BAM (Broke Agent Media) is officially underway.
I first met Eric Simon (aka The Broke Agent) at Inman Connect several years ago. We quickly became conference friends who kept in touch over the years. Eric has been growing The Broke Agent brand for 7 years – and the amount of talent he has is ridiculous. During that time, I was working on building a media company that services clients. (For more of BAM’s backstory, check out this Over Ask episode.)
We first started brainstorming in 2021 about a real estate course. It didn’t take long for that idea to evolve into a media company – between our businesses, we had all the pieces to create something new for the real estate industry. And so, BAM was created.
Each week, I’ll be blogging on BAM’s weekly happens as a new business. This is a venture I want to share every step of the way – what’s working, what throws us off our game, and the lessons we learn along the way.
So here it is. BAM’s launch week:
The Positives
There’s a neighbor at the end of my street who, after cutting the grass, goes out with scissors and makes sure every blade is perfect. Every. Single. Blade.
That’s what the days leading up to launch were like.
The day before BAM went live, BAM’s team leaders basically had a 24-hour Zoom on Easter Sunday. We paused in the middle of the day for some family and dinner time, took a 3-hour nap in the middle of the night, and logged back in.
We reviewed every detail of the site: every word on the blog posts, every cover image, every video, every link, every social media channel. This was my biggest highlight: to be working with a group of committed, creative people, each bringing unique talent and vision to BAM.
The dedication paid off. All five shows went live without a hitch, and each show already has a sponsor committed to 12 weeks.
And that real estate course that started brainstorming in 2021? Even without any advertising, people found it on the website and started signing up for it.
The Issues
Of course, the week didn’t go by without any glitches. While we’re fortunate there wasn’t anything catastrophic, any time we see an issue we call out: Code Red!
One of my blogs caught the eye of higher-ups at Zillow, who wanted to set a few things straight. We had previously recorded the premiere episode of The Walk Thru on Wednesday, but received a text from Zillow Thursday morning. We knew immediately we had to rerecord in order to be transparent and relay Zillow’s message. If we waited another week, it would have been outdated. Thankfully, Tom Toole and Dan O’Neil were able to commit to an early Thursday evening recording, and our team turned around the video and blog to go live a couple of hours later.
Another minor issue was with scheduling posts. The was a hiccup on the backend of the site, and scheduled blogs were going out earlier than they were supposed to. This was caught early and fixed quickly.
Final Thoughts
We couldn’t have had a better launch week. Despite picking a week where the real estate industry had its attention scattered – Inman had its 25th anniversary and Tom Ferry had a mastermind – we still got a big share of the attention.
Now, we’re ready to take on Week 2.