Social media has been an incredible tool for me.
Over the last few years, I've gotten well over a billion views across my platforms and it's changed my life and career.
In this email, I'm going to explain how I used it to accelerate my career.
When it comes to Twitter, now called X, at first I was hesitant to join because I thought it was the place where people go to get mad about politics and waste time arguing with each other.
And as we've seen over the last few years, that is partially true!
But there is also an entire section of Twitter that is full of dealmakers and niche business operators and there is also a powerful real estate community.
In late 2017 my business partner Dan and I had just raised $500k to build our first building and we had used our own capital to buy 4 more small buildings between 2017 and 2019.
But after that, the investors we knew were tapped out and we couldn't do any more deals.
I felt like I had been to every single kitchen table in my network and tried to raise cash and been told no.
And real estate is a VERY capital intensive business. You need a TON of it to buy buildings (especially in a responsible, low leverage way).
At the time, I was writing a lot on Reddit about my philosophy on business and I was engaging with other real estate operators over there.
Around that time, I met my now close friend, Moses Kagan who was a sophisticated real estate operator in LA.
He was on Twitter posting content and meeting interesting people there who he would ultimately do business with later on.
He called me and told me I should really get onto X and share what I was up to. I initially said no but a few months later he reached out again and told me I really needed to take this seriously so I did and it was one of the best decisions of my life.
So I got on to X and started tweeting in January of 2020.
I would tweet about my storage deals and share information about how I bought them, operated them and made money by making them more valuable.
Here is an example from early 2021, back when I had about 20,000 followers.
What I did differently on Twitter:
I was radically open about what I did inside my business and real estate company.
I shared my profit and loss statements. I shared the ins and outs of how we found deals.
At one point my partner Dan called me freaking out.
"Nick, why would you share so much?! You're going to bring on competition and we have nothing to gain here!"
Still, I had a feeling it would open doors. Sure it COULD bring on competition, and it definitely has, but I disagreed with the notion that this wasn't the right thing to do.
In reality, it did open doors. Major dealmakers came out of the woodwork on Twitter after seeing my tweets. Because of my content, they got a look inside my mind of how I thought about real estate and building companies without ever speaking to me.
They started sending me DMs and we had zoom meetings getting to know each other and I started building my network faster than ever before.
Over the next 2 years, I met some really smart folks who wanted to work with me and then we bought a property with 7 investors in September of 2020. Another one in December. Then in 2021 we went on a buying spree.
We bought 38 properties for over $50 million and raised $25 million from outside investors (95% of which I initially met on Twitter just because they followed me and liked my content and what I had to say).
And my life changed forever.
Fast forward to today and I've launched several other companies on the back of my social media following.
R.E. Cost Seg is a real estate services firm I founded with partners in June of 2022. We've done over 10,000 cost seg studies and we already have a team of 75 people. It's a $30m+ company now.
And then the biggest one you all know about is Somewhere.com.
I actually started as an affiliate for Somewhere back in 2021 and later acquired a majority stake at a $52M valuation with a group of investors in May of 2024.
When I got involved in the business, they were doing less than 100K/month in revenue. After I became a customer, Marshall Haas, the original founder asked me to be an affiliate. He wanted me to send traffic and leads from my social media following in exchange for a revenue share.
This is when I learned the true power of my audience and what I built.
My tweets gave them the firepower to 5X revenue in a very short period of time. They obviously had to service those leads, but a vast majority of traffic in the early days of hyper growth was coming from my audience.
This was a HUGE wakeup call. I learned that my social media following was extremely valuable and I couldn't just be an affiliate, I needed equity in these companies too.
So I struck a deal with Marshall to give me some equity in exchange for how much I was promoting them. Together, we dramatically increased the traffic and leads and a lot of it was because of my content and personal brand.
The business became so successful that the valuation grew by 5-7X in just under 3 years. And since I acquired a majority stake in 2024, revenue is up over 70% and the company is worth significantly more than what I paid for it just 19 months ago.
If you had told me in January of 2020 that all of my social media efforts combined would only help me win this one single deal, it would have been worth it for me.
At Somewhere, we now have 185 full time employees and help over 250 companies hire at least one person from around the world every single month.
But it hasn't stopped there.
Bolt Storage has also grown into a phenomenal business. We now have 68 properties across 11 states and over 2M sqft of self storage.
We did our first industrial deal earlier this year and the team is operating at a very high level. With interest rates coming down, I believe that real estate is going to get very good again soon and we've built the machine to capitalize on this.
Beyond my 3 main companies, I also got involved in and started several other businesses through my social media following.
BoldSEO is my SEO agency that quickly scaled to $165K/month and has now taken a breather but it's still doing great work.
I started an insurance company called Titan Risk, a business brokerage with my dad and became a partner in a fast growing pest control company and a few other ventures.
The flip side to all of this:
Some of my other bets did not work out and I've trimmed my portfolio down significantly.
I started a web design agency, a paid ads agency, a sales coaching business and a US recruiting firm which all made money but ultimately weren't worth the effort involved so we wound them down. More on that here:
Also, because I am so public, I have gotten a lot of hate for things I'm doing which is tough.
If you want to build a following online, you need to have very thick skin as the haters will try to critique you at every step of the way.
But if you want to use social media for your business, you need to think of it like a funnel.
People think I grew a following which gets 30 million impressions per month by tweeting about small business and self storage.
That isn't the case. Social media is just a funnel for me.
I cast a wide net with general life advice or jokes that get millions of impressions.
This one about HOAs got over 30 million total impressions.
This one about hiring employees overseas got 1.5 million:
And this is another one I did recently which generated a lot of business for Somewhere. It got 1.1M views.
A LOT of people see those tweets. They then look on my profile and see tweets like this about how I think about business and then they decide to follow me.
Here is the thing about the Twitter algorithm:
When you get a tweet with millions of impressions… The next 4-5 tweets you post will get 3-4x normal engagement because all the folks who clicked on your last tweet to read comments will be shown your next tweets.
The algorithm is trying to give the people what they want (i.e more of what they just liked and clicked on) so if your next several tweets add value and prove to people you’re a serious business man, they’ll follow you and begin to get to know you on a deeper level.
People think I got big on social media just by being “the storage guy.”
That is not true. You cast a wide net to a wide audience and then the people who are interested in what you’re doing will latch on and go deeper.
So my next few tweets will always be links to my newsletter, business advice, real estate stuff, etc that adds more strategic value.
My goal with content is to make smart people think deeply about something. I want to add value to their life by giving them a new perspective or a method I've learned.
My target is people who are interested in making money and operating businesses.
I want more real estate and business owners/operators to know who I am and follow me.
Also, if they want to learn about making money, they likely already have some of it and maybe we'll do business together some day.
The rage bait tweets are just top of funnel for me. Tens of millions of people see those but they aren’t my target audience. It’s all just a numbers game and it's a lot of fun. I know just a few of those millions are interested in making money and want to follow me long term.
That's who I’m after. My entrepreneurship content is one step below that.
Hundreds of thousands of people see those tweets every month.
This newsletter goes another layer deeper with 205,000 people getting it weekly. They get to read more of my in-depth thoughts and go beyond the surface level of a single tweet.
Then there's my 2 podcasts. About 5,000 people a week listen to those. They get to know me even better. They have my voice and my ideas come across loud and clear. They know and trust me intimately.
Then there is my book which a lot of people might buy but only a few people will actually read.
This is my longest form and most valuable content. The people who read this all the way through until the end will likely have some connection to me for life.
Then it’s the customers of my companies I’m fueling off the back of my social media following. 10-50 people a week are buying from me and my companies.
This is the bottom of the funnel and how I feed my family.
This is the hardest part.
Most people aren’t willing to do the work to actually sell something to their followers.
They waste time with all the engagement bait stuff but don’t own any assets they can make more valuable.
If you want to generate revenue from content, you have to build a real business that solves a real problem for people and then promote that.
Somewhere and R.E. Cost Seg are great examples of this. People need these 2 services so it's a natural next step to do business with me when they are in the market for hiring or for real estate cost seg services.
The last thing I'll leave you with is that it is super hard to build an audience.
I feel like the golden era of social media was 2020-2024 but it's getting harder every day. You have AI, bots, algorithm changes, more competition for attention, etc.
It is not easy to win at this game. Building a valuable following takes years of effort and consistency. I've written hundreds of newsletters and thousands of tweets. I've built a team around me to help.
I've done hundreds of podcast episodes myself and been a guest on 100+ more. There is serious work involved and it's doesn't happen overnight.
With all that being said, there is still plenty of opportunity to make money but there is also more competition than ever. Either way, I still think even a few hundred true fans could change your life. Content is a serendipity machine. You never know who it's going to resonate with or what opportunities will emerge from it.
Okay, that's it for now. I hope this newsletter helps. I'll see you back here for more next week.
Onward and upward,
Nick
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