All Forum Posts by: Mark B.

@Nathan Smith

Read all of the chapters here starting from the foreword: https://www.navalmanack.com/al...

it’s relatively short so you can do it in an hour or two. It’s the best, most relevant, and actionable advice I’ve come across. This is wisdom from a very successful Silicon Valley tech founder and angel investor, who came from nothing. That is important because as a young adult you should be listening to people who have their fingers on the pulse of the tech sector. They know the most about where the nature of our economy and future is going. 

I’m graduating this semester and I’ll be doing so with a lot cash and no debt. Here is what I would do if I were 18 again, most of which I did but at a later age:

1) Go to a local community college, continue living with parents. Live cheaply.

2) Apply for financial Aid and scholarships.

3) Transfer into a good computer  science program at a state school (in your state). If you can continue living with family, do so. 

4) Get into the highest paying internships and co-ops you can find all along the way. Stash that cash, CS students get paid absurd amounts in big tech internships.

5) Graduate with little to no debt, with the best technical skill a person can have today.

6) Work for 2-4 years at a tier 1 or 2 tech company. With diligence, you can have $200-500k saved. Get into a remote working role and the world is your oyster. Go to a market with a great profile for property investment. Since you have a W2 job with crazy income, banks will love to offer you loans for property acquisition.

And at this point, you’ll be wiser and see more options and opportunity than you knew about before.

Here’s another thread on the power of code’s leverage: https://www.thefastlaneforum.c...

That person saved $200,000 in one year and leveraged that into $20-30k of monthly combined cash flow in the 2nd year. This is business related, not real estate because you should learn about ALL the options that are out there. 

 Thanks! So that makes two recommendations for starting small, super targeted, and leveraging all marketing avenues. 

Thank you Elliott for this response!  

Funny you mention leveraging these other phone based marketing strategies too. I had the intent on supplementing my direct marketing by sending video text messages to prospects. The idea being to go as far as I can with building trust and differentiating myself from other sellers. A lot of business sources I've consumed recommend doing things "that don't scale" as a competitive advantage over the big players in a niche. And I'm in a super competitive market so I'll commit to testing these recommendations!

These perspectives are interesting. About the return with a business vs real estate investing. I remember on the BP podcast with Noah Kagan, he had similar views. Mentioned that he could yield way more by reinvesting in his businesses over real estate investing, so he couldn't justify focusing his time with RE.

Trying again for a post or two! Not gonna give up here!

I know statistically I'm one of thousands of faceless wannabe wholesalers that come and go over the years. I've been studying hard the last 8 weeks and have let go a well paying en.gineering job (I have the confidence that I can get another if need be). I've listened to over 200 BP episodes since 2015, and countless other business and marketing podcasts. Countless business and marketing articles. Several books. Several meetups. 

I'm very serious with real estate investing and treating it as a business with the intent to scale :)

 This post is incredible, thank you! Super helpful to see nitty gritty info like this on a complicated subject.

Hi BP, I'm new (have been a BP listener since 2015 though) and I'm fully committing to RE now, through wholesaling. Still in school but finishing part time to be able to give more focus to RE. The goal is to hopefully gain real traction in this as a business before graduating so I can stick with it full time.

I have enough savings to do some heavy direct mail campaigns, but of course the fear of my inexperience leading to losing it all without a done deal is holding me off the trigger. 

What would you advise?  

A part of me is saying if I'm too scared to take the full leap on a 9-touch direct mail campaign with a couple big lists, then I don't have what it takes to make the risks necessary to succeed in real estate or business. 

The other part is saying don't be stupid, respect what's at stake here and try to go about it smarter. ie: leverage my free time more by curating the lists down a lot and hyper targeting the homeowners likely to be the most motivated. That I can viably direct mail a small list like absentee owners with code violations over and over and squeeze a couple deals out of it, without spending $10k or more. Supplement with time intensive marketing strategies like bandit signs to affordably increase deal flow, too. Then scale up the direct mail as I get more experience and funds. 

This ^ seems like the sensible approach to me but I lack the data to know if massive volume (thousands of addresses) is mandatory to statistically close deals through direct mail. Can deals be done with 200-500 addresses if they are highly targeted?

What say you BP members?