953: Connected Investors: Tips on Being a Great Entrepreneur, Real Estate Investor, and Creator with Ross Hamilton

Robert Plank 0:04 Hey, welcome back to the podcast. We're here with Ross Hamilton from connected investors.com. They are an investment property marketplace and social network for real estate investors. And Ross has tapped into all sorts of fun real estate techniques, micro flipping, he's retired. He's really good. On the marketing side, he has a book, I believe, as well. And so we're going to talk to Ross about what he has going on and what makes him special. So Ross, glad to be talking to you.

Speaker 2 0:31 Yeah, this is really exciting. Marketing is what made my company successful. So I'm excited to share that and just give whatever I can here.

Robert Plank 0:41 Well, fantastic. And so I'd love to just jump right into that. So you say that kind of marketing is what you've done, right? What's your superpower in that sense? And so what do you think you've done really well, on that marketing side that you see other people not doing? Well?

Speaker 2 0:55 Well, yes, so throughout my business, I have been kind of head of figuring stuff out, right. And no matter what product you have, if you can't market it, then you don't even have a product. So what we kind of did early on, and I'm talking about 2005 is when I first built out my web platform connected investors.com, it was a social network for real estate investors. But there was no one on it. Right? So it's tough to get people to join. So I had like 80 accounts, I was sitting there with like multiple laptops, having conversations to kind of get things get things going. And what I did early in my career is I started to build relationships with with influencers. But that term didn't even exist back then there was no such thing as an influencer, it was just people of influence. And what I did is I white labeled my product, let them slap their name on it. So they all had their own social networks, that all fed into one big social network. Because creating a marketplace, if you ever have a marketplace product, you have to get both sides of the equation to show up at the same time. So that was very, that was very challenging. So I was able to launch connected investors get my first 20 or 30,000 people using the site, through creating white label versions that other people could use, I was giving away most of the revenue, but I just wanted users, I started this tech company as a real estate investor, who had no tech experience at all, didn't go to any fancy college hardly made it through my two year degree. But within the first two years of college, I already owned a lot of houses. So I was flipping properties, investing in my tech company trying to come up with all sorts of innovative ways. And that that was just the first way when I had an idea and MVP, but I didn't have any way to get my word out.

Robert Plank 2:45 And I think your champion is something that's really important and special. And also one of the simplest things is that it's so tempting to focus on the product or on the platform, and then neglect the marketing side of things, which is like it's not as much fun right to have to always be like prospecting and getting trying to get people to use what you have and doing kind of getting to like the critical mass point, right? Like, you know, better than most you will probably right as far as the social network, yeah, to make all these fake accounts, get people using it, because people can't, if they go, and they see like, no one's using it, they won't use it, but then you need that in place to get them to use it. And so you say that you you succeeded, because you found these influencers before, that was a thing, and you succeeded because of the kind of white labeling and I think that's just a good reminder, in general for those of us to, to like, you know, market our affiliate program and train our affiliates and kind of give them these tasks and get them to promoting us. And so what do you think has worked really well for you as far as just getting people to to take action because like, it's easy enough to say, find influencers easy enough to say you make a white little version, but still, it's the it's hard to get them to promote you so so then what

Speaker 2 3:57 I would send bags of cash, like literal like bags with $1,001 bills in it, anything I can do to get people's attention. I have sent laptops to people that when they opened it up, it was all it was like a custom MacBook, and it was like press play. Like I did anything I could to get in front of them. But then I did every anything I could to provide value for these individuals to give before I received and to maintain those relationships. And gosh, near 20 years later, some of these people they're my, you know, they're my best friends now. And you know, the marketing actually needs to come before the product. I know that sounds crazy. But even later in my career, we always came up with the hook for the product first. It's like a rap song, right? If I didn't have a good hook, all the other technical beautiful words didn't even matter. So later on in my career, what I would do and this is where everyone messes up. He's I would sell my educational course store my product before I even had it. And a lot of times and Elon Musk started doing that later on with the Tesla. But a lot of times, what I would do is I would sell a if I have a course a how to course, I would sell it, and then I would get everyone, I'd sell as many as much as I could. And then I would record the course live as I would deliver it to him. So that alright, Session One is next Thursday, because what that did is it gave me a deadline, if anyone out there is ever creating a course you have a million reasons why you shouldn't launch it, sell 100 of them, and then I guarantee you will get the things out way, way ahead of time, it was a ready fire aim type thing. If I had a good hook, I'd create a course around it, and I would build it but I had accountability to get it done at that point. And it was the more people that were part of the live course back then they really, they really enjoyed it so so you have if you can before you have it, because it creates accountability and you can test you can test the market, you can always give people their money back. If if it doesn't come doesn't come true.

Robert Plank 5:59 I love that. And I'm sure that for you there was that that added element of stress, but at the same time was probably more fun. And it made it more about the people you were helping and serving as opposed to just some ideas. And then I'm sure that there was some amount of course correction too, right? Like I'm sure that the when you make this course and you teach things, there's things that you think are so special and important that they don't care about, and vice versa, right? Things that like you'd like, Well, why should they even focus on this, but then you have that live audience on the Webinars or in the members area or whatever. And I'm sure that you adjust, and it's something that ends up being way better in the end than if you made the whole product first.

Speaker 2 6:37 Oh, absolutely. And the questions that people ask you, that's you use that to create all your marketing copy. Because you can't, you're looking at it from a different perspective. So even if you're a user of your product, I always a user of my products. I'm like I don't need to do market research. But I really listened to our members. And what they were saying and how they were saying I thought they were asking the question incorrectly. But that's how a lot of people were thinking. So I'd use that in my marketing messages and any follow up emails, those questions got really important. And then having a social network, I was able to see what everyone was talking about what everyone was, was asking me about. And back then I had this huge network of real estate investors. And it's when there were tons of properties, but no one had any money. So we had to figure out a way to help people find private money, money that is not coming from the banks from your rich uncle or someone like that, that wants to give you money to go buy real estate. So I did what I always did, I said who is the best in this space at this. It was a gentleman by the name of Doug Lebda, he owned a company called lending tree. And they kind of revolutionized online lending to where you can press a few buttons and lenders compete. That didn't exist in the real estate space. Him and I became buddies. We were both doing an Ironman Triathlon. That's how I met him. So we bonded over that, that pain. And he helped kind of guide me a little bit and mentor me and I created. I created I'm laughing, you'll find why in a second. A version of lending tree that was just for real estate investors. It's called Private lenders.com private lenders slash go anyway. So I showed it to Doug. And he asked me a few questions. He goes, Ross, how are you matching people? And I told him, he's like, Well, you're violating every single one of my patents. And if anyone else brings this up to me, I'm gonna have to sue you. I'm like, Oh, man. So here I go, I have something that's great that people need. I have hundreds of lenders that are paying me to just be connected with an investor, hence the name Connected Investor, right. More on that in a second. But I couldn't launch it officially because I was violating all these patents. Now. I did not raise tech money. I was flipping houses, putting it into my tech tech business. But Zillow, and land. The reason you would have to sue me is because Zillow was trying to sue him for his patent because it was too broad. So Zillow got his patent revoked, there was a huge ordeal. That day that happened, I officially launched Private lenders.com. And then what I had was our biggest marketing hack in the entire real estate investment industry, because I was able to buy millions of dollars in traffic. And liquidate on that traffic, meaning if I spent $10,000 in a day, I would get 10,000 back by selling that lead to up to five private lenders. So now I had a way to fuel my social network because I started off with the affiliates. And that was good, but it was high highs and low lows. You know, it's my mentor told me Ross if your whole business is dependent upon affiliates, you don't really have a business you have a hobby, you can make a lot of money with it. But it's not something you can like grow and scale and set targets for so I had to be able to buy traffic So now I was finally able to buy traffic, people would go through the form, and they would become part of the connected investors community. And that was a huge hack for us once you can buy traffic at scale, and have it pay for itself, you've reached kind of a new level in business and growth and you have a whole nother set of problems.

Robert Plank 10:20 It's fun to live vicariously through some of these adventures of yours, where you you, it seems almost like on purpose, you go for the big calculated risks, and you look for like, almost like the biggest problem you can find knowing that when you solve it, you'll have an even bigger problem on the other side of it. And so some of the I'm just trying to keep track of some of these lessons in my head of what you've been talking about, you said that how important it is to sort of mirror your marketing and like look at what people are saying and kind of absorb those keywords and repeat it back to them. And then look at specifically the problems are having so that way, instead of just being just another real estate teacher and trying to be louder than everyone else, you say, Well, what's everyone else talking about? And then what are the students saying, I can get eight out of 10 steps on it, I get I get stuck on Step nine, what step nine. And that's where I can solve that problem in an easier way and maybe hook them up with with someone else that solves their problem. And that's where I can stand out by just instead of being louder than everyone else, look at where the gap in the marketplace is, and then go for that and sort of solve that need. And then, and it seems like a lot of your kind of problem solving technique is instead of saying, Well, let me solve a math problem. Let me make my ads profitable. You're like well, and easier. I don't know shortcuts is a good word. But like an easier way out of your pickle is just to find someone with a need instead of trying to make the math work. You just like, well, this person has this problem. Let me just get in contact with them. And it seems to me that that's problem is solved by you just kind of being a networker, right, being a personable person having friends giving value, knowing that well, that might pay off in five or 10 years once I kind of have my inner circle, but I'm not being Mr. Greedy. And not saying like, Oh, but who's got my money? Who can help me you're being like, well, who can I help now knowing that will like pay it forward? Or it'll it'll pay off later in some way? I don't even know yet.

Speaker 2 12:17 Yeah, you know, and when you're when you first start, you don't have anything of value. Right? But if you're out there networking, just connecting the right people, you know, it's like you connect this person with this person, they can make a million dollars together. Don't be that greedy, sob that's like, Oh, give me a percentage of the money when I hook you. No, no, like, just connect the people, right? Start to grow as an entrepreneur. Always think marketing first. And the hook is important. So what we did in the real estate space, there's only so many terms in real estate. And they're all taken and you can be another person that's talking about wholesaling, or fixing, flipping, or buy and hold. We created a whole new category taught called micro flipping. So it's like, hey, micro flip, what's micro flipping? You just want someone to say, Oh, what's that? Right, you come up with a term. And micro flipping has two words that you can kind of assume you know what it means. But we basically took wholesaling, which is getting a property under contract and selling the contract to someone else. And we turn that into micro flipping by our platform, allowing you to do it all in one spot, to where you can find the deals, get them under contract, find the buyers make the connection. And you can do it all virtually. So we took the stock market from the stock market to you know, e trade, right, and we just rebranded it micro flipping and all we did was talk about micro flipping, micro flipping. And now if you Google micro flipping, it's like an actual real term. It's, it's crazy. We just came up with it, you know, hanging out at this dude at the studio one day just reading an article about micro dosing, you know, are like, Oh, that's Oh, what about micro flipping, and it just, it made sense. And then it just took off, like Quicken Loans wrote about it, like all of these big real companies started writing about Mark micro flipping, so we redefined the market. And we owned that that market, which was which was really helpful.

Robert Plank 14:15 Amazing. And so it seems like you're also touching on the kind of another repeat lesson here is in look at what's happening in other industries, because all the ideas have already been done. It's just a matter of, you know, what niche what category is doing it and see if you can adapt what they're doing in your own industry that gets the stock market doing this and it applies in different levels, right, it applies as far as the product side of it with the with your your your platform and having it all in one place. But then it also applies to the branding, the marketing the naming, you said micro dosing and so I think the the lesson I'm getting from kind of your your success and your personality is just like being open to new ideas and kind of have your your brain always on and be like a curious person Listen, and just see what's going on out there. Because sometimes you can adapt a really good idea that's just completely untapped in your space instead of trying to reinvent the wheel out compete everyone in saying, Oh, we're, we're wholesaling. But better. Well, who cares about that. But if you can invent this new term, that's really exciting. And so do you think so when you've kind of innovated in this way? I know that we said that, like you saw that term micro dosing, and he said, Okay, micro flipping, like, how do you recreate that? How do you go from saying, Okay, well, I need to stand out somehow I need to be in my own category, like, what's the process to, to getting that magic?

Speaker 2 15:39 Yeah, that's a great, that's a great question. And a few little lessons here, like being an idea person is a blessing. But it's also a curse, like, you have to know yourself. Every company needs that crazy idea, person. But a lot of times, those ideas can just flicker around, they never really come together. They're good ideas, they're too far out in the future. So a good self assessment of of where you are. If you're an idea person, you better have a lot of detail oriented people around you. Like, for instance, before I got on this podcast, right, I had my detail oriented assistant helping with every single little thing. So to recreate a category, I was already, that could be a jump forward, if you're brand new, maybe not. But I was already up, we already had over 1,000,002 million people in our in our network, and are on our email list. So I was able to use that to kind of get the ball rolling. But it all started with those those early influencers, those early relationships. I mean, those relationships helped me through some really tough, tough times, it hasn't been all straight up. You know, there was a time where I almost lost my whole entire business. Just we were running out of money. But we pulled you know, we pulled something crazy and shot straight up. So I don't know exactly how to say, Hey, how can you recreate your category, but it's just actually can answer that question. It's the questions you're asking yourself, right? If you're asking yourself, How can I recreate this category? How can I position myself? It's like when you get a car, and all of a sudden you start seeing that same car everywhere you thought it was unique car, but all of a sudden, everyone has an Audi S for right, like you thought you were the only one. So you have to want to do it. Ask yourself the right question. Keep it in front of you. And little bits and pieces will come in. I mean, that was a random conversation that we had. And all of a sudden it just kind of clicked. And I'm like we need to rename wholesaling. It hasn't been renamed in a while. So anyway, I loved that interview question. Yeah,

Robert Plank 17:59 I think it did in a lot of unexpected ways, which is also good, where you kind of had the mental gears turning for such a long time that once you finally arrived on the name, and you're like this is it, it's easy to say, Oh, well, I just randomly thought of it. It's like your brain thought of 10,000 different possibilities until you landed on it. And so you're really shining a light on kind of what entrepreneurialism is all about, right, which is not trying to be like a well rounded person, like when you were in school, and they said, you have to take this history class in this art class, you had to force yourself to do all these things you don't want to do just because I don't know though, what the rules were versus the entrepreneur journey, which is more like you say, Well, I've got kind of this lightning in a bottle, I've got these handful of skills, these things I'm really good at. And I'm open to growing and getting to where I need to go and reaching my goals. But why make things harder on yourself to like, be organized or when why not just find the people that can get you there hire people. And like, for example, be your assistant who hops on the podcast and sets things up and is a detail oriented person that way you can be free to strengthen your strengths instead of trying to strengthen your weaknesses, which is like such as seems like such a painful journey to go about. And so you're really tapped into some really cool stuff here. I love your stories. I love your energy. I love what you've built here. So in these last couple of minutes here, can you tell us about what the next steps are? If someone says, Man, I've learned so much from Ross as far as like these kind of entrepreneurial insights and secrets to success and things I should be doing. What's the next step here? How can someone find out about connected investors in your company and how do they know if they're the right fit for that?

Speaker 2 19:42 Yeah, well, if you're interested in real estate, you can. You can visit connect investors.com and sign up for the social network of real estate investors. That's a company that I have. I sold to first American a fortune 100 company, so I'm no longer with the company there. What I'm doing right now is I am We all in, in the nonprofit world, for affordable housing. So to me the journey of an entrepreneur starts with a grind. And then hopefully, after you make it, you can come back and help a lot of different people. My my skill sets are in, in marketing in real estate, even rebranding the word affordable housing, because it sounds like, I don't know, some beige hotel room, right. So we're, we're rebranding that, and my charity, if you're interested in affordable housing, and, and you want to learn more, you can actually just shoot me an email, if you can put the email up on the screen because I don't have a website anymore. Really, like I'm kind of, in this period of just introspection, and just reprioritizing what's important to me, I've been an entrepreneur since like, four. So I wanted to take a little bit of time off before jumping in. But if you shoot me an email Ross at success cap.com What I've done is I will actually just shoot you back all the stuff I used to sell my courses, my morning routine, and my habits because no matter what the secret of being a good entrepreneurs having good habits, so I have this 12 month habit planner that I use religiously, and daily. And then yeah, I'll give you a bunch of free stuff. And if you're if you're interested in helping in any way for the charity, I mean, we're it's gonna take a lot of people to make some something big there. But yeah, Ross is success cap.com I'll give you everything I have. I'm not even on social media. So that but that's why you're on podcasts and YouTube channels like this, because you can meet people that are, you know, behind the scenes behind the curtain and just want to share and give There you go Ross at success. cap.com Yep, yeah, get over. And I'll send you everything I got.

Robert Plank 21:47 And we're both men of action, right? It's so easy to say like, oh, well, we'll do it in post production. But why not just do it live right, get the thing right on the screen of Ross at success cap.com. And I'm excited for you, I'm excited for you to to get through all the ideas and get through all the brainstorming and rebrand affordable housing, like you've done with this other stuff. And you're just you're you're living the entrepreneurs dream of you build your business, you make your money, and then you give back which they say that it feels better than anything else. Right? It feels like you're at the point where you've, you're kind of at the peak and you give back and you kind of make make wait for the next generation. And so they're just closing the door behind you. And so Ross at success cap.com is where you can get that conversation with Ross going where he can just give you these materials for free and help you get on your way. And speaking of helping that next batch of people, as we went out our conversation Ross, it's always fun for me to put my guests on the spot and ask them about what advice they'd wish they'd gotten 20 years ago. And you've mentioned all these things so far about, you know, past mistakes, things you've learned from. And so what comes to mind here, when I say what advice do you wish you'd gotten 20 years ago?

Speaker 2 23:00 All right. So there's like, for my for my business with what I did it connected investors, I did not care about SEO, search engine optimization. And it was the biggest oversight, that I made some other companies that were focused on that. They just, they just had a huge competitive advantage. So that's what I would say when it comes to business. But just to the everyday entrepreneur, just being ridiculously serious about the bookmarks of your day, the start of your day and the end of your day. I mean, you have to like even if it's five minutes, 10 minutes on each side. Never give those up no matter what's going on. And you will achieve success faster than you ever thought you ever thought possible. So those bookmarks your day are really, really important.

Robert Plank 23:57 I love it, you tapped into something amazing here. I was just talking to my wife this morning about how she made the mistake this morning of checking her email first thing and she had all these emails and all these fires to put out and it just said it ruin your whole day. And it's one of those counterintuitive things you don't realize how important it is. And I love your advice there of focus on SEO and that's what you're doing here right? It's kind of on brand with you as far as being on on a podcast. That way you can tap into my audience and that way you can rank for other keywords and double on brand because you said earlier that you're all about Crete doing the marketing first before the product. So this way you're being on podcast you're getting the SEO figured out as you're forming your your next step thing and getting your name out there and affordable housing. And so that's such a good advice of focusing on SEO and getting the ball rolling early. But then also that mental game aspect you said there of mind the beginning and end bookmarks every day. Don't start and end your day on your phone or on a computer do something that sets you up for success for today and for tomorrow. So I love it. That Ross at success camp.com is the way that we can keep this conversation going. And I appreciate you so much Ross for getting me excited and giving me all kinds of fun ideas and insights. So I really appreciate you.

Unknown Speaker 25:13 Yeah, it was great to be here. Thank you so much.

Robert Plank 25:18 This is Robert plank from DF Why podcast.com forward Slash Free. Me and my team are super excited to jump into your podcast, whether it already exists, whether it's brand new, whether it's just in the idea stage, set up a call and contact us today claim your free gift at dfi podcast.com/free and we will see you there