How to Become a Digital Real Estate Mogul

I have no interest in investing in real estate.

I considered it for a bit, but after seeing friends in the business, I realized it looks like a never-ending conveyor-belt of shitstorms and headaches.

That’s why instead of becoming a real estate mogul, I’m working on becoming a digital real estate mogul. I don’t know if it’s easier to become a digital real estate mogul than a regular real estate mogul, but I do know I can become a digital real estate mogul in my underwear—and that’s all that really matters.

WTF IS A DIGITAL REAL ESTATE MOGUL?

Think MrBeast.

He has so many digital properties making money for him he’s like the Marriott of digital real estate. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, merchandise, etc. Like vacationers in Turks and Caicos, people are on his properties spending money and attention every minute of every day of the year.

I’m no MrBeast, but you don’t need to be MrBeast-level to be successful in digital real estate. Currently I’m like that dude who doesn’t need to work a real job because he has a few properties he Airbnbs—except of course my properties are Twitter, my newsletter, and my book. Like Airbnbs, people are visiting them and making money for me all the time.

I’m currently in between Step 1 and Step 2 below.

THE 2-STEP PATH TO BECOME A MOGUL

Here’s what the path looks like for most digital real estate moguls.

1. Start with 1 property (social media platform) and house insurance (newsletter). It’s very tempting to try to do every social platform, but you just can’t do it all alone—you’ll need a team to conquer the web (which we get to later). For now, just focus on that 1 platform until you’ve built a business on it where you’re making enough money you can quit your job. This is the hardest part and where most people give up. It took me 15 months to go from starting to take my Twitter/newsletter seriously to full-time on it. The newsletter-as-insurance model is key because if your 1 property gets fucked up in a fire, you’ll still have a way to communicate with your audience.

2. Start building more properties (social media platforms) and get property managers (social media managers) to lighten your load. Like 1 real estate mogul can’t manage 5+ airbnbs across a state, 1 creator can’t realistically manage 5+ different social media platforms by themselves. Like in physical real estate, you’ll need a property manager plus a team of contractors, plumbers, and electricians—video editors, copywriters, etc. Tip: start building those relationships before you need them, it’ll make the jump from Step 1 to Step 2 easier.

Like in physical real estate, leveraging your capital is key. You want your assets working for you as much as possible so you need to be strategic about this. There’s a couple key ways to do this.

• Increasing an asset’s value: An easy way to increase a ski house’s rental price is to add a hot-tub. The same is true for digital real estate. If you think you’ll see an ROI, you could do the same thing by paying a video editor to make videos for your digital properties. I hired a video editor a couple months ago and we’ve been chugging along slowly increasing the value in my digital real estate portfolio.

• Maintaining assets’ value for a long period of time: This is a lot easier on the internet than fixing leaky faucets or broken floorboards. If you build up a huge database of content, your assets work for you 24/7 making you money. YouTuber Paddy Galloway is a great example of this. “YouTube is the most powerful platform ever invented,” he tweeted. “I uploaded this video almost 2 years ago and every single month it pays me $500-$1000.” Those assets cost $0 to maintain. That’s the power of evergreen assets. The same is true for newsletters; I have 1-year-old posts that still bring in subscribers and paid subs.

But now the question we’e all been wondering:

WHAT’S IT LIKE BEING A DIGITAL REAL ESTATE MOGUL?

Money, fame, fortune, lots of sex? Perhaps.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get any of those fun stories.

I asked a few friends with big followings (300k+) what the biggest difference for them has been since their early days. I expected them to talk about sales and distribution, but I was surprised by their answers.

Greg Isenberg is the founder of an 8-figure holding company full of dope community-based businesses. “People talk a lot about how audience building is the hack to a sales pipeline, but not about the hack about a hiring pipeline. The hardest part of building a business is hiring the right people,” he told me. “A group of talented people can figure anything out, despite good or bad macro/micro economic environments. Your audience are your future teammates. Most of my team I’ve hired from Twitter.”

I can attest to this because I got a job working for Greg thanks to a cold DM on Twitter. He also hired 2 of my friends thanks to Twitter as well (shoutout Jordan and Tyler)! Instead of scouring through resumes on Indeed, Greg just checked who was replying to his tweets and sending him DMs. When you’re early in the creator journey, it’s easy to overlook the “finding talent” aspect—but it’s crucial to building a massive digital real estate empire.

AI founder Justin Fineberg told me “The most exciting thing about content creation is your ability to scale the amount of people you can talk to at once. When you have something like a platform like TikTok, you can communicate your ideas with literally 200,000 times the amount of people you can communicate with at once. Content is the scalable solution to communication—and that's a beautiful thing.”

Justin is absolutely right. With a digital real estate portfolio, you can talk about your ideas with thousands or even millions of people at a time. It’s like whispering something to a friend versus broadcasting an announcement throughout your hotel. If you want your ideas to spread, then building a massive digital real estate portfolio is a great way to do that.

Wherever you’re at in your digital real estate journey, keep on building.

Empires aren’t built in a day.

Cool Shit Corner

3 things to help you make more cool shit:

🎙 Did you know Christopher Nolan is a weirdo? Check out this podcast to learn why his weirdness made him one of the best directors in history. (link)

🎵 I’ve been listening to a lot of Young Thug’s Business is Business. Money on the Dresser is a fuckin banger. (link)

📝 I didn’t know Netflix A/B tested cover images. I learned about it this week and shared some insights on cover images and thumbnails. (link)

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason Levin

P.S. Want to really upgrade your content strategy?

📘 Check out my book on meme marketing Memes Make Millions

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Until next edition, see you on Twitter and LinkedIn.