Josh Dorkin, founder of real estate community BiggerPockets, discusses maintaining creator credibility by strictly separating third-party ads from personal endorsements.
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Denver VCs advised Josh Dorkin to shut down BiggerPockets
“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 t…”
Disclosure
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…”
Insight
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 …”