BiggerPockets Loses the Battle to School You in Real Estate

Henry Ford once said, "Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, only this time more wisely.

I believe that is the case here.

As most of you know, BiggerPockets has for the past weeks, been planning a real estate teleseminar on rehabbing, scheduled for May 25.  This event was to be the beginning of a series of educational calls and webinars, inspired by your requests for us to put them on.  We had put together a fine list of very successful real estate investors and others who we wanted to get for future events, and knew that you’d get a mind-blowing education out of each.

In our surveys to our members and in private discussions, you have told us that you wanted BiggerPockets to put these events on.  

You requested it.

We listened.

But, in true BiggerPockets style, this event wasn’t going to be like the others out there. We were offering a 90-minute event with no sales pitch and no nonsense, from a true expert in his field – an hour and a half of non-stop education.  There are very few events out there that take this approach; most are free events that pepper the bare minimum of valuable information, with the bulk of the event designed to upsell you on some other, expensive product, training, etc.  I’ve been approached my many of the gurus who have asked that we help market their seminars for a nice 50% cut of the action, and each time, they took the same approach.  They knew that people would get caught up in the hype, and they would make their money on the upsell.  

Putting these things together takes time and costs real money.  Our plan was to give a great event, offer as part of the price a great book, and for our effort, we’d walk out with a little bit of profit. You, of course, would walk away with your minds blown by the depth and breadth of information offered.

That was the plan.

Let me remind you all that I hate hype.  I think it takes away from the real intent of offering a real estate education -- the part where you get content usable and actual education;  but I contend that isn’t the intent of their events.  It is to sell you and it works!  We wanted to do it differently . . .

Failure to Market?

We also decided that we’d market it differently.  Instead of relying on countless annoying pitch emails(you all know what I'm talking about here), we promoted it through our BiggerPockets platform and through just a few emails to our list of over 35,000 people.

Over the five plus years I’ve been running BP, I’ve read many discussions where you have talked about your dislike of the current system that the marketers use to sell their real estate events and products, and we choose to keep that in mind when promoting this one.

We failed.

We failed because we listened.  

Apparently, you really do want to get all those emails in your inbox.  Apparently when a network of gurus all promote the same event, it validates that event to you, even if it may offer little to no value.  Apparently, I should have listened to a few people who told me that I needed to use the "standard formula" of email marketing for this event.

If that is how it must be done, then I don’t want to have anything to do with it.

I hoped that you’d see through all the noise to see the real value that we were offering, but I guess that we just didn’t get it right.  

We’ve had a whopping 3 – yep, you’re reading that right – three signups for this event.  

I don’t think I need to tell you how bad that number is given our 51,000+ members and 35,000+ email subscribers.

It is really bad.

So bad that these three people have been refunded their money and we’ve cancelled the event.

Perhaps there is another way to offer this education to you . . .

Perhaps we can still change the way things are done in the “real estate education” space?

After this experience, though, I’m not sure we can.

We’re going to take a little bit of time to lick our wounds, and then see if we can take another approach to bring you great information while making a buck or two for our efforts.

Keeping it Real

I’ve been told by some that I should have just used an excuse such as technical problems or issues with our speaker in cancelling, but I just can’t do that.  I’d be lying to myself and to you.  That's not how I roll.

We tried.  We failed.  We’ll begin again . . . this time more wisely.

Josh