Denver VCs advised Josh Dorkin to shut down BiggerPockets
Josh Dorkin · From Zero to 2M+: How Josh Dorkin Built the Bigger Pockets Community · Mar 3, 2023 · at 12:23
BiggerPockets founder Josh Dorkin explains early investor rejection when seeking venture funding around year three or four of building the real estate community platform.
0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 24.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I went and talked to a couple of venture capitalists in Denver where I was living about it. And You know, ask them, hey, what do you think about this? You know, what can we do with this? Or, you know, is this something that is fundable? And they both told me to just shut it down. They, you know, they said there's no, this has no legs. You know, there's no need for something like this.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Josh Dorkin
Dorkin: Telling new forum users to search old threads damages community culture
“When you run to pretty much any community, you'll see, like, the experienced guys always, like, there'll be, like, a new question that comes out, and they'll be like, well, have you gone and read, you know, all the other forum questions? Have you searched? You…”
Dorkin: True Community Requires Members Interacting Unguided Amongst Themselves
“Like, a community isn't a community even when you're interacting with your fans. That's not a community either. A community becomes a community, I believe, when you're interacting with your fans and They're interacting amongst themselves. Unguided. You know, t…”
Dorkin: Successful communities require strict rule enforcement despite pushback
“Enforcing those rules is really hard and you get a lot of people who push back against them and, you know, in order to be successful, you have to stand up for what's right.”
Josh Dorkin bootstrapped BiggerPockets for eight years with no outside capital
“And I never took a penny from anyone. You know, I started with my four dollar a month hosting and that was the only money I ever applied into that business was the first four bucks and then the next four bucks and the next four bucks, but like beyond that, I b…”
Josh Dorkin refused personal sponsor endorsements hosting the BiggerPockets podcast
“I don't think in hundreds and hundreds of episodes that, that I hosted the BiggerPockets podcast, I don't think I ever did a single endorsement.”
Dorkin: Broadening BiggerPockets beyond real estate investors eroded differentiation
“If you go too broad, I made the mistake of at one point going too broad and year eight, I discovered it because I said, Hey, bigger pockets is going to be everything for everyone. Real estate. And suddenly like I stopped focusing specifically on investors and …”