G'morning to everyone except the person who ratted us out for starting work without permits in hand.

Savage. 🙅🏽‍♂️

☀️

Livin' La Vida Luna y Luca

A few months ago, I hired YouTube Production Agency, Dragonfruit Media, to help me get back into creating video content.

We started publishing to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube around Feb 1, 2023.

Since then, my YouTube and Instagram channels have generated 100,000 views.

TikTok has been a bust.

Working with Dragonfruit has been a great experience.

The People

The people at Dragonfruit are amazing.

The founder, Adrian, is admittedly an excellent salesman. Our initial calls were formatted as interviews to see if we were a fit for each other. In reality, they were sales calls.

He was great at helping me discover my pain points. Talking to him was like talking to an old friend and business coach in one.

Michael, the CEO, is equally impressive. I did my first "Prompt Session" (more on this later) with him and he made it super fun and engaging.

Not only that, but he types wicked fast so as I was telling him my stories, he was able to craft engaging outlines on the fly.

Then there's Kirstie and Kim. Kirstie is an account manager and Kim is an account associate. They are who I interacted with most. They are both fun, professional, and easy to talk to.

I'll miss them the most (more on this later too).

The System / Process

Here's the monthly cadence we stuck to:

One 90-minute prompt session over Zoom.

Kirstie came to the call with dozens of prompts.

• What's the biggest lesson you learned as a real estate investor?
• What do most people not know about buying property?
• Why is real estate investing not for everyone?
• Should you buy real estate in your personal name or LLC?

These prompts weren't pulled out of thin air. She did her research.

During my intake, I filled out a form that identified accounts that I'd like to model.

Kirstie and Kim would then monitor those accounts and see what videos were outperforming and try to get me to provide similar value but with my own spin.

Scripting

Once we were done with the prompt session, Kirstie would send the Zoom recording and her notes to a copywriter who put together 25-30 scripts.

90-minute pre-recording Session

Once the scripts came back, we'd hop on another Zoom call and go through all the scripts and edit them to fit my voice / style.

I had the freedom to discard any script I didn't like or rewrite any script that didn't appropriately catch the essence of what I was trying to say.

Recording: ~2 hours

Once the scripts are finalized, it's on me to record. Each video takes me anywhere from 5-7 minutes to record and I only do 4-8 at a time.

So it takes me roughly 4-5 recording sessions to get a full month's worth of content recorded.

Uploading

As soon as I'm done recording, I upload the raw video to a shared DropBox and then my job for that month is pretty much done.

Editing

The editors do their magic and turn my 5-7 minute raw video of mumbo jumbo into a <1-minute video that makes me look like I know what I'm talking about.

Those videos are uploaded to a service called Frame.io and I'm able to make comments directly on the video's timeline if I want any changes.

I think I requested 1 or 2 changes per month. And they were sound / lighting related.

As far as the jump cuts, zoom cuts, and b-roll goes - I was really happy with it all. Dragonfruit has a talented roster of editors.

Publishing & Distribution

I think Kim handles publishing the videos across all my channels. Kirstie might have her hand in it too, but I'm not sure. The fact that I don't know the who, what, where, when, and why of publishing is a feature, not a bug.

I don't want to know. I just want it done.

The only things I want to be involved in are ideation, script editing, and obviously the recording. The reason I hired this agency is because they handled EVERYTHING else seamlessly.

Moving On

Despite the early success in vanity metrics (views), I don't think I'll continue my engagement with Dragonfruit in the immediate future.

Without disclosing how much I paid for 3 months of service (because I think they have a dynamic pricing model), I can't justify the cost to continue this experiment without a clear path to monetization.

It's a shame - because the feedback on my videos has been excellent.

With that said, I need to shift my focus from content creation to offer creation.

I might spend all of Q3 coming up with various offers that I can then funnel my traffic to.

So far I have the following ideas:

• Real Estate Investor's Guide to FOMO (Finding Off-Market Opportunities)
• Real Estate Investor's Guide to RPM (Raising Private Money)
• Something about Personal Finance

Anything else you think I'm uniquely qualified to teach?