This is a transcript from the Business Secrets Podcast With Robert Kanaat. Click here to view and subscribe on iTunes.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Business Secrets. My name is Robert Kanaat. Thank you so much for joining me here today on another episode. I’m really excited today because I want to talk to you about something that’s pretty important. I hope that you guys are enjoying these episodes, and I hope that it’s adding a lot of value for you.
Today what I have to tell you is a story. But behind that story, I think that you will learn a gold nugget of information that I hope will help you in your life basically on, and where you’re going and what you’re doing and all that other stuff. I want to talk to you about the evolution of Kribbz.
Kribbz is a real estate platform that I’ve been building, and it’s pretty dang cool. We are probably about a month– I want to say about a month and a half, or maybe five weeks away from BETA. And I wanted to start sharing kind of what’s going on with Kribbz. Kind of dropping that in here. Because I think it’s pretty important. Because it affects the whole timeline. Kind of like of my story and everything that’s happened.
You guys have already heard the whole origin story. Kind of like where everything kind of evolved from. The coolest, coolest, coolest thing that has happened is basically that when the business collapsed that I had built and brought in a business partner for and kind of – the business evaporated, because he took the business from me after we had a big dispute.
So after that whole thing collapsed, I went out there and I started doing articles about people. So I started writing Forbes articles and Entrepreneur Magazine articles. All I wanted to do was kind of find a way to add value. And I talked a little bit about this, but what I didn’t talk about was kind of the evolution of what happened, right?
One of the first people that I had reached out to was Russell Brunson, and you guys probably know that Russell Brunson is probably – literally one of the best marketers alive on earth, and he’s still super early in his career. I think he just turned like 38 years old, and he’s accomplished so much – which is so inspiring to see. I have gotten to spend a lot of time with him. I’ve gone to his Masterminds, I have shadowed him in his office.
Man, it’s just so cool. Sometimes it’s like overwhelming like – wow, like when you see somebody like super, super, super successful like that – you want to emulate but it’s like having that huge goal that I talked about before. But then you’re like, “Oh, I don’t know how I’m going to get there. But you just start taking one step at a time, one step at a time, one step at a time. I think that’s important too.
That’s kind of his evolution. Because I know that he failed a lot of times, and he almost went bankrupt twice. In fact, Perfect Webinar saved his butt from total abysmal collapse. The cool thing is, the first person that I reached out to was Russell Brunson. I was like, “Hey, like can I do a Forbes article about you?” Again, so that’s pretty cool. That’s kind of like my way of adding value, right? I just want to add value so I can learn.
Another person that I reached out to was David Sharpe, somebody who I knew about from Empower Network. I knew that he had built a massive company, and now he’s building a company called Legendary Marketer. It’s already kind of on it’s way up there to eight figures, and more probably by this point. He’s super, super intelligent, so I wanted to kind of learn the story.
Because I felt like, I felt like I emulated part of what happened to him. Because he had a massive dispute with his business partner, and he actually ended up walking away after a buy out. But I know that that was pretty bad. But funny thing is – which is kind of karma, because his business partner lost that entire business. So basically Empower Network collapsed.
So funny thing I was telling– I was telling David Sharpe this a while back. I was like, “Man, you got out at the wrong time.” He was like – you have no idea how much he knew that. I guess that’s kind of karma, like that kind of thing must feel good. So I started reaching out subsequently to all these people – Ryan Deiss, I believe was the third person that I reached out to. He’s the co-founder or I should say the founder of Digital Marketer.
He was like, “Hey,” he was like, “My business partner Roland Frasier,” like, “Write an article about him.” So I wrote an article. I was like, well first of all I don’t know who Roland Frasier even is. But cool, sure, sure no problem. Then I was asking one of my friends, and he was like, “Roland Frasier is the brains of Digital Marketer.” I was like, “Alright, sold.” So I did a Forbes article about Roland. I think I did two, I don’t even know? And some Entrepreneur Magazine articles.
But I think it was like after I did an article or two about him. He opened up his entire Rolodex to me. So he was like, “Hey, meet Frank Kern, hey meet Dean Graziosi, hey meet John Assaraf.” So subsequently he just started going through all these people. I started writing articles about them. It was just so cool, because it opened up an entire new world for me, right?
Because I was like the geeky, introverted kid, guy sitting behind – still do, like a kid. Sitting behind the computer screen doing the coding and stuff like that. I was never meeting people. The funny thing is, my business partner was the sales guy. There’s always like a sales person in a business, and there’s always kinda like– I was like the architect, right? I was the builder. The coder. The guy that was– I don’t know, I felt like– I was like master planning this whole thing.
To me, like that’s what I love to do. The nitty gritty, the sales and stuff like that. Like that was not me. That was not me before. I wasn’t the guy who wanted to be out there and be an extrovert. Because I’m just – that’s just not who I am. But sometimes things in life push you to do certain things, right? I was an introvert, but it’s funny because the extrovert has come out in me.
So another person that Roland Frasier introduced me to was this guy named Kent Clothier. Kent Clothier – super cool guy, really inspiring entrepreneur. He went through a really bad situation himself in life. But early on, he was like a king. He was at the helm of a multi-billion dollar kind of grocery arbitrage business. Funny thing is, he walked away from that business and kind of like lost all of his money in the process of like the following 18 months, and then had his back against the wall. Really, really cool story. Should read about it. I did a Forbes article about him.
But he turned it around when one night he was watching an infomercial. I think he was down to like his last like 5 grand or something, and that infomercial – it cost him like $1000. It was a real estate thing. But he learned how to do real estate arbitrage. Which is basically middle-manning a real estate transaction, and you never actually have to own the property.
So it’s like flipping a contract, right? You know how some people come in for new developments? They’ll secure a contract, they’ll put down like 30, 50 thousand dollars, 100 thou– Whatever it is, right? Then they’ll flip that contract to somebody else. But the coolest thing about arbitrage is – you almost have to put down like nearly no money at all in some markets. Like maybe 500 bucks. So you put down this money, you find a motivated seller, and then you go out there and you find a cash buyer.
So he figured out a way to find the cash buyers. He would bring the seller and the buyer together, and he would middle man that transaction. So he ended up making like a million bucks like in– I don’t know who many months, I forget what it was – in the following months that came after that. Maybe it was 8 or 9 months. Then he figured out, he totally systematized what he was doing, and he created kinda like a platform for that. That became the basis of his company, Real Estate Worldwide.
Cool thing was – I started helping Kent Clothier. So I started doing these articles about him and stuff. Then he – he was like, one day he was like, “Man,” he’s like, “Rob, like I really like you. Like let’s do something together.” I thought about that for a little bit, and I was like– I was like, “Wholly crap.” Like, I’ve got this company, this platform, this thing that I had created, and, “What do you think about this?” I started to show him the software that I had built, and kind of the way the business worked, right?
He was like, “Rob,” he’s like, “As soon as I saw this, you know what I thought?” Because I made a video for him. He’s like, “You know what I thought?” He’s like, “What if we remove the real estate agent from the transaction?” I was like, “Oh my God.” Ding, like the light bulb went off in my mind. That started a series of events.
Like I had met this guy named Howard Panes. Howard Panes is the guy who basically created disposable electronic cigarettes. He and I became really good friends. This was – I think like maybe last September, or October? I can’t really remember when. But I was attending Dean Graziosi’s 100K group. Which is part of the Genius Network, but it’s like the part that where like people pay $100,000 to attend. So like 15 people, actually Russell Brunson’s in that Mastermind.
So I attended that Mastermind. The funny thing was, is we were almost going to do something. Dean was almost going to be involved in this. But I don’t know what happened. I didn’t hear back from him after that. So Kent, Howie and I – we got together, and we were like, “Alright, like let’s do this.” Like I don’t know if this is the universe or– I don’t know, like stars aligning in the right way. But we all came together, and we were like, “Let’s build this platform.”
So Kribbz is basically something that I’ve been re-engineering and reinventing from a platform that I had developed for 3 and a half years. Literally this is worth millions and millions of– Just the code base itself is worth millions of dollars. The coolest thing is – Roland Frasier got me all the rights to the entire IP. Because of course my ex-business partner turned around and he sued me. Which I was like livid about.
But you know what? Like I could’ve destroyed him, literally. I’m great at SEO and stuff like that. I just decided not to. Like I just decided to take the higher road. As hard as that– That was so hard for me to do. As hard as that was, I took the higher road, and I’m glad that I did. Because that situation resolved itself. I got full rights to the IP of the software that I built, and that I created.
So we went about on this process, and in the last six months, re-engineering the platform to basically be the evolution of real estate. Kribbz is the evolution of real estate in the United States. The biggest problem that we have in the United States, is that if you buy or sell a home, you pay 3% on each side, right? But sometimes the selling agent comes and lists your home and does almost nothing, and you still have to pay that 3%.
That’s a lot of money. So like if you’re not in the United States and you don’t kinda understand how it works, just think about a million dollar house. You lose $60,000 in real estate commissions. That’s a lot of money. Especially considering that if the agents are really not doing – pulling their weight – and they’re just putting your property in something called the Multiple Listing Service, MLS. And they’re not pulling their weight, that’s frustrating as heck.
So basically that was a situation, and that’s the pain point that we are addressing with Kribbz. You can sell your home for nothing. For nothing. Let me say that again. You could sell your home and not pay a dime, okay? Literally the core service is that you can go in and list your home, and literally within 72 hours you’ll have bids and you could potentially have a transaction where you could digitally sign contracts in the cloud. This is the evolution of real estate.
So transactions are recorded not only in the cloud, but they will be immutable in the blockchain. So we are building a system – not only is it the platform, but we are concurrently developing our own blockchain. Now, I want to tell you how hard it is to build the blockchain, okay? There’s only a few blockchains out there. In fact, a lot of the coins out there are just using existing blockchains. Big Coin is kinda like that first hardcore blockchain, and the proof of concept, right?
It’s brilliant. Because I’ve just been researching blockchain like crazy. I’ll talk about blockchain maybe in a subsequent podcast. But it’s pretty intense, it requires double RSA 256 hashing, which is basically some cryptography, where it’s hash twice, and you use the key of– You use the hash of the prior transaction to hash the next transaction. So like subsequently go along in this chain, and you basically can’t – you cannot– Cannot hack it, because you cannot change all the other transactions. There would be too much computing power required.
So until quantum computers come out, which – probably going to be in the next like three to five years, blockchain is pretty secure. Then of course, I’m guessing that it will use quantum cryptography. In fact like, I think I’m going to set my blockchain up to use quantum cryptography. Kind of around the point where I realized that yeah, quantum computers are coming. Actually quantum computers probably do exist somewhere, they’re just not telling us. Anyways, that’s my own conspiracy theory.
But the message that I wanted you guys to get from this is like – I could’ve gone out there, I could’ve gone out there and – number 1 destroyed my ex-business partner, which I didn’t. Number 2, I could’ve gone out there and I could’ve tried to find like work, like – and replace an income. But I had passive income. So if I didn’t have passive income, I would have been in a really, really not so good spot – rock in a hard place.
But I chose to go out there and help other people. So what happens when you help other people? So like, I had something of value that I could give, right? But if I didn’t have that I would’ve searched for something else of value that I could give. Now because I went out there and added value, I built strong relationships with people. This literally took me like eight or nine months of helping others before something cool happened. I didn’t know and I didn’t do it with the intention that something like that would happen, and I didn’t know all that stuff would happen.
But my – here’s the thing that I wanted to pose to you. Is that – who could you reach out to in your industry or niche who’s really famous and really popular, and what can you do for them, and how can you contact them? Because email’s not going to work. So like I had Forbes and Entrepreneur, so I had a transference of trust. But if I didn’t have that, maybe you send out packages that are like interesting colored and like multi-shaped and faceted. Because people are going to delete emails. It’s really hard to reach somebody who’s popular or famous or whatever – really rich via email, it’s just super, super hard.
But if you use subsequent mailings like actual physical mailings, like mailing something to their office. Russell calls this a “Dream 100 strategy.” I didn’t know about Dream 100 before. But Russell calls it the “Dream 100 strategy.” So I think it’s pretty cool. Just a good way to reach people, and final way that you can add value to their lives and collaborate with them.
I think this strategy – like if you have no money for ads or to kind of promote your business – the best way you could promote your business is by– Is literally by networking with some of the most popular people in your niche. They’re not impossible to reach, like they really are not impossible to reach. You just have to want it bad enough, right? If you want it bad enough, you’ll interact with them.
So anyway, so that is the story for today. I don’t want to go off too long. But I will come back to this. I promise you, I assure you, I’ll come back to this in subsequent episodes. So I really hope that this– That you took away a really, really important lesson from this episode. Until next time, thank you so much for joining. Don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes. To like, comment, share, etc, etc. I really appreciate it. If you have a chance, follow me on Instagram, follow me on Facebook. I’d love to connect with you. Thanks guys, talk to you soon.