WS1209: Building a Million-Dollar Real Estate Business From Scratch with William Brown

EPISODE 1209

[INTRODUCTION]

0:00:00.0 WILLIAM BROWN I was living like this life at the time and through my teens where I had the world that I had to be a part of school and stuff in the world that I wanted to be a part of, hanging out with friends, playing video games, things like that. I never thought I would be able to reconcile those worlds. I always felt like there’d be a part of me that just had to do the things I didn’t wanna do, and then there was a part of me that I actually got to do the things that I enjoyed, and real estate was the bridge. The real estate I saw that I could play the economy game, I could play the financial game, I could play the buy-and-sell game and use that, use the exact skills and things that I’d love to do inherently as like a pure bred entrepreneur and actually use that bridge that go and build a life that I want to live.

[INTERVIEW]

00:00:35.000

Whitney Sewell: This is your daily real estate syndication show. I’m your host, Whitney Sewell. Today, our guest is Will Brown. 

Will is the CEO of TitanX a company committed to building the world’s smoothest customer experience to context-based natural language understanding technology. He plans to transform modern customer service in every industry through the use of smooth and intuitive AI wall laying the foundation for a future where human-computer communication is seamless and drastically lowers the learning curve for people across the world who will need re-skilling due to humanity’s transition into the artificial intelligence age. In his free time, Will loves to hang with friends and spend time in nature, learn unique skill sets. 

Will has a background in real estate. He is now into TitanX, the other company that he has started. But some cool things you are going to learn about Will is, I think he’s 22 years old. He has accomplished a lot before the age of 22 and a lot in real estate, and we’re gonna talk about some of that today. As I interview somebody to like Will, who is just after it, right at me is 22, he’s already done a lot in real estate, it should help just blow some limiting beliefs for you out of the water, right? 

And we’ve heard that when many years ago, you know it’s like, “Oh, you have not done this long enough yet,” or you feel like you can’t do it because you’re not experiencing that for old enough yet. Will is just not letting anything like that hold him back and you’re gonna hear that today, but he surpassed that many times over. 

But I hope that it’s encouraging to you as you have those limiting beliefs and are wondering, “Hey, can I do this? Can I step out?” You know, it’s hard to be uncomfortable, right? Well, Will is gonna help you with that today. But we’re gonna go into some morning routine stuff as well, and even just wanting most people aren’t doing it, right? 

He’s the youngest guy in the room, and I was at GoBundance with him, and he is like this guy in the room, you know, about 300 guys in there that are all doing amazing things. And so I just hope that you learn a lot from Will today and are encouraged and that you lose some of those limiting beliefs because of the discussion today. 

Here we are at GoBundance, from the real estate syndication show. The listeners, you have not heard me from GoBundance or from too many remote locations, but I’m excited to be here this week, and an event with some amazing entrepreneurs we interview every day, and I’m so grateful to you’re with us again today ’cause I have another amazing entrepreneur, the name is Will Brown. Will, welcome to the show.

00:03:05.000

William Brown: Hey, thanks so much, Whitney. Great to be here.

00:03:07.000

WS: Will has an amazing story that I know is going to encourage you and you are going to learn a lot. They’re more of, I’m learning about him, even just in the last 30 minutes, I’m just excited to present him to you in his story. I just wanna get right into it Will because so encouraged myself even by what I know about you. He’s gonna blow some limiting beliefs that I know that you have, we have all had at some time or another, and so this is gonna be a very helpful podcast if you’re getting started in this business. Really almost in so many parts of your life most likely, it doesn’t have to be real estate investing or even a real estate business. I’m looking forward to this. You know, you’re about 22 right now?

00:03:41.000

WB: Yeah, that’s right.

00:03:42.000

WS: You have done some big things and you started years ago, now, you know, in real estate and business. I wanna go back a little bit further because I feel like part of that story is helpful for probably many listening right now who are thinking a lot of things and what you and I talked about just a couple of minutes ago, and why, you know, the college thing and all of that. So I wanna go back at that time and get us started a little bit, that journey you were in college and what happened and why, and let’s move from there.

00:04:08.000

WB: You know, totally. If I get your partnership in this, this can be a conversation and, you know, for me to even understand, you know, to how did I get to do the things I’m doing, the things I’m thinking in the way that I’m going about it, you know, here at 22, if we can answer that question over the course of this conversation, that’s a win for me, ’cause sometimes I don’t know. I can’t always put the pieces together, but if I go back to the beginning, I grew up on a farm in Northern Virginia and my closest friend was like a mile away in (inaudible), so I spent a lot of time playing in nature and just being bored. 

And then as I started to get into a little bit more school, I learned about some very fascinating statistics, like in the third grade. I don’t know where, how I found them, but I saw that 70% of people don’t like their jobs. Like they actually hate their job, 70% of Americans and then further, like 67% of people who get a college degree do not work inside the field that they got the degree for it. And so, I discovered that I was like, “Wait for a second, why is nobody talking about this?” Pretty much what that meant is when my teachers told me things I didn’t blindly trust them, I took everything they say with a grain of salt. Because look, if these are the statistics and you’re gonna put me on an elementary school, middle school, high school to college to job route, you know, large numbers says I’m probably gonna fall into those statistics. I just started to ask questions at a very young age. I think that’s different than what maybe some of my peers or classmates were asking and I was like, “What would it look like if I put my life into my own hands? 

You know, what would look like in a carve of my own path? What if I model the people who live the lives that I wanna live rather than just resigning to the system and it’s gonna dump me wherever it dumps me?” And so my first 18 years of, you know, school, I sort of had that percolating and that those thoughts were growing louder and louder and louder. My frustration with the system was growing louder and louder. Whenever we had to write essays, like English class, I’d always write essays about why the education system is outdated. My English teachers, they did not like that. But where that sort of ended up is I had this pivotal moment. I went to the seminar with my mom in 2016, weekend seminar for real estate. What they were teaching was single family off-market acquisitions, wholesaling, I was like, “I don’t know if this is legitimate, I don’t know if this is legal, but if it is, I wanna learn everything I can about this.” 

And so at the time, I was really big into video games because that was my outlet, that was ability for me to carve and create the reality that I wanted to live in ’cause school was super boring to me, and I just did not like where that path was gonna end up. I went to the seminar and they came back and my head started spinning and the seed was planted. And they wanted to, you know, upsell my mom and I $20,000 that we did not have to go to the boots-on-the-ground training, and so we’re pissed off about that. But a couple of months later after that seed had been planting, it started the journey. And it started the journey one day when I was playing a video game and they came out of this update, we could buy a property, and I was like, “You know what? I wanna start doing this in real life,” and I unplugged my Xbox at the time and I went online, found bigger pockets, I bought a bunch of books, and literally every single spare second I had for about the next year and a half when I was in high school, just been diving into entire, learning the entirety of the real estate space.

00:06:52.000

WS: So that was while you were in high school? That was before you ever went to college. Oh, actually, I wanna go back a little further. You grew up on a farm. What did you all do on your farmer?

00:06:59.000

WB: Yeah, so we had vineyards. We did wine, that night I sort of learned, you know, one year it was frost that kills it, another year it was bugs that killed it, and so I saw my parents sort of tried to do a multiple full-time jobs. Both blood parents were landscape architects, and so it didn’t successfully pull off the winery, and then we had hay and a couple of animals as well.

00:07:15.000

WS: How do you feel, or do you, like growing up on a farm affected your entrepreneurialship? You know, your journey.

00:07:20.000

WB: You know, I think I’ll probably be answering that question my entire life. I think it’s… what it created was sort of this green field, you know, blue sky mentality. It wasn’t like, you know, in this little house in an alleyway and the entire world was my street. You know what I mean? I could look around, I could see, you know, meadows for miles, and it was really beautiful and it’s just, I think, probably allowed my creativity to blossom, my ability to ask questions and not always just try and find like what’s gonna be the bare minimum path for survival, but how can we really thrive? How can I create a life that’s beautiful? Just like what my parents had created, they both grew up very poor, and then they moved to North Virginia and got this awesome house and in this amazing farm, and I’m so blessed villa. Start life there, that’s the biggest blessing and privilege that I had.

00:08:03.000

WS: That’s awesome. I also grew up on a farm. I feel like the early on that was so good for me. I had to be up early, you know, marking stalls before I went to school, right? You know, doing those things, I feel like that instilled many things in me that I still have… have just helped me as an entrepreneur, you know, in business, in many ways, so it’s interesting that you bring that up. 

But you learned or you figured out that most people go to college and they don’t love what they’re doing, and most don’t even end up in a field at what they went to school to study for, right? And so what really turned you on to that, or what helped you to see that? Because I feel like as even my children, I think, “How can I help them to see that?” Right? How can I help them to want to be entrepreneurs, right, and to see that it’s so limitless, right? You do not have to go down this path, right, that most people do and be so limited. How… what really turned you on to that? Sound like your mother even took you to a real estate seminar, but that maybe that was after you were already, like desiring something different.

00:08:57.000

WB: Yeah, I’ve come to think recently that, you know, we were hunter gatherers and then we were an agrarian society, and so if you think about that, that is more entrepreneurial than the Industrial Revolution. We have an education system that’s built to create workers for the Industrial Revolution. This is not controversial, this is very clear, and you go to the time frame was like, “Oh, I started to connect the dots” and I started to see how they weren’t giving me the tools for me to create myself to be whoever they wanna be, they were… It seemed like trying to mold me in a way that would fit the system and the need for labor and workers, which has been happening and which has been needed for the last 50 to 100, 150 years, but society is rapidly evolving. 

Like with the advent of the internet age and how decentralized information is and how I could go and learn anything that I wanted to, you know, in a split second asking a question into my phone, it’s like the world is much different, this sort of strategy that they’re giving me on how to grow up. And so I basically said, “No, I’m gonna take a risk” and keep asking questions and make decisions for myself rather than blindly accepting that. And I think the default has that been that. I don’t have a lot of that programming, just because I put into short-term memory, I’d always study right before tests, I didn’t think the material was relevant to my life and then I would forget it. I don’t know why I cared to get like ACE tests, some reason is still a part of that incentive structure, but I didn’t wanna clog my brain with the irrelevant things, I wanted to mold myself to be someone that could look at things newly and provide new solutions and opportunities.

00:10:17.000

WS: That’s interesting that you had that drive even at such a young age. It’s very rare. However, you know, you started… you went to that seminar, how old were you in seminar, and did that really spark you into real estate? 

00:10:29.000

WB: It absolutely did. Yeah, it was a… it was a pedal moment and I was 16, and I was 16 and I was realizing, I had this crazy thought, ’cause I was just learning how to drive, I was like, “Wow, everybody here knows how to drive. That’s crazy.” And I was like, “Huh, people can… things come with age, “but then I realized the insecurity that I first fell of basically being 16 years old in a room full with 30, 40, 50, 60-year-olds, I was like, you know, first, I don’t belong here. And the second was, “Wait a second, I’ve never met somebody who could trade their money for a longer life,” and I realized I was… if I considered myself to be the wealthiest person in that room, that was a much more empowering belief. I believe we choose our own beliefs. We can either choose the reactive one, that one to keep us safe and keep us in our side of our comfort zone, which is, “Hey, this isn’t for me. I should probably go back to the path with the rest of the people my age,” but then I was like, “Wow, I have a massive opportunity here to learn from others and also be a contribution” and see, I was literally where could I be if I was to implement these things here at 16, 17, 18, 19 rather than 50, 67 and I was like, “How much more of a contribution could I be to the world? And to myself and to my family if I did that?”

00:11:31.000

WS: What gave you the desire to do that? And I just wanna… I’m not gonna spend a ton more time with this, I wanna get to some bigger things to you, you know, or the rest of your journey ’cause it’s gonna be so helpful to the listeners, but it’s so rare as 16 to put the Xbox down or to, you know, to see the opportunity there and to harness it. And I just recently my niece and nephew reminds me of my nephew, I think he’s 17 now, and my niece 13. I gave them two books, and I’m paying them to read like some specific books. I want to change the way they think about entrepreneurship and real estate and money and just life, right, in many ways. I found that even offering to pay them, there’s almost no drive still to do it, you know it’s like, “Oh, come on,” you know, but you did that. You noticed the opportunity and man, you pursue it. What happened by the time? Great team.

00:12:20.000

WB: Yes, so my fuel compounded frustration for 15 years, right? It was not like… And again, if I go back to all the exact events to be very fascinating, I’m still trying to answer that question myself and say, “How did I get the spark?” But I was desperate and I was like, “Wow.” I was living like this life at the time, and through my teens where I had the world that I had to be a part of, school, and stuff in the world that I wanted to be a part of hanging out with friends, playing video games, things like that. I never thought I would be able to reconcile those worlds. I always felt like there’d be a part of me that just had to do the things I didn’t wanna do, and then there was a part of me that I actually got to do the things that I enjoyed. And real estate was the bridge. The real estate I saw that I could play the economy game, I could play the financial game, I could play the buy-and-sell game and use that, use the exact skills and things that I’d love to do inherently as like a pure bred entrepreneur, and actually use that bridge that go and build a life that I wanna live. 

And so once I saw that the bridge could be built, I took all the energy from one and just funneled it together. And so by the time I was 18, I had probably 500 podcasts listened to under my belt, I was going to (inaudible). I was, you know, since in college, I was leaving my classes early to go drive a couple of hours to (inaudible). I met a couple of mentors. I met a mentor, and I was basically… I remember I was just setting up a security camera at one of his full houses, and there was a conversation that we had that really changed my life there too, ’cause at the time I was sort of buying and selling stuff like buy-and-sell electronics, and he was demoing a property. There were some like nice Ray Ban sunglasses. It was like, “Oh, these are worth 70 bucks. That’s awesome.” And I was like, “Hey man, if I take this stuff and sell it, we split 50-50,” he’s like, “Man, you can take it for free. I don’t care,” I was like, “Why?” He’s like, “‘Cause I’m like 100 times that flipping this property,” and that’s when I started to discovered dollar-productive activities and the ability to use leverage, and then I just continued to compound that. 

May of 2018 is when I left college. I went down to Norfolk, I was going to college of William and Mary in Williamsburg, went down, met up with a couple of guys from the Navy who were at this  as well. They were sort of like wanting to get to the Navy, start this as well, sleep on air mattress for the first couple months, making cold calls, going to the courthouse to get probate, just like really dig in the trenches, not knowing it now, but I learned that the morning routine was everything. So I started getting up early, I started reading books every single morning. Even though it felt cheesy and it felt artificial and it felt like I was stepping in the shoes much bigger than the ones I could fill, I kept that consistent practice up and inside of that, learn some very fundamental strategies of just how to organize, you know, your time and how to organize your focus and your energy, and most importantly, the things not to do, right? As soon as you do a $10,000 deal, don’t go buy an $8,000 car. You know, basic things like this, that conventional wisdom says, as soon as people like can afford something they go and leverage themselves up to the hilt with that.

00:14:48.000

WS: Especially at 18.

00:14:49.000

WB: A hundred percent. 

00:14:50.000

WS: And that’s so impressive though, that you did that. Tell me about, you know, how the family… how your family saw this? So we didn’t go into much of that, but you were in college for a year, you dropped out, and I wanted you to highlight there like why you saw that option or it was okay for you to leave college and quit that to go pursue something else?

00:15:12.000

WB: Yeah, I think there’s something very interesting about that because I actually didn’t wanna go to college ’cause I was getting… it was probably like 300 podcasts in by the time high school ended, but I did not have means to… I couldn’t even sign on the dotted line for properties, even though I was going up close. If I actually find a deal, I’ll have to have my parents sign, like that’s pretty embarrassing, but it didn’t stop me. 

And so, I’ve really got acknowledge my parents, because from a very young age they didn’t try and steer me to a path, they always steer me to, “Will, you make your own choices. We recommend you make the choices that are gonna give you the most options.” And from a parenting standpoint, I don’t know if there’s better advice, because what you’re basically seeing is “Hey, make choices to set yourself up to choose the life that you wanna live,” and so I don’t think they were happy when I did get into… when I got that offer letter said, “Yeah, this is fine, but I’m probably gonna drop out anyway.” You know, I think sometimes we say things and then those things come true. I think actually all the time we say them, if there’s a belief behind it, they come through over a certain amount of time. 

And so, with it they were concerned as any parents probably should be, but I think they also had seen that this wasn’t like, yeah you know, sort of flimsy with a commitment. They seen me for the last couple of years, changed my entire life, changed my habits, even at a high school, and I would lock my door when I was listening to podcasts and taking notes on, so they won’t disturb me. I miss dinners. So they saw the commitment and I think they had the faith that they needed to, they were still definitely gravely concerned probably because they went the college route, and so on my older brother, he went to college route. But, you know, then we a couple of months later we lockdown our first couple of deals, and I started to say, “Hey, this is actually working,” and then we just scaled up from there.

00:16:37.000

WS: That’s awesome. I love thinking through the parenting aspect of that as well. I was also in… my mom has supported me in every endeavor, you know, and pursued just the best for me, you know, and encouraged me, and which has been amazing, however, most of our family would have said, “Hey, you need that diploma, need that to go have a great job and have that security,” right? And I did not go to college though, either. It turned out quite well. I’m thankful now that I did not, ’cause I think that would have changed the projector in my entire life. 

So a couple of things you said there though, and I didn’t even know we were gonna talk about this, but I have talked about it many times on the show because this changed my business as well, once I was very purposeful with my time in my morning routine like that is when I started unleashing like education that I had not had time for before. I started learning faster than I had ever learned before, and things that I could start doing to make things happen, right? It was that morning routine. Go into your morning routine a little bit, and I still wanna get more into real estate and even what you’re doing now and how that’s changed over the last couple of years. Tell us about your morning routine and why that’s so crucial, maybe some details of how you structure that. 

And I love how you say it seems so mundane, and yes, most podcasts you hear somebody talk about morning routine, and a lot of people shake it off, you know, “I’m not a morning person or whatever,” I would say, “Hey, I try to tell myself that as well,” you know and started my wife, right? And then when I started getting up early, eventually she started getting up early and it’s become our favorite time of the day, you know together. It’s been just crucial in our relationship and entrepreneurial journey. Tell me that some highlights of your morning routine that’s been essential for your success.

00:18:16.000

WB: Yeah, and my morning routine has evolved over the years, and it’s sort of fluctuated, I think in tandem with depending on the work that I was doing, how much structure and rigor versus how much creativity was required. And so if I go back to 2018, and I go back to doing these first couple of deals, my morning routine was waking up at 5:00 AM, drinking a cup of black coffee and jumping right into, like a cold shower, jumping right into the books. And I think I wanna do this because I wanted to build an identity for myself, how I saw myself, consistent with who I saw I needed to be… to pull off what I wanted to pull up. And so that was the biggest part of it, is when you, you know, wake up and you say you win that first decision, your day. First of all, I hate getting up early. 

I still hate getting up early, I love my sleep, and I love to sleep 10 hours pretty much on the dot, I just let myself sleep. And I also, like now have built incredible communities, and so sometimes I stay up later doing some awesome things with people. I’m still sort of trying to reconcile that but there are some times, like over this last year, and we’ll talk about the tech, then a building now, where it wasn’t so much about me getting up and hitting the phones, it was about me being able to be the most creative person I could be and be able to see things without stress and without that, and so sometimes in over course of month, I let myself sleep in much more. Really, really just depends. I’m at the stage now here as we’re launching this product, we build it over the last two years, where I’m like, really, I feel like I’m scratching this habit and I wanna get back to that structure, and it is one of the hardest things. I think habits are so hard to break, and so for me, what usually that comes down to is a cold water therapy, which is I have roommates or people that live around me, if we’re not up or meeting here at a certain time, get a classic cold water on my face, that tends to do it for me.

00:19:50.000

WS: That’s some accountability right there, I like that. I’ll have to… I’ll have to tell my wife that I’m gonna start trying that with her, right? Though kidding, of course. You know, and I’m not gonna keep on about the morning routine, but I hear people, like you said often say, “Oh, that’s not for me.” I (inaudible)  that’s not important. You don’t have to do that to be successful.” Well no, you don’t have to, but you know I’ve interviewed, I don’t know, over 1,300 people over the last three or four years, and more times than not, the ones that are very successful, I would say 80% of the time, guess what they have a structured morning routine, they do. You know, you mentioned it at one point early on, it’s like finding the people that are doing what you wanna do. 

What are they doing to make it happened? It’s not rocket science, right? So let’s go figure some of those things out and meet those people and start figuring out the habits that they have. Okay, so I wanna move forward a little bit, you got into real estate, you started, were you flipping homes? What were you doing?

00:20:37.000

WB: I was just wholesaling, contracting assignments to contract. 

00:20:40.000

WS: So you started wholesaling, how did that transition? What happened in your real estate business? How did that grow? What did that look like over that, you know, you started at 18 wholesaling, give us the transition there, maybe how that whole wholesaling business grew within what it changed into.

00:20:53.000

WB: Yeah, I think probably the biggest takeaway is, like I said, it’s about 10,000 hours of research, and I’d probably put another 250 hours of actually taking action and then dropped to school May of 2018. We didn’t close our first deal until July 18th of 2018, and so it was just quite a long road, and on our first deal, I’m calling my title at turning a good friend of mine and John, he’s like, “Yeah, well, you know pretty much everything that could have gone wrong here went wrong, and I’m happy for you… for that, right, because you’re not really gonna be faced.” 

And so we did the first one July and we did two in August, and then like four in the next month to get to the point where a year later I did about 100 and it just scaled up, and I have this sort of interesting pivotal moment in my life in March of 2019. I was part of a mastermind group, you know, it’s called M1, march to a million net worth. And what attracted me about this group was people thought bigger and people question the realities, and they’re so weird for me to find that at that time. And so we do this, and we all decided to stay an extra day and we’re in a hot tub. We start asking questions that they use on a path of pretty much a 10-hour conversation, and something caused me to wanna turn on the voice recorder in my phone. And at the end of the 10-hour conversation, my life was completely different because I was at this point where from looking at, you know, less than one year before dropping out of school, $30 night out, sleeping on an air mattress. 

Two, having seen that I leveraged all the education that I have. I’ve seen the entire market and saw that my access point, a lot of people, I think wanna find the formula and to some degree modeling someone that works, but I was just so impatient. I don’t wanna spend 30 years to get swear, somebody who’s 30 years ahead of me, is I wanted to see how can I find that, not a cheat code, but what’s the shortest path for me to actually create and provide value? 

And so one of the biggest revelations I had listen to these podcasts was that I kept hearing again and again, and to get people from all walks of life didn’t have anything, figure out a way to make it happen, and then they had money, track records and networks. They had all of it, probably more than you could ever need. And what was fascinating to me as I was like, “Okay, well, I don’t have any of those things” right? I’m 16, 17, 18 years old. What are they still missing? What’s still bottleneck-ing their business? And every single time, it came down to one thing: consistent access to off-market deals. Light bulb went off in my head, you can buy a nicer car with more money, you can buy an watch with more money, you cannot buy a nice a real estate deal with more money because the definition of deal is that it’s discounted, like that’s interesting. 

And then I looked at that and I was like, okay, well, if I can have 100 conversations with people a day, right, and I can find people who are in situations where they would rather choose speed and convenience over getting absolute highest price, I was like, I would be able to carve out a margin. Average at about 14,000 and we do that 150 times. And that got me to the point where I was in March of 2019 in this hot tub, like I’m not to scale this up to the entire country, and so I wanted to move it to all 50 markets, and I had this weight, but why moment? And I was like, “Well, why do I wanna do that?” And then I got connected to some of my goals. And when I was in college, when I was really lacking direction, I wanted to find a North Star goal, and I was like, I love space, love space since I was a kid, and I figure colonizing Mars is already pretty mainstream, or it’s gonna be in the next few years, which I’m very happy about, you know, go humanity. But Titan was an interesting thing for me. Titan is Saturn’s largest Moon, and it’s very interesting as a planet, I won’t go deep deep into it, but was like, yeah, I’m gonna colonize Titan by 2050, and in all the groups and all people, I declared that as a declaration. Everyone told me I was crazy. That was still my Northstar. 

And I saw that order to do that, right, I need billions of dollars, I need an entire army, I would be able to… I need to learn leadership, I need to be able to do so many different things that I don’t have. And I realized that getting to flipping a couple of thousand homes was kind of boring way to get there, and so I was like, “How can I figure out what this problem is, that allows me to actually make 14,000 per flip? And how can I build a solution that scales to provide a higher quality of service for people that wanted to sell their house at a lower cost, and I think that’s where value gets created.

00:24:29.000

WS: Wow, okay. So you found a goal, you found some (inaudible) goal, right? And tell us a little bit about though the path to making that happen. Right, I’m sure many hard lessons, many long nights, lots of hours, work, all those things, right? I wanna go back to ’cause, you know, you showed that you would do that even when you were under high school, you were learning about real estate, right, then you start, you leave college, you’re gonna do the wholesaling business, you’re putting in the time, right, you’re willing to put in the hours, and that’s what most people are not willing to do, right? Yeah, I think you mentioned it earlier as well, they look for this cookie-cutter formula, “Hey, you know, how do I get there?” 

But they’re not always willing to do what it takes to make it happen, and you prove that numerous times now, and now, you also set this goal TitanX, right? You know, tell us a little bit more about, you know, moving to that goal. Tell us a little bit of a learning experience and even moving from, say, specifically real estate into this different venture.

00:25:23.000

WB: Yeah, the nice thing is I’ve been extremely humbled by it over the last two years, because real estate it is, there’s not as nearly as many variables as when you build software, and then software is like, you know, here and then artificial intelligence is orders of magnitude higher. and so TitanX is the name of the company, it used to be called Achieve Intelligent Technologies, but they were like, that doesn’t… what happens when we have intelligent technology, right? It’s sort of confusing, and so stands for TitanX experiences, the world’s smoothest customer experience. And when I was looking for what I wanted to do upon that, I didn’t wanna, you know, suck value from the role on. I waned to create value, I want to increase the quality of life and decrease the cost of living for everybody who touched my work. 

And so, founded this company and, basically, I wanted to build a super intelligent personal assistance. I wanted to build an intelligent assistant that was able to understand your goals, understand your habits and actually work with you, meeting you where you’re at with what you want to get there, leveraging AI. 

Right now, the tools are… there’s good tools there, but I was like no product that’s gonna change the world, it’s gonna be one that you have to spend half your life in putting data about your life. I wanted something that’d be very seamless, I could understand the contextual ambiguities of what somebody wanted and so I thought this technology of human computer communication existed, I seriously thought it did. Turns out it doesn’t, turns out chatbots are terrible, it turns out that’s why we wait on hold. 

And when I was sort of in this transition period, I remember, you know, I was on a call with the utility company and they made me wait on hold for like two and a half hours and hung up on me twice. It’s like how are we putting people on the moon 50 years ago, right? But this is still the case of customer service. I was like, if I don’t do anything else in my life, if I solve customer service, I will put myself on the back and feel like, you know, I did a job well done and created a lot of value. 

And so how it ties to real estate is real estate, I think gave me this confidence that I would be able to look in industry, see what are all the people, who are all the players, first of all, and then what do all those players have, and then what do they not have, and then how can I just focus on the things that they don’t have? Because I don’t really compete. I don’t really have a lot of competition in the space. There’s some companies doing the same thing, but is kinda like the same thing with wholesale, it was like, I don’t really have a lot of competition because even though it’s super saturated, ’cause I went and I spent the time to learn the fundamental mechanics of how real estate works and how marketing works, and how the seller’s mind work, where things are going as it shifts with the market. And so all of that has come together, and now I’ve been able to fuse sort of that real estate. Kind of like I was saying earlier about the, you know, video game world and then reality of fusing two worlds organic together, which is my experience with real estate and this technology and building tools for investors to basically automatically locate off-market deals and it’ll have the conversations with the sellers that’s gonna make the difference. 

And it has been the most challenging but rewarding thing in my life, and I still feel like I’m just getting started, and the more that I learn, I feel like the more that there is to know, which has caused me to come up with this kind of, you know, funny belief that feel like a symptom of getting truly wiser is feeling stupider because you get to see more of the world and how things work, and when I was in my own little vertical just you know, “Hey, I’m gonna do this,” whether the video games or, you know, inside of college, I was like, “this is the world.” As soon as you start going outside of that, the world is a lot bigger, and so inside that I’ve adopted here, one of the most valuable things which is that even though I’m, you know, in a different stage of life, I have something very, you know, to learn from each person and I’m very curious and ask incredibly like deep, sometimes cutting, sometimes offensive questions, not meaning to offend because I really want to understand that person in their walk, so I can learn from that and so I can contribute to the next person.

00:28:38.000

WS: Are you still in real estate? You’re still wholesaling or doing anything like that?

00:28:42.000

WB: Yeah, so I haven’t wholesale the house in two years but now that we’re in our final stage of beta testing I actually was like, “I’m gonna get back into this, I gotta walk my own talk.” And so to pull the trigger on some pretty big mail campaigns, generating traffic every day here, testing the technology that I’ve built day-in, day out for two years, and it’s been really great to come back.

00:28:59.000

WS: Wow. No, that’s incredible, I love that. It’s just interesting that oftentimes once we get that real estate bug, it’s like we start the wholesaling, we start flipping, maybe, you know, maybe some rehab, some single-family rentals and some smaller multi-family, then finally, maybe we get into commercial real estate, maybe we start sending, you know, get it larger and growing, right? Well, you saw this need and you just said, “You know what? Real estate is great.” I can see the need for that, and I love this business, but man, there’s a need here, there’s an opportunity that I can go capitalize on and help a lot of people in the process. 

And so I love that that you weren’t so laser-focused on real estate that you just have blinders on really, and that you miss this other opportunity that you pursued and what you just said, you know, all this growth that has come because of that. Just love the willingness to step out there. I would say all those things, you step out of your comfort zone, right? 

And that’s just another massive step, and I’m sure so much personal growth has come because of that. I’ve felt it myself, you know, numerous times as I’ve said, “You know what? I’ve agreed to do something, right?” And have no clue what’s gonna happen and so, I love that. I just appreciate you, just your transparency about that. I know there’s listeners who are wondering, right? Can I do that? Should step I out? Should I, you know, get into real estate? Should I start my own business? And so tell me though, what’s the biggest thing holding you back now from scaling to the next level?

00:30:15.000

WB: Yeah, so when I was first getting started, I heard this sort of like common limiting belief that we have which is, that keeps us lone-wolfing things, right, nobody can do it as good as I can. When you’re doing something that, you know, you’ve educated yourself on, you’ve built severe, you have a ton of practice, that’s absolutely sometimes can be true or can feel true. With software though, the limiting factor if it’s like a chemical reaction, what’s the thing that… what’s the element here that’s the least amount is my tech network? I’m real estate guy, I come from that, right? I didn’t work at these, the tech companies and seeing just how much of a different walk this is, and so being able to first bring on people who have walked the walk on to my team and build that network so I can have guides on this journey because this, it’s not even like it’s harder if I try and do it myself, it’s impossible. 

And I think that probably correlates to a lot of things, right? Like even with commercial real estate, there’s massive learning curves, and sometimes the things have seen the simplest, right, there could be, you know, trolls hiding under that bridge that you’re not expecting and a deal is looking so good and you basically are paying to tuition. I think the beauty of finding guides and people along the way is that they’ve already got the tuition, they already paid their tuition, and you guys just get to create value together, and I’d rather learn through having them teach me than learn through, you know, slamming my face in the, you know, door every single day trying to blindly find my way through this. So I would say that would be the biggest thing holding me back, is the network that I have which I’m actively building every single day of people who have walked this walk in the tech space, who have scaled organizations, that’s what I would say for sure, one hundred percent.

00:31:50.000

WS: That sound important, your network is, that’s why we’re go abundance. We are networking and meeting other people who can push us and are ahead of us in many ways, you know, who we may be ahead of it as well, in many ways also. Actually, I wanted to ask you, how did you fund this? How did you… did you raise money? How did you fund starting a tech business?

00:32:08.000

WB: Well, I think I funded it first by thinking it was gonna be a lot less expensive than it was gonna be. And so like the first quarter million, I basically would make money for my wholesaling and I put it into the… to paying the engineers, like I’m at like a $20-25,000 per month burn until I realized the best town the people actually need for 10, 15, 20 per month. And that for me, I had a job and we were still developing the core IP, we are still building this, is patent pending now, but I had this really strange like phenomenon happening which is I was context-switching, I was going from real estate closing deals, managing title companies to developing deep tech, and I was getting to the point where I was like not doing either one really well. And I also saw that I’m building a singing vacuum, and I was like, “Look, I want to see what the world has to think about my ideas, and I want to use the world’s feedback to refine that,” and so I started Angel, started self raising money from friends, family, mom grandma, you know, friends, tenth cousins, like all at 5,000, 10,000 chunks, right? To date, we’ve raised 1.5 million from 35 people, but the part of it that sort of goes back to that, you know, hustle is I had to pitch 500 people, and the value from pitching 500 people, it’s not the money, but the amount of questions that I have that the market will not be able to stem me. I have plans A to Z, every different combination of circumstance because I’ve had those conversations and everybody’s gonna tell you, you know, your idea is good if they wanna be your friend until you ask them to pull out a check book, then you can really see how good they think your idea is and how much they believe in you, and so that’s how I funded it so far.

00:33:31.000 

WS: That’s incredible. I appreciate you saying, “Hey, I had to talk to 500 people to get 35 to invest” and you raised 1.2 million. Congratulations, by the way. I mean, the listeners are trying to raise money as well, they’re learning that process or learning how to present themselves well, present a deal, right and communicate with investors, and you gotta get good at rejection, right? You gotta be okay with it, how you just go in there and make it happen if it’s gonna… if it’s a hundredth person that’s gonna say yes, guess what? The sooner you get started, the sooner you get to the hundredth person, right? I love that mentality, just what you did there. Were you gonna say something about that?

00:34:03.000

WB: Each pitch, you get better, right? That was sort of this compound effect, this exponential sort of theme that is an undercurrent to my life, and with this technology every single day we build off of what we did the day before. That’s compounding. It’s not linear. There’s no resetting, right? I think it’s the same thing when you’re finding any skill, whether it’s painting or dancing or whatever, right, or pitching, or raising money every single time. If you are open to hear people’s feedback they will tell you what you could have done differently, they will tell you their concerns, and so I don’t think I raised like for the first 50 people that I pitched to, but my intention, my goal was not to raise money, my goal was to refine my pitch. And what we’re funding my pitch look like was actually getting clear on what I’m doing myself and what our actual plans are and how we plan to navigate these issues.

00:34:49.000

WS: That’s incredible. I just… I love how you approach that, I think that’s so helpful to the listeners. Even the questions from investors when you don’t know the answer, it’s pretty awkward maybe at first, right? However, you just got better, you’re gonna go and figure that answer out, you’re gonna go study and you’re gonna be prepared for the next time that’s asked, so you got better even though that person may never talk to you again, or maybe you’ve never invest with you, you got better because you are willing to be uncomfortable and put yourself in that position. Alright, last question, How do you like to give back?

00:35:15.000

WB: Yeah, that’s a great question. I like to give back by believing in this passing the torch kind of mentality. I don’t want to… if somebody’s cold, right, if I don’t want to go and warm them up for a little bit, and then when I leave, they’re gonna be cold again. I believe that there’s a fire inside each one of us, and the greatest conversations I’ve ever had is when people are on, you know, trajectory and their life is not exciting, and through some conversations that I have with them or even just a couple of questions, they get re-present to their purpose, they get re-present to their fire, and so having those conversations and facilitating environments where we have those conversations, to ask the tough questions. 

I debate people on crypto, I debate people on, you know, different things in real estate not because I just like to argue, I actually hate arguing, but I like to ask the questions and for people to really see that once, even once we become successful and that’s, you know, calm with this group, we’re sort of still looking for that next purpose. And there’s a massive amount of power that we have in a massive amount of opportunity to give back, and so I can give back in building technology to do that at a high level. I try to make a material difference with each person that I come into contact with.

00:36:20.000

WB: Will, I’m encouraged just by meeting you and hearing your story. I know the listeners are as well. I mean from 16 to 18 and now 22, you’ve accomplished a lot and it’s incredible, it’s rare, right? It’s rare to be at 16 or 18 and have that mentality, have that drive and really the self-discipline, right? And I love talking about self-discipline as well, even through the morning routine, it’s so important, and it is the consistency, right? 

Is the daily actions that build up, like you talked about over a long period of time, and you are a great example of that. I look forward to seeing you a year from now and five years from now, right, and having you back on the show, and it’s talking about your journey and what you’ve accomplished.

00:36:59.000

WB: Let’s do it, yeah.

00:37:00.000

WS: Will, where can people get in touch with you and find you?

00:37:03.000

WB: Yeah, awesome. So just in general, I put a lot of cool content on my Instagram @will.jbrown. You can find me on LinkedIn as well, William Brown. And if you’re interested in learning more about what we’re building with a plug-and-play off-market deal, titanx.ai. So that’s our site. 

I look forward to hearing anybody, and I’m gonna have a county a link on there as well, or I’m gonna offer up 10-15 minutes, just you know, ask me anything that you want, open to everybody, no cost there on the site as well. So if you wanna… if you have another question for me or you just wanna chat or connect, please reach out.

00:37:32.000

WS: And so, Will, thank you again for being an amazing guest on the real estate syndication show. I look forward to staying in touch with you and I hope you have a blessed day. 

00:37:40.000

WB: Thanks so much. See you next time.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[OUTRO]

0:37:32.0 WHITNEY SEWELL Thank you for being a loyal listener of the real estate syndication show. Please subscribe and like the show, share it with your friends so we can help them as well. Don’t forget, to go to lifebridgecapital.com, where you can sign up and start investing in real estate today. Have a blessed day.

[END]