AI transcript
Alright, so Sean, I wanted to have Isaac on because we talk a lot about making money on this podcast
But I’ve been with Isaac at his home a bunch. I’ve got to know him and he’s inspired me that
To believe that like money isn’t the only reason for business. It’s about like kind of craftsmanship
It’s about like creating like your little like corner of the 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 turned real estate mogul, but he’s really most passionate about painting and being an artist and I was like
This kid’s the most interesting person I’ve ever read about
What the hell and 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 got to know
I
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 admits
When you say you met him in a business context, what context did you meet him in the same?
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 Oak Lake which I’ll get to in just a second and like here’s this guy Sam
Who’s some business moguls 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 was 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. That’s a total waste of time. Good luck basically and he’s like, no
You should really make a post that you should make an account and it’s like no whatever
So he made this post that kind of 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 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 fanboy
It was just like this random dude on the internet who started texting me about business
and his numbers Sean
They’ll blow you away. I’m ready to be blown away. Go ahead. What is it? Can you can you say the numbers?
Yeah, yeah, so let me just tell you a quick story live oak lake if that’s alright because it’s it’s pretty cool
So I was a bookkeeper and I had this dream. I was 24 years old just got married
I had this dream to create this like immersive
cohesively designed
Village of tiny homes in Texas. I didn’t really have terminology for it
I just had it’s really hard to articulate because I just had 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 hmm
I should check that out drove over and when I walked on the property. I literally got goosebumps
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 24
Was not bankable by any standards had experience in construction. So my dad was a plumber general contractor
I grew up with that experience. I’ve always been an artist. I’ve always loved design
So how did you get under contract? Would you if you didn’t have any money?
What would you pay to put it under contract?
I paid like two thousand dollars of earnest money
But to close with cash in 30 days because it was a super competitive market
This was 2021 in Texas people were flocking here and I knew this property
I mean, I was there within hours of when it was listed and I knew it would have been gone by the end of that day
So I was like, I’m gonna get under contract with the due diligence period and then I’ll figure this out
All right, let’s take a quick break because I want to talk to you about some new stuff that HubSpot has now
They let me freestyle this ad here. So I’m gonna actually tell you what I think is interesting
So they have this thing called the false spotlight showing all the new features that they released in the last few months
And the ones that stood out to me were breeze intelligence
I don’t know if you’ve seen this but if you’re in HubSpot and you have let’s say a customer there
You can just basically add
Intelligence to that customer the estimated revenue for that company how many employees it has maybe their email address or their location
If they’ve ever visited your page or not
And so you can enrich all of your data automatically with one click using this thing called breeze intelligence
They actually acquired a really cool company called clear bit and it’s become breeze, which is great because now it’s built in
I always hated using two different tools to try to do this now
It’s all in one place and so all the data you had about your customers now just got smarter
So check it out
You can actually see all the stuff they released through the cool website go to hubspot.com
Slash spotlight to see them all and get the demos yourself back to this episode
How much would you need at the end of that period to have come up with?
$133,000 was the price of the property which was a really good deal to it for five acres
So you just make this clear you have $19,000 you put $2,000 down to lock this up
You now have I forgot how many you said days you said 30 69 30 days like that 30 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 30 days. Of course. Why would I not?
Well, you got to have conviction you got to believe in yourself if you expect anybody else to believe in you
And I did have a list of people that are 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 this small 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
20% 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 overconfident really banking on my abilities to deliver this just crazy property
That would appraise at really high values. So, okay, I called them up and they’re like, no
We don’t want to give you a hard money 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 40% 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 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 maniacal about the details of that because I’m a little little bit
OCD as a perfectionist. So
Finally, I got a bank that’s like they were like, no, no
I mean literally you could imagine 24 year old kid rolling their eyes
But I found the 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 co-guarantee it
But they were like 80% of the appraised value is what will loan you so great
You know box is checked 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 forma. I didn’t know what a pro forma was just like this Apple numbers spreadsheet thing. It was like my
Guestument 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 1.8 million so the bank was like won’t loan you 80% of that
So bank was like we’ll give you a million and a half
Loan if your dad and brothers will co-guarantee this and my estimate was that the project was gonna cost like 2 million
So we had like $500,000 shortfall. She wasn’t great long story short. It actually cost us 2.3 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 got to make this work
I bought another five acres down the road built a
$750,000 spec home in four months and sold it and profited
200 grand from that home was able to roll all of those profits directly into this project
Of course maxed out every credit card put in my 19,000 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
I 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 into the project. So we open in January of 2022
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 in 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, oh like all right
we got to figure out direct bookings and so long story short found this travel influencer who lived 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
$950 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 $40,000 of direct bookings through our website. So I whipped up a website overnight and
40,000 of direct bookings and 5,000 followers on Instagram from scratch
So as you can imagine that was my sort of eureka moment on direct bookings and 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 then that first year was a whirlwind 95 percent occupancy overall with these seven cabins
Just just crazy starting from zero 80 percent of all the bookings were direct
So here’s the deal about direct bookings the OTA, which is like online travel agency
So Airbnb their fees are like roughly 15 percent
So if you can capture the customer direct you make 15 percent of margin you get the customer’s email
So you can retarget them you can’t ever be D platformed 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 like oh we got to come stay here
We had guests come back three or four times in one year because we were able to retarget them and because the experience was just and wow
You you sold this what four years in for how much to two and a half years and we sold for seven million
So last October two and a half years in yeah, all right guys. So listen up. We’re doing something a little bit different here
So we had this guy named mr. Ballin. Mr. Ballin is one of my favorite people on earth
If you have been on YouTube or tiktok, you probably know who mr. Ballin is
So he’s has tens of millions of followers and he’s built this massive business on it
He’s probably the best storyteller 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 130k or that was just the down payment
That was the land
That was the whole land okay the land you never did you never had built things like this you had done some construction some plumbing
Projects, but I assume you had never like had you ever built a cabin before no and you built these yourself
Are you subcontracted out to a company? I subcontracted but it like I said
I mean I was in there on ladders doing stuff myself. That’s how I broke my pelvis
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 costing you two point three
But did you say you were selling?
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 kind of nightly rate like 600 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 500k 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 thing and you sold it to who a
Small private equity group and how did that come about they approach you you approach 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 want to raise money, I want to 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 commoditized 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 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 finance 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 yeah, the look that you have Sean, that’s how I had when I first met him
So when I first met him, I was just in the phone with him and I go
Hey, like I’m got to go to this conference in Idaho
I think you said your parents or something like you have a connections there
You want to meet me up there and like you want to 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 and the way that he’s principled and like he like
Outlines what he’s gonna do. I found to be intoxicating. 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 right?
You start with a vision
Then you don’t count yourself out. I think that was the next most important step. You didn’t count yourself out
You could have said I don’t have the money. I don’t have the experience. I don’t have the the time
I don’t have anyone who believes in me. You don’t have the network. What whatever you didn’t say any of those things
You said, how do I get the time? How do I get the money? How do I get the network?
How do I get the cash?
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 want to stay in kind of a more unique experience and
B once you realize once you turned your disadvantage into advantage you turned your Airbnb disaster into a
Wait, I got to 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 through my own to do direct bookings. What do you think this property would have been worth?
Had that not happened?
Maybe three or four million is my guess
Right, maybe and that’s and maybe not even be a sellable asset
Right, maybe maybe not like definitely not a private equity sellable 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 it with Airbnb originally which felt like a
Complete defeat like literally you can’t imagine. I mean it was 24 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 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 conspires for those with a mission. There’s a bunch of stories of people winning
massively
By having the idea of build it 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 kind of 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 succeed
Do 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, 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 a vision and then you have to story tell
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 Devon
So Devon is also 24 years old for now
I’m 27 but I was 24 when I built Live Oak Lake and he was he was an engineer
so he’s a smart kid and he had this dream to create this
Shipping container home that was just super wild
it’s 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 95% of it
He built with his two hands and he documented the whole process
With an iPhone and a $20 tripod on Instagram and tiktok and he grew 1.5 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 build
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’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 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 going to have some hard knocks
I have fallen flat on my face more times and you want to hear including
During and even after the sale of live oak lake. So you have to learn humility and you got to 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
It’s like this is going to work and here’s why and even if I can’t convince you
I still believe in it ends a conviction and then people rally around that and then of course
Your track record is a lot when you’re starting from zero you don’t have that
But as you go you got to be very careful with 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 into a business that makes you millions of dollars
I think that is a
Awesome romantic vision. I know several people 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 not talking not to me and sam
You’re talking to this person who’s listening
Who is inspired by this and 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, arabian bees have been commoditized. They’re just
You know 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 houseboats meant and so he
Built for $200,000 built this houseboat. You can look it up. It’s 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 berserk now. He’s raised a bunch of money. He’s buying marinas
So the cool thing about houseboats is you don’t fall typically into the same regulations as st
R 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 harbour or in aplis or
Wash place wherever and you get 360 degree harbour views. You’re 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 want to be 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 sir coast or that’s a radical example. So find
Go off the beaten path. It’s okay to get away from places
But you want to 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 like a staycation distance. So you’re going to get a lot of two three night staycations
You need to be within two hours from a major metro area
You need to be within 15 to 20 minutes of like a town that has a 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 want to find that two hour goldilocks zone
Then find land that’s super cheap that has some natural potential
Let’s say trees are kind of a must because you can’t grow a tree overnight
And that’s what live oak lake had
Maybe it has some topography 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 kimball and christine had a dream
They’re in rural ohio
They buy this piece of property with zero money that the guy was a pastor
He had no money
He bought this piece of property and then he noticed it had like this old dilapidated 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 of the year
And they had this idea so they actually dug out and dammed up this little pool
And then they put in a pump recirculated 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 hawking hills. It’s absolutely wild. This place has gone mega viral
They’ve got 600 000 followers on instagram. They’re booking out every single night two years in advance
And that water feature probably cost them
20 to 30 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
Architecturally make a beautiful infuse unreasonable hospitality into it. So you don’t need an on-site concierge. You don’t need
People holding your hand, you know at every like five-star luxury would be what you need is
Touch points that people care about so when I opened live oak lake
I I quickly just had this idea people love to see their name handwritten
So I perfected 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
So 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 topochikos 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 as 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 to read coffee table book?
But then on top of that there’s this handwritten 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 a little ways like this
I love this Sam has this phrase and I’ve taken his copyrighting 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 404 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
Careful and that’s what we did with live oak lake 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 play 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 this
I’ve got a community of about 50 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 that we just wound up we just kind of let go and just like
Holy shit
Sorry, I love it. I know don’t apologize. I love it. 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 hanging out with them
And then you feel like there’s people where you you feel inspired
What are some ways that a smart person could get this wrong? So
Not not every you know any blueprint if I say hey, I’ve had all the success in e-commerce
Well, I know a bunch of people who have failed in e-commerce and I could 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 that it
Uh, or at least I didn’t say I’ll take this one. Yeah, I mean like I I bought one of the I 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. Uh, the first thing is uh, there is no such thing as 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 it and forget it
Would you agree with that Isaac?
99% 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 another thing is you really actually have to give a shit and care about it like
In order to like make outsize 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, well, 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 that that was not an exceptional plan
Yeah, I think that design is the number one lever that you can pull as my friend Hans who’s awesome. By the way, Hans Loreight
Um, absolutely blown up on instagram recently
He’s got like 550,000 followers and he’s like breaking down interior design in these little short form videos
The 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 guests 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. They see the live oakley 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 want to 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 zap here. We had like six softwares. 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 24/7 thing
I mean that is that’s intense any way you cut it and
When you don’t have somebody who cares about that or 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 going to suffer and there’s this great quote by tem 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, um, 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
subpar
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 disagree like I think the barrier to entry is low. Yes, it’s easy to play but it’s not easy to win
um
And so anytime I’ve tried to do something that works online
I don’t know. I threw my all into it. Uh, I wasn’t necessarily very good
So even if I got a mediocre result, it wasn’t due to lack of effort
It was due to lack of skill or or I’d make something really good that nobody cared about nobody wanted
It was just the wrong problem to solve
Um, 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?
Uh, 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 it 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 going to build
A luxury, you know, a luxury stay here and I’m going to serve customers essentially by hand
Uh, it’s definitely easier than that, but 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 is so low
Because the barrier entry is 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. It’s still hard
Well, you we have so many friends that are popular on the internet and they make crappy stuff
Like it’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 mr. Beast who you know is is friendly with us and and
Is obviously super successful youtube. He just released a guy. I guess I got leaked his uh production document
Do you guys see this I read the whole thing? So I actually want to do like a whole bigger thing on it
So I don’t want to go too much into it
But one amazing thing is you know, you get to see inside of his mind and 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 the famous directors and and artists 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 their taste is a bit better
or is it
the chef in
You know new york who makes this one unbelievable burger that’s 36 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 mr. Beast has made his success because he’s decided to be mcdonald’s on the internet, right? He is creating the videos
That are mass market that are going to get the most number of views even if they’re not the most
Life-changing introspective 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 and 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 artisanal content and you know
Who’s to say what’s better? What’s better than the others depends on your goals?
Can I tell you a crazy story about?
Uh 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
Storytelling was I mean golden and you don’t know how many people I’ve 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 erin sorkin about stories and I I’m in
Transpired I want to 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 storyteller
Actually, but I was like I feel like I can learn this skill and I’m gonna figure it out
So I went down the rabbit hole and I listened to podcasts and I read books and I took courses and and copywriting 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 it an eight month break from twitter. So last fall I stopped posting at all and 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 it. You’re like a battery
You’ve got to recharge and but I came back kind of guns a 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 were like threads are dead and you know twitter is dead the algorithms trash whatever whatever and literally one after another
And I’m knocking on wood
But at the end of the day like I’ve never had so much sustained success like the last 10 threads
I’ve written in a row without exception have gone an average of like a million views apiece
And then one of them went totally crazy. So I wrote this thread
Um about this train car that my dad it’s pinned to the top of my profile if you want to look at it
But yeah, I’ve seen that one. So I wrote this thread. I stayed up like all night. I spent eight hours writing it
I just finished copy that the second time and so like it was fresh on my mind and I I wrote this thread
and
Uh, I didn’t know you know, I put 60 percent going off of your advice going off of a lot of people’s advice
Like 60 percent of my effort of those eight hours were spent
Writing that hook like both writing it and also curating those images
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 this sentence in there
Let me read it. So I said my dad bought this 120 year old train car for $2,000. 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 controversial this would be
I said but after investing 147k and five months of work. We redeemed it today
It’s one of the most profitable and exclusive stays in the country. Here’s what happened
So here’s here is what happened
There is like 30 of the population. I’ve come to believe are these cat-loving
I mean
Karens and I loved 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 have kicked you out
Blah blah blah blah blah blah like machine gun fire. 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 kind of crazy and I’ve learned
I’ve been like Brian Chesky comment on the or Brian Chesky reposted it twice in one day Joe Gabby
I reposted it Paul Graham repote quote tweeted it and then like you know 20 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 300 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
uh business insider fast company the daily mail kody 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 luck 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
All right, if you’re listening to this pod, I already know something about you
You my friend are nosy you want to know the numbers behind all of these things that we’re talking about
How much money people make how much money people spend how much money businesses make you want to know all of this people’s net worth all of it
Well, I’ve got good news for you. So my company hampton. We’re a private community for CEOs
We do this thing where we survey our members and we ask them all types of information
Like how much money they’re paying themselves
How much money they’re paying a lot of their employees what their team my bonuses are what their net worth is what their portfolio looks like
We ask all these questions, but we do it anonymously
And so people are willing to reveal all types of amazing information stuff
You really cannot google you can’t find anywhere else and you could check it out at joinhampton.com click the report section on the menu
Click the salary and compensation report. It’s going to blow your mind. You’re going to love this stuff. Check it out now back to the pod
I love that story. Yeah, I checked out this this thread. It’s it’s great. But I think that the
The real lesson here. 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 obsess 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 obsess of all the tendencies 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
Uh, you you’re on the wrong platform my friend man
It’s I want to 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 concisely 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 10 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 nice green screen maybe video of me talking about it and telling that story
like really snappy on
Instagram 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
A perfectionist 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 shon about you he was like, oh, it sounds like an amish guy who likes money
And I was like, yeah, I guess that’s a that’s an interesting description
Um, but if that is yeah, I was like, I’m the next two words were i’m in
Yeah, um, and if that and let’s just say uh, it’s just someone who’s not like entrenched in this isaac
Your community is similar ish to amish
What do they think about you like being this popular internet guy or did they even know?
Do they even know like who you what you’re doing?
Are you sinning by being on this podcast right now? Like what’s going on? What’s the reaction back at the farm?
All right
We’re gonna go way back, but i’ll try to be brief here
So my wife’s grandparents actually founded this community 51 years ago and it started as an inner city mission in
the slums of manhattan
And they had actually been atheists 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 disaffected with life
Sort of came together and a core group
started coalescing 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 200 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 joined 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 blacksmithing and
Then fast forward they picked up and moved to texas in the early 90s
And so we have a piece of property around 450 acres just outside of uh weiko where
First the group was in austin some was in weiko 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 uh working playing
Doing doing life together and there’s about 1200 people
A part of this texas branch about a third of those actually live on that piece of property that 400 acre piece of property
The rest live on their own places nearby. We’re not common purse
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 emin california if i went and visited where you guys live what would seem
Most different to me. Well, what is it that you guys do that would be most different?
Yeah, uh, we don’t have tv’s in our homes. We don’t really have internet in our homes
We again like 95 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 want to control it versus being controlled by it
And so basically I grew up on a farm taking care of animals. I was homeschool. 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 went by the way shawna 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 and when I went there
They believe i’m gonna kind of summarize isaac and they believe that in order to like show they’re close to god and everything
That they were they’re craftsmen 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 was these women singing. I swear to god
I’m like this sounds like a black choir in like in harlow. Like this is the most like stylish like best singers
I’ve 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 to submit
So in order to learn instagram, I have to study it and i’m going to execute
Uh, 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 want to 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 innately is just a virtual world
So we’re trying to find ways to the story teller because I feel like we just like I feel like sam got you hooked on sugar
And you hadn’t had sugar you were like, yeah, no, I love vegetables
And I just love all these earthy flavors and then sam was like here have some sugar and now you’ve had sugar
You’ve had the viral sugar the feeling of going viral on making millions of dollars and everybody loving your story
And some people hating your story and then you want to respond to them. You’ve now tasted that
How is that f with your brain? Yeah, it’s like, hey, I think just just a little crack. You just want a little crack
Just a little you’ve had that social media crack. What’s what’s your honest feeling 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 have a family. We have we have a little boy. We have another on the way
I have this amazing community life, which I’m starting to be more public about
I made a thread 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 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 accountable and like are going to 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
Um have been like very honest with me and at times critical and I totally love them and respect them for that
What’d they say?
Oh like, you know the way you’re the way you came across here was
bragging or the way you said that
um
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 up voluntarily, but they’re like, you know
Is that consistent with?
You know the way that you would talk so and so and basically we want to be very careful that we and I want to be very careful that I don’t put
That the version of me that you see on the internet is exactly what you’re going to 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 phone 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 addicting. 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 man
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 robs a man robs a bake and you like suddenly stop it and you’re the hero
That’s one of them patrolling main street. Yeah, something goes down and I might be needed
Yeah, just like to be the tough guy that protects everyone once
Then the second thing is to like live in a farm with your family and your community as like
Everyone’s like lives like a little socialist hippy life and I’ve went to his
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 and 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 have to take care of this
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’ll 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 we’ll just spread it out evenly
Just being there for that 24 or 48 hours that one particular time
I was like I’m fulfilling that need of like seeing this like hippy lifestyle
You saw that David Beckham post Sam. Oh where he’s growing
He’s like growing a fruit now or growing vegetables friends of them
Yeah, he went viral because he posts this video on his instagram
But it’s him in a flannel shirt and the like old time
Me like Irish hat and the caption is my kale is doing well and it basically it’s him on his farm
He like now lives a farm life. He’s him on his farm. He’s gardening
He’s beekeeping 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 DM soon to learn a little bit
Do you not feel this urge showing every once in a while?
We are like I wish I would just sort of farm with my family and friends and we all like did this together
No, dude, it’s way too much work. No, I don’t have that urge Sean. You got to come visit at least
I have my versions of of these but they’re like, you know, like for example, I like writing and I’m like cool
I just don’t want to work. I just want to 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 want to go develop those
But I’m like, I want to 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 irrigating something
I don’t want to irrigate nothing. Okay. So like I don’t have that urge
For me personally, I got I guess my own versions of them, but they’re a lot more mild
Well
That’s
Okay, dork, let me go play house in the woods without you
I still want to have wi-fi like
This is like the man version of playing house and dress up like, uh, you know what I mean
Isaac, can we do rapid fire to end this? So, uh, how old are you?
27
What’s one thing I can learn from you about hospitality even though I’m not going to 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 selfless 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 urge inside 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
Uh, I don’t think it needs to be some grandiose thing
I think you just have to want to serve them and people are going to feel it
Isaac, I think what you did with uh
The live oak lake and what you’re showing other people doing with floating homes and shipping containers and stuff like that is
Amazing it’s an amazing trend people should go follow you on twitter to kind of 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 links so that I can go stay at 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 to be exceptional on the content marketing to go viral so that you can get booked
You know for two years out
You have to 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 it’s 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 going to do do it with hospitality do it 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 in life. I want people to
Say well, that’s a life well lived and I want to say that at the end of my own life
That is an amazing quote
Dude, thank you so much for the band. Um, we appreciate you and we’ll wrap up there. That’s the pot
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But I’ve been with Isaac at his home a bunch. I’ve got to know him and he’s inspired me that
To believe that like money isn’t the only reason for business. It’s about like kind of craftsmanship
It’s about like creating like your little like corner of the 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 turned real estate mogul, but he’s really most passionate about painting and being an artist and I was like
This kid’s the most interesting person I’ve ever read about
What the hell and 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 got to know
I
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 admits
When you say you met him in a business context, what context did you meet him in the same?
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 Oak Lake which I’ll get to in just a second and like here’s this guy Sam
Who’s some business moguls 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 was 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. That’s a total waste of time. Good luck basically and he’s like, no
You should really make a post that you should make an account and it’s like no whatever
So he made this post that kind of 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 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 fanboy
It was just like this random dude on the internet who started texting me about business
and his numbers Sean
They’ll blow you away. I’m ready to be blown away. Go ahead. What is it? Can you can you say the numbers?
Yeah, yeah, so let me just tell you a quick story live oak lake if that’s alright because it’s it’s pretty cool
So I was a bookkeeper and I had this dream. I was 24 years old just got married
I had this dream to create this like immersive
cohesively designed
Village of tiny homes in Texas. I didn’t really have terminology for it
I just had it’s really hard to articulate because I just had 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 hmm
I should check that out drove over and when I walked on the property. I literally got goosebumps
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 24
Was not bankable by any standards had experience in construction. So my dad was a plumber general contractor
I grew up with that experience. I’ve always been an artist. I’ve always loved design
So how did you get under contract? Would you if you didn’t have any money?
What would you pay to put it under contract?
I paid like two thousand dollars of earnest money
But to close with cash in 30 days because it was a super competitive market
This was 2021 in Texas people were flocking here and I knew this property
I mean, I was there within hours of when it was listed and I knew it would have been gone by the end of that day
So I was like, I’m gonna get under contract with the due diligence period and then I’ll figure this out
All right, let’s take a quick break because I want to talk to you about some new stuff that HubSpot has now
They let me freestyle this ad here. So I’m gonna actually tell you what I think is interesting
So they have this thing called the false spotlight showing all the new features that they released in the last few months
And the ones that stood out to me were breeze intelligence
I don’t know if you’ve seen this but if you’re in HubSpot and you have let’s say a customer there
You can just basically add
Intelligence to that customer the estimated revenue for that company how many employees it has maybe their email address or their location
If they’ve ever visited your page or not
And so you can enrich all of your data automatically with one click using this thing called breeze intelligence
They actually acquired a really cool company called clear bit and it’s become breeze, which is great because now it’s built in
I always hated using two different tools to try to do this now
It’s all in one place and so all the data you had about your customers now just got smarter
So check it out
You can actually see all the stuff they released through the cool website go to hubspot.com
Slash spotlight to see them all and get the demos yourself back to this episode
How much would you need at the end of that period to have come up with?
$133,000 was the price of the property which was a really good deal to it for five acres
So you just make this clear you have $19,000 you put $2,000 down to lock this up
You now have I forgot how many you said days you said 30 69 30 days like that 30 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 30 days. Of course. Why would I not?
Well, you got to have conviction you got to believe in yourself if you expect anybody else to believe in you
And I did have a list of people that are 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 this small 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
20% 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 overconfident really banking on my abilities to deliver this just crazy property
That would appraise at really high values. So, okay, I called them up and they’re like, no
We don’t want to give you a hard money 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 40% 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 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 maniacal about the details of that because I’m a little little bit
OCD as a perfectionist. So
Finally, I got a bank that’s like they were like, no, no
I mean literally you could imagine 24 year old kid rolling their eyes
But I found the 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 co-guarantee it
But they were like 80% of the appraised value is what will loan you so great
You know box is checked 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 forma. I didn’t know what a pro forma was just like this Apple numbers spreadsheet thing. It was like my
Guestument 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 1.8 million so the bank was like won’t loan you 80% of that
So bank was like we’ll give you a million and a half
Loan if your dad and brothers will co-guarantee this and my estimate was that the project was gonna cost like 2 million
So we had like $500,000 shortfall. She wasn’t great long story short. It actually cost us 2.3 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 got to make this work
I bought another five acres down the road built a
$750,000 spec home in four months and sold it and profited
200 grand from that home was able to roll all of those profits directly into this project
Of course maxed out every credit card put in my 19,000 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
I 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 into the project. So we open in January of 2022
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 in 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, oh like all right
we got to figure out direct bookings and so long story short found this travel influencer who lived 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
$950 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 $40,000 of direct bookings through our website. So I whipped up a website overnight and
40,000 of direct bookings and 5,000 followers on Instagram from scratch
So as you can imagine that was my sort of eureka moment on direct bookings and 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 then that first year was a whirlwind 95 percent occupancy overall with these seven cabins
Just just crazy starting from zero 80 percent of all the bookings were direct
So here’s the deal about direct bookings the OTA, which is like online travel agency
So Airbnb their fees are like roughly 15 percent
So if you can capture the customer direct you make 15 percent of margin you get the customer’s email
So you can retarget them you can’t ever be D platformed 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 like oh we got to come stay here
We had guests come back three or four times in one year because we were able to retarget them and because the experience was just and wow
You you sold this what four years in for how much to two and a half years and we sold for seven million
So last October two and a half years in yeah, all right guys. So listen up. We’re doing something a little bit different here
So we had this guy named mr. Ballin. Mr. Ballin is one of my favorite people on earth
If you have been on YouTube or tiktok, you probably know who mr. Ballin is
So he’s has tens of millions of followers and he’s built this massive business on it
He’s probably the best storyteller 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 130k or that was just the down payment
That was the land
That was the whole land okay the land you never did you never had built things like this you had done some construction some plumbing
Projects, but I assume you had never like had you ever built a cabin before no and you built these yourself
Are you subcontracted out to a company? I subcontracted but it like I said
I mean I was in there on ladders doing stuff myself. That’s how I broke my pelvis
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 costing you two point three
But did you say you were selling?
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 kind of nightly rate like 600 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 500k 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 thing and you sold it to who a
Small private equity group and how did that come about they approach you you approach 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 want to raise money, I want to 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 commoditized 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 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 finance 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 yeah, the look that you have Sean, that’s how I had when I first met him
So when I first met him, I was just in the phone with him and I go
Hey, like I’m got to go to this conference in Idaho
I think you said your parents or something like you have a connections there
You want to meet me up there and like you want to 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 and the way that he’s principled and like he like
Outlines what he’s gonna do. I found to be intoxicating. 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 right?
You start with a vision
Then you don’t count yourself out. I think that was the next most important step. You didn’t count yourself out
You could have said I don’t have the money. I don’t have the experience. I don’t have the the time
I don’t have anyone who believes in me. You don’t have the network. What whatever you didn’t say any of those things
You said, how do I get the time? How do I get the money? How do I get the network?
How do I get the cash?
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 want to stay in kind of a more unique experience and
B once you realize once you turned your disadvantage into advantage you turned your Airbnb disaster into a
Wait, I got to 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 through my own to do direct bookings. What do you think this property would have been worth?
Had that not happened?
Maybe three or four million is my guess
Right, maybe and that’s and maybe not even be a sellable asset
Right, maybe maybe not like definitely not a private equity sellable 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 it with Airbnb originally which felt like a
Complete defeat like literally you can’t imagine. I mean it was 24 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 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 conspires for those with a mission. There’s a bunch of stories of people winning
massively
By having the idea of build it 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 kind of 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 succeed
Do 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, 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 a vision and then you have to story tell
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 Devon
So Devon is also 24 years old for now
I’m 27 but I was 24 when I built Live Oak Lake and he was he was an engineer
so he’s a smart kid and he had this dream to create this
Shipping container home that was just super wild
it’s 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 95% of it
He built with his two hands and he documented the whole process
With an iPhone and a $20 tripod on Instagram and tiktok and he grew 1.5 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 build
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’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 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 going to have some hard knocks
I have fallen flat on my face more times and you want to hear including
During and even after the sale of live oak lake. So you have to learn humility and you got to 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
It’s like this is going to work and here’s why and even if I can’t convince you
I still believe in it ends a conviction and then people rally around that and then of course
Your track record is a lot when you’re starting from zero you don’t have that
But as you go you got to be very careful with 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 into a business that makes you millions of dollars
I think that is a
Awesome romantic vision. I know several people 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 not talking not to me and sam
You’re talking to this person who’s listening
Who is inspired by this and 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, arabian bees have been commoditized. They’re just
You know 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 houseboats meant and so he
Built for $200,000 built this houseboat. You can look it up. It’s 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 berserk now. He’s raised a bunch of money. He’s buying marinas
So the cool thing about houseboats is you don’t fall typically into the same regulations as st
R 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 harbour or in aplis or
Wash place wherever and you get 360 degree harbour views. You’re 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 want to be 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 sir coast or that’s a radical example. So find
Go off the beaten path. It’s okay to get away from places
But you want to 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 like a staycation distance. So you’re going to get a lot of two three night staycations
You need to be within two hours from a major metro area
You need to be within 15 to 20 minutes of like a town that has a 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 want to find that two hour goldilocks zone
Then find land that’s super cheap that has some natural potential
Let’s say trees are kind of a must because you can’t grow a tree overnight
And that’s what live oak lake had
Maybe it has some topography 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 kimball and christine had a dream
They’re in rural ohio
They buy this piece of property with zero money that the guy was a pastor
He had no money
He bought this piece of property and then he noticed it had like this old dilapidated 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 of the year
And they had this idea so they actually dug out and dammed up this little pool
And then they put in a pump recirculated 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 hawking hills. It’s absolutely wild. This place has gone mega viral
They’ve got 600 000 followers on instagram. They’re booking out every single night two years in advance
And that water feature probably cost them
20 to 30 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
Architecturally make a beautiful infuse unreasonable hospitality into it. So you don’t need an on-site concierge. You don’t need
People holding your hand, you know at every like five-star luxury would be what you need is
Touch points that people care about so when I opened live oak lake
I I quickly just had this idea people love to see their name handwritten
So I perfected 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
So 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 topochikos 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 as 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 to read coffee table book?
But then on top of that there’s this handwritten 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 a little ways like this
I love this Sam has this phrase and I’ve taken his copyrighting 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 404 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
Careful and that’s what we did with live oak lake 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 play 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 this
I’ve got a community of about 50 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 that we just wound up we just kind of let go and just like
Holy shit
Sorry, I love it. I know don’t apologize. I love it. 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 hanging out with them
And then you feel like there’s people where you you feel inspired
What are some ways that a smart person could get this wrong? So
Not not every you know any blueprint if I say hey, I’ve had all the success in e-commerce
Well, I know a bunch of people who have failed in e-commerce and I could 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 that it
Uh, or at least I didn’t say I’ll take this one. Yeah, I mean like I I bought one of the I 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. Uh, the first thing is uh, there is no such thing as 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 it and forget it
Would you agree with that Isaac?
99% 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 another thing is you really actually have to give a shit and care about it like
In order to like make outsize 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, well, 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 that that was not an exceptional plan
Yeah, I think that design is the number one lever that you can pull as my friend Hans who’s awesome. By the way, Hans Loreight
Um, absolutely blown up on instagram recently
He’s got like 550,000 followers and he’s like breaking down interior design in these little short form videos
The 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 guests 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. They see the live oakley 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 want to 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 zap here. We had like six softwares. 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 24/7 thing
I mean that is that’s intense any way you cut it and
When you don’t have somebody who cares about that or 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 going to suffer and there’s this great quote by tem 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, um, 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
subpar
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 disagree like I think the barrier to entry is low. Yes, it’s easy to play but it’s not easy to win
um
And so anytime I’ve tried to do something that works online
I don’t know. I threw my all into it. Uh, I wasn’t necessarily very good
So even if I got a mediocre result, it wasn’t due to lack of effort
It was due to lack of skill or or I’d make something really good that nobody cared about nobody wanted
It was just the wrong problem to solve
Um, 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?
Uh, 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 it 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 going to build
A luxury, you know, a luxury stay here and I’m going to serve customers essentially by hand
Uh, it’s definitely easier than that, but 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 is so low
Because the barrier entry is 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. It’s still hard
Well, you we have so many friends that are popular on the internet and they make crappy stuff
Like it’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 mr. Beast who you know is is friendly with us and and
Is obviously super successful youtube. He just released a guy. I guess I got leaked his uh production document
Do you guys see this I read the whole thing? So I actually want to do like a whole bigger thing on it
So I don’t want to go too much into it
But one amazing thing is you know, you get to see inside of his mind and 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 the famous directors and and artists 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 their taste is a bit better
or is it
the chef in
You know new york who makes this one unbelievable burger that’s 36 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 mr. Beast has made his success because he’s decided to be mcdonald’s on the internet, right? He is creating the videos
That are mass market that are going to get the most number of views even if they’re not the most
Life-changing introspective 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 and 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 artisanal content and you know
Who’s to say what’s better? What’s better than the others depends on your goals?
Can I tell you a crazy story about?
Uh 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
Storytelling was I mean golden and you don’t know how many people I’ve 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 erin sorkin about stories and I I’m in
Transpired I want to 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 storyteller
Actually, but I was like I feel like I can learn this skill and I’m gonna figure it out
So I went down the rabbit hole and I listened to podcasts and I read books and I took courses and and copywriting 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 it an eight month break from twitter. So last fall I stopped posting at all and 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 it. You’re like a battery
You’ve got to recharge and but I came back kind of guns a 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 were like threads are dead and you know twitter is dead the algorithms trash whatever whatever and literally one after another
And I’m knocking on wood
But at the end of the day like I’ve never had so much sustained success like the last 10 threads
I’ve written in a row without exception have gone an average of like a million views apiece
And then one of them went totally crazy. So I wrote this thread
Um about this train car that my dad it’s pinned to the top of my profile if you want to look at it
But yeah, I’ve seen that one. So I wrote this thread. I stayed up like all night. I spent eight hours writing it
I just finished copy that the second time and so like it was fresh on my mind and I I wrote this thread
and
Uh, I didn’t know you know, I put 60 percent going off of your advice going off of a lot of people’s advice
Like 60 percent of my effort of those eight hours were spent
Writing that hook like both writing it and also curating those images
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 this sentence in there
Let me read it. So I said my dad bought this 120 year old train car for $2,000. 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 controversial this would be
I said but after investing 147k and five months of work. We redeemed it today
It’s one of the most profitable and exclusive stays in the country. Here’s what happened
So here’s here is what happened
There is like 30 of the population. I’ve come to believe are these cat-loving
I mean
Karens and I loved 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 have kicked you out
Blah blah blah blah blah blah like machine gun fire. 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 kind of crazy and I’ve learned
I’ve been like Brian Chesky comment on the or Brian Chesky reposted it twice in one day Joe Gabby
I reposted it Paul Graham repote quote tweeted it and then like you know 20 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 300 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
uh business insider fast company the daily mail kody 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 luck 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
All right, if you’re listening to this pod, I already know something about you
You my friend are nosy you want to know the numbers behind all of these things that we’re talking about
How much money people make how much money people spend how much money businesses make you want to know all of this people’s net worth all of it
Well, I’ve got good news for you. So my company hampton. We’re a private community for CEOs
We do this thing where we survey our members and we ask them all types of information
Like how much money they’re paying themselves
How much money they’re paying a lot of their employees what their team my bonuses are what their net worth is what their portfolio looks like
We ask all these questions, but we do it anonymously
And so people are willing to reveal all types of amazing information stuff
You really cannot google you can’t find anywhere else and you could check it out at joinhampton.com click the report section on the menu
Click the salary and compensation report. It’s going to blow your mind. You’re going to love this stuff. Check it out now back to the pod
I love that story. Yeah, I checked out this this thread. It’s it’s great. But I think that the
The real lesson here. 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 obsess 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 obsess of all the tendencies 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
Uh, you you’re on the wrong platform my friend man
It’s I want to 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 concisely 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 10 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 nice green screen maybe video of me talking about it and telling that story
like really snappy on
Instagram 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
A perfectionist 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 shon about you he was like, oh, it sounds like an amish guy who likes money
And I was like, yeah, I guess that’s a that’s an interesting description
Um, but if that is yeah, I was like, I’m the next two words were i’m in
Yeah, um, and if that and let’s just say uh, it’s just someone who’s not like entrenched in this isaac
Your community is similar ish to amish
What do they think about you like being this popular internet guy or did they even know?
Do they even know like who you what you’re doing?
Are you sinning by being on this podcast right now? Like what’s going on? What’s the reaction back at the farm?
All right
We’re gonna go way back, but i’ll try to be brief here
So my wife’s grandparents actually founded this community 51 years ago and it started as an inner city mission in
the slums of manhattan
And they had actually been atheists 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 disaffected with life
Sort of came together and a core group
started coalescing 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 200 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 joined 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 blacksmithing and
Then fast forward they picked up and moved to texas in the early 90s
And so we have a piece of property around 450 acres just outside of uh weiko where
First the group was in austin some was in weiko 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 uh working playing
Doing doing life together and there’s about 1200 people
A part of this texas branch about a third of those actually live on that piece of property that 400 acre piece of property
The rest live on their own places nearby. We’re not common purse
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 emin california if i went and visited where you guys live what would seem
Most different to me. Well, what is it that you guys do that would be most different?
Yeah, uh, we don’t have tv’s in our homes. We don’t really have internet in our homes
We again like 95 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 want to control it versus being controlled by it
And so basically I grew up on a farm taking care of animals. I was homeschool. 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 went by the way shawna 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 and when I went there
They believe i’m gonna kind of summarize isaac and they believe that in order to like show they’re close to god and everything
That they were they’re craftsmen 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 was these women singing. I swear to god
I’m like this sounds like a black choir in like in harlow. Like this is the most like stylish like best singers
I’ve 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 to submit
So in order to learn instagram, I have to study it and i’m going to execute
Uh, 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 want to 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 innately is just a virtual world
So we’re trying to find ways to the story teller because I feel like we just like I feel like sam got you hooked on sugar
And you hadn’t had sugar you were like, yeah, no, I love vegetables
And I just love all these earthy flavors and then sam was like here have some sugar and now you’ve had sugar
You’ve had the viral sugar the feeling of going viral on making millions of dollars and everybody loving your story
And some people hating your story and then you want to respond to them. You’ve now tasted that
How is that f with your brain? Yeah, it’s like, hey, I think just just a little crack. You just want a little crack
Just a little you’ve had that social media crack. What’s what’s your honest feeling 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 have a family. We have we have a little boy. We have another on the way
I have this amazing community life, which I’m starting to be more public about
I made a thread 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 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 accountable and like are going to 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
Um have been like very honest with me and at times critical and I totally love them and respect them for that
What’d they say?
Oh like, you know the way you’re the way you came across here was
bragging or the way you said that
um
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 up voluntarily, but they’re like, you know
Is that consistent with?
You know the way that you would talk so and so and basically we want to be very careful that we and I want to be very careful that I don’t put
That the version of me that you see on the internet is exactly what you’re going to 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 phone 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 addicting. 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 man
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 robs a man robs a bake and you like suddenly stop it and you’re the hero
That’s one of them patrolling main street. Yeah, something goes down and I might be needed
Yeah, just like to be the tough guy that protects everyone once
Then the second thing is to like live in a farm with your family and your community as like
Everyone’s like lives like a little socialist hippy life and I’ve went to his
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 and 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 have to take care of this
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’ll 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 we’ll just spread it out evenly
Just being there for that 24 or 48 hours that one particular time
I was like I’m fulfilling that need of like seeing this like hippy lifestyle
You saw that David Beckham post Sam. Oh where he’s growing
He’s like growing a fruit now or growing vegetables friends of them
Yeah, he went viral because he posts this video on his instagram
But it’s him in a flannel shirt and the like old time
Me like Irish hat and the caption is my kale is doing well and it basically it’s him on his farm
He like now lives a farm life. He’s him on his farm. He’s gardening
He’s beekeeping 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 DM soon to learn a little bit
Do you not feel this urge showing every once in a while?
We are like I wish I would just sort of farm with my family and friends and we all like did this together
No, dude, it’s way too much work. No, I don’t have that urge Sean. You got to come visit at least
I have my versions of of these but they’re like, you know, like for example, I like writing and I’m like cool
I just don’t want to work. I just want to 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 want to go develop those
But I’m like, I want to 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 irrigating something
I don’t want to irrigate nothing. Okay. So like I don’t have that urge
For me personally, I got I guess my own versions of them, but they’re a lot more mild
Well
That’s
Okay, dork, let me go play house in the woods without you
I still want to have wi-fi like
This is like the man version of playing house and dress up like, uh, you know what I mean
Isaac, can we do rapid fire to end this? So, uh, how old are you?
27
What’s one thing I can learn from you about hospitality even though I’m not going to 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 selfless 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 urge inside 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
Uh, I don’t think it needs to be some grandiose thing
I think you just have to want to serve them and people are going to feel it
Isaac, I think what you did with uh
The live oak lake and what you’re showing other people doing with floating homes and shipping containers and stuff like that is
Amazing it’s an amazing trend people should go follow you on twitter to kind of 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 links so that I can go stay at 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 to be exceptional on the content marketing to go viral so that you can get booked
You know for two years out
You have to 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 it’s 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 going to do do it with hospitality do it 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 in life. I want people to
Say well, that’s a life well lived and I want to say that at the end of my own life
That is an amazing quote
Dude, thank you so much for the band. Um, we appreciate you and we’ll wrap up there. That’s the pot
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Get our episode with MrBallen before anyone else: https://clickhubspot.com/mbe
Episode 631: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Isaac French ( https://x.com/isaacfrench_ ) about how to he bought his first investment property at age 24 with $2K down and sold it 2 years later for $7M.
—
Show Notes:
(0:00) Buying an investment property with $2K
(9:53) $7M exit in 2 years
(16:41) Repeating the formula
(20:35) Blueprint for flipping properties into Airbnbs
(27:27) Mistakes to avoid
(31:07) Games that are easy to play, but hard to win
(34:56) How to write 20M view threads
(54:58) 2 quotes to live by
—
Links:
• Isaac’s Newsletter – https://www.isaacjfrench.com/newsletter
• Live Oak Lake – https://www.liveoaklake.com/
• Isaac on IG – https://www.instagram.com/isaacfrench_/
• Isaac on X – https://x.com/isaacfrench_
• Isaac on YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/c/isaacfrench
• Isaac on LI – https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaacjfrench
• Experiential Hospitality – https://experiential-hospitality.com/
• Isaac’s site – https://www.isaacjfrench.com/
• Unreasonable Hospitality – https://tinyurl.com/3j8ymjpp
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Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd
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Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
