592 – 0-40,000 Downloads Per Month – A Property Podcast Case Study With Tyrone Shum

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Tyrone Shum

Episode highlights:

02:53 – The value in others’ mistakes
05:21 – Accessing the big names
07:25 – A lot can happen in a year
08:27 – How long should it be?
11:42 – The devices they use
13:12 – What topics perform best?
15:45 – From 20 downloads to several thousands
19:17 – On-site elements that helped
20:55 – Organic search traffic
21:35 – After the show…
23:54 – What was most surprising?
27:12 – The road ahead
29:09 – What Tyrone would ask himself

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today I have a very special guest, Tyrone Shum, from PropertyInvestory.com. Welcome to the call.

Tyrone: Thank you so much, James. Pleasure to be here.

James: You’re a good friend of mine, Tyrone. I’ve known you for many years in this online journey. And you were super kind one year. You put together the most incredible video for my SuperFastBusiness Live event. And I was struck by the professionalism of your team and the quality of the video. And of course, it generated a bunch of ticket sales for my event. So I’m very grateful for your projects.

So you’re somewhat of a video documentary expert.

Tyrone: Yes, I love video. That has been always a passion and a hobby project on the side for me.

James: Whenever I see you at an event, you’ve usually got a camera in your hand.

Tyrone: That’s true. It’s always fun. It’s sort of my second attachment.

James: You’ve also been a really wonderful contributor to the SuperFastBusiness membership community. And recently, you made a post in there about your podcast journey. And we’ve been following this for a while, you actually started a while back, and it was great to get an update of where you’ve gone with it.

I’m just going to read out some things from your post here, just so that we can get up to speed. In short, you started your podcast around about 12 months and seven days ago, from the time that you made this particular post, and you’ve received 120 plus iTunes reviews, around 40,000 monthly downloads, and you’ve done 150 plus episodes. And you’ve learnt quite a number of things that have worked, and other things that haven’t worked in your particular niche, which is the property niche. You’ve got this website, PropertyInvestory.com. What’s the podcast called?

Tyrone: Property Investory as well. So it’s the Property Investory podcast. And what we do is, we bring a lot of experts from the Australian property market onto our podcast, and turn it into pretty much a story-based type of podcast. So people actually follow the journey on how all these people become successful in investment property. I’ve had numerous speakers, from property developers with multi million dollars, even actually billion-dollar property portfolios, and people who are just starting out on their journey who have built up to like, 20 properties, and just living a really amazing life.

The value in others’ mistakes

James: Yeah, so story’s a recurring theme here. We’ve talked about stories on previous podcast episodes, we’ve had experts talking about stories at my live events, you’ve incorporated story elements into the video you made for me. It seems that stories of experts get a lot of attention, and especially when they share their worst moments and mistakes. Is that right?

Tyrone: Yeah, absolutely. What’s really interesting is a lot of people don’t seem to ask that question because they want to just hear about the nuts and bolts and the how to. And because I was listening to a lot of podcasts driving to work (and I’ve got about a half-an-hour commute), I listened to a lot of property podcast, and I went through them pretty quickly. But what was missing in a lot of those podcasts I was listening to was that element of going, ‘Okay, were there any actually journey or parts where things just didn’t go right? What were some of the failures?’ And a lot of people don’t share that, because they don’t get asked. And I thought, Gosh, I’d love to learn from that. Because I think a lot of us learn from mistakes, and also be able to see where that lesson comes from. And then hopefully we don’t make that same mistake.

So that’s the reason why. I think that’s been a real key component of the storytelling part. And then you turn that around to take it to the success stories. And that’s what’s been working really, really well.

James: So it’s almost like you took the mistake that podcasters were making, and, turned that into your advantage. And certainly, when it comes to high-ticket items, like properties, you’d prefer to make your lessons from other people’s mistakes than to do them directly, right?

Tyrone: Yeah, for sure. And there’s been plenty of mistakes. I mean, I recently interviewed another gentleman by name of John L. Fitzgerald. And one of his biggest mistakes in the past has been losing, like, $100,000, just from one property deal. And even though he’d been making millions and millions of dollars prior to that in property development, that big mistake cost him quite a bit. And it set him back for a little bit.

But what I guess you can learn from that is, he said, to make sure that if you’re going to do any type of deals or anything, make sure that you don’t neglect or miss out on certain fine details. And that’s the thing, I think he just got too confident, as he mentioned, and neglected some of the details, and that’s how he made a mistake like that. So it’s just making sure that you cross the t’s and dot the i’s in properly, in a lot of circumstances like that.

James: Yeah, he’s quite an inspirational guy. I remember reading his book when I was on a Mercedes-Benz trip in Fiji. Well, no, it was Tahiti. And when I came back, I bought my second property. I was inspired. And I think one of my work associates actually went off to work for him. He had quite a big following with his property investment stuff.

Accessing the big names

Do you find having a podcast gets you access to brilliant property investors who you might not get a return phone call from otherwise?

Tyrone: Most definitely. Well, what’s interesting is, for me, I’ve been very fortunate because I had known a lot of the experts initially when I first started, and I had some big names that came on to the podcast, which helped me leapfrog to get the other names I got on, because a lot of people who have come to me and you know, done interviews with me said, they always say, “Hey, Ty, how did you manage to get all these big names on podcast?” Like, quite well-known names, such as like Michael Yardney, Margaret Lomas, Steve McKnight, all those. And it’s because in the past, I’ve been very fortunate to have gone through a few of their courses in the past, to meet them personally and also work with them. And then through that kind of connection, they were happy to actually come on.

And I shared a vision to them that I wanted to actually create stories about them, rather than talking about the nuts and bolts, because they’re experts in their field and they talk about the nuts and bolts of property investing all the time. But unfortunately, not many people actually delve into their story. And that’s what really inspires people a lot more to be able to take some form of action, because if you can hear how they succeeded in property or how they succeeded in their whole journey, you actually would be more inclined to take some action, because stories resonate a lot more than just facts. And that’s what’s been really powerful about this.

And that’s why I think a lot of people have been continuously subscribing to the podcast and downloading it, because every story is different and unique. And you know, you’re wanting more every time you listen to one story, that just keeps inspiring you more to do other things.

James: Yeah, I think you make a good point there. Certainly, in my world, in the business space, there’s a lot of nuts and bolts. There’s any number of blogs and reports, and I love these case-study-style podcasts where I’m talking to someone about something they did, and the journey along the way. And they do get more downloads, and they are interesting.

And especially, I like case studying people who are not famous in the regular sense. So if you go back through SuperFastBusiness archives, you’ll find people in everything from the rheumatoid arthritis market through to, I actually coach someone who is in the clothesline space. I mean, there’s some bizarre things, it doesn’t have to be all in this make money side of things.

A lot can happen in a year

But you know, the thing that struck me about what you were sharing is, you did achieve quite a lot in a relatively short time. And one year, it’s not micro short, but it’s also not decades. You’ve built yourself an established audience which lends itself to the current scenario you’re at, where you’re just refining your business model now, and tuning in on ways that you can help your audience, and perhaps even your guests, as one of my suggestions to you, to grow their businesses.

So that’s really the meat of the story here, is that if you’re listening to this podcast, and you don’t currently have one, or you’ve just started one and you’re thinking that you’re getting like 200 listens, or 150 listens per episode, you want to find out from Tyrone what’s working for his podcast to get such traction. And so far, the big lesson is to have interesting stories and to probe into mistakes and difficult moments, because that’s what people are really compelled to listen to. And they’re not getting that much of a diet.

I’ll ask you a couple of technical things, and then I want to go back into that topic a little more. But firstly, ideal time length for the podcast. This is a question that get asked a fair bit – how long should the episodes be? Or what have you found works for you?

How long should it be?

Tyrone: So for the market, I actually, it’s interesting, I did some testing. And on average, people seem to like the 20 to 30-minute mark. And I think it also resonates with me really well, because that’s my travel commute time. Most people take about 30 minutes, yeah, about 30 minutes to get to work, depending on where they live.

I tried an hour limit, and unfortunately, a lot of people sort of just kind of died off after about the 30-minute mark as well. And that was on the hundredth episode, I thought, I’ll give everyone a sort of an insight into who Tyrone is. And we did it an hour-long episode and thought that would be really cool. And it took us a bit of time to do that one. But unfortunately, a lot of people kind of dropped off, from the stats that we saw.

James: Was that disappointing? Poor old Tyrone.

Tyrone: So yeah, it was quite interesting. And I think what happened is that, I think we’d kind of trained them after about 99 episodes, that they’re used to that 20 to 30-minute mark. But for me, in my niche markets, that sweet spot is that 20 to 30-minute mark. And I guess the reason why it works really well is because I follow a very kind of similar format to what they do in video, where we kind of just introduce the guest through some form of narration. So everything I do is actually narrated in through there. So it’s not just a plain interview that we get someone to call and just ask questions. It’s actually structured in a format. And I actually have a few journalists who help me write this all up in the background, or edit this in the background.

And we go through a very similar story that we talked about in SuperFastBusiness, because there’s a lot of structures and frameworks that you can follow to do that. And we kind of make sure that just before we hit the middle part of the like, 10-minute mark or so, we introduce the worst, I guess, worst scenario for them, or the worst part of their journey, which could be anything – could have their houses burned down or, you know, infested with cockroaches, etc. And there’s actually some really interesting stories. And at that point, that’s when I actually turn it around and actually introduced them into more of the success stories. And I think that’s where people get really engaged, and they keep listening all the way down to the end. And that’s the reason why I can go through 20 to 25 minutes, anywhere to, yeah, up to that kind of mark.

James: And where are you seeing those stats, because the old podcast stats didn’t really show how long someone listens to, and I think Apple are now showing us this information? Is that what you’re using?

Tyrone: Yes, absolutely. So, I think back in beginning of this year towards like, from memory, January, February, Apple started releasing these stats inside your, what’s it called? Podcast Connect. So if you log into that, you can actually refresh your podcast, but also there is a section that says, Podcast Analytics. And it actually shows you the durations, it shows you when people actually are listening, too. So it’d be like a percentage. If people are listening up to 90 percent, then your podcast is obviously doing really well. And the reason why I know mine isn’t up to 90, and people drop off the last 10 percent, is because I do offer, like, a call to action at the end, like an ad or something. So that’s probably the reason why. People used to that, they drop off at that part.

But the good thing about these stats is that it does have information about the time limit that people listen to, what type of devices that they’re downloading from, and also too, how many devices actually unique to downloading your particular episode based on your feed as well. So it’s really, really good information. I highly recommend whoever has a podcast that they use that information to determine what’s next in their podcast.

The devices they use

James: I was having a look at my own stats in that portal. I’m curious, do you have a lot of devices listening to your 40,000 downloads? Do some people listen to the episode more than once?

Tyrone: That’s actually interesting. I haven’t been able to see that in my own dashboard. But I know that there are definitely a majority coming from Apple, obviously, iPhones and stuff like that. And there are people coming from Android devices as well. So probably 70 percent is probably Apple, and then the remainder is Android and other devices.

James: Nice. And in terms of the actual number of devices, do you think they’re only just reporting on Apple stuff?

Tyrone: Oh, I’d say so.

James: It seems a bit, the number seems slightly different than what I’m seeing in my Blubrry podcast statistics where, say, when I publish an episode like this one (which doesn’t have as fancy narration and it’s a great tip, maybe I need to get some help on that), there’ll be a couple of thousand downloads straightaway, like in the first 24 hours, but then if I log into Apple, it shows like 890 devices. I’m sure not everyone’s listen to it twice. I’m thinking maybe there’s podcatchers or something that’s not getting detected.

Tyrone: Yeah, I’d say that’s probably true. Like, I’ve actually got three analytics to look at. I’m the same, I’ve got Blubrry and also Libsyn and also Apple Podcast dashboard as well, and the stats actually vary as well. Like, if I look at Libsyn, the stats seem to be high compared to, say, Blubrry, and then once again when you’re looking at the Apple dashboard, it’s a little bit lower as well, too. But you know, you’re probably right, it’s because they don’t have every single device that’s listed inside the Apple dashboard, for probably good reason as well.

What topics perform best?

James: Do you ever go back through the episodes and have a look at which ones are getting more attention and downloads and see if there’s something you can glean from that?

Tyrone: Yeah, definitely. I go back and have a look at the stats to see which ones have been performing the most in the past. And it kind of gives me an indication of what people are interested in. And what seems to be the interesting ones in the past have been the ones that have been talking about the glam. There’s a really popular episode that was done with Chris Gray, talks about Lamborghinis and speedboats and big mansions and helicopters and stuff like that. It seems to have got a lot of attention, and I guess I’m not really that surprised, because that’s kind of like the lifestyle that people want to live.

But when it comes to reality, I guess there’s been a few other episodes that have given people more talking about lifestyle, like Scott O’Neill’s one that we talked about where he’s like, traveling the world on a $300,000 income for his property portfolio, but having six months off. And that seems to be capturing a lot of attention as well, too.

So yeah, I mean those kind of episodes – lifestyle, kind of story-driven type of podcasts – seem to get a lot of downloads, for some odd reason.

James: Right. And that’s interesting when you’ve got a lifestyle-attracted audience, but you mentioned something about having a dip on weekends, so you don’t post on those days. And I was wondering, that almost seems counterintuitive. You’d think the people who are in the lifestyle or the biz op side of things tend to be weekend people, and the more hardcore, enterprise, business-y type people are weekdays, but you’ve definitely found your sweet spot during the week.

Tyrone: Yeah, for sure. And I think this seems to be true for a lot of podcasts out there. Maybe a lot of people who are listening to this podcast are probably working full time, Monday to Friday. They’re probably also like me, commuting to work and stuff like that. And that’s probably the only time they can listen to it. Because once I’m out on the weekend, I’m usually out with my kids and family, and I don’t usually pop anything in the car.

James: Yeah. Down to the park with the kids, sports, all that sort of stuff.

Tyrone: All that stuff. So I can understand why they don’t listen. But what’s really interesting is Sunday night I get a massive spike, leading up to Monday.

James: Oh. So they don’t want to go back to work.

Tyrone: Yeah.

James: That’s great.

I’ve found, for SuperFastBusiness community, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is the big fat bell curve, and then it just tails right off on weekends. People, they’re doing, you know, they’re living, doing their other stuff.

What do you think made your podcast different to the other ones out there, aside from including mistakes and having narrations? Because they sound like huge differences. I mean, that’s pro-level storytelling. You’ve brought your video creation genius to the podcasting market and made yourself different. Is there anything else you do differently, like the way that you design it or the way that you market it?

From 20 downloads to thousands

Tyrone: I guess I leverage off a few things I’ve learned within SuperFastBusiness, and also from you, James, as well, is to actually reach out and make sure that whenever I’m doing optimization for iTunes, for example, we put in the keywords and stuff like that. So I think that’s kind of helped, because initial days when I first started, I was getting probably, like, maybe at most 20, 30 downloads per episode, which was really nothing. I mean, this is going back in May of last year.

James: But that’s worth repeating. You’ve gone from 20 or 30 downloads per episode to, clearly it’s several thousand. That’s quite a transformation.

Tyrone: It is. I mean, I look back, it has been 12 , and yeah, a lot has changed.

James: Was it disheartening when you had so few downloads?

Tyrone: Oh, for sure. For sure. I was like, going, what do I need to do to try and ramp this up? And I guess I learned from a combination of different things online. I did a lot of reading beforehand as well about pre-launching the podcast. Because the key aspect about ensuring that you have at least 10 or 12 episodes lined up rather than, you know, one or two, and making sure that you reach out to all the guests who have been on to share and stuff like that.

And what was really disheartening was initially, when I first started, I was hoping to get like thousands of downloads because I had at least 10 guests who said, and they even committed, said, “Yep, I’m going to share it with my community.” But when I first launched, exactly that, like, 20 or 30. I thought, ‘Gosh, why is it not going where I wanted?’ I was just like, thinking, ‘Is this going to actually work?’

And you have these fears and doubts initially, because you’re putting so much work in. I have to admit, it took me at least a good three to four months prior to even launching to get all these interviews all set up and lined up and edited, and so forth. So there was a lot of behind-the-scenes and upfront work that that was involved to get it to where it was.

And then yeah, I guess slowly and gradually over the next few months, I just stayed consistent. And that’s something I’ve learned from you, is just, if you stay focused, and stay consistent on what you’re doing, and just continue to do a little bit every day, it just becomes a snowball effect. And that’s the thing I started to notice, that after about three, three to four months, that’s when it started snowballing. And that’s when my motivation continued to push through.

But yeah, honestly, it was a pretty hard slog, because I implemented a lot of SEO techniques. And the thing about podcasting in the iTunes space at this point in time (and probably a little tip for the listeners), is it’s actually not that hard to rank quite well. It probably goes back to those good SEO days back in Google, where you could just type in a keyword in your title. If you have that keyword in the title and you have a number of episodes already published out onto iTunes, they actually get ranked quite well. So for example, I ranked in the top three or four spaces for the word, just “property”, if you searched in the iTunes store. And like, “property investing”, I was up in the top five as well.

And that probably took about a month or two of just optimizing keywords and putting them into the episodes. And basically, I don’t think anyone really knew about that, and that’s the reason why this market was quite easy to jump in. Now, I’ve noticed after about 12 months or so, I’ve noticed about four or five new podcasters have come into the market and started to do something very similar. And I even had someone as well copycat what I was doing, because they caught on to it. But obviously, I did have so many episodes, so they couldn’t really rank as well as my podcast.

So I think, yeah, just looking back at it, it was quite a lot of SEO that we did for the iTunes, sharing a lot out to our podcast guests who’ve come on and asking them to share onto Facebook and trying to encourage them to share with the email list. And when that started happening, that’s when everything sort of just fell into place, and I just continued to publish on a regular and consistent basis. And that really, really made a huge difference.

On-site elements that helped

James: What about on the website itself where you publish the podcast? Did you make some decisions around show notes versus transcriptions or any kind of opt-in upgrades?

Tyrone: Yeah, that’s been key, because the whole strategy for me is to drive the listeners back to the website to capture the details and become a subscriber. So that way in the future, and as I’m speaking now, actually, is to create this membership site so that I form a community behind Property Investory. And yeah, that has been the key component.

So when I first started, I made sure that I had opt-ins on the homepage to offer them a lead magnet. And it was case studies and that captured a lot of people download, because people want to know the numbers behind the successful property portfolios of these people. Like as I mentioned earlier, lifestyle-type podcast from Scott O’Neil. He was really, really open and kind to share his portfolio, and we’ve got all these numbers sharing how many properties he’s got, the exact stats behind, how much rental it’s generating, and all those kind of things. And when people get access to that, man, they just reply back and say, “I love this, can you give me more?”

So we kept creating more and more of these case studies, and I think today, we’ve got more than probably 2000 case studies in the back end to share with all our listeners, and people keep subscribing to that. We’ve also made sure that we give away resources such as transcripts. So anytime somebody lands on a particular episode, there is an opt-in at the bottom to access the transcript, if they want to actually read the transcript. And we also include all the show notes.

So yeah, we definitely have plenty of opportunities for people to be able to opt in and subscribe. And on top of that, we’ve been recently done quite a number of joint ventures with other type of websites, to I guess promote and offer our lead magnets, and I’ve been getting a lot of subscribers through that way as well, too.

Organic search traffic

James: Nice. OK. And you’re getting organic search traffic to your website?

Tyrone: Yeah, we are. It’s interesting, because I’ve been trying to sort of capture some dead backlinks from an old successful website, previously was API magazine. I think they’ve just been reinstated recently, because they came out of administration and another personal company pushed them out. But we’re capturing some of the backlinks from there and, I guess, redirecting them back to Property Investory.

We are ranking organically for a few keywords, such as, like, “Australian property investor”, and a lot of the keywords for the guest names that we’ve been interviewing have also been ranking as well, too. So if you search for a lot of the guests, most of the time we come up probably in the top two or three.

After the show…

James: And how do your guests feel about being on the show afterwards? Do they ever come back to you or have any continued dialogue or invite you to things or send you stuff?

Tyrone: Yeah, for sure. They always keep coming back, and say, “When can I be on the show next?” Because it seems like a lot of times after the show gets published, they get a lot of inquiries coming through. So it’s obviously working for them. And the feedback I’ve been receiving is they’re always keen to share more info.

And I guess my challenge is, because I’ve got about a backlog of about two to three months with the guests already in the pipeline, I kind of want to just always make sure I’m bringing new guests on board to talk about new stories rather than about the how-to and the details. Because there are plenty of podcasts out there talking about nuts and bolts of the Australian property market, but my strategy behind this has always been keeping these stories evergreen.

So I guess I am mostly looking at new stories of new investors or investors who have not been on the podcast, though in saying that, my strategy has also been to invite them back onto interviewing them, so we can actually use them for inside our community rather than going public. And most of them have been quite happy to share that, because then they can talk about the details of property investing strategies and so forth towards the community as well.

James: Nice.

So yeah, I know what you mean about this effect. Why, I get requests everyday, people wanting to be on this particular podcast. And usually, people just see it as a soapbox where they can come along and pitch to my customers, you know, which is a correct assumption, that they’re going to get traction. And I hope people go and check out PropertyInvestory.com after listening to this, especially to listen to the way that it’s narrated. And if you’re interested in property, well, that’d be a great bonus. I was a guest on Pat Flynn’s podcast, Smart Passive Income, and I got such a tremendous amount of ground swell after that, that I’d be happy to go on his podcast every week.

Tyrone: For sure.

James: It’s good when you can be a beacon. I imagine that you could use that effect as an attraction to get the guests that you want on your show. I know when I invite people onto my podcast, I’m able to say, “I’d love to have you on my show. I know my listeners are very interested in your topic. They tend to go and download things and read books if you’ve got them or take your courses.” And this is why people are happy to put aside the time – important people who generally won’t go on every single show. So it’s a good positioning to take.

What was most surprising?

What do you think was the most surprising thing for you through this last year of podcast journey?

Tyrone: Gosh, James, you put me on the spot here.

James: I see that as my role.

Tyrone: I think…I mean, I had a goal set out, and I shared that inside the SuperFastBusiness community, that I wanted to achieve X amount of downloads, and also, I guess, generate an X amount of income. And I have actually achieved the downloads numbers, which has been phenomenal. So I guess that that was already, in my mind, set in stone. I knew that I’d achieve it.

But I think the big surprise is the learnings I’ve gained from it. Like, because of the guests and the people I’ve actually been introduced to and interviewed, they’ve been extremely, extremely generous with their time and a lot of them have even invited me on board to be going to their boot camps as well, their training courses. In particular, one gentleman who’s constantly helping me and supporting me in property development as well, he’s invited me to his boot camp to be part of that and be part of their community and help out as well. And, you know, people pay a few thousand dollars to be part of that, and I get to be kind of a guest, you know, without anything in return.

It’s things like that that have really surprised me, because you just don’t know where the journey will take you. I guess my thoughts behind when I first started this was to one, scratch my own itch, which was frustrating because I was listening to so many podcasts, and I was going, these are great interviews and great podcasts, but a lot of times, there’s a lot of fluff in it. And they’re not, they don’t get down to the heart of it.

And I was like, I really, really want to know more details about how they went through their journey, what some of the failures were, and how they overcame these failures and became a success, because that is the ultimate true story that comes out of all these people. And a lot of people don’t get that kind of story from well-known experts, because not many people out there are able to interview and ask the right questions.

So I think that’s been a real eye-opener for me, to be able to learn and discover a lot of these things. Because, for me, it’s still a learning journey. I’m still on my journey to build my property portfolio and to be able to access all these amazing, amazing guests on my show. And for them to be so generous with their time and even reach out to me, like, as I said, John Fitzgerald was actually someone who reached out to me because he’s promoting his new book coming up shortly. Said, “I’d love to be on your podcast.” Actually, when I had a chat to him and found out how he found out, his daughter was listening to my podcast and said to him, “Hey, this guy sounds really cool, you should get onto his podcast.” I was like, wow, you know, I can influence or reach that many people, even people who I have never, ever met in my life.

So yeah, that has been probably one of the biggest surprises for me this whole journey.

James: Yeah, it’s wonderful. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. I love your humility, and your natural curiosity, combined with your narrative style of storytelling. It’s just a winner.

Tyrone: Thank you, James.

James: And I’ve found guests who have books are a really easy setup, because they’ve probably done interviews before, so they’re reasonably good guests. They definitely want to put the word out about the book, because it helps them make book sales. And it’s something that credentializes your podcast – if you have published authors, it’s getting some of that association, you’re bringing in some of that polished look and feel to your podcast show, because you got people who other people have heard of on there. They can go and buy their books straightaway on Amazon, or wherever. And, you know, it’s feeding the machine.

The road ahead

So what are the next steps for you? I imagine, you’ve mentioned you got the membership coming along, and that definitely sounds very exciting. And I have no doubt you’ve got the skills to run a good membership now. And you’re also getting approached by guests, I imagine, to help them with their own marketing, because you’re so good at it.

Tyrone: Yeah. As discussed inside the forum, I am at the moment in that stage. And just, I guess it comes back down to, for me, focus to see which will actually generate the best and most productive use of my time, because as entrepreneurs, there’s so many opportunities, so many places that you could be in taking on so many different things.

So for me, I’m focusing right now on building up this community and creating a membership site, and then from there, continuing to help the community grow and also go along in the same journey as they are as well. Because I think I’m in a very unique position where I can be at that part of the journey and beginning of the journey. Because a lot of the experts out there who have already been there for 20, 30 years already have been past that stage, and sometimes going back to the level of where people were just starting out or growing their portfolio is a little bit harder for them. Because in day in, day out they’ve kind of seen already the successes. So for me, I can also share that journey with a lot of these people who are also going through this stage as well.

And luckily for me, I can tap on shoulders of experts who also can overcome a lot of the challenges that we all face right now. And especially in a market in Australia right now, it’s a completely different market to what it was going back 20, 30 years ago, as well, too. So it’s really good to be actually in this position right now.

James: Yeah.

There seems to be, from the news reports, a little bit of an easing of the investor market. So this is probably the time where education becomes really important, when it’s not just a rising tide lifting all the boats, people have to be pretty clever with their decisions to get ahead. And I imagine they’ll be drawn to resources like you have.

Tyrone: Absolutely, and that’s good to hear.

What Tyrone would ask himself

James: Tyrone, just to finish up, if you were interviewing yourself for this podcast, what sort of questions would you have asked that I might have missed?

Tyrone: I always ask this question to actually all my guests is, if you met yourself 10 years ago, what would you say to him or her? You know, it depends on the person. But yeah, that that’s probably a good question to ask.

James: And how would you answer that?

Tyrone: Ten years ago, I would have said, just buy as many properties as I could, knowing in hindsight what’s happened in the last 10 years, and make sure that I spend a lot of time educating myself as well, too. Because I think it was very easy to just, yeah, go along the flow and get involved in so many different things. But I think the biggest thing is educate, focus, and buy. That’s what I would tell myself back 10 years ago.

James: So it’s like the standing mantra for a property investor?

Tyrone: Yeah.

James: What if I modify that question? If you were to go back a year from now, for when you were starting the podcast journey, what would be the things you would have told yourself?

Tyrone: That’s a good question. I would have said, just start it early and sooner, because honestly, I probably hesitated on starting this podcast, probably for a good 12 months. It was sort of swimming in my head for a while, because I had been thinking about it probably even before the video days, you know, helping you creating your videos, and also helping a few other clients with video. And I’d been thinking to myself, I would want to get back onto doing podcasting, because I had done it probably going back five or six years ago in another niche. And it was really, really successful ones. A lot of fun, I really enjoyed it.

And the good thing about podcasting is people don’t actually have to see you and you can actually do it from anywhere, whereas video, sometimes you’ve got to actually be looking professional on camera. You can’t just be in your PJs and pop on to do a video compared to say, for example, podcast. So for me, I think that’s probably been one of the things I should have said to myself, look, a year ago, you should have started probably earlier and just really, just gave it a go, give it a crack. Because the thing is, you don’t know until you do it. Now that I’m looking over the last 12 months, what I’ve accomplished, I’m absolutely grateful to see that everything has come to what I sort of planned out to do, and just following all the principles that you’ve taught inside the community has really made a huge difference.

James: Well, thank you, Tyrone, and I really appreciate you coming on and sharing this. You didn’t have to – it’s just that you posted such great information, I just asked you, cheekily, would you come on and share this on the SuperFastBusiness podcast. So these case studies are truly inspirational. And the most important element here is you’re just a year or so down the track. This is not, I’m not talking to someone who’s been doing it for a decade and has reached the most lofty heights imaginable (and we do have those ones as well). But this episode is a testimony to good work ethic, the right business approach, an insatiable curiosity, an infectious enthusiasm, and total humility.

Tyrone Shum, it’s been a pleasure to have you and I’m looking forward to the next chapter. I hope you’ll come back in another year from now and tell us how the membership’s going and what fantastic twists and turns you’ve taken down the path.

Tyrone: For sure. I’d absolutely love to, James. And yeah, thank you so much for creating such a great community as well. I’m loving being part of it, because there’s just so much to learn and also so much to be able to share, and just great support to be able to help us implement it and action. Since I’ve been part of community, I’ve been able to implement and action a lot of things that I would not be able to do without your support and help through the community.

James: Fantastic.

So there you go, that was Tyrone Shum, PropertyInvestory.com – check it out, his fantastic case study. To be getting 40,000 downloads per month, he’s doing something right. Have a listen, see what it is.

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