Thirteen years ago, Joshua Dorkin’s friends teased him about starting a website that seemed to have no future.
“I would get calls from my buddies who would literally call me on my cell phone [and say] ‘Hey Josh, we just walked past a penny on the ground. We were thinking about picking it up and mailing it to you.”
At the time, Dorkin had just launched BiggerPockets, a then-nascent website about real estate investing.
“I was working a full-time job making no money as a teacher,” Dorkin says, “… and then [I] quit that job, reliable income, to blindly create this platform for other people. And I was helping other people get rich, and I was broke.”
Dorkin spent the next 8 years working mostly as a one-man operation as he tried to monetize a fledgling website.
“We were struggling and scraping by on every AdSense check that we could collect,” Dorkin says. “The business really wasn’t making serious money for probably getting close to a decade.”
The story has a happy ending. Today, BiggerPockets has grown to more than 870,000 members. The podcast has almost 250 episodes and the blog features more than 8,100 articles.
In today’s episode, I have a heart-to-heart with BiggerPockets founder Joshua Dorkin about the blood, sweat and tears that’s required to start a successful online business. What lessons did he learn along the way? What regrets does he hold? And what advice would he share with other aspiring online entrepreneurs?
We don’t talk about real estate investing in today’s episode. Instead, Joshua and I focus on the harsh realities of growing an digital empire.
Enjoy!
Resources Mentioned:
- BiggerPockets
- @JRDorkin on Twitter
Thanks to our sponsors!
Regardless of whether or not you’re carrying any debt, maintaining healthy credit is important if you want to buy houses (residential or investment properties). So if you want to check your credit score for free, plus get personalized tips about managing your finances, check out Credit Sesame.
This website is absolutely free. You don’t need to present any payment information to create an account. As a bonus, with your membership, you also get free identity theft insurance worth up to $50,000.
It’s great to know what your credit score is and to get educational content on how to improve it, so check them out!
You’re busy. You don’t need to junk up your schedule with mundane tasks.
Here’s a question: if you’re an entrepreneur or someone with a side hustle, how much time do you spend organizing invoices, chasing your clients down for late payments, and messing with receipts and reimbursements?
Yeah — more than you’d like to.
Save time by using Freshbooks, an easy-to-use, cloud-based accounting system that takes the stress and hassle out of bookkeeping and, especially, invoicing. You can create an invoice in a few seconds, and Freshbooks’ automated system will handle the rest. They’ll help you get paid faster, with less hassle.
Wanna try them for free?
Visit Freshbooks.com/paula for a free 30-day trial. Please mention this show when they ask how you heard about them.
