Seth: Hey, everybody. How's it going? This is Seth Williams. You're listening to the REtipster podcast. Today, I'm sitting down with my friend, Meir Shemtov, to talk about a pretty fascinating project he's been working on. It's an Airbnb property he developed. This all started with a piece of land he bought that was on a steep slope and nobody else saw the potential in it, but he decided to put a bunch of mirror villas on it.

If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or anywhere else where you're hearing the audio-only version of this, I'd encourage you to check out the video version of this podcast episode, because it's going to give you a lot more context and help you understand just how cool these things are. We've got a lot of footage from this property. You can see exactly what it looks like and why it's a place that everyone wants to stay. You can find the video in the show notes at retipster.com/220.

In this conversation, I want to hear more about where Meir got the idea to do this and why he did it and where and how he got the money to do it and a lot of other stuff. So if you've ever wanted to create a unique experience property like this, or if you're just curious about what goes into it, you'll probably learn a lot from this conversation.

So Meir, welcome. How's it going?

Meir: It's going great. Thank God. Thank you for having me, Seth. Again, this is a true honor and privilege.

Seth: Yeah, absolutely, man. Lucky to have you here. So where should we start? Why don't we start with where and how you found this property? So you're a land investor, right? Was this one of the many vacant lots that you came across?

Meir: It's funny. Most people think that that's how it happened. I have purchased slopey properties in the past that I had to figure out what to do. But this was actually, this started many years ago. My cousin and I had this vision of creating a micro resort where it's very intentional, a lot of attention to detail, very high-end premium experience. You know, the big box hotel chains that are out there these days are just lacking soul or lacking something like an experience, like that feeling.

And back in 2020, that's what I set out to do before I even started my land business. And I was living in California at the time. So was he. So we went out to San Bernardino County, Joshua Tree, all these hot places that we figured we could create one of these unique experiences. And very quickly, we realized that there was a lot of red tape in a state like California to get permitting for unique stays like these. So we kind of put it in the back burner for a little bit.

Then I moved to Florida and my cousin, Ellie, and his brother, Menachem, he was also dreaming of creating a place like this. So a lot of the credit goes to them. They found this property right across the street from a ski resort. It's called Whitetail Ski Resort in Pennsylvania, right by the border of Maryland. It's about 90 minutes from Washington, D.C. And they live in D.C. as well. And they came over to me and they're like, "Hey, man, we need you." And that was like deep into my land business. And I have a tendency to have a bit of a shiny object syndrome.

So I was like, "Yeah, I don't know, man, things are going well," and they kept on pushing me and they're like, "No, we really need you. A contract is expiring. We need the money. We need your experience." We need a lot of different things that, I guess they were lacking at the time. And I really believe in them. They're incredible partners. Their work ethic is second to none. And I'm like, these guys are definitely A players and I want to join with them.

So that's what we did. It was a week before New Year's and the contract expired December 31st. And the property was $200,000. And I had all my money tied in, you know, how the land business goes and a bunch of subdivisions and deals. And so what's funny is I needed $200 grand to just close on it. And they posted on a land group in the community saying, "Hey guys, I need to buy this property. Does anyone want to help me out here for just a little bit?" And there was a land investor there who right away reached out to me and said, "Hey, man, I'll just wire you the money." And I'm like, "Yeah, do you want to talk terms? Do you want to talk like what's the interest rate?" He's like, "No interest rate. Just pay me back whenever you refinance or just take it." I'm like, "Why?" He's like, "Listen, I've heard you on different podcasts. I've been following you a little bit. I want to learn from you a little bit more. I want to kind of connect. And this is kind of my way to just help you out."

Seth: You got friends like that, huh?

Meir: Yeah, I mean, I didn't really know him well at the time and we put a lien on the property obviously on his name so if anything goes south he owns the property. Recently I was talking to him I'm like "Hey man, why'd you do that? Are you crazy?" and he's like "Yeah my wife was telling me the same thing" and I said "Listen I want to do this myself if these guys don't actually execute I'll just do it myself."

So that's interesting. It's incredible land. The community, how we say in the land space, it's so giving and everyone's just so friendly and close. So that's really how we got our start.

Seth: Now, you mentioned that you paid $200,000 for this. In your estimation, was that the actual market value or were you getting this below market value at all?

Meir: So this property was sitting on the market for years. And reason being, it was at the side of a mountain and got no permits to do anything. It's just dirt. Like how many times do we pass as land investors on these slopey properties, as we call them, you know, bad topography, cliffside, and we're like "so hard to build. No one wants them." And no one really saw the vision. So credit goes to Ellie and Menachem, who actually went there and saw the vision and they hiked up this slopey terrain and they just saw the slopes and they're like, "This place is incredible." And they had that vision to be able to fully execute it.

Seth: So do you think that $200,000 price, like, did that reflect the fact that the seller had had it on the market for a long time and they lowered it and lowered and lowered it? Or like, was there any kind of, and I know I realize, especially with properties like this that are slopey, it's hard to know, like, what is market value? 'Cause it's not flat and what do you compare it to? But I'm just trying to figure out like, did you get any kind of a favorable equity position in this or did you just buy it at market value because you saw the potential and what you could do with it?

Meir: Yeah, we just paid market price for it, because we saw the potential of what could be done.

Seth: And when we say it's sloped, do you have any idea what the percentage of a grade was? Like, is this like 45 degree angle, super steep, or was it like 15% or 5%? How bad was it?

Meir: So, the entrance is not that bad. We were able to do it with a regular car. As you go higher up, it gets steeper. We do have a problem with the winter, obviously, with the snow and the ice. So we had to heat up the driveway. That was actually one of the requirements from the township was the driveway needs to be heated. So, you know, we don't want people just crashing down into the road.

I don't know the exact slope but it's doable now that we paved it obviously and we created the driveways and the roads.

Seth: How did you heat it? You have like some electric blanket or something like that?

Meir: So when we build that we put underneath the gravel or asphalt the heating pipes. I think I'm not sure if it works with water or hot water.

Seth: So you have like a big hot water heater unit that heats the water and pumps it throughout?

Meir: Yeah, it's called a pump house. That's how we call it. It's got all the water softeners, the treatment, all the Wi-Fi. It's kind of like the outhouse that keeps all the utility stuff there.

Seth: Did you have to build any retaining walls or anything like that?

Meir: Yeah, so as you go up, every unit that we built had to be obviously on a flat surface. You don't want people falling off their beds at night. So we had to build semi-retaining walls. We had to engineer it in a way that it wasn't going to be cost prohibitive to build, but it was still good enough for it to work.

Seth: How expensive was that? Because I have a little bit of experience doing that on a property I bought and developed. And it's kind of a lot. Again, I don't know exactly how steep this is, but that coupled with the pipes and that kind of thing, it doesn't sound that cheap to build it or run it. So are we talking like a fortune to get this thing drivable?

Meir: Yeah. I mean, I have to look at the line items of every single thing that we did. But just in terms of getting the driveways and the place ready, without even talking about the units, we spent, I think, about $600,000.

Seth: How many acres was this property?

Meir: 17, approximately.

Seth: So that kind of tells you why no one bought this property, because you're looking at three times the price just to make it drivable and usable. 17 acres, that's a nice size. You can do a lot with that if you can just get past the whole sloped aspect of it.

Seth: Cool. So how many of these mirror villas did you buy?

Meir: Yeah, there's four of them for now. There's two that are the deluxe, which are the larger ones. Those fit about four people and those have a private sauna as well. And then there's two honeymoon ones, which are slightly smaller. All four of them have private hot tubs, but the honeymoons don't have a private sauna. And that's why they're a little bit less expensive per night. So that's a total of four.

Seth: And how big are these things in terms of like square feet?

Meir: I'm not sure the exact number, but what I will tell you is that when you walk in, because they're floor to ceiling, for those who don't know, these are floor to ceiling glass walls. Think of this like big rectangle that have sort of like the skyscraper in Manhattan, you know, those windows that you can't see inside the office, but when you're inside, you see clearly outside. So it's a very special material. It's very unique. We had to import it from Estonia because that's where they manufacture it.

And when you're inside, it feels way, way bigger than if you were to go to tiny house. And that's because there's literally no walls. It's like wherever you turn, even in the bathroom, it's all glass. We did frost the four or five feet just for privacy. But when you're showering, if you're a little bit taller, you can actually shower and you feel like you're outside and it's an incredible feeling. And when you're outside, what's interesting is that when you're looking at these villas you kind of don't see them—they disappear in nature.

Into nature because they just blend beautifully and it has like a bit of a tint which actually is very flattering when you look at yourself. It's not like a regular mirror, it's like a little bit darker in a way and it also has a UV film for birds not to fly into it and crash so they can see them.

So at night, when you're inside, if you have all your lights on and it's pitch dark outside, then yes, people can see in. And which is why we have floor to ceiling curtains that you can use for privacy. But during the day, no one can see in.

Seth: And again, just a reminder, check out the video version of this. You can also go to modernescapes.com. That's Meir's website where he currently has these things. There's pictures of them and they're really sharp. Actually, I can sort of see the slope of the land. And this is kind of a wild guess, but it kind of looks like maybe a 25, 30% slope. It's pretty steep. I mean, it's hard to do much with that unless you have a plan like this. So I see why.

Now, there's four of these things on 17 acres. Are these like next to each other? Or like if you're staying in one, can you see the other one? Or are they in different places?

Meir: So they're kind of well separated from each other. Yeah, you can see them from a distance, but you definitely have your privacy. There's also trees around. Then we did a lot of landscaping, so we designed them intentionally in a way where you have complete privacy.

Seth: It sounds like there's full bathrooms inside each one.

Meir: And one of the units actually is ADA compliant. Yeah. So it's very big bathroom, big door, you know, it's easily accessible.

Seth: So that's nice. So if you had a wheelchair, you can get right in there.

Meir: Absolutely. We actually recently had a guest who wrote a whole review about it. Go to Google Maps and you type in Mirror Villas Whitetail or Mirror Villas Mercer's Berg. We have five stars actually across all the reviews. And what's interesting is that you can see pictures of people staying there as opposed to Airbnb, the reviews in Airbnb, you can't really see pictures. But this is cool. Like you actually get a firsthand experience of what it looks like.

Seth: Very cool. And being four separate units. So like people who don't know each other will be staying there at the same time, right? It's actually four separate properties, essentially on Airbnb that you're renting out. Is that right?

Meir: Yeah. Airbnb is not even like our main driver, but there's four separate units. They don't know each other. You could rent all four at once if you wanted to do a corporate retreat or extended family stay where you go with your cousins or your siblings and everybody's got their own space.

And what's very nice is there's a lot of local cafes and restaurants and the local community has been incredible. From the permitting to the contractor to all the service providers and the workers that came together for this to come to life have been incredible to work with and it's such a nice little town. I mean you pass by a farm on the way. You see horses on the way out. And it's literally 90 minutes from DC, which is incredible. That's so close to a massive city with the ports and everything. And then at the same time, the drive there is very special. The sunset also sunsets right in front of the villas by the mountain because it's facing west.

It's just incredible, it's very magical. The word I would use is magical. I recently stayed there actually last weekend with my wife and it was just so magical to stay there as a guest and be like, "Wow, this is, I get why people are raving about it. I get why our occupancy is 90% up." It's just such a well-executed vision.

Seth: That's awesome, man. That's really cool. These units that you got. So they came from Estonia. How did you even find this? Did you just do a Google search for like magical mirror villas or something? Or did you look at a bunch of different companies before deciding on this one?

Meir: Yeah. So we did a ton of R&D. And when I say a ton of R&D, we literally stayed in so many tiny homes. And we know every single manufacturer by name. We know the owner. We did a lot of research and it's fun to do R&D on these things. And I personally love the whole tiny house glamping sort of industry.

But what we quickly realized was we didn't want to be a glamping resort. We wanted to be a micro resort, like a luxury high-end resort. And all these yurts and domes, yeah, they're cheap. You know, you can put up a dome for 20 grand. And when we were looking at that, we're like, this is not really what we want to do. We want to create unique luxury stays in nature. So you have both. You have that nature feel. There's deer everywhere. You can literally just see them running around. It's such a wholesome experience, but we wanted something very premium to just feel luxury.

So our bedding, our pillows, our blankets, this soap shampoo from Ace Soap, like just everything about it needed to be premium. So when we were looking for something premium and we were seeing what's out there, none of these other alternative unique stays, let's just call them, were interesting. They were all kind of gimmicky and weird. So we were like, what is the absolute best, most premium product that we can build.

And then we stumble upon these units. And I found one in the US that a place that had one similar to it. And I literally flew there and stayed there. When I say we took our R&D seriously, I mean it. And when I was there, I was like, this is it. We got to buy these panels somehow. So we started toying with the idea of doing it ourselves. And then we're like, okay, who created these panels? And then that took us to a factory in Estonia who creates these mirrors, these glasses, and we got in touch with them and then we purchased the materials and we actually flew down the team that designed it and that assembled a few of them to our location in Pennsylvania to instruct our contractors and our local people and showing them how what is the best way to assemble them in the way that it comes out amazing, which I think that was, as you can tell, we didn't cheap out in any part of this process.

Seth: That's awesome, man. So cool to hear about how you did this. What do these things cost to pay for this company in Estonia to construct them? And also like, what parts of them did they not build? Like, for example, did they just make the walls in the floor and then you have to furnish everything?

Meir: Yeah so we did all the interior so all the piping, the dry walls, the flooring, all of that was obviously done in-house and the assembling as well was done all in-house on the site. Them and their glass together with some of the poles and the posts and the structure—everything was built on site.

But what was very interesting is I don't know if you remember there was a strike, all the ports were closed in the U.S., and that was October 1st and our units arrived literally the night before.

Seth: Oh my gosh.

Meir: And that was a strike that lasted a couple days but it backlogged weeks and weeks so we had a lot of these tiny little miracles that happened to us along the way. But everything arrived on time and then everything was built locally by local contractors.

Seth: So it sounds like the main thing that you got from the company in Estonia was the mirrors and they're like a fixture or something that the mirrors are attached to. So basically like the walls.

Meir: Yeah. It's like these very thick metal, aluminum beams, I would say, and the structure and the glass.

Seth: This product that they make, is this like the main thing that they're building or are these mirrors used in like a bunch of other types of buildings too?

Meir: Yeah, they try to make like saunas with them sometimes. I see that they're trying to create different units with them.

Seth: So in terms of like the design of this, did you have to hire like an architectural engineer to do something? Or did the company in Estonia like make the plans for you and then your contractors just following that?

Meir: Yeah, so before we get to talking about like engineers and architects, there's also permitting. And I just want to touch on the permitting part of things because that's probably the biggest bottleneck to creating one of these. You can't just buy a piece of land somewhere and then make a micro resort with these units.

And there is so much compliance that goes into permitting, zoning approvals by the board. You have a township, you have the county, you have the city, you have the state. There's so much red tape and regulation. So in places like California, it's frankly, it can take you years. Then there's places like Pennsylvania are a little bit easier, but still very, very hard to go through that.

And part of that process is also designing the flow of the place. So we had to do that in-house. We designed where we want the door to go, where we want the bathrooms. We had a lot of agency in terms of the layout of the space, and we had to draw those plans and get them approved. So we did all that in-house using local contractors.

Seth: The permitting process. So it sounds like the area where you did this was fairly easy to work with?

Meir: I would say they were very good to work with. We did everything that we were supposed to do and just go through the process. I know some areas are harder than others, but we're very grateful to them for allowing us to make this vision a reality. And I think ultimately it really helped the local community for sure, boosted the employment.

Seth: Is this considered like a rural area? Is that what you would call this?

Meir: Yeah, I would say pretty out there.

Seth: Okay. Well, because I know that's, I have heard that tends to make it easier, just generally speaking, like when there's not a super dense population, kind of like you said doing this in California in LA like it's probably almost unthinkable or would cost a fortune and take years to do but the more out in the sticks you get, there's just less red tape in general so maybe that's part of what's going on.

Meir: Yeah I would agree with that. But then again if you do them in the middle of nowhere, like I remember I was buying a piece of land and I think it was like Alabama or something. I called the county and the operator says, "Who can I direct your call to?" and I'm like, "Can I please speak to planning and zoning?" And she's like, "Oh, we don't have zoning."

Seth: What do you mean, you don't have zoning?

Meir: Like, "Yeah, we don't have zoning." I'm like, "Okay, thank you." You can do what you want—you can build a skyscraper there, but who's going to do that in the middle of like Alabama?

Seth: Well, I'm wondering, did your property taxes go up much after making these improvements? Like, could that be part of why the municipality was like, "Okay, you can do it" because we can charge more money now?

Meir: Yeah. So it's interesting to ask that. We recently spoke with an attorney in Pennsylvania who specializes in property taxes. And Pennsylvania is very unique in the way how they calculate property taxes. And we haven't yet gotten our property taxes reassessed. It's something that they're probably working on for next year. But yeah, it'll probably go up.

Seth: The general contractor that you got locally that did all of this work, really probably the most important work, like making it all happen, how did you find them? You just call a random person or like, did you get a referral from somebody? That's an important set of shoes to fill. So I'm curious how you found them.

Meir: Great question. I mean, when you're working in a small town, you're like, okay, who built the bank? Who built the library? Who built all the bigger structures, buildings in place? The bank who we worked with is also local and they recommended them. They're like, "You know, these guys are good and we've worked with them in the past. So if you work with them, we'll be happy." Let's just say it that way.

So it's been great working with them. I mean, usually you have, it's very rare to see someone that gets along with their contractor. I don't know if you've ever done your house, if you ever use the contractor, but a lot of people tend to like not be in talking terms with the contractor after they finish the work because over budget, over time, you know, but it's been great.

Obviously a lot of hiccups along the road as you can imagine, but keeping an open line of communication has always been top priority for us. And having my partners there made all the difference. There were early morning trips, late night trips, overnight trips. Like they were really the ones who were doing a lot of the local work while I was focused more on the fundraising, on the different aspects that didn't require me to be there because I live in Florida.

Seth: Now, what was the timeline like on this from the date you bought the land and then the date you ordered the mirrors to the date that construction's finished? The first person is staying there. Like how much time went by during this whole process?

Meir: I would probably say it's record-breaking in terms of how quickly we got things done. Like, this is not a blueprint for how most things will look like. This is just probably because Ellie is just a crazy animal and how fast he works and how optimistic he is. But we closed January 1st, 2024. That's when we closed on the property. And we had our first guest stay January 15, 2025.

Seth: Wow. That is, for a hotel, yeah, it's wild how quickly we worked.

Meir: So we closed on the 1st. Then we had, obviously, the permitting process. Again, you know, we're very grateful for the township for working with us and working quicker than other places. Like in L.A., we would still probably be working, waiting for a callback from zoning.

And then in June, I believe we started breaking ground and started laying out the foundations, the driveways, and everything else. October 1st, as I mentioned, is when we got our panels, that was a very quick turnaround from when we got the panels to when we assembled the units.

And then we were just racing against the clock because we pre-booked our stays a year and a half in advance. So we sold out before we even opened our doors. It was a crazy rush when you have people coming on the 15th of January, no matter what. Your contractor doesn't care. No one else cares. You care. So it was just a crazy, crazy hustle, mostly on my partner's part. I flew in and I tried to help out as well in the construction, although that wasn't really my department, but we got it done. We got it done by the 15th.

Seth: Yeah. This might be a good segue talking about just the money aspect of it, like where the money come from, how many investors are involved. So let's start there. Like how many investors are in on this deal with you? Like how much money did you have to put in? And then like, where'd the other money come from?

Meir: Yeah. I have a very rich uncle who died a week... No, I'm joking.

So we got a loan. So the whole project costs about 1.5. That's like land, everything, everything beginning to 1.5. We got a loan from a bank for about a million, so we had to put up another 500 of our own. And I got an investor who gave him some equity, and he put in a quarter million, and then we put in the rest. And that's how it broke down. Million dollar loan, 250,000 of an investor who got some equity. And then you and I don't know who else had to put in the remaining 250,000.

Seth: Where did that amount come from?

Meir: So the land is actually worth 200. So that counted for the 250. And then the other 50 was just me and my partners.

And in terms of how we paid back the 200 from that original lender, that's a great question and that is the segue into why we pre-booked our stays a year and a half in advance. Because if we can pre-book these things then we don't have to sell a half a million in equity and give up a ton of equity. We could just pay him back right away. As soon as we finished the campaign, the Indiegogo pre-launch campaign, and then the money comes in and then you pay that back. And then you get to retain a larger chunk of equity that way.

Seth: And this is really interesting. I've never talked to anybody who has used Indiegogo for this. Maybe for those who aren't even familiar with Indiegogo, maybe they've heard of it, but don't know what it's all about. What is that? And then what exactly did you do with it? How do you pre-sell these things? Like what do the people have to pay for it and what is their expectation on what they get as a result of that?

Meir: Great question. So I have experience with Indiegogo. I've launched multiple products about six-seven years ago—an electric skateboard, different headphones, and I was always back in my mid-20s that's what I was doing. So I have experience with the crowdfunding platforms.

For those who don't know, crowdfunding is essentially usually someone has an idea and they say, "Hey, I want to create this new set of headphones. They're electrostatic and you don't need to plug them into a wall," which is kind of what I did in 2016, I think. And it was great.

Now you have to basically put renders of it, pictures, a video, what it looks like, a prototype, and then people back your campaign. What that means is people give, so you have different packages. So people say, "I want to back $250" and the perk that you get is when we actually launch and we fulfill the product, you get a product shipped to your house.

So it's not that you're buying and you're getting something, it's you're contributing, right? You're contributing to the campaign and whether the campaign is successful or not. So let's say the campaign fails. You don't get to get your money back because you just contributed towards a campaign. But if it is successful, then you get whatever perk you chose on the platform.

So it's a little bit hard, but there is a... Have you ever seen those lines outside of Apple when the new iPhone comes out? And you're like, who are these people, right? So they're called the early adopters. So if there's like a bell curve, you have the early adopters who are like those people who want in on the first thing and they always love talking about innovative stuff. Then you have the top of the bell curve which is most people who are like, "Yeah, let me know when it's ready and I'll go." Then you have the end, the long tail is the people that are the late bloomers.

So what we needed to do is capture those early adopters and show them that this is real, that we're actually launching. Ask them for money, give them a 45% discount and allow them to book once we're live which is a big ask, but for 45% off and we also give them perks and a welcome package and a bunch of other stuff.

So the misconception, and this is going to be a myth buster right here, is most people think that you just go on Kickstarter or Indiegogo and you launch your product, you announce that you're going to create a product, and then you get hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because of course, you go to Kickstarter, they want you to believe that. So they put those in the homepage. And you're like, "Wow, I could just have this idea and put it up there and make a ton of money." Well, that is not true.

The way it works is you got to work your crowd before you launch. And that's what we call a pre-launch. So let's say we launched, I think we launched September, October time, right? So I think we launched it like mid-September. So what we needed to do was two months before that start running Google ads, Facebook ads mainly, and showing pictures, showing renderings, getting some PR around it and then bringing people to a landing page where they can give you a deposit—a $50 deposit.

And what you promise to them is that when we go live, you are going to be the first ones to book. And it's a first come first serve basis based on the numbers. So if you're the first backer, you're 001. And those are the people who get to pick the dates first. So you want July 4th, 4th of July, you want spring break, whatever it is that you want. The earlier you become a VIP, and we call those the VIPs, the people who give you $50 to go on your VIP list.

And then the minute we launched, that's why if you look at the campaign, most of the money came in the first three hours, which was a surreal moment. My partners and I were on a Zoom call while we went live. And then the email just went out and we're like 100, 200, 300. It's crazy. I mean, we ended up raising five hundred and thirty thousand dollars from close to five hundred backers. It's just pretty crazy.

Seth: Yeah, that's fascinating. There's a lot of questions just in that, like around the pre-launch and knowing what to say in these Google ads to pre-sell the thing. And I assume you have experience doing this. So it was kind of a natural thing for you to know how to do all that. Just in terms of pre-selling the idea, like you have some architectural rendering of what it is going to look like. Or how do you convince people that it's worth that? That many people to the point that you get $530,000.

Meir: Yeah, great question. So Kickstarter doesn't allow you to do this if you don't actually have the product. Indiegogo allows you to do it with renderings. So that's why we chose Indiegogo. So once you have renderings, and we had pictures and videos of our construction workers doing the work and the contractor. And we created a private Facebook group for these VIPs where we would give updates.

And at one point, I literally took my phone and I filmed a selfie video saying, "Hey, guys, listen, my name is Meir. I've done this before. I promise you, I promise you that this is going to happen. And if it doesn't happen, I promise you I will give you your money back and you have my word. And that was it—you either trust me or you don't trust me. In general, I'm a very trusting guy, like I trust the universe and I believe that that's kind of how it works both ways. People see me, they look me up, and they're like "Yeah, I trust this guy."

So that together with renderings, pictures, updates... The team, they read a little bit about what's going on. Some people even drove by the site and they're like, "Is this real? Like there's backhoes and there's trucks there and it's real." So I'm very, very grateful to those early backers who believed in us.

They weren't easy, not an easy crowd. I'll just say, if you're planning on doing this, brace yourself because these people are not easy to handle.

Seth: When you say that, like, how are they not easy? Are they like calling you every day asking for updates or something or what was so hard about it?

Meir: Yeah there's just like "Hey, we're told this, we were told that," but we kept them very engaged. For example, "What type of sauna should we get?" So we would do polls within our community of backers—"Wood burning or do you want it to be electric?" So all these kind of questions so people remain engaged.

But I knew this from my previous Indiegogo campaigns. People give you money. They didn't get anything in the mail the next day, like we're used to. So they're like, "Are you real? Are you not? You said this, you said that..." They're trying to sort of prove to themselves that you're real, but they do that by asking a million questions. And things come up, you know, so you just have to communicate. Again, open line of communication is key.

Seth: Yeah, that's interesting. And by the way, I'm going to put the link to Meir's Indiegogo campaign. I'm going to post that in the show notes again, retipster.com/220. It's helpful just to see what it looks like, like what the pictures look like, the video, got an FAQ section, the story just gives a lot of very helpful info to somebody who might be thinking about putting money into this. Like a lot of those questions are answered. It might be a good model to follow for anybody else out there who's trying to do something like this someday.

But that thing you mentioned about keeping people engaged. So my friend, Oren Claff, worked with him a little bit this past year, a few months ago now about raising money for a private equity deal. And that's something that he does really well. And it's almost like part of the plan is that every single week, there is a live community call with the investors just to keep them engaged, just to let them know where things are at. Like, how is the deal progressing? And it would be hard to have questions in that crowd because every conceivable question is answered if you're showing up to those things. So something like, I never would have thought of that, that that's a big part of raising money, but I think it is. Depending on the project and how much money and where it's coming from is just constant communication with those people.

Meir: I would agree. It makes it a little harder when there's that time component to it. 'Cause a lot of people are like, "Hey, my anniversary is February 5th. And I literally backed your campaign because I want to go for my anniversary." And then they're getting nervous like, "Oh, this, that..." They're just nervous like it might not happen by their time. And at a certain point, I have to tell people, "Hey if you want the certainty just book, go to Airbnb and just book something else and then use this for a later date."

We had an insane amount of pressure, you have no idea, of all the different people involved with this. And in that Indiegogo campaign it lists a bunch of the people involved including you—who is like officially in charge of running this place? If I was one of these Indiegogo investors and I got a question, who am I asking? I'm asking you, Meir, or somebody else on the team?

Meir: Yeah so most people have this vision of a company where you have like this big hotshot CEO who's like the driver driving the car. And the way we see it, it's more like a rowing team. So Menachem, Ellie, myself—we're all rowing the boat right? So yes, we each have different seats that we sit on. If you're familiar with EOS, there's different parts of the business.

I'm more the visionary, and then they're more like the integrator. And then there's the finance, the marketing, then there's operations. So we divvied up kind of all the different parts of the business. So if it would be a guest communication, like if a guest has a problem, that would go to Jennifer, who's our location manager. And Jennifer reports to Ellie. So that's kind of how things work now.

Although when we did start, I have to admit, we weren't as organized and everybody was just doing everything. And it was just like, go, go, go, go, go until we were done. And now we were able to take a breather and be like, okay, because we do have, I mean, we talk about this a little bit more, but this is our first of many, many, many locations that we have in the pipeline.

So we had to organize ourselves with the EOS framework to be able to know, okay, what's our 10-year vision, our five-year, three-year, what are quarterly rocks? What are the seats? What does the org chart look like? What's everyone's scorecard? What are the issues that we need to tackle? We have weekly all-time meetings.

So now it's, the first was let's create the product. Now it's "Okay, we've actually built the company now." And this company is, we already have investors looking to come in on next deals. We're already on contract for different properties. So this is where it really starts getting very exciting.

Seth: So if I, or if you wanted to like copy this concept somewhere else in the country or even in the world, or just copy as many components of it as I can to make success happen somewhere else, what do you think are some of the most crucial things that must be true? Like, does there have to be a ski resort across the street? Does it have to be a mirror villa? Could it be another kind of property? Does it have to be 90 minutes from Washington, D.C.? Like, which parts of this, if they weren't true, would make it fall apart?

Meir: So the first one is not location-dependent. The first thing you have to look at is yourself. Look at yourself. Look at your history. Are you the type of guy who started doing the dishes but then sort of left it undone, who started organizing your room but sort of walked away, who thought of building a business a million times and never got your act together?

If you're that person, don't do this unless you have a partner who is okay with the way you are and maybe you bring something else to the table. This requires extreme amount of discipline, focus, determination. You know, we took the loan, for example, the units weren't ready yet and we still have to pay the mortgage. Like there's a lot of stress that goes on. So that's the first thing. If you want to do this, by all means, it's very hard, but it's very rewarding at the same time.

Let's assume that you have what it takes to get it done or the partners to get it done. I would say you want to be near a city and you don't want to do this in the middle of nowhere because obviously people need to get to it somehow.

Seth: When you say near, do you mean like an hour and a half near? Like how far is too far?

Meir: I would say within two hours of a major city. And what we're doing, and that's what separates us from the rest of people, is we're strategically picking locations that have built-in traffic, built-in audience. Like we're directly across from the ski resort. The ski resort is owned by Vail Resort, it's not going anywhere. Like this winter season it was packed. I mean you just drive up there and it's like there's nowhere to park.

And our second, third, fourth and fifth locations are going to be very similar to that. Granted, it's harder usually unless the property's slopey. Properties that are right next to main attractions are expensive. So if you want to do your first one, it doesn't have to be an incredible location per se. Get your feet wet on a maybe smaller project. I wouldn't even do four. Maybe just do one, see what it looks like, and then scale from there.

Seth: So it sounds like yourself, the proximity to a city, traffic source is really important. I mean, obviously the numbers have to work. That's kind of an obvious one, but the whole mirror villa thing, like, could you do this with the yurts or tiny houses or A-frames or some other weird kind of property? Or how important is the mirror, just the uniqueness of that?

Meir: There's two metrics that matter in the short-term rental business. That is nightly rate and occupancy, right? And if you want to combine them both as ADR (Average Daily Rate). That's the only thing that matters from an underwriting perspective.

So you could do yurts, you could do domes, you could do containers, you could do airstreams. It doesn't matter what you do—just run the numbers and make sure that because they're going to be a lot cheaper, right? Like I said, you can pitch a dome for 25 grand. But then how much money could you command per night? And how many people are actually going to stay in a dome?

And don't get me wrong, there's dome resorts that are killing it. And they're fully occupied, and they're charging a ton of money. So then go do that if you're in that kind of area, just make sure your numbers pencil.

So one thing we did well, I think as well, was the due diligence aspect and the underwriting. We are the type of people that if we do something, we want to do it right. So we want to go for the best and we want to make it more expensive, but it's going to cost a lot more money to do, but it'll command higher nightly rates and the occupancy will be much higher as well. So it just has to underwrite.

And then number two, I would say, create something that you're proud of, that you're passionate about. What's driving you to do this, right? If it's money, okay, we just spoke about the underwriting, make sure that it's going to make you money. But if it's maybe something else, maybe you want to do like a farm, you know, homestead kind of retreat, and you don't need these fancy mirror villas for that. Maybe you want to create a more holistic community around farm to table and yurts are amazing. Domes are nice. There's so many unique glamping structures out there. So those are the two decisions that you should kind of make when determining what kind of tiny house you want to build.

Seth: The images and the footage and that kind of thing. It seems like that's a really important component of building up the dream. And just it's similar to selling land, you know, and if you can make your listing look amazing, you're going to have an easier time selling it. It makes me think you could probably get great footage or photos of anything as long as it looks halfway decent and you care enough to sell the dream, right?

Meir: Yes, but you can market from today to tomorrow and you can take the nicest pictures. If the product is not A+, people are not going to come back. The reviews are not going to be great. You have to make sure that whatever you do, it doesn't matter what you do, but whatever you do, you do it 100% well.

And to your point, Seth, you want to be remarkable. I think that's the key word. We're in an age where there's so many unique stays and Airbnbs. Like we don't even care what other Airbnbs in the areas are doing because we're so remarkable and unique. I don't care if somebody is renting their house down the road and they're only charging a hundred bucks a night. It's irrelevant to us because we created something that's completely different.

That's bringing traffic and leveraging existing traffic from the ski resort. So the location combined with the product, it's so unique and so remarkable that it's kind of in a league of its own.

Seth: Well, you mentioned the cost and the occupancy rate. So what does it cost to stay there per night? Does that cost vary by season? Do you have like a minimum number of nights people have to stay there or anything like that?

Meir: Yeah. So what's interesting about this location is that we're across the street from a ski resort. So typically winter is low season in the area. But because we have that resort across the street, winter is actually very high season for us. And then in the summer, it's beautiful. And we have a golf course from Whitetail as well. Very nice golf course right next door to it. There's kayaking. There's just a lot of activities to do year round. So this is a year-round resort, which is incredible.

In terms of nightly rate, it's $1,000 a night approximately. We do run some promotions.

Seth: Is that for one of the villas?

Meir: That's for one villa for one night. And we have a minimum of two night stays. Sunday nights, you could do one night just on Sunday night. Just the way the housekeeping works. Check-in is on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Those are check-in and check-out dates. So it kind of keeps everything streamlined. You can stay for three nights if you want, but the minimum is two nights.

Like I said, Indiegogo people paid a little less. I mean, a lot less. We gave them a 45% discount. So it's hard to see kind of where the chips land, you know. Right now, our occupancy is like 95%, right? Like, it's just hard. We want influencers to come and stay so we can drum up some business, like grow our Instagram presence. And it's like, "Sorry, we're just sold out." But a lot of that has to do with our pre-launch campaigns or Facebook campaigns.

And what's interesting about the pre-launch campaign that Facebook came up, we didn't really touch on this so much, but people tend to ask me like, "Oh, you spent a ton of money on marketing and yes, you raised over half a million dollars and you're sold out, but how much does that cost you?"

So what's interesting about this, and I can give you the exact numbers here if you'd like, is so we raised at the time of the campaign finished (because you can still go on Indiegogo and contribute and book), but at the time the campaign finished, we raised $528,000 from 493 backers. Now here's what's incredible. We spent $148,000 on Facebook ads, but the Facebook ad required people to put down a $50 deposit. Those $50 were reinvested into Facebook ads. Now, guess how much our cost per deposit was, our cost per lead, essentially, on Facebook was $49 cost per lead, and people were giving us $50, right? Now, granted, we had some people who had refunds. We had some credit card fees on those $50. So total out-of-pocket spend to raise over a half a million dollars through Facebook ads exclusively was $12,000.

Seth: So I assume, obviously, some of these backers put a lot more than $50 in?

Meir: So the $50 was the VIP, was to get on the VIP list. Those $50 were reinvested in Facebook ads. Then once you're on the VIP list, the minute we launched, you backed, meaning a lot more than 50, you backed, you basically paid for two nights a day. So most backers paid about $1,200.

Seth: So $12,000 raised $550,000. Talk about an ROI.

Meir: That's pretty impressive.

Seth: Well, I mean, it sounds like there's some magic going on. Part of what's making that work is that you knew how to advertise this well on Facebook, right? Or Google or wherever you were doing that. And I know that may seem simple to you, but that's not an idiot-proof thing. On two occasions, I've blown through $10,000 and got nothing out of it just because the agencies I hired didn't know what they were doing. It's not a brainless thing. But if you know how to do that, apparently that works really well.

Meir: Yeah, so this goes back to what I was saying about what type of person are you? And this is all credit to Menachem, my partner. He's the one who took this on. I mean, I've done this in the past, but then he kind of took over. And he has incredible determination to see things through till the end. And he just does not give up. He's relentless.

So we had weeks, for example, where their cost per lead was $25 or $30. And that was amazing. We're like, "Wow, people are giving us 50 bucks and it's only costing us 25. We're making money just on these ads," which is crazy. And then we had weeks where it jumped to $70 or $80 cost per lead. And that was like, "Oh my God, this is crazy. We're losing money. What are we going to do?"

And not only that, we had a time where Facebook accidentally deleted permanently all of our campaigns. It was our fault and we learned from that, so we had to bounce back.

The way Facebook works is you have to create the right audience so you have to start spending money. And we were thinking, "Okay, people who live in DC, this kind of demographic..." And then Facebook starts learning what performs better, what performs worse. Like we learned that if you put a red arrow on an image, it's going to convert higher. And how do we learn that? Well, we A/B split test with a red arrow versus without. And the red arrow somehow just captures your attention, makes you click. It's crazy things like this that just enhance a campaign and really, there was a huge learning curve for sure. But I mean, the end results were incredible.

Seth: On the occupancy rate thing, you said it's 95%. And I guess this hasn't been open for a full year yet, right? But I'm curious, like in your projections, what does the occupancy rate have to be in order for you to break even and not lose money?

Meir: Oh, to break even? 20% occupancy.

Seth: Yeah, no, I mean, this is, again, it's a premium product, people are willing to pay for it, we're still getting bookings at full price, people who didn't get the discount or anything, people who just live in the area. It's also a very affluent area. I mean, 18 out of the 25th highest gross income zip codes in America are within driving distance, right? So historically, Virginia, Washington, DC, Maryland, there's a lot of affluent people, older wealth, inherited wealth, a lot of people working for the government. It's definitely a huge plus.

We'll see what the ADR ends up being. But we are investing a lot in marketing as well, just to book out next year already. And just to build out our social media following. At the end of the day, these micro resorts are mainly driven through social media. You see a reel, you see something incredible—again, it's all about your product. Are you remarkable? Is this something worth talking about? Is this something people want to take a picture and share? And people just go to the website and book.

So, it's too early to tell, but at the rate we're going, thank God, I think this is going to be one of those great starts into our second and third location.

Seth: Yeah. I would say this is a very social media friendly property. I mean, if I was standing there, I would totally want everybody to know where I stayed and I want them to see what it looked like because it looks awesome.

Meir: Yeah. Thank you.

Seth: I'm curious, just kind of a random question with all these mirror windows, is it difficult to keep those things clean? Like, it seems like it could start looking dirty quickly if somebody's not squeegeeing these things all the time, or do they just kind of magically look good no matter what?

Meir: Yeah. So when I was staying there last week, I actually saw the cleaning crew cleaning the other units and I just popped my head in to say hello. And I see them scrubbing down the glass and Windex. Windex is definitely a line item in our expenses. But yeah, it gets done. It's definitely very clean when you go in.

Seth: Do they do that like every single week?

Meir: I'm not sure what the cadence is on the cleaning, but they're professionals and they're really good at what they do.

Seth: So what does property management cost? Did you have to find a property manager with anything special or could any short-term rental property manager do this job?

Meir: We have to vet them. Cleaning is the number one, I would say, factor in any short-term rental, even if you're just renting out your studio. If you go into an Airbnb and it's dirty, it's an automatic one star. It's an automatic refund. So whenever you do any of these kind of projects, you have to make sure that your management, your cleaning crew is 10 out of 10. So I would recommend you interview a couple, stay in one of the spaces that they cleaned if you want to go that extra mile and then see if they pay attention to detail. Do they sweep under the beds or do they just kind of... These things really, really matter.

Seth: How close do you live to this property?

Meir: I'm a two and a half hour flight plus an hour and a half drive. So for me, it's a bit of a hike.

Seth: So does somebody on your team live near this?

Meir: My partners, both of them live in DC. So for them, it's a 90 minute drive.

Seth: So are they the ones who would be checking in and monitoring the property manager to make sure they're doing a good job?

Meir: Yeah, they go there frequently. They're on top of anything that has to do with local construction or management. It's more their department.

Seth: So back to that question of what your role is in this now, it sounds like you had a really important role in getting the word out there about the Indiegogo campaign and communicating with people. Now that it's up and running, like, do you oversee property management or do you do something else? What is your job?

Meir: Yes. So I'm in charge of marketing or anything that has to do with whether it's social media or promotions. I'm also in charge of the guest experience. As the visionary, if you're familiar with the EOS structure, the visionary is more the right brain, creative, big picture thinking guy who has relationships with investors. Who's the one that's raising money? Who's the one that's storytelling?

That's more my strength. When it comes to the finance part of it, the operations of the company and the management of it, that's not necessarily my strength. I mean, I could do a decent job at it, but I don't love doing it. It's one of those things that if I would be in charge of that, I would push it off and put it in the, you know, when you have a to-do list of things to do, like the thing that you really don't want to do, it's kind of the thing that you just don't love doing. So they're a lot more like that, which is why we're, I think, a great team together.

Seth: So I am curious, how do most of your tenants or whatever you call them, people that stay there, how do they find out about this? Like, is it through your main website or is it through Instagram or is it through Airbnb? Or what accounts for the way that most people discover it and say, "Oh, yeah, I want to stay there."

Meir: Yeah. So currently most of the people staying there right now, as of this recording, are people from the Indiegogo campaign. And they probably saw us on Facebook, Instagram, and they went to the campaign. They backed it and now they're staying there. We are on Airbnb, probably word of mouth. It's again, too early to tell and to run kind of a survey, but it's a mix of social media and our website.

Seth: Well, on the whole social media thing, it's kind of a random question. You got a ton of followers on your Instagram page. Over 15 and a half thousand people following you, where did they all come from?

Meir: Yeah. So what's interesting, and this is a quick tip for someone, if you are boosting ads or you're running, let's say Facebook ads, you can do them in a way that you're essentially boosting existing organic posts as ad creatives. So then all the likes and comments and shares, all the engagement carries over to all the other ad sets and then it remains in your page even after you finish doing the campaign.

So we have a couple reels that have millions of views. We boosted them and obviously like I was mentioning before, we were spending a lot of money on ads which ended up being not so expensive. But those aren't just to drive people to your website to book, but those people, because you're boosting organic ads, are on your Instagram. So they just hit follow.

And like you mentioned before, this is very Instagrammable. People want to follow us because it's so cool. It's like, what's the next location? What's the next kind of structure? So Modern Escapes is a parent company that we created for this. And it's the parent brand. The mirror brand is just these mirror units. Our second tier locations might look a little different, might be a different spin, a different product. So people want to follow and see what we're up to. So yeah, we're grateful for the following that we have. And it's only growing. We're only getting started.

Seth: And when you're talking about on Instagram, boosting organic ads. So when I hear the word organic ads, that sounds like a paradox to me. Like an ad isn't organic. So what do you mean by that? You mean like just one of the reels that you made, you're boosting that. And then that gets more people to follow you?

Meir: So yeah, you can take existing posts and use them as ad creatives, right? So if you want to, if you're into this, you can just search it up on YouTube or Google. You can write "creating ads using post ID." So then your ad is just using the ID of the organic post that you posted, as opposed to creating new ads that disappear once you stop paying for the ads. So as of today, that is something that you could do.

Seth: Gotcha. So that really just makes your, and I could be totally wrong on this, but that just makes the post that you created, whether it's an image or a reel, it makes that just show up for more users out there that Instagram thinks it's relevant for?

Meir: Exactly. So all the engagement that you get because again, you spent a lot of money boosting it, so you're going to get a lot of engagement. When the ad finishes, instead of "Okay, the ad is no longer running so it sort of disappears"—well, it was an organic post that you used as an ad so it just stays on your page with millions of views and the people are kind of forced to go onto your Instagram page. And then they follow and that's how you can create a pretty big following.

Seth: That's really interesting. That's like a whole other conversation in itself. But like, what kind of money are we talking about here? If you want to boost like one of these reels that has 18,000 likes on it, like what does it cost to get that many?

Meir: It's funny, like we mentioned before, right? You can spend all the money you want, if your product isn't good, if you're not remarkable, different, magical, if there's nothing of substance that people actually want to see, it's not gonna—it's gonna be very expensive because no one's liking or sharing it.

But if you actually have something very good like we have a reel that's like "The best getaway 90 minutes from DC" and it just has incredible renderings and drone footage or whatever—if I live in DC, I'm gonna like it, I'm gonna share it with my wife, I'm going to be like, "This is so cool. Let's go."

So it has to be, the product has to be great. And that's the focus. Then, you know, Tesla doesn't spend money, famously, for marketing because they just have such an incredible product. Maybe now things are different. It's more competitive. But like, if you're different, then yeah, you can boost it a little bit. But right now we're not running any boosted ads at all. And we're still getting a ton of engagement and their following is growing.

Seth: Gotcha. So there's not like a way you can pay for follows. You can pay for views though. And from the views come follows.

Meir: Yeah. I'm not exactly sure about the entire customer journey or user journey. But I think when you see an ad that's boosted and it says on top "by Mirror Villas," that's our Instagram.com/mirrorvillas. So people see Mirror Villas and then they just click it and then they see that it's a cool page and it's a lot of eye candy. So people like that.

Seth: I'll include a link to that Instagram account in the show notes again, retipster.com/220. So we're getting near the end, Meir. Appreciate all you've shared. This has been awesome. Really appreciate you being so open about all this.

As you look back on this whole experience, what would you say was like the hardest or most difficult part about developing this? Was there any moment or two that was like, "Oh man, that was a huge setback. I didn't know if it was going to work out when this happened."

Meir: Yeah. Yeah. Raising money is for anyone who's ever done it at kind of a seven figure level is hard. And especially we didn't at the time have a track record of building and developing a micro resort and the amount of "no's" that I got. I actually kept a list of all the people I reached out to and everyone said no. Everyone said, "Come on the second, come on the third, you guys are too inexperienced, it's too early."

And there was a time where we actually needed the money. It was a 70-30 loan to construction and we just needed those 30% so the construction could go. The loan can kick in and set everything in motion. I definitely had sleepless nights, lost a lot of sleep over the whole summer of last year. It was a lot of anxiety and stress because that for me was the hardest part.

If you ask my partners, for them, it was all the construction and all the hiccups along the way and the permitting and things getting delayed. That was probably the hardest part for them.

Seth: It's really interesting. You maybe did a similar thing, Meir, but I know when I was building my self-storage facility, it was like nothing I had ever done before. And I was kind of nervous in some ways. And I pray a lot. And my prayer would be like, "God, if you don't want this to work, I want you to sabotage these plans. I want you to kill it as soon as possible. I don't want to spend a bunch of money and get all emotionally invested into this and have it blow up in my face."

I'm going to be paying very careful attention to things that go wrong and try to perceive whether that's you telling me to stop this. I think that was my prayer for months. As we got further and further, there were some setbacks, but ultimately I was kind of surprised at how the doors just kept opening. Like when you look at this kind of process and you see some things go surprisingly well, it's like, "Oh, we got the permits. That was really not that hard." Or "Man, this seller is willing to part with a really good property. They don't see the potential." But then you have the money raising issue and you have the issue with the strike that held up the panels, just stuff like that.

I don't know. How do you deal with that just emotionally? Is there anything where you're like, "Oh man, this was a huge mistake. I never should have done it because of this." How do you keep your courage as you keep going through this process?

Meir: Yeah. I second that. I pray a lot. I'm a man of faith. I pray every morning. And during that time, I had a lot of special prayers that I would make for money to come through, permits to come through. We needed a variance for a few different things. We definitely experienced a lot of tailwind, a lot of the hand of God was present for sure at many, many steps of the way.

And look, I believe that nature is a constant miracle, right? And the reason why we're not blown away by it all the time is because we're just so used to it. But when you're an entrepreneur and you put yourself out there in the arena and you're hit with so many different challenges on a daily basis and you just turn to God and you're like "Just help me out here" and He helps you out and then you get to see that so often and it's so beautiful to be reminded constantly of who's really the boss and the master plan that's in place. So I'm grateful for that.

Seth: Yeah, that's awesome man. One last question here, in your opinion, from what you've seen of this place, is it better to stay there in the winter or the summer? Because I'm seeing pictures of both seasons and both of them look gorgeous. So is one like more popular or one that you like better than the other?

Meir: Well, we haven't had a summer yet, so I haven't stayed there in the summer. So I can't give you my personal preference. It's a tough one.

Seth: Well, it's great, though, that you've got one where it's a tough call. You know, like it's a great place in both seasons. Like that's a huge deal. I know I got friends that have short-term rentals in Northern Michigan and like this summer, that's when it happens. Like you better make your money in the summer because it's going to be dead in the winter time. And it sounds like you don't have that problem.

Meir: Yeah. Thank God we're lucky that way with this property. And going back to the little miracles, like if I literally go back to the timeline, like even getting that wire from a land investor who just said, "Yeah, Meir, I'll do you a solid. I know you're good for it. Just here, take my money." Like, how do you explain that? You know, like there's so many parts of this process where it's like, how do you explain this?

In terms of summer and winter also, like we didn't even realize what an incredible location this was. And this property was literally out there for the taking for years. So there's so much. And as I always mention, Seth, and you know this about us, we give at least 10% to charity, at least sometimes it's closer to 20%. And I just believe in giving of whatever is given to me. We're stewards of money, of time, of anything that's given to us. And the universe and God kind of bring that back in a certain way.

If you stand in front of a mirror and you take, you do the motion of taking, what you see is someone taking from you. But if you stand in front of a mirror and you give, what do you see? You see someone giving you. And that's how this universe works. So my advice is just be as giving as possible. And that's really what it's all about.

Seth: Yeah, that's very encouraging. I mean, if you spend your life giving, you shouldn't be surprised when things go well. Whether it's God or the universe, whatever you think it is, it gives to you. That's how it works.

Well, Meir, again, thanks so much. I was hoping we could have this interview and I'm glad you agreed to it because I learned a ton. I'm sure a lot of people who are into this kind of thing loved it. If people want to find out more, again, should they go to...?

Meir: Modernescapes.com is where they can book. And for me, I mean, they can follow me on Twitter. That's x.com/landmeir because I sell land. Meir is M-E-I-R. But yeah, modernescapes.com. You can book there. Instagram.com/mirrorvillas. You can follow us there.

And I didn't want to... I wanted to say that this is actually the very first time that we're sharing all this information with the public. I've never done a podcast about this before. We've never done any blog posts or any articles. We kept all our numbers confidential. But I do very much appreciate you, Seth, our REtipster community, the land community, and I figured this is a great place to do the first coming out of the closet with all the numbers and all the stats. So I appreciate you for giving us the space.

Seth: Yeah, I'm actually, I'm glad you pointed that out. That's something I think a lot of listeners take for granted when they hear people coming on this show being this open. Like it takes guts and courage to do that. Like it takes real vulnerability.

Believe me, there are plenty of people I invite to come on the show who say no because they don't want to share it for whatever reason. And it's totally up to them to make that decision. But I just want to applaud you, Meir, just for being willing to share this and anybody else out there that I've ever interviewed who has been so open.

Like it is seriously useful to a lot of people who want to understand how this stuff really works and not just see the flashy lights, but understand the actual good, bad and ugly and difficulties that go into this kind of thing and how it's still worth it in the end. There's a lot to take away from that. And we can't do it without people like Meir being willing to share.

Meir: And to that point, yeah, my pleasure. And there's also a little selfish reason for sharing as well is if you have any property that you think this is a trophy property and I want to do something like this, but you don't want to go through the whole process from scratch. You want to partner with us. Like I said, hit me up on X. Or if you're an investor and you've always dreamed of doing something like this and you want to partner, now that you know our story, you know our numbers, you know where to find me and we're happy to cut Seth a little commission.

Seth: Okay. I'll take it. Awesome. Thanks again, Meir. Thanks again for everybody who listened. Again, show notes. And more than usual, I suggest you check them out so you can see the video of this and see the footage. But it's retipster.com/220.

Meir, thanks again. And I'll talk to you all next time.

Meir: Thank you, Seth.