How I Went From Broke to $7 Million With An Airbnb Business

alright so sean i wanted to have isaac on because we talk a lot about making money on this podcast but i have been with isaac at his home a bunch and i've got know and he's inspired me that to believe that like money isn't the only reason for business it's about like kinda craftsmanship it's about like creating like your little like corner of universe and into your vision and i wanted to have him on the pod because i think he's different than a lot of the guests that we've had on here but let me explain how i met isaac i saw that he had this amazing website for his airbnb and it said isaac french owns this place he's a former accountant turn real estate mo but he's really most passionate about painting and being an artist and i was like this kid's is the most interesting person i've ever read about like like the hell i'd so i just called him and we became friends on the phone and then eventually met up in real life and he's kind of blow my mind as i've gotten known so when i met isaac i met him in a business context he had this vibe where he was like oh like no the right way to do this business is doing this this when you say you met him in a business context what context did you meet him in so sam can i tell a tiny story here about that yeah yeah so shout out zach he's cool he introduced us he introduced me to sam at least i had no idea who sam was but basically i started texting this guy named sam and i was like i couldn't really give a rip i had just built live clay which i'll get to in just a and and like here's this guy sam who's some business mo what zach told me and so i started texting him and he's like oh this is super cool you know whatever i told him all my numbers and then he's was like the next morning he was like hey i'm about to make a post on twitter you should join so i'll shout you out i was like i don't have twitter i that's a total waste of time good luck basically and he's like no you should really make a post you should make an account and was like no whatever so he made this post that kinda blew up it got like millions of views so halfway through that process i was like oh maybe i should go ahead and join this and the rest of is history because like i actually and i'd love to talk about that but i absolutely love the ability to connect with other people online and share what i'm all about but that was my introduction to sam it was not as a fan boy it was just like this random dude on the internet who started texting me about business and his number sean they'll blow you away i'm ready to be blown away go ahead is can you you what can you say the numbers yeah yeah so let me just tell you a quick story live oak lake if if that's alright because it's it's pretty cool so i was a bookkeeper and i had this dream i was twenty four years old just got married i had this dream to create this like immersive cohesive designed village of tiny homes in texas i didn't really have terminology for it i just had it's it's really hard to articulate because i just this vision for what it would feel like and i put an emphasis on feel because that's it was like a vibe i wanted to create and people started laughing at me like you're crazy and i started looking for land for like three months one morning i wake up open up zillow and there's this five acre like jungle down the road for me that i driven past probably a hundred times but never thought anything of but it had this little cow pond in the middle so i was like i should check that out drove over and when i walked on the property i literally got goosebumps so i was like this is the place to create to realize this dream met the realtor got it under contract i had nineteen thousand dollars of savings to my name again twenty four was not bank by any standards had experiencing construction so my dad was a plumber general contractor i grew up with that experience i've always been in artist i've always left design so so i'd how'd you get it under contract would you if you didn't have any money would would you pay to put it under contract i paid like two thousand dollars of earnest money but to close with cash in thirty days because it was a super competitive market this was twenty twenty one in texas people were flock here and i knew this property i mean i was there with hours of when it was listed and i knew it would have been gone by the end of that day so i was i'm gonna get her contract with the due diligence period and then i'll figure this out how much would you need at the end of that period to to have come up with hundred and thirty three thousand dollars was the price of the property which was a really good deal to for five acres so you just make this clear you have nineteen thousand dollars you put two thousand dollars down to to lock this up you now have i forgot how many you said days you said thirty sixty nine thirty or something like that thirty days where you're like i am i have faith that i will come up with another hundred thirty thousand dollars that i've never seen before in the next thirty days of course why would i not we gotta have conviction you gotta believe in yourself if you expect anybody else to believe in you and i did have a list of people that were like yeah these people are i'm gonna find somebody to make this dream work so i started calling people well my brothers and my dad who have the small jeep general contracting company which is what i'd grown up working they didn't have the cash either but they had access to a line of credit so my hope was that i could get a hard money loan from them to buy the land to get the twenty percent of whatever the bank wouldn't loan me and then pay it back once i could refinance the property so i was already you know really banking a little over confident really banking on my abilities to deliver this just crazy property that would app prey at really high values so okay i called them up and they're like no we don't wanna give you a hard my loan we want equity in that because we like the idea and we'll loan you the money through our line of credit so great i gave them just handshake deal that day forty percent equity and they were gonna help me with the difference of whatever but then of course i was gonna have to find a loan and you know go through all the rigor moral of that so we get under contract and literally i hit the ground running so the next day well the first three days i spent on the on the phone with banks like hitting up every local bank i possibly could and then also walking the property all by myself with no phones or anything just sort of like letting the land speak to me about how to build this this little micro resort and figuring out like how each cabin would be positioned and like being a little man messiah about the details of that because i'm a little little bit ocd as a perfection so finally i got a bank that's like they were like no no i mean you could imagine twenty four year old kid rolling their eyes but i found a local bank who said we'll give you a loan because you know you have your dad and brothers on board we want them to c guarantee it but they were like eighty percent of the app oppressed value is what will loan you so great you know boxes checks then they send an appraiser out and the appraiser and i gotta give it to them i didn't know what i was doing i drafted up this really primitive pro form i didn't know what a pro form a was just like this apple numbers spreadsheet thing it was like my guess on how much the property was gonna cost how much it was gonna bring in sensitivity analysis for like occupancy and they probably laughed their heads off but anyway they gave that along with like some napkin sketches of what these cabins were gonna look like my drone photos like marked up of the site plan and the appraiser came back at like okay this is gonna cost one point eight million so the bank was like we'll loan you eighty percent of that so bank was like we'll give you a million and a half loan if your dad and brothers will c guarantee this and my estimate was that the project was gonna cost like two million so we had like five hundred thousand dollar shortfall which wasn't great long story short it actually cost us two point three million so here's the deal i the spec home market was booming in texas at that time and so i was like okay we're going all in i gotta make this work i bought another five acres down the road built a seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars spec home in four months and sold it and profit two hundred grand from that home was able to rule all of those profits directly into this project of course maxed out every credit card put in my nineteen thousand my dad and brothers brought their line of credit we got the project done nine and a half months start to finish which was absolutely wild as you can imagine too mean this is post covid supply chain issues are crazy i was designing it as we went it was the wildest year of my life on top of that i broke my pelvis like seven months engine the project so we open in january of twenty twenty two two weeks later my whole business as i knew it ended i woke up one morning open the airbnb app everything's grayed out were suspended on airbnb worst feeling probably i've top ten worst feelings i've ever had my life and i called their customer support couldn't get a hold of anybody there was no warning there was no explanation so i felt like i was totally kicked in the gut and was like like alright i gotta figure out direct bookings and so long story short found this travel influencer who lives like an hour away and i didn't even know what this was but just by digging i stumbled upon them they said pay us nine hundred and fifty dollars will make a post a giveaway post about your property so i sent them photos two days later they made the post seven days later we had forty thousand dollars of direct bookings through our website so i whipped up a a website overnight and forty thousand of direct bookings and five thousand followers on instagram from scratch so as you can imagine that was my sort of uri eureka moment on direct bookings in instagram six days later we got restored on airbnb so the timing was like perfect it was a glitch in their system but the direct bookings game was on fire so so then that first year was a whirlwind ninety five percent occupancy overall with these seven cabins which just just crazy starting from zero eighty percent of all the bookings were direct so here's the deal about direct bookings the ot which is like online travel agency so airbnb their fees are like roughly fifteen percent so if you can capture the customer direct you make fifteen percent of margin you get the customer's email so you can re target them you can't ever be be platforms and you're reaching a more aspirational guest because they're booking from instagram not airbnb so they're not price shopping they see these immersive videos and i'm like oh we gotta come stay here we had guests come back three or four times in one year because we were able to re target them and because the experience was just in wow you you sold this what four years in for how much two two and a half years in we sold for seven million so last october two and a half years in yeah alright guys so listen up we're doing something a little bit different here so we had this guy named mister ball mister ball is one of my favorite people on earth if you have been on youtube or tiktok you probably know who mister ball is so he's has tens of millions of followers and he's built this massive business on it he's probably the best story i've ever heard of my life to be honest and he did this amazing podcast with us that we're gonna release soon we're not releasing the episode right away but we are gonna give it to our true fans and if you are one of those true fans and you do want this interview we have a link below so check it out click the link in the description below and you can listen to it right away now back to the show so you let's just recap here you go by land land is you said what hundred thirty k or that was just the down payment that was the land that was the whole land okay the land you never did con you never had built things like this you had done some construction some plumbing projects but i assume you had never like have you ever built a cabin before no and you built these yourself or you sub contracted out to a company sub contracted to but it like i said i i was in there on ladders doing stuff myself that's how i broke my all this okay so you you build seven cabins on top and the whole project build out you thought was gonna cost you two million bucks ended up cost you two point three but did you say you were selling you were the spec market was booming you just sold a separate property just to help fund it you didn't sell you didn't pre sell anything on this property correct okay so you you do this it took you nine months to get live with the seven with all seven cabins is that right or one at a time all at the same time nine and a half months nine and a half months okay that's amazing and this is like you know post post covid and you start renting these out how much does a cabin rent for what was the average kinda nightly rate like six hundred bucks a night yeah he said he was doing one point one million a year in revenue so you do a million a year a million a year in revenue five hundred k of profit and you sold this thing for seven million bucks yep so a million dollars a key two and a half years after starting construction on the whole tank and you sold it to who a small private equity group and that how did that come about they approach you you approached them what happens so we actually listed it my philosophy is that every material thing should have a price tag this was super controversial a lot of people that saw the success were like you should never sell this this is lightning in a bottle but i was like no i've learned so much from this process that i could theoretically redo everything way better and plus if i ever wanna raise money i wanna be able to show like the full life cycle of a deal so we went ahead and listed it with a broker and we got approached by multiple private equity groups they see the writing on the wall for comm short term rentals and they want these one of one of a kind properties and but most of them need to operate like at a much bigger scale this group was small enough that they were willing to take a one off property so here's the crazy thing in the hotel industry you typically have three parties you've got the real estate you've got the managing company and you've got the brand sometimes the the operator and the brand are the same well with this property we built a hundred and fifty thousand followers on instagram plus like thirty or forty thousand people on the email list so we essentially were selling the brand and the real estate together which is part of the reason we got such a crazy high price you know for a seven cabins in the woods in texas but basically they came along offered seven seven million we negotiated some of the terms because they wanted to sell or refinance some of it and the deal fell through like three times as could be expected they ended up having to get a bunch more debt than they thought but they came through eventually and we closed last october so yes the looked that you have sean that's how i had when i first met them so when i first met them i was just on the phone with them and i go hey like i'm gotta go to this conference in idaho i think you said your parents or something like you have a connections there do you wanna meet me up there and like do you want become friends because when i met this kid i was like you're you're amazing and i said when i share you on twitter you're gonna get popular and just promise me that you're gonna let me always invest in anything you ever do from now on because i think you're gonna be a very popular person because his passion in the way that he's principled and like he like outlines what he's gonna do i found to be into do you get that vibe sean you know what i mean yeah well i think the hustle that you showed there's great i mean that's like what successful entrepreneurship looks like great you start with a vision then you don't count yourself out i think that was the the the next most important step you didn't count yourself out you could have said i don't have the i don't have the experience i don't have the the the time i don't have anyone who believes them me don't have the network what whatever you didn't say any of those you said how do i get the time how do get the money how do get the network do i get the cash what what do i need to do to get this right and you did it and i think you had a unique insight which is that a that people would wanna stay in kind of a more unique experience and b once you realized once you turned your disadvantage into advantage you turned your airbnb disaster into oh wait i gotta find another way to promote this and you found a better way to promote it right because let's say you had never done let's say airbnb had never knocked you off the platform and you had never realized that i should be using instagram content through influencers or or through my own to do direct bookings what do you think this property would have been worth had that not happen maybe three or four million is my guess right navy and that's and and maybe not even be a sell asset right may may maybe not a like definitely not a private equity sell asset but maybe just to another real estate owner who's looking for rental properties yeah totally i think the brand that moment with instagram which felt like a with airbnb originally which felt like a complete defeat like literally you can't imagine i mean it was twenty four recently married had just spent two over two million dollars of other people's money had been a little bit laughed at by even some of my friends like why are you spending because that was even a lot of money when we built it a lot of my friends in waco in the short term rental market said you're crazy we already have this glut of short term rentals here but my whole thing was we're building a new lane of traffic we're creating a destination build it and they'll come but when that airbnb debacle hit it ended up being the biggest blessing in disguise i could've have ever engineered i got extremely lucky and just overall was obviously extremely blessed with the project but it's become my conviction that if you have an inspiring vision you have the ability to communicate it and you have the conviction to bring that vision to life you become a magnet for everything you need and that applies to capital to guests on and on the universe cons inspires for those with mission there's a bunch of stories of people winning massively by having the idea of build that they will come but there's a whole lot more stories of people having that attitude who lose big and i like it doesn't matter what what business you're in this idea build it when they come build it and they'll come that kinda separates i think a visionary from someone who's tapping in and building a great business i like people who point and say this is where we're gonna go and a lot of times those people a lot of times those people fail more often than not they fail but i think it's dope when they do it when they when they when they succeed you know what i mean i find that to be different than how i look at life and i find it to be inspirational yeah okay that makes sense isaac like what you're you're gonna say something on that well i was just gonna say you know people now come to me asking all the time like how do we recreate that same success and what i really do believe i just said this but is that you have to have vision and then you have to story i think storytelling is the most valuable skill not just in marketing but in building something including building something like construction and here's why i've got a friend devin so devin is also twenty four years old or now i'm twenty seven but i was twenty four when i built live and he was he was an engineer so there's was a smart kid and he had this stream to create this shipping container home that was just super wild was like five containers stacked on top of each other and he has an incredible amount of resilience and passion he went out and built the whole thing with his two hands like ninety five percent of it he built with his two hands and he documented the whole process with an iphone and a twenty dollar tripod on instagram and tiktok and he grew one point five million followers from scratch look it up it's called the pacific ben that's b i n it took him a year to build this thing and when he launched he had so many emails that when he opened up the calendar he he pre sold the first year in like two weeks and now again he's become this magnet where people are like hey come bill you know get they're trying to give him money and i understand a little bit about what that feels because people have done the same thing to me but again like he understood storytelling he did it very authentically and he had a vision and you just have to believe in it now it it's a little bit more art than science in terms of like is the vision a good one i think some people have that and some people don't i credit my childhood and some of the stuff i already described and the character that my parents put in me as like fully responsible for the success that i've had and let me just tell you like if you're a super confident person like i tend to be you're gonna have some hard knocks i have fallen flat on my face more times than you wanna hear including during and even after the sale of live clay so you have to learn humility and you gotta learn it the hard way but that doesn't that's not mutually exclusive from having that kind of just intuition and sense that like i think it's a sense of taste too is like this is gonna work and here's why and even if i can't convince you i still believe and it ends a conviction and then people rally around that and then of course your track record is a lot and when you're starting from zero you don't have that but as you go you gotta very careful the projects you take on because obviously you don't want to compromise that record so i think this idea of creating these unique spaces and places and having people fall in love with them online and then that turns business that makes millions of dollars i think that is a awesome romantic vision i know several google my life that would like have the urge when they hear about these to be like could i do that could we do that where we live in this area whatever what are the opportunities you see so what do you think somebody out there could go do and break that down like a blueprint like okay you're now talking not to me and sam you're talking to this person who's listening who is inspired by this says could i do that how would i do that what would you tell them what's the the two minute blueprint you would give them yeah love it huge opportunity again airbnb have been comm monetized they're just you know unrecognized unrecognizable from each other there's no differentiation so whether this is a an old summer camp that could be totally transformed into like this micro resort or say it's a roadside motel a lot of people are doing these or it's seven cabins around the lake i got a friend named brian who had this idea to rethink what house boats meant and so he built for two hundred thousand dollars built this house boat you can look it up flow home that's f l o h o m it means like totally different than what you think of it's like a mini yacht almost and then he started renting it out absolutely when be now he's raised a bunch of money he's buying marina so the cool thing about house is you don't fall typically into the same regulations as s str as short term rentals because you're on the water so he gets to be in like these prime locations in like you know baltimore harbor or annapolis or wash wherever and you get three hundred and sixty degree harbor views your you're sometimes in hotels sometimes not even in any zoning at all and there's zero competition so again that's completely unique there's such a spectrum of what these could be i've got another friend who's doing tree houses so he bought a piece of property and here's here's the blueprint that i go after number one choose red states over blue generally speaking because get speed to market is everything and you wanna be in a in a place that's super easy to build so rural texas which is where i am there's essentially like no zoning and i didn't have to go through some long permitting process like i would if i was on the big sur coaster or that's a radical example so find go off the beaten path it's okay to get away from places but you wanna be within two hours from a major metro area of like let's say a million plus people because that's your drive to distance it it's it's like a station distance so you're gonna get a lot of two three nights vacations need to be within two hours from a major metro area you need to be within fifteen to twenty minutes of like a town that has a re a coffee shop maybe a good restaurant maybe there's ways around that like you could do a meal kit where you could partner with a local chef or local farmers and like make that part of the experience that you're offering the guests but it's okay to get off the beaten path you wanna find that two hour gold lock zone then fine land that's super cheap that has some natural potential let's say trees are kind of a must because you can't draw a tree overnight and that's what live oak blake had maybe it has some top people love water perhaps you can create a water feature so i've got this other crazy story and i'm about to make a twitter thread on this but some friends named kim and christine how to dream they're in a rural ohio they buy this piece of property with zero money that the guy a pastor through he had no money he bought this piece of property and then he noticed it had like this old d lodge on it but he noticed like down below the lodge there's this little cliff and there's a seasonal stream that only flows like a few weeks out year and they had this idea so they actually dug out and dam up this little pool and then they put in a pump rec circulated the water so that it's flowing year round and there's essentially a waterfall swimming pool look it up it's called the cliffs at hoc hills it's absolutely wild this place has gone mega viral they've got six hundred thousand followers on instagram they're booking out every single night two years in advance and that water feature probably cost them twenty to thirty thousand dollars and has literally created millions of dollars of value both in the brand and in the property that they have so like find a property that's mediocre but that has the potential with your vision to create something totally one of a kind and then architectural make a beautiful infuse unreasonable hospitality into it so you don't need an on site concierge you don't need people holding your hands you know at every like five star luxury would be what you need is touch points that people care about so when i open live oak lake i i quickly just had this idea people love to see their name handwritten so i perfect this process where we would hand write a card to each guest and then i partnered with a local bakery that was like five minutes down the road to fresh bake our own recipe of chocolate chip cookies every single morning and then on the back end with my software because i pretty much automated the whole property it was running with like two part time employees the whole thing on its own i gave access to those bakers and they could see every morning like how many reservations were that day they would make the cookies the cleaners who also had access to the property management software would pick them up would deliver them they would write the card so i didn't have to do any work for less than ten dollars some fresh baked cookies a handwritten card and a couple top chico in the fridge made a massive impact and an emotional connection with the guest not only was it a beautiful architectural and natural experience but they felt like me as the owner is isaac like my story which we could go we could go down so many rabbit holes but like i wrote out our story in this booklet that we gave them like we turned what would have been a boring house manual into like this fun coffee table book but then on top of that there's this handwritten in note and they all felt like oh isaac just now left this for me this morning and so and then like in the messaging we did all these automated messages but we wrote them in such a way that was extremely careful and extremely intentional so it felt very fresh and spontaneous it's so little ways like this i love this sam has this phrase and i've taken his copywriting course copy that two times now it's absolutely gold in my opinion but he has this little thing about these forgotten areas of copy so whether that's like the four zero four landing page on a on a website or like the terms and conditions whatever you find these little places that are overlooked and then you just spice them up and you make them feel cared for and that's what we did with live blake and the guests absolutely loved it so there's a bunch there i could go on and on about this but basically here's the plate anyone can do this anyone can go out and and spend a hundred thousand dollars if you find the people buy this piece of land yeah you're gonna have to get a bank loan i know tons of people doing so i've got a community of about fifty people building these properties right now around the country and the value creation in such a short amount of time if you execute this well is just off the charts did you like one of these toys we just wound up we just kinda let go and just like holy shit sorry i love it no don't apologize i love it i i whenever i get done hanging out with you i i feel more energy you you know i think there's like two types of people there's people who are you feel like worn out when you get done hang out with them and then do feel like there's people where you you feel inspired well what are some ways that a smart person could get this wrong so not not every you know any blueprint if i say hey had all the success in e commerce well i know a bunch of people who have failed in commerce and i can tell you where they go wrong you know some of the common traps that a smart person could fall into i mean i i i feel about it or at least i didn't sounds like i'll take this one yeah i i mean like i i bought one of the bought a property wanted to turn into this and i actually didn't i broke even i mean i probably made a little bit of money but i didn't it wasn't like a screaming success so here's like a list the first thing is there is such thing is set it and forget it passive income when it comes to real estate if you own the thing that that that ain't true it's still like a business that you have to run there is no set and forget it would you agree with that isaac ninety nine percent of the time unless you are just an extreme exception but yes the illusion of total automation is absolutely just that an illusion i think the another thing is you really actually have to give a shit and care about it like in order to like make outs size returns you do really it needs to be really really different and special as opposed to just like in my case i was like oh there's not a lot in this part of the the country like this picture looks good i'll stand out done that's why my returns were only okay but that was not an exceptional plan yeah i think that design is the number one lever that you can pull as my friend hahn who's awesome by the way hans laura absolutely blown up on instagram recently he's got like five hundred and fifty thousand followers and he's like breaking down interior your design in these little short form videos but design is the biggest lever you can pull in controlling how people feel and going back to that vibe and that feeling that you're creating hospitality is all about emotional connections with people with your desk and you're in a business that's notoriously difficult to operate so you live or die based off of every single guest interaction and going back to raising all the money this is what i feel like a lot of startups inevitably fail at they try to scale too fast they invest all that money they see the opportunity see the live case study they invest all that money and like hiring these designers and hiring you know spending a ton on ads and doing all these things that are like the priorities are wrong you need a story so like if you wanna do this you probably chances are like you shouldn't just dump a bunch of money into somebody else's well you can do that if it's the right person but ideally you need to be or you need to be partnered neck and neck with someone who is extremely passionate and wants to tell that story but hospitality is all about like how do you serve these people and so this is where even though i i did automate most of the property like i'm telling you it was awesome we had zapier we had like six software we had smart home technology the place was just running like a machine but i was still reading every single review i was still at least seeing every single message from every single guest and that's a twenty four seven thing i mean that is that's intense anyway you cut it and when you don't have somebody who cares about that where you don't have the right employees that have even once you've built it who can operate it with that owner's mentality you're just you're gonna suffer and there's this great quote by ten ferris you've probably heard it but he says there's a glut of mediocrity in the world please don't contribute to it and i would say that applies to the design aspect that applies to the operations and like hospitality aspect that applies across the board so if you come with the right mindset of i'm here to serve i'm here to like again build out this incredible vision tell that story authentically chances are you're absolutely going to succeed because people gravitate towards that naturally you know sean you and i make money on the internet and when you make money in the internet that means the barrier to entry is really low so it's really easy to have an idea and turn it into something very quickly because of that i think i've gotten into a habit of creating things that were to use a funny pun sub par like there was very little passion involved in them or there's very little excellence have you ever like felt like that when you're making stuff online sean like where you're like looking back and you're like this is just not a very high quality thing even though it's making money honestly i do degree like i think the barrier to entry is low yes it's easy to play but it's not easy to win and so anytime i've tried to do something that works online i don't know i threw my all into it i wasn't necessarily very good so even if i a mediocre result it wasn't due to lack of effort it was due to lack of skill or or i make something really good that nobody cared about nobody wanted it was just the wrong problem to solve so i i think that yes it's easy to try something online i don't think it's easy to win at something online i don't think you can get away with something how do you define winning you you know whatever hitting my goals for it right so having something that actually grows that is sticky that is you know very profitable you know the the things i look for when i do a project online is i'm trying to have to be successful i don't think any of these are easy they're definitely easier than going out into a plot of land and being like i'm gonna build a luxury you know a luxury stay here i'm gonna serve customers essentially by hand it's definitely easier than that but i i wouldn't say it's like i don't think you can get away with sucking online and be successful because the barriers entry so low because they're very interest so low there's so many people playing because there's so many people playing to actually do something that's that works and captures people's finite attention is still hard well we have so many friends that are popular in the internet and they make crappy stuff like that's crappy by our standard this is not crappy by the customer standards right like i was thinking about this the other day so jimmy mister beast who you know is is friendly with us and and is obviously super successful with youtube he just released i i guess i guess i leaked his production document do you guys see this i read the whole thing so i like actually wanna do like a whole bigger thing it so i wanna go too much into it but one amazing thing is you know you get to see inside of his mind and his his mind works in a really unique way and i think you could see from that document why he's so successful but if you read the document or you hear the stories about him you would think that he is making the greatest videos the world has ever seen that he is the whatever i don't know who this famous directors and an artist of our time are but you would think he's doing that when in actuality it's it's sort of like saying who makes the best burgers is it mcdonald's who has the most popular burgers they sell the most volume of burgers is it someone in the middle is it five guys because they they're pretty popular but maybe they're taste is a bit better or is it the chef in you know new york who makes this one unbelievable burger that's thirty six dollars and if you ever put a mcdonald's burger next to that you could you would laugh at the mcdonald's burger right which one is the best burger and mister beast has made his success because he's has decided to be mcdonald's on the internet right he is creating the videos that are mass market that are gonna get the most number of views even if they're not the most life changing intros emotional or beautifully told stories there are other people who do those and so i think there's just like it's hard to say what is what is the best right like the people the friends of ours who we think make this like pretty crap content that works it's because they're doing the mcdonald's thing right they're giving people fast food content and then there's other people that are giving them artisan content and you know who's to say what's better what's better than the others it depends on your goals can i tell you a crazy story about twitter and going viral yeah what do you got so actually sean i need to publicly thank you because your episode on how i write with david about how storytelling was i mean golden and you don't know how many people i referred to that episode but like i don't know four or five months ago alex lieberman made a post about he was like i just watched this interview with aaron so about stories and i i'm in trans transpired it i wanna go down that rabbit hole and so anyway when i saw that it resonated with something i was already feeling i wouldn't consider myself naturally a great story storyteller retailer actually i was like i feel like i can learn this skill and i'm i'm gonna figure it out so i went down the rabbit hole and i listened to podcast podcasts and i read books and i took courses and and copywriting and and writing in general and then i was like okay i'm gonna figure this out and i'm gonna i'm gonna try it and so well first of all i take an eight month break from twitter so last fall i stopped posting at all and i i took an eight month break but i would sort of describe it for various reasons but one was i was just recharging as a creator you can't just constantly go you've got you're like a battery you've got recharge and but i came back kind of guns of blazing in june with all of this like knowledge that i had been accumulating from all of these different sources and right out the gate i had like a six million view thread and people like threads are dead and you know twitter's dead the algorithms trash whatever and literally one after another and i'm knocking on wood but at the end the day like i've never had so much sustained success like the last ten threads i've written in in a row without exception of gone an average of like a million views of piece and then one of them went totally crazy so i wrote this thread about this train car that my dad it's penn to the top of my profile if you wanna get it but yeah i see that one so i wrote this thread i stayed up like all night i i spent eight hours writing it i just finished copy that the second time and so that it was fresh on my mind and i i wrote this thread and i didn't know you know i put sixty percent going off of your advice going off of a lot of people's advice like sixty percent of my effort of those eight hours were spent writing that hook like both writing it and also t those so it's got this great visual hook where you see like side by side train car before after and then like hours writing four or five sentences i know that sounds crazy but writing and rewriting it just trying to make it a science but i had the sentence in there let me read it so i said my dad bought this hundred and twenty year old train car for two thousand dollars it was a rotting cat infested wreck so i knew that i was probably being a little controversial when i said that i had no idea just how she would be i said but after investing hundred and forty seven k and five months of work we redeemed it today it's one of the most profitable and exclusive days in the country here's what happened so here's here is what happened there is like thirty percent of the population i've come to believe are these cat loving i mean karen and i i love i guess what spoiler alert i love cats too i was not meaning disrespect to the cats when i said this but these people read that whole thread and then just absolutely murdered me in the comments what happened to the cats the cats were the landlords they should've have kicked you out blah blah blah blah blah blah blah like machine gun gunfire i mean it was crazy and so on top of what was a pretty good hook and a good story we had just jet fuel poured on the fire by these cat lovers and me haters so that was kinda crazy and i've learned like brian c comment on the or brian chest you repo it twice in one day joe gabby repo it paul graham rep quote tweeted it and then like you know twenty million views total in the first day but here's here's another crazy thing so there's all these journalists that lurk on x you don't know about them because they probably have like three hundred followers so within like two days i got invitations for coverage so in in the two or three weeks since i wrote that post we've been now the story has been featured in the new york post vice business insider fast company the daily male cody sanchez is coming to do a youtube video like tens and tens of millions of views so you're just really creating like this surface area of for lock when when you post on twitter because it's basically proof of concept they're like oh this story is resonating we should go ahead and post it too so it's crazy i love that story and yeah i checked out this this thread it's it's great but i think that the the real lesson here the what's the right takeaway i think there's a few one is yeah there were some nice copywriting techniques in here and yes it's cool that you decided like hey this is all a skill i can learn i can learn storytelling i can learn writing i can learn how to how to be better at content creation and you just decided to like ob obsessed and devour that stuff but the real thing is the story went viral because of what you guys did you did something amazing you took this you know basically like beating up rotten rotten train car and you turned it into something cool and it's like without that you could obsessively all sentences you want that car that story is going nowhere and so the best content creation is go do amazing things in your life and then learn some best practices about how to talk about them is a much better approach than learn the amazing skill of writing hooks and never do something amazing in your life and i hope that more people do the amazing thing in life instead of of the opposite but dude why are you on twitter because you need to be doing this on tiktok you you're on the wrong platform my friend man it's it i wanna start doing short form video but i love writing and twitter helps me think better like at number one i get to connect with much smarter people than those other platforms and it's not just about some vanity metric of having a big audience for me i genuinely enjoy the process of having to write concise and again it's like a skill i just wanted to attack in copywriting and writing in general and so that process of like clarifying your thoughts by writing tweets and like every single word counts and building a slippery slope that sam talks about that people will fall down i just absolutely love that process and not just for production value of the story but for what it does in my own thinking but yeah the iteration will probably be i prove these these story concepts and and sort of write a script in my twitter thread and i've had like ten of these that have like i said gone like pretty viral and then i basically have all my heavy lifting done for me and i just like throw together a a nice green screen maybe video of me talking about it and telling that story like really snappy on on instagram and tiktok and then eventually i want to do youtube because of course as you guys know there's an insane loyalty and of course you can monetize and whatnot through that as well but i'm also perfection and like the short form thing like people what really is working right now is really raw and authentic and that's cool but again i care so much about the production value that's hard for me to sort of fit into that slot originally when i told sean about you he was like it sounds like an amish guy here who likes money and i was like yeah i i guess that's a that's an interesting description but if that is i was like i'm the the next two words were i'm in yeah and if that and and let's just say it's to someone who's not like entrenched this isaac your community is similar ish to amish what do they think about you like being this popular internet guy or didn't they even know do they even know like who you you're doing are are you sitting by being on this podcast right now like what's going on let's what's the reaction back at the farm right alright we're gonna go way back but i'll try to be brief here so my wife's grandparents actually founded this community fifty one years ago and it started as an inner city mission in the slums of manhattan and they had actually been atheist but had these radical life changing experiences with god became christians and then felt called to start this mission there and it was super unlikely beginnings but basically a motley crew of folks from all backgrounds a lot of people that were sort of like disinfected with life sort of came together and a core group started coal and basically a church was founded but then a few years into it they they were like you know they were all young parents and they realized we need to have a culture where we can raise our kids that is going to sustain the values that we care about like family and our faith and whatnot so they started looking for land outside the city long story short they all moved about two hundred people to colorado western colorado which was like the middle of nowhere for people that had spent their whole lives virtually in new york city and that's where my parents recently graduated high school western slope of colorado encountered these group of like weird people being called a cult by all the locals but again had these transformational experiences came to god and join this group and then in colorado they sort of learned all these skills like how to live off the land how to grow your own food how to work with your hands and you know relearn all these traditional skills like woodworking and pottery and blacks and then fast forward they picked up and moved to texas in the early nineties and so we have a piece of property around four hundred and fifty acres just outside of waco where first the group was in austin some was in waco it consolidated here and basically what makes us different is we take our faith very seriously and we want to make that faith come alive in every aspect of life so instead of just like church being a program that you attend a few times a week we we truly try to live out community so we're are working playing doing doing life together and there's about twelve hundred people a part of this texas branch about a third of those actually live on that piece of property that four hundred acre piece property the rest live on their own places nearby we're not common per we put a huge emphasis on like individual responsibility but basically we strive for simplicity so well just explain it like this if i i live in a what a you know a cookie cutter suburb of america so just like general m in california if i went and visited where you guys live what would seem most different to me what what what is it that you guys do that would be most different yeah we don't have tvs in our homes we don't really have internet in our homes we again like ninety five percent of the community either is self employed or works for each other so we live this agrarian lifestyle we grow gardens we do use technology and this is where we're one of the ways we're different from amish we just our whole philosophy is we wanna control it versus being controlled by it and so basically i grew up on a farm taking care of animals the i was homeschool school so we homeschool our kids i i have nine siblings there's a lot of big families not everybody has a big family but i i i went by the way sean and i stayed in the community and i would joke with isaac i'm like isaac i'm an atheist don't try to convert me any of this stuff but i would love to explore and learn about your community i and when i went there they believe i'm gonna kinda summarize isaac they believe that in order to like show their close to god and everything that they were they they're craftsman in like everything they do so they have this like restaurant and like they make all of their own food there or they have a church where they built it you know and it's like beautiful it's a beautiful church dude they had this easter thing that i went to and there these women singing i swear to god i like this sounds like a black choir in like in harlem like this is the most like stylish like best singers i've have ever heard of my life because they like studied it and they like perfect these things and so he had this vibe where he was like oh like no the right way to do this business is doing this this submit so in order to learn instagram i go the study it and i'm gonna execute perfectly no like i said we use technology we we use media too like we we haven't really used social media and i'm kind of one of the first that's pioneering that but we wanna tell our story we just we don't want to substitute for the substance of the community that we've created so intentionally over decades by using like social media which innate is just a virtual world so we're trying to find ways the story because i feel like we just like feel like sam got you hooked on sugar and you hadn't had sugar you you're like yeah no i love vegetables and i just love all these earthy flavors and then sam was like hey have some sugar and now you've had sugar you've had the viral sugar the feeling of going viral and making millions of dollars and everybody loving your story and some people hating your story and then you wanna respond to them you've now tasted that how is that f with your brain yeah it's like hey i say just a little crack just want a little crack just just a little you've had that social media crack what what's your honest feeling of of where you where you are right now with that man it's it's tough that's one of the reasons i took the eight month break because personally i felt like it was becoming i love attention i'll just be honest about it and i i felt like it was becoming a distraction for what really is like a lived life and for one i a family we have we have a a a little boy we have another on the way have this amazing community life which i'm starting to be more public about i made a threat about the community in a couple months ago and people are really intrigued with that but again like work life to use the term everybody's familiar with work life balance is is a very very real thing i just feel like i if there's a way if there's an overarching guiding principle that work and life and family and play and everything can fit into they don't need to constantly feel like they're in conflict with each other but in order to make that happen i need people in my life that hold me a animal and like are gonna be real with me and i've had plenty of that just to be honest like some of my friends that know me very well have been like very honest with me and at times critical and i totally love them and respect them for that animal what they say oh like you know the way you the way you came across here was bragging or the way you said that was maybe not completely what or not telling me it was more like asking questions because again like nobody tells you what to do here we're very very much like we we open ourselves at voluntarily but they're like you know is that consistent with you know the way that you would talk to so and so and basically we wanna be very careful that we and i wanna be very careful that i don't put that the version of me that you see on the internet is exactly what you're gonna get in person and and as you guys know there's just like that inevitable conflict but i feel like i've learned a ton through it and it's a constant struggle for me where i i probably need to delete the app from my iphone and just use it on desktop i have a lot of friends that do that but twitter is that thing for me i mean it's it's highly addict it's just such a great format to connect with interesting people sean i think that every man once he has children and becomes a family manner i think they have two urges the first one is to be in some type of situation where they can exert force and be like use a little bit of violence to be a hero you know what i mean like a man rob obey rob's a bake and you like suddenly stop it and you're the hero that's what about patrol main street just the case stuff goes down and i might muted yeah just like to be a tough guy that protects everyone once then the second thing is to like live in a farm with your family and your community and like everyone's like lives like a little socialist hippie life and i've went to his i i i hung out in his area and isaac was like hey check this out i just planted a hundred apple trees and a bunch of like fruit trees in about three years these are gonna be ready to bloom and i'm like oh nice that's kind of a lot of fruit like you're gonna eat all that fruit he's like no it's for everyone i'm like well you're gonna to take care of us he's like no i just told everyone in the community that i planted these trees and we're probably gonna make like a schedule but we're we'll all chip in and like tend to the trees to make sure like it's gonna bear the most fruit and then we'll just like to we'll just spread it out evenly just being there for that twenty four or forty eight hours that one particular time i was like i'm fulfilling that need of like seeing this like hippie lifestyle you saw that david beckham composed sam oh where he's growing he's like growing a fruit now or who girl got old friends of yeah he he went viral because he posts his on his instagram and it's him in a flannel shirt and the like old timing like irish hat and the caption is mike kale is doing well and it basically it's him on his farm he like now lives a farm life he's let him on his farm he's gardening he's keeping and this is what he's doing and people people just went nuts and about this about this trend isaac i feel like you you've influenced him or maybe you should influence him i think he he might slide into your dms soon to i learn a little bit do you not feel the search sean every once in a while we are like i wish i just had to farm with my family and friends and we all like did this together no it's way too much work now i always have better sean you gotta come at least i i have my versions of of these but they're like you like for example i like writing and i'm like cool i just don't wanna work i just wanna like you know i don't i don't know how to paint i'm not skilled enough to paint i don't know how to build i'm not skilled enough to build i don't really wanna go develop those but i'm like i wanna write a movie or i want to spend my day you know playing playing soccer with my kids or whatever it is things like that but i'm not as i don't have the same like roman empire urges that most guys have meaning like i don't care about history as much as get most of my friends do i don't care about living off the grid and like providing you know like pumping my own water and like irr irritating something i don't wanna irr nothing okay so like i don't have that urge for me personally i got i guess my my own versions of them but they're a lot more mild well that's i guess okay dark let me go play a house in the woods without you i still wanna have wifi like shoot me this is like the man version of playing a house and dress up like yeah you know what i mean isaac can we do rapid fire to end this so how old are you twenty seven what's one thing i can learn from you about hospitality even though i'm not gonna have my own you know mini hotels and all that but if i just have a guest coming over to my house i got an old friend from college coming over what's one hospitality thing i can learn from you it's the single most valuable skill to have in life and you have to be selfish you have to want to serve other people so i don't think it's something that you can affect but if you i think everybody has that urgent side of them i think we're born to serve other people and read unreasonable hospitality if you haven't already but basically look for those little ways like i described with the handwritten note that are surprising they're small but they delight people and sometimes the smallest acts of kindness and generosity show the biggest parts and so i don't think that i don't think it needs to be some grand thing i think you just have to want to serve them and people are gonna feel it isaac i think what you did with the live oak lake and what you're showing other people doing with floating homes and shipping containers the stuff like that is amazing it's an amazing trend people should go follow you on twitter to kinda like see more of these i think it is amazing because it is so hard and so for the few people who are capable of putting in the like you know the creativity the passion the care the hospitality that takes to make these successful that's amazing and send me your link so that i can go state your places and for me it's a it's a reminder of like if if you want an unreasonable result you sort of have to do an unreasonable thing in certain in certain areas and this is definitely one of those areas and so for me you know i would never be able to pull one of these off so props to you because i hear your story and part of me is like oh i would love to do that but the bigger part of me who knows me better is like this is not for you you have to be exceptional to make this work you have to be exceptional on the real estate development side you have be exceptional on the content marketing to go viral so that you can get booked you know for two years out if be exceptional on the hospitality because you have to re earn the business you know with every guest stay and i think it's i think you are exceptional you've done that and i think also it's a it's a good thing to know about yourself whether that's for you or if it's not for you and i think a very small subset of the population who who it's for them well i appreciate that can i close with two quotes that mean a lot to me one the way you do one thing is the way you do everything so sweat the details care put your heart into whatever you're gonna do do it with hospitality to do with excellence and number two there's this quote by this english pastor actually named john wesley he was like a few hundred years ago but he said light yourself on fire with passion and people will come from miles to watch you burn and that's kind of my my hope and life i want people to say well that's a life well lived and i wanna say that at the end of my own life that is an amazing quote i love that quote dude thank you so much for the band i we appreciate you and we'll wrap up there that's the pod