hasn't been built yet. Right. As the community is being built out. And he was like, oh, wow.

You know, he—

one, he had the best time playing soccer with the kids and like, Uh, and you know, the new story team brought in new goals and we set that up and it was this really fun thing, but just, he had such a good grounding experience of like, you know, now he's never like, never going to complain that like, you know, there's a big mud patch in his soccer pitch that their team is playing on. He's like, mine is level and it has grass. Like, what more perspective, what more could you want? Yeah, it's so true.

And I mean, just super quick on, I mean, my experience, like I actually didn't grow up visiting developing world countries or environments that were out of my bubble or out of my comfort zone. And I am so grateful I went on this missions trip to Haiti a couple years out of college, and it just completely rocked me. You know, Haiti's a more difficult place. It's really sad what's going on there right now. And like, Man, just, I would just encourage people wherever it is, you know, I think international is like really good perspective.

Yeah.

But even if you can't go international somewhere else, if you're in the US, like getting out of your bubble and your comfort zone has so much, I think just, just benefit and impact on you personally. It's so easy to just snooze it and not do it or be like, I'll do that like later on. And in my experience, you're just, you're just kind of missing out on what is like, what is reality for the overwhelming majority of the world, right? And I think that just seeing things firsthand, interacting with people firsthand just really helps, I think, you as a human and your perspective. You also can learn a lot. And I have, you know, I think, you know, I've seen families that are, you know, on the, definitely on the lower end of income and poverty and what they actually have materially. And then I've, you know, through New Story, I've been fortunate to see people that are at the absolute highest end of that. And it kind of sounds like it's cliché to say because I think people hear it, but it's real. It's so real where a lot of these families and a lot of these kids, despite material, materialistic hardships, they have a lot of stuff that matters, you know, a lot of stuff that matters in, in the big picture. Um, I think there's a lot to learn from that.

Well, I am the biggest fan of New Story. I think we've been supporting the org for 8 years now, and another 10 years we'll, we'll be right here alongside you. But talk a little more about like what it looks like. You know, you're not building individual homes, you're building whole communities, right?

Yeah, yeah, we really, um, like if you think about the product that we create, it's actually not a house. The product we create is a, is like a neighborhood.

And so how many homes total has New Story built?

We're getting close to 6,000.

That's amazing.

Yeah. We are really intentional about having clean water and sanitation all in the homes, bathrooms all in the homes. These are— it's a really, really, really great home for, for the areas that we work. The other thing that we really try to do is bring in like Wi-Fi, telecom, and try to, you know, show, you know, there's such talent and there's, there's so much potential in, in the areas that we work. And our, our hope is that we can connect them with, with more opportunity. And honestly, like Wi-Fi and telecom and bringing, bringing people into like the modern age and where everything is going is exciting. When you think about the ability to learn. There's all types of opportunities with like with medicine and telehealth or getting help with nutrition. And then even, you know, kids being able to learn about whether it's being a creator or anything online is something that's so important. So those are things that we really strive for, but none of that can happen if a family doesn't have an adequate home. And so where we work, to give context on how black and white it is. I think you probably saw maybe some of the families before they moved into a new story neighborhood. I mean, families are living in a, at best, a very, very, very small kind of pieced-together, um, makeshift shelter.

Yep.

Often with dirt floors, um, not— no safety, um, you know, when it rains at night you know, it's usually people are getting wet, it's hard to sleep, um, and it's usually very overcrowded as well. So, um, anybody listening, if you have a family or a couple kids, imagine y'all all being in the same room, or maybe one other room, and there's nowhere else to go.

Yeah, the entire house might be this— the size of the podcast studio that we're recording right now.

Yeah, which is just like, you know, when you're in that— when you're in that environment, you live in what we call— it's like a survival mode. And when that happens, you can't really actualize like your creativity and your potential. And like when you're stuck there, you just, you can't get out of it. And so that's why we're so passionate about, about housing and neighborhoods is because it enables people to have their basic human needs met, which is alone worthwhile. But then after that, it helps unlock people's potential, their creativity, entrepreneurship, their dreams of what they want to do. And that's what we're so passionate about.

Yeah, I love it. There's a bunch that I wanted to get into around business model and how things have, have changed over time. But let's dive into innovation first, because on one hand, housing is something that, you know, not much has changed over, you know, many centuries. On the other hand, there's all kinds of things that can change.

You know, how we think about innovation is there's a couple different components. Um, on the house itself, it's one piece, and I'll get into some other ones. On the house itself, I mean, like, the way we think about it is you're never going to know what actually works unless you try it, right? Like, you can't just have a, a prototype in some lab and you're not actually, like, getting out there and having families interact with it. And so we actually, um, as a nonprofit, we actually have an R&D budget that is intentionally designed to try things that the chances of them working is not high, but if they work, they could be like a real breakthrough in achieving cost or better quality, or maybe something the family really desires. And so our belief is that it makes sense to take calculated risk on different innovations for the actual house. And that could be everything from, you know, as, as exciting as, um, 3D printing houses where we, we actually did, um, the very first 3D printed community of homes in the world with our partner Icon down in Mexico. Um, New Story also was, was their first partner in, uh, designing or in funding the, um, the first machine that would 3D print a house in Austin, Texas. And so that's an example of like, we, we wanted to be an organization where we would take these types of of risk for innovation. And we've done that with many different examples.

So how does it play out in, 'cause the things that look really exciting, right? Like 3D printing an entire community, and you guys obviously, one, pulled it off. It's not just like a theoretical, we did it in 3D modeling, but you can actually do it. But how does that balance with what is most practical on the ground? You're not 3D printing all of your communities.

No, no, no.

How does that come together?

I mean, we're like, we're, we're, we're agnostic to like what works. And so like what we're really trying to get at and, you know, a definition I like to use for innovation is, is just imagining what could and should be better and then having the courage to, to do it. And so, you know, for us, we could think about, well, Maybe it's a certain home design and the roof should be different, or we should use a different style of architecture. Um, or it could be something, something else that's not as shiny, not as sexy. And what you're really trying to do, how we think about innovation is like being close to the customer, in our case, the family that will move into a home, understanding their pain points and their problems. Um, and then trying to really go a layer deeper. As to why they're experiencing those problems. And then innovation is like your solution to that, right? And that can mean a lot of things. That can mean where you buy land, how you do home financing, how you try to get capital for home financing, et cetera. But it's really about first knowing what the problem is so deeply, working with the family, working with the customer to learn from them about what they really want and need. And then from there, after you've gathered that intel, then it's like, okay, how do you actually have the courage to try it? Right. And knowing that it's probably like it's— you're going to have to learn by doing and you just, you have to, have to, have to try or else you're never going to— you're never going to have any type of breakthrough on what you want to do.

But you guys, I believe, were in the very first cohort to go through Y Combinator as one of the first ones.

One of the first.

Yeah. Yeah. Really early on. What was that experience like?

One of the best things that ever happened to us, to be honest. You know, we, we went through Y Combinator, gosh, like in our first 6 months. And, and I think, I mean, we're like a completely different organization now. I mean, our mission hasn't changed. We've always focused on, on housing and building neighborhoods. But like how we do it is like an entirely new company. But what, what we learned at Y Combinator, to answer your question, was, was way more about mindset. And I think that was, that was one of the best things, um, was just being surrounded by other founders. Um, I mean, I had going into it, I had so much imposter syndrome going into Y Combinator. I didn't have any type of fancy background, no fancy resume. You're walking up to people, they're like, like, oh, I was at, you know, NASA and this started this new cryptocurrency in Asia and all these things. And I'm just like, that's not me, right? But being surrounded by peers and then having the partners at Y Combinator really like in a positive way almost brainwash you to think what is actually possible if you, if you set goals a certain way and then you have a real plan to hit those goals. And so that was like the biggest thing from a mindset perspective. You know, one of, one of the early stories for those that have known anything about Y Combinator, you basically, you go through the program and at the end of the program you have to pick like one big metric and then you stand on stage at Demo Day after and you have to say like, this is what we did in 3 months. And the partners are you know, they're kind of— we went through it— kind of notorious for like challenging you to set a bigger goal. So, so it's, it seems like, and it's real that you actually did accomplish a lot in 3, 3, 4 months. And so we kind of, we knew that they were going to challenge us. And so we wanted to try to get ahead of them and pick like a really ambitious goal. And so going into it, we've been doing this for 6 months. We're 24 and 25-year-old kids in hindsight. And I think we did like 6 houses up until that point to get us like to get started. And so we're like, okay, in 3 months we were going to do 50 houses, which literally felt like, yeah, no way. And the first thing they said back was double your goal. Your goal is 100 houses.

And you're like, we already went for a big goal.

We like, yeah, we were like, speechless.

Yeah.

And literally felt like there's no way we could do this. Turns out we create a campaign, 100 homes in 100 days. We, you know, when you set that goal, 100 homes compared to 50 houses, you like, you have to do things differently or else you won't hit the goal. Like you can't, you can't go after the same targets. You can't go after, you know, some of the same tactics. For a smaller goal. Like you have to have a bigger, different tactics. So it forced us to do that. And the end of the story is we ended up doing about 108 houses in 100 days. Yeah.

Wow.

And that whole story is just an example of we would have never, we would have never gone after that. We would have never thought that was possible. We would have never came up with a campaign, do 100 homes in 100 days. And then we ran that campaign and it was really public and we got press around it. And it was just an example of this other mantra we say that I've certainly learned as an entrepreneur is that bold ideas often attract bold people. And when you have a more bold idea, you usually can attract more, whether it's investors or donors or team members or any PR. And that was like an early, early story of what happened to us. And then since then, we've, you know, we've changed our goals, right? But that was like the mindset.

What do you think it is about setting a goal that's that much bigger that makes it actually achievable? 'Cause you have to approach things in a totally different way. And I've seen that time and time again as an entrepreneur where you're saying, "All right, I think I can do double." And someone, you know, a mentor in some way is like, "Okay, what if you had to do 10x?" You know, well, that's not possible. And they're like, "All right, but let's just brainstorm it." And then you usually end up in totally different thinking. Were there things you had to do completely differently?

[Speaker] Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, like, that's been our whole story is, you know, there's, as I just talked about, I'm all for big goals.

Yeah.

I also think that they like, like for us, how we think about it is they need to kind of be just on the, the, the road or the ridgeline of impossible and possible. So, you know, I can't say like, oh, in 5 years we're going to house every person on the planet, right? Like, you need to pick something that feels extremely ambitious.

Yep.

But, you know, is within the realm of like actually doing it, you know? And I think, you know, when we've tried to do that and I'll walk through a couple of examples, like it literally changes how we design the organization, who we hire, strategy we have. And if we weren't doing that, if we were just trying to have, you know, consistent year-over-year growth without going for something more long-term, we would be nowhere near where we are today. And the goal I'll talk about soon would never be a goal. So I think even for creators, even if you don't actually do what you brainstorm, it still is so healthy to zoom out, think long-term, because when you're only thinking short-term about the quarter or the year, or honestly even a couple years, you're going to, you're going to go about things differently. And so I think so much of entrepreneurship and being a creator is this duality of long-term vision and ambition that I think you can get— think big on, but then, you know, executing in the short term, right? Like that's, that's so much of what you do and what we, what we have to do.

Well, I think some of that brainstorming is interesting. Like if you're looking at it from the creator side, Yeah. Where pretty much everything you do is about investing in, you know, in serving an audience in some way. Totally. That's why they pay attention to you is what you do for them. And so if you look at it and say, okay, how would my business and my content change if I was only serving 10 people and I went absolutely as deep as possible? You're like, okay, well maybe I'd be flying them out or I'd be going and meeting them in person. I'd be working with them on whatever their fitness or business goal. Like you'd have this, ridiculous spectrum of how you'd go really, really deep.

Totally.

And then if you went the other way and said, okay, what if instead of the 1,000 students that I have now or whatever else, what if it had to be 100,000? And if you brainstorm everything that goes into that world, you might, like, chances are you're not going to go to one extreme or the other.

Yeah.

But going through that exercise is going to bring up a lot of ideas and like, okay, what can I do for this focused way? What can I do at scale?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think when you put a long-term perspective on it, it's like, it's imagining like, and I do this when we set our goals, it's like, it's like, I know today I'm not where, and I know our organization is not where I want it to be, but I'm projecting out what we're going to learn and the progress we're going to make in the coming years that will then allow us to do what we want to do in the future. Yeah. So like for a creator, it's like, okay, You may not be there right now, but you know that if you put in a certain amount of effort in learning and investing into, you know, creating content or learning things and like truly becoming more of an expert, you're going to be way better in a couple of years. And you should, you should like imagine and forecast yourself being that person in a couple of years.

That makes sense. Yeah. Well, let's jump up on the board. I'm curious for you to map out just where the how the business model has evolved over time. Yeah, we can go.

Let me explain it first. Then. Okay, so that's good. So like, so New Stories is a nonprofit and, you know, we our first 7 years, this is our 10th year, the model we had was even though it was innovative and exciting and different, at the end of the day, how we got homes built was, was a charitable-based model. Meaning if Nathan Barry or you guys, Kit has actually done a lot of this. If you, if you funded New Story, we would use that money and that's the money that we would use to go build a house, right? So say a house costs $10,000. Well, we would raise $10,000 in philanthropy to get the land, hire a construction team, etc. So how it was funded, the business model was it was funded by philanthropy. Makes sense.

Yep.

What we realized was, um, uh, even though we were, um, we were, we were building many new homes, we were raising, uh, up to over $15 million a year doing that in philanthropy, um, we had really great year-over-year growth from raising philanthropy, using that money to build houses and build neighborhoods. What we realized was if we had a bigger goal, which we did, of trying to impact millions and then tens of millions of people, we couldn't like, like the business model didn't work of relying on philanthropy alone to fund all of the homes and all the neighborhoods for 10 million homes, right? Like you just, there's just not enough philanthropy. Like we would have to raise, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in philanthropy. And that's not even, that's not even like putting a dent in the problem. The problem's so big.

'Cause a lot of people in startups talk about like, oh, the total addressable market, if I just capture 1% of it, you know, and you're looking at it, there's the customer side.

Yeah.

Where you're looking at it and say, hey, I actually, the total addressable market is, if you're philanthropy-based, is all money that goes into philanthropy. And you're realizing even if we got, you know, close to 100% of it, it's still not tackling anything close to the problem.

So let me give you a stat. Last year, the amount of philanthropy that was given to all international causes, the total of like every single thing was $500 billion.

Okay.

Which sounds like a big number. But yeah, you need, you need trillions of dollars for the global housing crisis because it's just so big and it's so expensive. So even if we captured, yeah, 5% or 10%, which is impossible of the global philanthropy market, You're, you're, you're just, you're making a tiny dent. And so we realized like, whoa, what if there's another way? And the thing we had to solve for is, is the funding, is the capital. Like, where does the money come from to help a family in El Salvador or in Mexico or in, um, Rwanda have access to a basic life-changing home, right? Like it's a, it's a, it's a money problem. Where does the money come from? And so what we wanted to do is we wanted to say, hey, what if the money to fund a family in El Salvador, a family of 4, what if that— what if they weren't dependent on how much philanthropy New Story can raise? Because we can't raise enough. What if that family had an opportunity, just like a lot of us listening, to actually become a customer in a housing market and have a path that they could just buy a house and that you can have a market-based solution where the family can build credit, own an asset, and then qualify for some type of home loan or a mortgage, because that actually has trillions and trillions of dollars available in capital to help home lending or any type of capital markets. And so that was kind of like the big idea. But we didn't know what we were doing. So, so we, we basically decided to, to go for this evolution as an organization. I would say it was much bigger than a pivot. It was taking our mission, which is to now empower families to become land and homeowners in thriving communities. this is what our revenue and our impact started to look like. About like this.

Yep.

Literally about like this. This was about for— it literally looked like that for about 2 years. During this time as an entrepreneur and as a leader, this was a bad feeling.

Yeah, that would be a really bad, very challenging.

Our revenue went down almost 50%. Okay, in those 2 years, because we completely changed what we were doing. It was kind of like, it was kind of confusing to donors. We didn't really have it figured out yet. It was harder to market, harder to talk about. Um, we were still piloting things of like, how do we get this— we call it a market-based solution— like, how do you get this market-based solution right? How do you get the team right for it, etc.? So during this time I felt bad. The team was a lot like, it was a very, very, very messy time. But what we knew and what I knew is that we were changing News Story to ideally, you know, basically go like this in the future. And then if you were to project this out even more, another 10 years, when I sat there and looked at This is the lesson. When I sat here and looked at from here to here, and if you imagine like a stock chart, it helped make this time more bearable.

Yep.

'Cause it felt like we were actually investing here into something 10, 20 years down the road. And then if we didn't actually do this, we actually weren't gonna have anywhere close to the future impact and growth. If we didn't go through this evolution. Right. And so yeah, now we're actually out of this. You know, we're somewhere probably up here, and I feel better than I've ever felt, like probably times 100, about our future. But we had to go through a really hard evolution.

Yeah, that makes sense. So as you were, you know, somewhere in here, right, is where you— start to question, is this the right move?

Totally.

All of that. What I think as content creators, as founders, there's often things that we know, both gut instinct and then start to have the data to back it up.

Totally.

But then it takes this leap, you know, and crossing this chasm. What would you say, you know, what would you say to yourself back then, or what would you say to someone else who is in the middle of either like making that leap, but they don't yet have the results to back up their intuition?

I think, I mean, we had, I kind of mentioned before, like we had data just on like our ambition and that we knew, we knew we had to have a different funding source than philanthropy. And we also didn't wanna depend on the government, especially in international markets. And so it's like, well, what else is there? It's like the only other option is a market-based solution where you help underserved, lower-income families become customers in the housing market. So I think like I knew and we knew at a gut level that was the path if we were serious about impacting tens of millions of people at scale. Right?

Right.

And so I think for anybody in their business, like, if you have, you have to have like pretty, pretty strong conviction that it's the right, it's the right philosophy. So like the philosophy was right, which was, evolve from charity-based to market-based, but the tactics of how are we going to deliver market-based was not clear. And that's where a lot of the harder season was. It was in figuring out how do we actually do this, right? That's where you have to pilot new things. That's when you have to really learn from what's not working. And so what I would say to anybody going through it is one, You need to have a pretty strong level of conviction that this needs to happen. Two, be willing to go through a lot of learning and piloting and know that that is part of the process. Like, you're never going to get to the bigger outcome if you don't, if you don't learn and pilot and change. And then the most important part would be having a long-term, a long-term vision. Like that to me, a long-term vision is the superpower for I think a creator, for an entrepreneur. Like if you're really serious about building something that matters and lasts, you can't just think in the quarter or the year. And I think as a founder, it gets really hard when maybe things aren't going well that quarter or that year, your revenue's down. There's a lot of things that come with that that are bad, right? But you have to stick it out and think about the long term. So long-term thinking is to me the most important thing. And I know you read so many business biographies, like all the greats, they all think long-term.

Yeah.

And they care about the short term, right? Like a lot of them are like maniacally focused on the short term, but it's all in service of the long term.

Yeah, that makes sense. So, okay, so something that you're doing is obviously housing is, you know, in the United States is a very investable asset class.

Yeah.

But in these other countries, I guess in these other countries it is for a certain demographic, certain wealth level, all of that. What are the things that go into it in order to take someone who doesn't have a home, doesn't have a credit score, like what do you need in order to actually make their needs investible so you can bring in trillions of dollars of outside money?

Yeah, so the first thing is, is like, if you think of— if we think about it from first principles, it actually doesn't start with the house. Okay, so the house is like at the end, like at the very end, and we had to learn that. You know, I think it's easy to just think about, well, just figure out how to build a 20% cheaper house, right? And people think about that in America too. That's like the end, honestly. Like sometimes the house is like the icing on the cake. And so what we learned was like, well, if a family is— it has— usually they have informal working, so they don't have like a— they don't have like a formal credit score. Yeah, right. So that's a problem because you're never going to get credit scores. Yeah. Number one. So that's a barrier is them not having a credit score. So you got to figure out how to solve for that. The second piece is, is is land ownership. Okay, so a big problem that internationally is a family, and if anybody listening has lived internationally, they understand how big of a problem this is because in the US we actually do a good job of land ownership, but if a family is living on a piece of land that they don't own and that doesn't have legal property rights, What bank is ever going to lend to that family to build a house if they can't trust who owns the land? Does that make sense?

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, these are things that for the most part we take for granted.

Completely take for granted.

Yeah.

If you don't have those two things, like you can't unlock capital, right? Like, like actual investible capital. So what you're— so what's left is if you don't have these things, it's kind of just like straight charity or like government aid programs, which in our opinion just doesn't scale and doesn't, doesn't work effectively with bigger numbers. So these were like, these were the first two. And then I say the third one was, yeah, having a lower cost home, you know, design. So we, we realized that these were 3— there's other barriers, but these are 3 of the biggest barriers to help a— as to why a lower-income family is currently living in inadequate housing. So how can we design solutions to help them have a credit score, land ownership, and have lower-cost design? And so that's what we've done.

Yeah. So what is that?

Yeah.

What does that look like? Right. We know these are the goals.

Yeah.

How do you go about systematically? Well, like, because we can break down— here's how we can do it for 5 families. Yeah. But you're like, how do we do it for 50,000 families and beyond?

Let's break it down for— so let's say, let's say this is a new piece. This is a new piece of land. Let's say this is like 20 acres.

Okay.

Okay, and New Story wants to have 500 families living in this new town, and this piece of land is near a road. So there's a road here, there's probably another— there's like some work over here, jobs. This is— this piece of land currently is probably owned by either an agriculture company or a private family. And so what we do is we have investment capital and we go in and News Story buys this big piece of land. So we buy 20 acres of land and then you were going to divide this up into different lots. So you have like you eventually have all these lots, like almost 500 lots in here. And then you'd have— you would have parks, etc. And so what we do is now that we own the land, We find 500 families, and before the family says, I would like a home loan, because they still don't have a credit score and they still don't own land, what they do is they go through a payment program where they, they have the opportunity to purchase their own lot.

Okay.

So they, they have a, we have a payment plan where we own the land. We divide it up and then we find families that want to own their land first because that helps them because they're paying for it. So that helps them build a credit score.

Right. So they, as they, you know, go along and make payment after payment.

Yep.

Then they're— they start to have that credit score.

That's right.

You know, and it's against the land. You're taking that initial risk. I guess it's not even that much risk because you, you have collateralized by the land, right?

Yeah, but we, but we would never buy this land if we didn't know that the demand was there.

Right.

So actually what we're doing from a, from a marketing and sales and research perspective, which is super important for this whole model, is we're qualifying families. We would actually be qualifying 500 families before we would buy land for 500 lots.

Right.

So we actually have customers on a waitlist.

Right.

That's literally what it is. We have, we have customers on a waitlist that say, yes, I want to purchase land, I know how much it costs, etc. Sometimes they even put down payments and then we buy the land and then they go on a payment program, usually around 12 to 18 months, and they're making monthly payments for that piece of land.

Okay.

And then once they're done paying, they then get legal title, property title to that land.

That's land ownership.

They now own the land. We also, with our investment and what they're paying for, We're putting in like really important life-changing infrastructure. So this is something else that people, when they think of housing, they don't think of that often, but electricity, sewage, clean water, roads, all of that stuff is so important before you build any home. And so the family not only owns their land, but their piece of land now has like basic infrastructure so that they can have electricity, sewage, clean water, Wi-Fi, telecom. So they own that asset, which is the piece of land. There's now, because they have all those services installed, that land has more value, right? So it's appreciated in value. And then we help connect them with different low-cost home designs that we know the price of these they could get a home loan for because they now have a credit score and they own the land.

Okay, that makes sense. So when someone is buying into land, obviously it's going to be different in so many different areas.

Yeah.

But what's an example in a community of like the cost of the land they'd be buying into and the monthly payments that they'd be making?

So it ranges a lot. Yeah. In Mexico, it could be anywhere from like $5,000 up to about $8,000. And that will get you— you will own your land. It would have services. And then the home from there, the home could cost only like $15,000, $16,000 USD, and you can get a home loan for that. Or if you own your land, then you own it. And so what a lot of families will do is they'll try to, and this is just very cultural internationally, they'll try to self-build their house. And we actually, you know, we have We provide like architecture assistance on that. And they could then build their home, which sometimes is even cheaper.

Right.

And, but think about it, a family's never going to invest into building a built, like a long-term home if they don't own the land that it's being built on. So that's why the land is so important.

Yeah. Yeah, it's what everything is based on. Because that's where you get these temporary structures, because why would you invest in it Why would you? If you don't know if 6 months from now you're going to be able to—

That's right.

Live here.

Why would you put all of your life savings or try to— You wouldn't. Yeah. So this is like, again, this is stuff that we've learned over 7, 8, 9 years that we didn't even, we didn't even think about in the beginning, right? We were just like, oh, like build homes in a community and have it funded by philanthropy. And we, you know, we did a lot of things right in that model. But this is more of like, man, what are the problems behind the problem? And how do we create solutions for these barriers, that if those barriers were knocked down, then the family could actually just be a customer in the housing market.

So then what are your bottlenecks right here? I would imagine, you know, we're talking about The local jobs available, the income, is that a big bottleneck right now of the families having the money to make these consistent payments?

They have the money for it.

Okay.

Yep. So we work with families that, I mean, they're all on the— there's a spectrum, but they're in lower income spectrum. But families, you know, they have— some are farmers, some have informal jobs. They have income and they know going into this what the monthly payments will be and they're signing up for it.

Yeah, so like what would a monthly, say it was a $5,000 property.

Yep.

What would the monthly payment be?

$200, something like that. And then if they need more time, we can give them more time. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

This is super helpful. Let's sit back down and chat through it some more. One thing that stands out to me a lot in this is how you're taking something nonstandard. Like every person's situation is different.

Yeah.

You know, family size, income level, the industry they work in, how recognized their job is, like their income sources and all of that. And you're really standardizing it.

That's right.

Because then you're taking like, you know, developers look at that and they go, okay, I understand 20 acres, 500 homes, you know, do you have services? Yes. Okay, cool. I understand all of that. So talk more about the—

the other thing real quick on that, which, which kind of relates to, um, some of the US housing stuff, is the other thing that we've learned, and we've had to build a team for this, we— so we partner with a developer. Like, a developer will come in and they'll actually, you know, they'll do a lot of the infrastructure, they'll do the They'll put in the sewage and then build houses. But a really, really, really big risk. And the reason why a lot of developers don't do this in the areas that, that, that we work is because there's so much that goes into getting the land and then all of like the permitting and zoning, the, the red tape. Right. And that— and you hear a lot of that in the US now. Yeah.

Your entitlements and all.

Exactly. So So like, a developer is not incentivized to go, you know, where we work and, and like start working on this project, unless they know that the municipality is going to be behind it, and that they have the permitting, the zoning's right, and that the municipality is going to be for it. So what we do to de-risk that is we have a team that just works with the local government and the municipality. And we get them to sign off before We bring in the developer and then we also have the families already signed up as well. So we really de-risk that, that whole— it's called the pre-development process or like the pursuit phase in real estate development. We've learned like how valuable that is to, to de-risk.

Right. So then for each entity, I mean, it's de-risked all across the board because the And we say that there's significant amounts of risk, but like the risk that you're taking on is in standardizing all of this because you're going to the, the local government and say, hey, we're going to build high-quality communities. We're going to do it in this way. Here's our track record.

It's going to improve your economy. Here's our case studies. We want to help lower-income to middle-income markets. That's right.

Yeah. And then going to the, the individual customers.

Yep.

And same thing, you're able to say, here's the track record, here's how you can buy in. We've made it so much more approachable, probably to the level that if someone, you know, was just pursuing this from a financial return perspective, their money might find somewhere else.

Yes.

You know, they're going to invest somewhere else first. And then the developers, they're also looking at, why don't I go build, you know, the custom home for someone else at, you know, 30% higher margins? Yeah, but in this case you're like, no, I can actually—

that's right.

I can guarantee someone will buy the house when you build it.

Yeah.

And you know, the designs are—

you have paying customers from the beginning, right? You're paying customers from the beginning. And we do a lot of other things not to get too technical with the developer, but, but yeah, that's, that's what we've learned and it's, it's working. I mean, we're our goal over the next— I mean, by the end of 2025, will probably have around 12,000 of these, of these lots.

Wow.

12,000 families paying in a way that is, is market-based. So it intentionally— they're intentionally like the unit economics of it is not subsidized. Right, right. Like our— we still have staff like HQ and stuff, which is, which is what's funded by philanthropy and R&D. But like if you just look at that project, We are intentionally not bringing subsidy to each lot. And we're also— the other thing that we're doing that we're unapologetic about is we're giving families like market rates on their, on the percentages, interest, etc. And the reason for that is because a developer or a homebuilder or a lender, like they have to be incentivized to keep working with this underserved demographic.

Oh, so you can't come—

Yeah, meaning so what we've learned, again, what we've learned, if we're serious about helping not just build another 50 neighborhoods, but building thousands of neighborhoods, like we have to have lenders, homebuilders, developers, like they have to get a fair margin and profit, or they have no incentive to scale it.

Right. They might do 1 or 2 communities as a favor.

That's exactly right.

You know, or because they're excited about the mission.

That's exactly right.

But you need someone saying, hey, no, we can make a good business off of this. Yeah. If we—

Fair, good business that has social impact. And people do, they want to do it for social impact. If it doesn't have a fair margin for what they're doing, they're going to do 1 project. So that's also something we've learned and It's all about incentives for those players.

Yeah, so then how have you, like, as you're talking about raising, you now both need to raise philanthropy to fund your, you know, the core New Story organization, which that's what, you know, we personally and Kit contributes to. But now you also need to raise investment dollars for, you know, buying the land and all of that, right? 'Cause you're packaging that up in a way correct, investable by, you know, family offices and investment funds and all that in the U.S. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right. So, so we still need philanthropy that is primarily funding our staff. Yeah, just really important. So we're trying to have—

because really quick, you have— you've always had a split model. That's right. Where someone— you get one group of people, the builders, who donate to fund the operations, the overhead, the staff.

Yeah.

And then you have the general public, you know, contributing and 100% of that money going to building homes.

That's right. Yep. That was the old model. So we still have the Builders Program, which is super important because it's, it's just, it's funding our team. It's funding our staff.

It's funding this innovation.

It's funding research and development. It's funding all these things. And then, so that will still be important, especially, you know, in the coming years. But over time, like over, over time, and I won't get too much into this today, but New Story, my vision is for New Story to be like pretty sustainable.

Yeah.

Where over time, you know, we can have a, you know, a small fee per lot or like just very small amounts where New Story is recouping some of the transaction, like very small amounts. But that over time actually starts to cover all of our operational expenses. And now you're in a whole nother world of sustainability and future growth. Is if every project we do, we can have our local staff covered just by, by the, by the revenue that's happening.

And then the philanthropy that you're bringing in can be around learning all the new things as you expand to different markets.

That's exactly right. You read my mind. Yeah. So yeah, then philanthropy from there, which we will need less philanthropy and like, I don't know a nonprofit CEO that's talking about needing less. That's like not the smartest thing to do, but like, That's like our vision, right? We will still need it, but it'll be way more strategic and like much smaller compared to all the other capital. And yet that like a good use case for that would be like, hey, we want to go into like this, this risky country and the country today and the market and maybe even try to work with like some of the poorest families in that area. It's not investable yet. Like it's not ready for, for home loans or for impact investment. So we want to use philanthropy to do pilot things.

You think with $500,000 to $1 million, we could come in and we could test this theory, get it stable enough, standardized enough, that then we'd feel good taking investment funds that are seeking a return.

That's right. Then it becomes de-risked. We demonstrate it. I think that's a really high leverage use of philanthropy, right? And then to answer your question of like what funds what, I mean, we're talking about literally like one of the most expensive problems in the world. Like, like literally, like, like it's one of the most expensive problems in the world. And so today we're using, we're using impact investment to just to, to, to do the land, do the land financing and infrastructure. We actually have an impact investment fund. It's called the Land Ownership Fund. And all it's doing is just is developing land and then families are paying for it. And so long term—

so that is some of the investors are contributing money to?

Yes.

Okay.

Yep. So you could invest into this fund and you'd be getting— you act as like an LP in a real estate fund. You'd be getting a return in that. And then, then after that, the best part is because families are now— they now have a credit score and now have the land ownership, they are qualified to get a loan from a local bank or provider. So what that means is New Story doesn't have to fund or finance all of these mortgages because that's the most expensive part. That's when you start getting into the billions and tens of billions of dollars is the cost of all the homes. And so what we've learned is like we can help that family become qualified and that they could go and we connect them to a local bank or credit union and they could actually get a mortgage And we don't have to fund that mortgage. It's just already in the market, which makes it even more scalable.

And your payback period on the land ownership, because that cost is— yeah, is—

so we just recycle it, right? It's all cash flow. It's monthly cash flow that we just, we recycle. We go and buy more land and we just keep going.

As you've brought this model and, you know, brought it to your donors and the broader investment community and all that, like, what's the reaction been? I imagine some people are all about it and other people are very confused or, or maybe even some people are negative on it because they're like, no, I was, I was donating for impact and now this feels like a business.

Yeah. It's, it's not as simple to understand at first.

Right.

And we're trying to get better at that. But it is.

That's why we're doing hour-long podcasts.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. To explain, you know, but the reality is, and I love simplicity, it's a value of News Story. Like, this is a— it's a, it's a more detailed you know, complex model, right? Where it, it really looks more like bringing bit like a real, real business practices and like real business models to underserved markets that nobody else is trying to go to. So that's— there's more, there's more to that than just saying what we used to do. Come to New Story, 100% donation directly funds this family that we show you. We use that $10,000 that you donated and we built a house for this family. That sells, right? Like, like, and that's awesome and it's great. And we did a lot of that. And now we're saying like, you don't actually fund this family, you fund all these other things that happen. So to answer your question, I think, you know, the majority of people have said this is super exciting. Like if you, if you guys can pull this off, right? This is incredible, right? And so I think like, and then when you start to lay out the numbers to people and you say like, well, do you know how much it would actually cost to house a billion people or even, even 10 million people? People are like, oh, I didn't think about that. Like, where does all that money come from? And, and so I think like once somebody understands how we call it market-based solutions, can, can impact underserved families and people in need, that to me is like, like they can't stop thinking about it. And I think, you know, I try to, especially in the last year, and I'll be doing a lot more of this in the future, just trying to talk to more social entrepreneurs about the power of market-based solutions and business and how you can bring innovation and pioneering new models, new lending models, all different types of things for underserved families that they have to— in my opinion, I don't want those families to only be dependent on charitable aid raised in the US or government programs that are most likely not going to be effective.

Well, I'm thinking about some of these innovations that you see in the nonprofit world where, and I'll share the ones that I encountered, probably someone else pioneered them, but these are the organizations that I heard about them from first. Like with Charity: Water being one of the first that I had heard of to take the split approach like you all do, right? They have their organization, The Well, right?

[Speaker:NATHAN_BARRY] Yeah, they're amazing.

[Speaker:TIM_FERRISS] Who's funding operations and And that actually is still a controversial idea in the world of charities.

I like it.

That's a different thing. I think it's great. And then you get to like an organization like Kiva to be able to really like, okay, let's package up and standardize microlending. And so you get another innovation there. And I believe what you're doing with New Story is implementing these market-based solutions at a scale, you know, 5 years from now, other organizations would be like, oh, they were just one of the first to do it. But now, you know, and we'll get even faster at explaining it and, you know, and it'll be one of these step functions that fundamentally changes, you know, nonprofit work and this impact type work.

That would be a dream. I know it would. I mean, that would be, that would be a dream. And, you know, this, this stuff we're talking about today, it, it's not enough silver bullet. Like it doesn't, it truly doesn't. It doesn't work for every social problem. Some of the other ways of tackling things without market-based solutions are incredible and are deeply impactful and should be operating the way they are, and people should be scaling those. I just think what we've learned, and the more like you think about it as an entrepreneur, it's like, man, for some of the biggest, most expensive social problems, market, if you can get market-based solutions, and as an entrepreneur and as a team, if you can work towards those, there is, in my opinion, exponential impact and upside if you can get that right. So yeah, our dream would be like, we're proving this out more and more over the years, and hopefully other industries and entrepreneurs can, can take market-based solutions to places where that doesn't exist. Yeah.

And you, you bring up some good points on there. There are characteristics of the problem that you're solving that particularly lend themselves to this.

That's right.

Right. The land ownership is absolutely key, right? And so if you're solving a problem maybe in medical care or another area where you don't have the same financial instruments, the same credit standardization, you know, in the land ownership, then it's a different beast.

Yeah, it can be for sure. I think that we've learned of a lot of really incredible products and services where let's just say it's a medical need, like maybe it doesn't make sense to charge for something, but if you could charge even a small amount, you know, to cover your costs, that's just— it's going to help you have so much more impact and scale. And I think— and my hope is that more, more donors, more philanthropists, more creators that are listening, like you start to see that not every social problem should just automatically— you shouldn't just automatically think like, let's apply charity to it.

Right.

And again, I run a nonprofit. Yeah. I would love for y'all to donate to New Story. So, but like, there are— what if— how can we think of more creative, entrepreneurial, business-oriented, unapologetically ways to help more families just buy a product.

Yeah, that makes sense. If people, uh, are listening to this and they're saying, okay, I want to partner with New Story, yeah, uh, where should people go and what should they do?

You should just, um, you could reach out to me directly on social, or you could just go to our website, newstoryhomes.org. We have a, you know, a contact us form, and, um, and we'll see it and just say you heard us on Nathan Barry Show you wanna learn more and we can have somebody from our creative team reach out and see, see what you have in mind. You know, one of the things about New Story that is, you know, opportunistic for creators if in the US, where we work, we work primarily in El Salvador and Mexico. So if you actually wanted to eventually go on a trip or get involved in some way, it's, I'm not saying it's easy to get to, but it's easier to get to. Than other parts of the world.

Yeah. I mean, we— our travel down there was, was quite easy.

So yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we'd love to hear from you all. We're up for, up for creative ideas.

Yeah, I love it. So thanks so much for coming on.

Yeah, loved it.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to the YouTube channel, just search Billion Dollar Creator and go ahead and subscribe. 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 who else we should have on the show.