Meet the Investors
This is my biggest video production project to date.
The fact that I LOVE the BiggerPockets community is no secret to anyone who knows me. I learned how to buy real estate through BP, I’ve met most of my real life friends through that community, and these days I’m always looking to give back to those who have given so much to me.
In 2020 I had the chance to tell BiggerPockets success stories of people I know while using my camera. Below are most of the videos released to date, but keep reading if you want to know more about how this series came to be.
Backstory:
I’ve been a hobbyist photographer for ~5 years and while I’m not great at it I had a fantastic mentor who taught me the technical side of the craft very well. I’m not very creative or artistic but I am good at telling stories about people. I wanted to graduate from photography to videography but I sort of hate being on camera, though I’m improving in that area.
In mid-2019 Netflix stock dropped 30% in one day when they lost the rights to their two biggest shows “The Office” and “Friends” and an idea hit me like a ton of bricks. Netflix was just a host for other companies’ intellectual property and that intellectual property was the only part of Netflix that was valuable. So I decided that I would focus on intellectual property more than anything else going forward.
In my 2019 year in review blog I specifically mention that YouTube is my main focus for the year going forward. With this series I feel pretty good that I’m fulfilling that goal!
Production:
This is the part that no one sees, the part that I put on my shoulders all alone, but also this is the part that gives me invaluable talents no one can ever take away from me.
Until this blog I have had no where really appropriate to tell the story of what goes into making these, people don’t care about production they only care about the end product. I’m sure very few people care, so if you read this, I’m incredibly thankful for your precious time.
I put together my very first video that was more than a talking head (just a camera on a tripod and me talking) in March of 2020. I got together with my buddy Nate Cross at his flip when it was just beginning and said “Hey I should practice filming this and see what I can get”. At the end of the flip I filmed it again along with him talking about what he learned.
I took that little video and asked BiggerPockets if they could use it. They said “HECK YES!” but told me they couldn’t use just one, they needed 12. So I went to my very big rolodex and started looking for other people who also had a great real estate/BiggerPockets stories to talk about.
Over the next few weeks I lined up all the logistics for 12 episodes. I wrote the stories out on paper before hand, I directed the guests so I could get them to confidently tell their story on camera. I filmed the whole thing myself, I edited them all myself, and then I sold them to BiggerPockets for almost nothing at all. This was a tremendous amount of work, all of which I had never done before, with no support system to help me out. I can’t believe they came out as good as they can consider I’m the idiot who made them!
This is a passion project. It wasn’t commissioned or even made in tandem with BiggerPockets and I did it because I wanted to add value back to the community. At the time of this writing I’m in the middle of creating season 2 where I went to Washington DC and filmed another 12.
I hope you enjoy these as I put a significant portion of myself into them. A like, a subscribe, and a comment in the videos is much appreciated.