Dhar Mann Studios: Dhar Mann

Five years before he became a massively successful content creator, Dhar Mann was nearly broke and living in a studio apartment. It’s the kind of story he might tell in one of his videos: bite-sized, live-action morality tales that have earned 60 billion views across YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms. Raised in an Indian Sikh family, Dhar had a strong entrepreneurial drive, which led to early business success, but also a spectacular downfall when he got pulled into a Ponzi scheme. A few years after losing nearly everything, he began making short, dramatic videos that conveyed life lessons. Nobody watched at first and critics called them cheesy, but today, Dhar has a huge production studio in Burbank, where dozens of employees make content for tens of millions of subscribers. This episode was produced by Alex Cheng and Casey Herman, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Katherine Sypher. You can follow HIBT on X https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back

• 2:16Guy Raz?

  on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever,

• 3:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

  or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the car that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best

• 4:27Guy Raz?

  ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary. Visit mobilefuels.com for details.

• 5:12Guy Raz?

  Hey, it's Guy here. And before we start the show, I want to tell you about a super exciting thing we are launching on How I Built This. So if you own your own business or trying to get one off the ground, we might put you on the show. Yes, on the show! And when you come on, you won't just be joining me, but you'll be speaking with some of our favorite former guests, who also happen to be some of the greatest entrepreneurs on Earth. And together, we'll answer your most pressing questions about launching and growing your business. Imagine getting realtime branding advice from Sun Bums Tom Rinks, or marketing tips from Von Weaver of Uncle Nearest Whiskey. If you'd like to be considered,

• 5:55Guy Raz?

  send us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. And make sure to tell us how to reach you. Each week, we'll pick a few callers to join us on this show. You can send us a voice memo at [email protected], or you can call 1-800-433-1298 and leave a message there. That's 1-800-433-1298. And that's it. Hope to hear from you soon. And we are so excited to have you come on the show. And now, on to the show.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  I never thought this would go further than my living room couch. It took me hundreds of takes to say my lines because I kept messing up. So all those takes later, I was finally satisfied enough with my first video. I posted on Facebook, and I refreshed and refreshed, thinking I'd get millions of views. It never even broke 100 views. My very first comment that I got said, "Who do you think you are, Tony Robbins?"

• 7:19Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 7:32Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Dar Man went from completely broke and living in a studio apartment to, five years later, racking up billions of views for his videos on Facebook and YouTube, and building a powerhouse content studio.

• 7:50Guy Raz?

  A few months ago, I found myself in an industrial park near the airport in Burbank, California. I was there to visit a production studio, actually, a YouTube studio started by a content creator named Dar Man. Now, around 10 years ago, Dar Man was just emerging from his third failed business venture. He was broke and at a low point, which is a remarkable thing to consider when you see what he's built since then. The warehouse, actually, multiple warehouses, contained dozens of film sets, sets resembling schools and locker rooms, hospital wards, a town square, grocery stores, and on and on. It's

• 8:33Guy Raz?

  the kind of place that you'd half expect to see at a major studio like Paramount or Sony. Every single day on these sets, a small crew films episodes for Dar Man's shows that are then posted on his social media channels. Inside the office, more than 150 producers, writers, editors, camera operators, and actors churn out content almost daily. And all of this was started by a guy with no connections in Hollywood, no significant money, and no experience making films. Yet Dar Man's videos have been viewed over 60 billion times since he launched his channels just a few years ago. The videos

• 9:15Guy Raz?

  are best described as morality tales, sort of like bite-sized after-school specials, if you remember those from the 80s and 90s. Now, not everyone loves the videos. DAR's critics call them hokey or even cheesy. But check out a typical video and you'll quickly see that they get millions and millions of views, more than a lot of prestige television shows. Now, as many of you know, this month, we've been looking at the business of content creation, and DAR Man has become one of the most successful creators in the space. But long before he got famous on Facebook and YouTube, DAR was famous for, well, a

• 9:55Guy Raz?

  few things he regrets: failed business ventures and a life-chasing get-rich-quick schemes. But as you will hear, all of these things were a necessary part of helping DAR become a better version of himself, and now, a growing force in the world of media. DAR grew up in and around Oakland, California. His parents are immigrants from India, and as early as DAR can remember, both of them worked really, really hard. They would eventually build one of the largest taxicab companies in the Bay Area.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  My dad tells us that one of the biggest days in his life, in my parents' life, was the day he saved enough money to buy a car. And so, of course, he turns that car into a taxicab. So that was our personal vehicle. Wherever we went, we were driven around in a taxi. And my family is Sikh, and part of our religion is you're not supposed to cut your hair.

• 10:52Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  So my dad wore and still wears a turban. And my brother and I also had turbans back then. And so, we would get bullied pretty bad for it. People would call us Aladdin, a poo, every racial slur you can imagine. The bullying was so bad that I remember that my brother would come home with bruises and bloodied all the time. And even though it was the hardest thing in the world for my mom, since she's so religious, one day my brother came home beat up so badly for his hair that she sent us with our uncle to go get haircuts.

• 11:29Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  And I remember crying the whole time at the barber shop, thinking when you cut your hair, it would really hurt. I had no idea what it was like. But of course, in a moment, the barber closes his scissors, you know, my hair falls to the ground and it was over.

• 11:44Guy Raz?

  Wow. Tell me about, you know, the, I mean, the decision your mom made. Obviously, she was trying to protect her kids, right? And, and what a wrenching decision, right? Because this is your faith. And, and so, I mean, I'm assuming after that point, you and your brother no longer kept your hair long, no longer wore turbans?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I've got my haircut when I was in fourth grade. So in fifth grade, I'm still in the same elementary school and nobody recognized me. I felt better at school because I wasn't getting judged as much, but I felt very shameful when it came to the Indian community and at our temple and places of gathering. But I guess that's part of what every immigrant feels.

• 12:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Coming to this world is you get torn between these two different cultures and ultimately you have to find yourself in all of this. And I think that's part of the challenge that I felt throughout my life was finding myself.

• 12:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Um, as you got older and, and went to high school, did you end up kind of like finding a group of people, of kids that you were comfortable with or, or not, not really?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in high school, as I got older, I always felt like an outcast. Being the only Indian kid in a very racially divided school, I didn't have a lot of friends and because my parents weren't around, they'd give me money to make up for not being able to give me their time. So I did discover there was one way to get kids to want to hang out with me. And that was by me offering to buy them. Things. And I noticed when I was paying for things like lunch or snacks or arcade games, a lot of people wanted to be my friend. And I didn't realize this until my adult years,

• 13:40Speaker 01

  but I associated money with love, since that's how my parents expressed their love to me, since they were never around. And at this stage in my life, I was only concerned with, how could I make as much money as possible in order to be as quote unquote, as loved as possible?

• 13:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Um, Tara, I know, I know that as a kid, you did a lot of like classic kid entrepreneurial things, right? Like, like sell baseball cards or candy. But your, your first real business was, was like an advertising business, right? That I guess you started in college, like posting flyers for local businesses. Can you, can you tell me a bit about that?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I went to C Davis and at that time, there was this really desirable place to live called Primero Grove. And it was on campus, which mean that you could walk to all your classes. So this apartment was more expensive than I could afford. So I needed to find a roommate. So one day I'm walking by this bulletin board in a lecture hall and I thought, hey, that may be a good place to advertise. So I make a cheap flyer, looking for a roommate. I printed out a bunch of copies and then woke up super early in the morning and posted flyers all around the different bulletin boards on campus. And within no time, I start getting phone calls and I found a roommate within that same day.

• 15:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  So that's where I come up with the idea of Davis Marketing Services. Initially, at that time, my idea was just to post flyers around campus on different bulletin boards for businesses. But I didn't have any money to hire anyone to do the postings for me. But one day when I was out posting, I saw a sorority putting up some flyers. And I asked the girls how much they got paid and they said, nothing, their pledges. So a light bulb went off in my head. I went to the sorority house and I asked if I gave them $50, if they could have their pledges go out and post my flyers for me every morning. So now I have my labor supply figured out.

• 15:49Guy Raz?

  Forced labor.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  I know, I'm not advocating that this is the correct way to doing things, but 19 years old.

• 15:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's so, I mean, you were, from what I read, like, bringing in like, you know, a few thousand bucks a month doing this business. And I guess at a certain point, you decided not to go into the flyer business full time, but to, to drop out of, out of school and focus on running a business. And it turned out to be like a mortgage company. How did that happen?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So at this time, this was around 2004, 2005, when real estate was booming. And my brother, he had just become a real estate broker and he had just bought a condo in San Francisco. He bought a new Mercedes and me being money motivated at that time, just saw whatever he was doing with his real estate business as much more successful than whatever I was doing with Davis Marketing Services. But I knew he was in the business of helping people refinance their home to either take equity out or get a lower interest rate. So when I asked him what it was limiting him to take his business to the next level,

• 16:57Speaker 01

  he said it was not having more leads to close more deals. And so my idea was I could just start my own telemarketing company that could generate leads by cold calling homeowners and trying to get them to refinance. So the next step was I needed to hire telemarketers. And thankfully, I was able to use my marketing company for that. I put up flyers all around campus saying I was looking for commission-based telemarketers. And within a month or so, I had four students working for me.

• 17:30Guy Raz?

  And just let me just interrupt for a sec. You basically had four students working for you. You would just start dialing? And then if you, if they were interested, that was a lead that you would then feed to your brother?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Exactly. So how a call would go is I would say, hey, I'm Dar calling from California Real Estate Services. And I noticed you're paying 6% on your home loan. How would you like to lower your interest rate while also possibly taking cash out of your home? And for every 99 people that would hang up on us, one would say yes. But what I didn't realize is

• 18:11Speaker 01

  An application didn't mean a closed deal and it certainly didn't mean a paycheck.

• 18:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  But one day I get a phone call from my brother and he says, I have some good news. I got excited and I said, do we close one of my deals? And he said, not just one, but we closed three in that same week. He wouldn't tell me over the phone how much it was. And when I go see him, he smiles and hands me a check. It was for $40,000 and it was the most money I'd ever seen. So I felt like a millionaire at that point. So not too long after all this was happening, I decided to get my own real estate license. So I could close my own deals instead of relying on my brother's office. And that's when things really took off.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  So within that year, I had three different offices and around 25 students working for me.

• 19:04Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  So I remember a big moment for me was at 21 years old, when I bought an orange Lamborghini.

• 19:11Guy Raz?

  Wait, pause for a sec. 21 and this is all by doing mortgage refinancing.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 19:18Guy Raz?

  You had an orange Lamborghini and you were living in Davis, California at that point?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  In Davis.

• 19:23Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  So for the first time in my life, I saw what having all this attention felt like. I was driving around in this small town with this super flashy car. And remember my whole high school career, I felt invisible with no friends. And now I was being seen by everyone. Everyone wanted to be my friend at that point.

• 19:43Guy Raz?

  And how were you sustaining those payments? Was the business doing really well? Like, how were you staying above water with all that debt?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  So it was around 2007, when the real estate housing crisis started.

• 19:58Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  So just like lots of other mortgage companies at the time, I ended up going out of business. So this was the first time I'd experienced business failure. And you'd think with a degree in econ, I might be saving money more in anticipation of a market crash coming, but. I just didn't have that foresight. I closed my doors and I had to move back to Oakland. But I still had the Lamborghini and the payment was really expensive. And I didn't want to give up my car because my car in my head was the key to all this attention I was getting. So instead of giving up the car, I started an exotic car rental company.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  I learned some basic web design and put up my Lamborghini for rent. So I was able to keep my car and more importantly, the appearance that I was a lot more successful than I actually was. And as time went on, I used my profit from that to also expand into limousines. And I had my, I had a background in transportation because of my family taxi business. So it seemed like a natural thing to do.

• 21:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And I should point out that this is a pattern that, that really continues to this day, right? Which is this sort of serial entrepreneurship. For example, like over the next few years after, after this car business, you started like a property management company. And then you had a, a real estate development company, which actually would get into some trouble with later. And we'll, we'll talk about that in a minute. But I want to ask you about something else that you got into that was actually pretty new at the time, uh, which was medical marijuana. And, and I'm, I'm just trying to get in, into your head, right? Were you just thinking like, how can I make money in the fastest way possible? Or, or were you genuinely interested in, in this particular industry?

• 21:51Guy Raz?

  Like, tell me how the cannabis idea got started.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it didn't start that way initially. I had a very negative perception towards the industry. I thought it was illegal. So when I was running the property management company, one day I had a commercial tenant who was running a catering company, come in and tell me they had a break in in their unit. So I asked if he had reported it to the police as I'm picking up the phone to call 911. And he says, wait, before you call, I have to tell you something. I'm not exactly running a catering company. And he said he's using the property to grow medical marijuana.

• 22:30Guy Raz?

  And he was doing this legally?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  That's what he said, and I thought he was out of his mind for saying that. So I filed an eviction and right before we went in front of a judge, my attorney comes up to me and says, Dar, I looked at all their paperwork and sure enough, everything checks out. So I'll look at my attorney and say, you mean it's legal to grow weed? And he nods and I had no idea that the cannabis industry was this huge industry. And the epicenter of it was where I was, Oakland. So I decided to fully jump into the medical marijuana industry because as I did more research, all I saw was green, pun intended.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  So I started what later became known as the Home Depot of weed. And it was a 15,000 square foot hydroponic store right by the Oakland airport, where we sold all the supplies patients would need to grow their own cannabis. Not the actual plant or any flower, just the tools to grow it.

• 23:37Guy Raz?

  I've talked about this on the show a lot because it's like, you know, selling jeans to the, to the gold miners or pickaxes and shovels is not going to the gold miner.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. And at that time, this was in 2010, when all the hydroponic stores still operated in the shadows. So even though they had all these customers that were spending thousands of dollars on indoor grow systems, the stores had to act like these systems were being used to grow tomatoes. So you couldn't mention medical marijuana in hydroponic stores or you'd get kicked out. And I thought it was because the stores were concerned about the federal law. So I was originally going to follow the same rules and not mention medical marijuana. I had a press release going out the night before of our grand opening saying,

• 24:27Speaker 01

  15,000 square foot indoor gardening store opens by Oakland airport to help customers grow tomatoes.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  But the whole thing just felt a little hypocritical to me. So right before the release went out, I changed it to 15,000 square foot indoor gardening store opens by Oakland Airport to help customers grow medical marijuana. I sent it out to Newswire and went to bed to get some sleep before our big grand opening the next day. And I wake up a few hours later to all these phone calls from my store manager saying, "Dar, you better get down here quick. There's a bunch of white vans outside." So they were there to cover the grand opening of my store. I couldn't believe it, but the first interview I did, it happened to be on CNN Live.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  And every other major news outlet you can imagine was there.

• 25:24Guy Raz?

  Let me back up for a sec. I mean, how did you, how did you finance it? How did you get the money to buy the equipment and to stock that equipment into a 15,000 square foot warehouse?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  I guess from an early age, I always over leveraged myself. So I relied a lot on credit cards. And for suppliers, you could actually get products on terms with them where you wouldn't have to pay them back for 30, 60, 90 days. And I was just relying on product sales that would help me pay off the inventory I bought from them previously. So it was a lot of leverage. But if you remember how earlier I said, I thought all hydroponics stores didn't discuss cannabis because they were worried about federal laws. I came to realize that it was actually because of rules that hydroponics suppliers that

• 26:17Speaker 01

  controlled the hydroponics supply chain had set up. So there's a few big distribution companies that supply most of the products you see sold inside of hydro stores. They were so big and selling products all over the world that they didn't want their products having any affiliation with cannabis. So if you even mentioned it, you would get cut off from product distribution from them. And here I am on CNN Live, talking about the medical marijuana superstore. So the night of our grand opening, I got contacted by the big distribution companies saying they were cutting us off from receiving any product. So my business was pretty much doomed from the start.

• 26:59Guy Raz?

  That was sort of the end of the like the Home Depot for hydroponics. Just the business was failing. Distributors weren't selling stuff to you.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. And my thinking was to try and save the business. The city of Oakland around that time was about to issue medical marijuana cultivation licenses that were going to be the first of its kind. And fortunately, I was one of four companies to be awarded the permit. So I thought this was my golden goose, right? Like I made it big. But that's the point in time where the shortcuts I took during my time in real estate development would come back full circle and it was time for me to pay the price for that. Or as I say in my videos, what happens in the dark always comes to light because that's exactly

• 27:52Speaker 01

  what happens.

• 27:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So, so tell me what, what happened? Like, what were you doing as a, as a real estate developer that got you into trouble?

• 28:01Speaker 01

  So property management, that came easy to me. But construction, that was a lot more complex. And I quickly found out that construction projects take a long time to finish and they were very expensive. So I could only take on a certain amount of projects at once. But I always wanted to do things quickly. So that's why I was really excited when I found out about this real estate grant program that the city of Oakland had where you could get a 50% reimbursement if you fixed up properties that were in certain rehabilitation areas. So I decided to take on multiple renovation projects at the same time.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  And what I didn't expect was how long of a time it would take for the city to issue these grant reimbursements. It turned out the money could take anywhere from one or two years to come in after all the work was completed and all the money was paid. So I found myself in this financial pinch. I took on too many projects at once that I couldn't afford. So that's when I made a huge mistake that would come back to haunt me. I decided to take some shortcuts on my grant application. I changed the dates on my paperwork to make it seem like the projects had been completed

• 29:29Speaker 01

  and contractors had been paid sooner than they were in order to start the reimbursement process.

• 29:36Guy Raz?

  Faster.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Faster.

• 29:38Guy Raz?

  You get this license to grow medical marijuana, which is potentially could be a really lucrative thing. And just maybe a few weeks later, you were charged by county prosecutors with grand theft and forgery and defrauding the government of Oakland. And this begins now a two-year saga of lawsuits and going to court and eventually a settlement around this. Tell me a little bit about when you saw those charges, because that was public, it was in the papers, right? What was your reaction? I mean, were you just terrified about what was going to happen to you? I don't know. What were you thinking?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  My life completely changed. People that were doing business with me no longer wanted to work with me. And the city of Oakland even revoked the cultivation license I had won based on the charges alone. And then from that point forward, my life became all about defending myself against those charges. So I was still running my different businesses, but my focus wasn't fully there. So that started going downhill. So I went in front of a judge and the judge said if I agreed to pleading no contest, paying a $40,000 fine and doing probation, I could have my case completely

• 31:03Speaker 01

  expunged at the end of probation as long as I didn't mess up again.

• 31:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  And there'd be no jail time. So, given the circumstances, I decided to agree.

• 31:16Guy Raz?

  Dar, did you ever, I mean, you're now in your late twenties. Did you think that this was gonna, this reputational hit was gonna be so bad that it might affect the rest of your life?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  I definitely felt like a failure and I certainly felt people's judgment of me based on that. And I certainly wish I could go back and tell my younger self how important it is to do things the right way and how much your reputation really matters. The people you associate yourself with, the businesses you get involved in, decisions you make when you're in your twenties, you think may not have big consequences for you later in life, but they do.

• 32:04Guy Raz?

  All right. So, failure one, the mortgage refinancing company. And I'm chuckling because I think, we talk about this all the time. If there's one word in the Venn diagram that comes up again and again out of the 500-plus episodes of the show, it's failure. Like, it is critical to success. You cannot, you cannot become successful unless you've experienced failure and you've tried things that didn't work. But you already had two significant ones, and then the cannabis business. Now, you are poised to restart, but you would make a third mistake. This is around 2013, 2014. I guess you decided to move down to LA from Northern California. Tell me about what was going on in your life. What did you decide to do next?

• 32:50Speaker 01

  I was looking for any sort of opportunity to once again make money quickly. And around that time, I ended up meeting someone named Nick.

• 33:01Guy Raz?

  This is Nick Jussowala?

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Correct. And he drove a really nice BMW and a lot of people would just say how successful he was.

• 33:11Guy Raz?

  And Nick was, I think, he was half Indian, right? And so like you had a sort of shared cultural background a little bit.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 33:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  So the day I met him, we hit it off instantly. He seemed like he was a really open and honest guy. He told me about all his businesses and he even showed me his bank account.

• 33:29Guy Raz?

  And what did he say his businesses were?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Affiliate marketing.

• 33:33Guy Raz?

  Okay, right. So he would get a commission every time somebody bought something that he would refer them to.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 33:39Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  So he told me in his business, in order to make money, you had to spend money.

• 33:43Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  But the margins were great. And, you know, he said the only thing that was preventing him from scaling up his business was needing more capital so he could grow faster. So naturally I asked him if I could invest and he says, yes.

• 34:01Guy Raz?

  Do you remember how much you gave him?

• 34:02Speaker 01

  My very first investment, I think, was $30,000. I think that was all the money I had.

• 34:07Guy Raz?

  So it's a lot.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:08Guy Raz?

  But he would basically give you a monthly interest payment on that loan?

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 34:13Guy Raz?

  Or on that investment? Okay, so it sounds like a pretty good deal. And, and you had seen him live this like great lifestyle. He had a nice car.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  He seemed like the real deal. And after a few months of getting this return every single month on time, in my mind, I was like, this feels very legit. So then my mindset became, how can I invest more in him to make even more passive income? So that's when I decided to sell my limousines and cars and whatever was left in my medical marijuana company. I invested every dollar I could and as I invested more, my monthly cash flow kept going up. And Nick and I would be spending a lot more time together. We became pretty close friends. So one random weekend, we decide to take a trip to Los Angeles.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  And I was blown away by the LA lifestyle. There was nice cars everywhere, good looking people. So that trip on the spot, we both decided that we were going to move to LA. I realized in LA, you need two things, money and fame. And as far as fame, at that time, with the explosion of social media, in order to be popular, you had to have followers. And Instagram was skyrocketing.

• 35:36Guy Raz?

  It was just starting at that time, really. I mean, it was starting to, this is 2014, around 2014.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. But once I discovered that, I decided that I was going to do whatever it took to build a large following on Instagram.

• 35:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So you created a profile and how are you going to build that following?

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Well, luckily for me, Nick also had the same interest in that superficial lifestyle I was into. Partying cars, popularity, stuff like that. And he told me he didn't have great credit, but if I agreed to use mine, he'd gladly split the payment for any cars or house I wanted to lease. So the very first house we rented was a three-story mansion in the Hollywood Hills. And at the same time, I got a Ferrari and a Rolls Royce, one car for each of us. All this coming from the passive income from Nick.

• 36:29Guy Raz?

  And this was still, you were financing these things. You weren't outright buying.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  I was living, once again, beyond my means.

• 36:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And you were posting photos of yourself, like in these cars and in these kind of flashy places, and that would increase your following?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I still remember the very first picture I posted on my Instagram account, as embarrassing as this sounds now. It was me in front of these two exotic cars, holding the keys to the new house we were renting. So it didn't take me long to realize that the flashier I was on Instagram, the faster my following would grow. So it quickly became this addiction for me. I've never done any hard drugs in my life, but I would say Instagram was more addictive for me than any drug.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Out there for someone who valued social acceptance as much as I did.

• 37:21Guy Raz?

  I'm looking at your Instagram now. I don't see those pictures on there. So are they, would they delete them eventually?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  That my whole old self has been deleted many years ago at this point.

• 37:33Guy Raz?

  But getting a monthly check for this, I mean, it sounds like one of the greatest investments, you know, I mean, it's amazing. I mean, the returns make, I don't know, like Berkshire Hathaway look like, you know, an amateur. And that's because it was a fraud. It wasn't real. Tell me what, how you found out that this was not real?

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So around the same time, I started having some of my family see my Instagram. And they began asking me how I was doing so well. So I told them about my investment. I was doing a Nick. And it wasn't long before my cousins, my brother, and even eventually my parents all started investing. And so as my followers grew, I started getting recognized. My life really felt like a movie. And the icing on the cake was I met a girl who was on a reality TV show. And within a few months of dating, we got engaged. But everything went downhill at my engagement photo shoot. One of the staff members pulls me aside and

• 38:39Speaker 01

  says, Dar, we have a problem. My credit card for the payment of the photo shoot didn't go through. So I opened my bank app and I was shocked to see the last payment Nick made to me bounced. And even though I was making a lot of money, because I was spending it so fast, I was still living month to month, as crazy as that sounds. I wasn't saving at all. So I call Nick and he tells me, don't worry, there was some banking error that he'd have it corrected the next day. But the next day comes around, no money from Nick. A week later, nothing. And now it's taking longer and longer for him to respond to me.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Eventually, he just stops answering completely and goes dark. And that's when I found out his entire business was actually a Ponzi scheme, which I know what you're thinking, Guy. It sounds so obvious from the start.

• 39:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  But you know, when you're in it, it's amazing how many red flags you're willing to look past because you just want something to work so bad. And here I am again. I went from being this high profile Instagram baller to now being completely broke. And even worse, having caused my family members to lose money because they all invested based on me saying this was a good investment.

• 40:10Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, did you lose all of your money? I mean, did they, everybody lose all their money?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, everybody lost their investment. I mean, he was making payments for some short amount of time, right? That's how these things work.

• 40:23Guy Raz?

  But it was a Ponzi scheme. He was bringing money in and he was sending money out.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. So you'd get a few payments, but you'd never, you only got like a fraction back of whatever the principal was.

• 40:33Guy Raz?

  So at this point, I mean, this is like 2014. You're now, you know, 30, around 30. I mean, what was your financial situation like?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  That was the lowest point in my life. I went from living in a three story house to sleeping on a couch, from having hundreds of thousands of followers to deactivating my account because I could no longer afford to keep up that lifestyle. And then plus, the girl I was engaged to broke up with me. And I was completely broke. I had less than $600 in my bank account.

• 41:12Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Dar starts to rebuild his life and finds an opportunity on social media as a storyteller. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 41:32Guy Raz?

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• 42:14Guy Raz?

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• 42:59Guy Raz?

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• 43:44Guy Raz?

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• 44:28Guy Raz?

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• 45:08Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the end of 2014, and Dar has lost just about everything in a Ponzi scheme. Not only his money, but money from his own family and friends. And he starts to think very hard about how he got to that place.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  And the one main thing that got me through that period of time was reading inspirational stories of how other successful people went through rough patches in their life, and somehow overcame them and still went on to be really successful. I spent a lot of time reflecting on everything that had happened to me in my life. I thought about Davis. I thought about after college, working in Oakland, I thought about my adventures in Hollywood. And I realized that every time something went wrong, I never took personal accountability for anything that had happened to me. My first failure in real estate, I blamed the economy. My second failure in medical marijuana, I blamed the government.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  My third failure with my investments, I blamed Nick. Every single time, it was always someone else's fault, not my own. And that's when it dawned on me that I was the common denominator in all of those failures. I was the person responsible, not anyone else, me. So that was the first time in my life that I realized I had to take personal responsibility for everything that went wrong, not just for the past, but that's how I would live my life going forward. So you're doing this thinking, but what were you gonna do to make a living?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so one day I'm at a lunch and I happen to meet a makeup artist that was a popular Instagram beauty influencer. This is Tamana Roshan? Yeah, and she was telling me a story of how she was traveling all over the world, teaching makeup seminars, and they were selling out every city that she would go to. And students were paying hundreds of dollars a seat. And I thought, what an amazing business. And she mentioned, yeah, it's great, but all of that traveling all the time is really hard. So I asked her if she had ever thought about teaching classes online and building an online school. And she said she loved the idea, but she had no idea to go about it.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  And for some reason, I blurted out, I can build it. You said you would do it? I said I would do it, even though I had no makeup experience, no online education experience, no e-commerce experience.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  And she looked at me and said, okay. So we became 50 50 business partners in an online makeup school. This is called Dress Your Face. Dress Your Face Live. Students would get new live classes taught to them every month for $20 a month. How did you figure out how to stand this whole thing up? I figured it out, just like, I guess, I figured out every other business that I ever got into. I would just do a lot of research. I would consult with people. I remember I went to Best Buy and said, hey, I want to start doing live online classes. What do I need? And they said, well, you probably need a webcam and two softbox lights. And luckily they had a starter pack for $200.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  And I still needed a website. So I go on Craigslist and I put an ad up saying, I will pay someone to build me a website. So then I get an email from a guy who says he likes the business idea. And within a few days or so, I had a website. And in order to market the classes, I had the beauty influencer I was partnered with, record a short video explaining what the school is about. So my web developer tells me that the best way to put the video on the website is to host it on YouTube. And then he'll pull the link to the site, which is exactly what I did. That was the only reason that we posted on YouTube. YouTube was not part of my thinking at all at that time.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  So I upload the video, I make the website live and I went to bed that night before the launch. But to my surprise, when I woke up in the morning, my inbox was flooded with emails. New user registration, new user registration, new user registration. And there are all these payments for $20 that were coming in from PayPal. I was so confused. I was thinking, how could anyone find out about the school when we hadn't announced it yet? And I checked the beauty influencer's Instagram, thinking she may have posted the announcement early, but she didn't. She didn't mention it one time. There was no link or anything.

• 49:52Guy Raz?

  They found, how did they even find out about the YouTube video?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Just because I put her name in the title and she was a popular makeup artist, it was gaining a lot of views and those views led to students signing up to the website.

• 50:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  So I couldn't believe it. I was literally days away from getting evicted from my little studio apartment with no money left in my bank account. And within 24 hours of our website going live, we brought in six figures of revenue.

• 50:24Guy Raz?

  Wow, from signups.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  From signups. But this was the first time that I experienced success and I decided that I would not be flashy. I would not spend money wastefully. I didn't upgrade my lifestyle even 1%. I told myself until I paid back all of my family members that had lost money from the NIC investment. And that's exactly what I did within about a year of starting that online makeup school.

• 50:53Guy Raz?

  All right. So you guys now have a bona fide business. Does that become your primary focus now, working with, with this influencer with?

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 51:02Guy Raz?

  With Tamara? Was that, I mean, you were focused on, she was basically the, the brand.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:07Guy Raz?

  And you were managing this, this business?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  So not only did the business I have with her continue to grow, but I also start partnering with more makeup influencers to build more schools. And during one of those classes, I ended up meeting one person particularly that would change my life forever, which is Laura, who's now my wife and the mother of my two children.

• 51:32Guy Raz?

  And she would go on to become a hugely important business influence and partner for you too. As you were sort of bringing on these influencers, you and you and Laura, you were a couple. You guys basically decide to create a new kind of cosmetics brand or company called Live Glam. Tell me about about this idea because you must have had a bigger vision for something, well, something bigger you wanted to do.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So at this point, I was running the online makeup school, but I knew I wanted to build something bigger. That's just always how I've been, probably seeing my dad go from one taxi cab to my parents building their big taxi business. So my idea was to scale. The next step would be to start a cosmetics line. This was right when cosmetics was starting to boom. Like Kylie Cosmetics had started. There were a lot of popular YouTube beauty influencers. There was a lot of focus on the beauty industry, especially on social media.

• 52:32Guy Raz?

  And cosmetics, as we've done a lot of on this show, it's an amazing opportunity because there's so many white label manufacturers and you can pick your ingredients and you can start a brand.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Yes, but it's also incredibly difficult, especially if you want to manufacture your own products, which is what I wanted to do, but I had no knowledge about the makeup industry at all. But luckily Laura did. So I asked her if she wanted to partner with me to create our own line of products and she agreed. This was probably within a week of us meeting each other.

• 53:08Guy Raz?

  Because she had experience in the industry. I mean, she was a makeup influencer, kind of.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  She was a beauty influencer. She still is. And she was also sort of the ambassador for other makeup brands. And when we started our partnership, things started off real scrappy. So I moved from that small apartment in Hollywood to downtown LA. We got a two bedroom apartment. Laura moved in with me. I still kept my roommate that I had. And then we also ran the business from this new apartment. So the living room would be where we filled in all of our classes and created all of our content for the school. The kitchen table would Be where all the employees sat and we'd use the common area hall that leads to the elevator.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  That was where we had our fulfillment team stuffing envelopes for shipping.

• 54:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And so you were basically, the idea was the influencers would use makeup, but then the idea was, well, why don't we make the makeup? They'll show people how to use it, but then we can also sell this brand.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. I thought the education and the products would go hand in hand like that.

• 54:18Guy Raz?

  And the brand was called Live Glam? Okay, I should say it still exists.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Yes, we still put out hundreds of products a year.

• 54:26Guy Raz?

  This was launched, I think around 2015.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:29Guy Raz?

  I think I've read that at some point, at some years, you were doing over $8 million in revenue. Is that about right?

• 54:36Speaker 01

  It got to even bigger than that. So within a couple of years, Laura and I had hundreds of different products. And we got to about 100 employees. We moved to an actual fulfillment center. And we got to a point of we were shipping over a million products a year.

• 54:51Guy Raz?

  Were you profitable?

• 54:53Speaker 01

  The entire time.

• 54:54Guy Raz?

  Wow. And so, I mean, imagine initially, you probably thought, this is it. I've found my business. I found my life's work. It's gonna be this cosmetics company.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this was 2018 and my wife was great. Laura and I were running a solid business together. We were financially comfortable. Except I tell Laura all the time how I felt and how I couldn't stop thinking about my younger self. The guy who was so lost and needed change and needed help. So around this time, there were a lot of popular motivational speakers that were going viral on Facebook. People like Prince EA, Jay Shetty, Lewis Howes, lots of others.

• 55:39Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  And these influencers would talk directly to camera, they still do, and inspire their audience with whatever message they're trying to share. I didn't really spend too much time on Facebook, so I didn't see these videos too often, but Laura did and she'd always watch these videos. And she goes, "You could totally do this." Basically telling me to create short inspirational videos.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  And I wasn't confident in my own abilities. So I told her, no, I can't. I'm in my 30s. People on social media are so much younger than me. So I basically told her every reason why this wouldn't work. But she kept on pressuring me to do this. So after a while, I said, you really think I could make videos as good as this? She responds and says, no, I think you could do them better. And in no way am I saying that my videos are better than anyone else's. But she just knew that that was exactly what I needed to hear to get me going. And sure enough, it was. It got me going.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  So I started making videos.

• 56:52Guy Raz?

  All right. So to be clear, because I've seen the first video you post, it's still up. It's before deciding to give up on your goals.

• 57:00Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 57:00Guy Raz?

  Like, watch this. And it's you sitting on a couch and talking to the camera about people who had failed, like Michael Jordan, like Oprah, like Elon Musk. And that what connects people who succeed is persistence, not being bold, right? And it's a, it's a short video, a couple of minutes. When you recorded that, did you have a vision of like, okay, I'm going to build something out of this? Or was it literally, I'm just going to put these videos out and see what happens?

• 57:30Speaker 01

  The latter. I never thought this would go further than my living room couch. Because it all started with just me hiring one person. His name is Ruben Ortiz, and he was 22 years old at the time.

• 57:44Guy Raz?

  You hired him to film and edit them?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I sat on my living room couch and he would film and edit the videos. Now, even though my video was scripted and only three minutes long, it took me hundreds of takes to say my lines because I kept messing up. So all those takes later, I was finally satisfied enough with my first video. I posted on Facebook and I decided to post it on my birthday. That was almost six years ago now. So May 29th, 2018.

• 58:19Guy Raz?

  And?

• 58:20Speaker 01

  After I posted, I refreshed and refreshed, thinking I'd get millions of views. It never even broke 100 views.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  I thought there was a problem with the Facebook algorithm at first. That's how delusional I was.

• 58:36Guy Raz?

  So you make this video, and by the way, there's a style to the way you're talking. It's very simple, short, enunciated, slow. Was a part of you worried about being judged or like people like, who is this guy? Or this is sounds so dumb. I don't know. Was a part of you at all worried about that?

• 58:56Speaker 01

  My very first comment that I got was from a long time friend who said, who do you think you are, Tony Robbins?

• 59:06Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  But I'm just grateful that I was at a stage in my life in my 30s, where I was able to keep pushing past that.

• 59:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Even though I wasn't getting views, I still committed myself to posting two videos a week, no matter what. And that consistency was key because you have good days, you have bad days when you're an entrepreneur. Just like if you're trying to work out, right? Like if you only went to the gym every time you feel like it, you'd never get in shape. And how my videos worked back then is half the screen time was me on camera and the other half was stock footage of B-roll with whatever subject I was talking about. That was intercut throughout the whole video.

• 59:49Guy Raz?

  What were you gonna, they were gonna be inspirational, but where were you gonna get your ideas from? Like, how are you coming up with things to say?

• 59:56Speaker 01

  My ideas initially started off just inspired by my own life experience. So if you look at my earlier videos, it was more so messages that I needed to tell my younger self. My next iteration was I realized instead of just giving life advice, if I told a story and gave a moral at the end of it, then those videos started performing a little better. So instead of getting 100 views, maybe they would get to 500 views. And since I was telling original stories, I couldn't just rely on stock footage. I now had these cartoons that I would pay some international company around $200 or so to develop.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  So very low budget animations. And then I would tell voiceover over the cartoon.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  And my face again would pop on at the end and tell the moral of the story. So when I did that, using the cartoons, now my videos went from 500 views to 1,000 views. So that's when I did one final iteration. So one day, my brother-in-law was visiting from San Diego while I was writing a script. And the story I was working on was about cheating in a relationship. I was trying to showcase how cheating can start off as a small, seemingly innocent act, such as a guy liking his ex-girlfriend's Instagram post behind his wife's back.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  I look over and coincidentally, my brother-in-law is on his phone, sitting behind a girl who has his back towards him. And a light bulb goes off. And then I go up to my brother-in-law and this girl and I say, hey, are you guys okay with being in this video? And thankfully, they agreed. And I told them, just keep doing what you're doing. You know, my brother-in-law to continue being on his phone and the girl to continue to have her back towards him.

• 1:01:59Guy Raz?

  So just to give this some context, you are standing in a kitchen. I think this is your kitchen, your apartment.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:06Guy Raz?

  In front of your brother-in-law, who's just looking at his phone, there's a woman. And who's the woman in the video?

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  I think she was just an employee or a friend.

• 1:02:15Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  And I stand in the camera frame and I narrate the scene using them, quote unquote, my actors. That was my first attempt at creating what I now know to be called live action filmmaking.

• 1:02:31Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  So I excitedly posted that video. And while I love to sit here and tell you that was the one that went viral, it didn't.

• 1:02:40Guy Raz?

  That was not.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  It only got slightly more views than my animation format.

• 1:02:46Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  So at this point, I couldn't help but feel really discouraged that after trying all these different formats, none of them were working. Plus, remember, I was still running a full-time cosmetics company.

• 1:02:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  So I wasn't sleeping a lot. I wasn't getting to spend time with Laura. I wasn't really doing anything besides work. So I told her that my next video I was gonna post was gonna be my last video. It was another low budget, live action video using actors I found on Craigslist and me narrating. The topic was a husband taking his stay at home wife for granted.

• 1:03:21Guy Raz?

  It's a three minute video. Explain that, what you see in the video.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  So it's a husband that comes home, he's dressed in a suit and he's tired from a long day of work. And as soon as he walks in the kitchen, his wife, who's hard at work making his favorite food, is excited to see him, but he looks around and he's clearly upset. There's this big mess that he's looking at. And he goes, "This place is a mess. What have you been doing all day? Just sitting around?" And she is absolutely heartbroken. She grabs this notebook that is on the counter and throws it in the garbage can and walks out of the room. So he grabs the notebook out of the garbage and looks at it,

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  and it's a to do list of everything that she did that day. And so then we rewind in time to show what she was doing. She was doing the laundry, cleaning the dishes, taking care of the kid.

• 1:04:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  And then after she cleaned everything, the kid made a big mess once again, and she didn't have time to clean it. So he looks at this notebook and he realizes how hard her day actually was. And then I would come on at the end and say a moral about how stay at home moms actually have it a lot harder than people may realize and why we need to appreciate them.

• 1:04:52Guy Raz?

  All right. So you put this video out there and this was gonna be kind of the last one.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  Correct. And sure enough, that video within a few hours had gotten thousands of shares and over a million views.

• 1:05:06Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  And I'll never forget, it was posted on August 30th, 2018, and today that video is gone. To receive over 200 million views.

• 1:05:17Guy Raz?

  Wow. Was there a reason why this one hit? Do you know?

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  It just struck a chord with stay at home moms who happened to be on Facebook and spending time on Facebook. So it was the right message for the right platform on a message that wasn't very prevalent on social media at the time. And after I had that viral hit, that's when I got even more motivated, especially after reading all the comments. So many people were saying my video brought them to tears. Stay at home wives were saying that they felt seen and appreciated. I started gaining a lot of new followers at that point.

• 1:06:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  But it wasn't until I had a handful of more viral videos that I got the notification, my profile qualified for Facebook ads in my videos. And I think the first month it made around $160 or something. So it was so small that I never thought too much of it or even looked at my dashboard.

• 1:06:22Guy Raz?

  And you were writing all the scripts?

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  I was writing everything.

• 1:06:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  We were writing all on topics that were universal truths that everybody could agree on, which was very important to me because I didn't want to write about anything that was controversial or divisive. So no politics, no religion, no swearing, no explicit content. Everything from day one was meant to appeal to a broad audience of all ranges. Because in my videos, unlike in the real world, the good person always wins in the end and the bad person always learns their lesson. So I stayed consistently putting out two videos every week using that same format. And then my next iteration was to have actor speaking

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  dialogue the whole time versus me doing voiceover for their lines.

• 1:07:11Guy Raz?

  And where would you film them?

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Still in my apartment.

• 1:07:14Guy Raz?

  Still in your apartment. And for people who aren't super familiar with your videos, like, again, I think the best description is they're like mini after school specials from like the 80s, you know, where you, it would be like a story about a bullied kid or an abusive parent, like just little morality tales. And as you say, in every video, the good guy wins comes out redeemed.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Correct. I experimented a couple of times in my history with not having the good guy win. And my community did not like it when the good guy does not win in the end.

• 1:07:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah. At what point did you start to say, maybe I need to focus my attention on this thing? Like, what was the turning point? Because you had this small cosmetics business. But at what point did you start to see the potential in this actually becoming something potentially significant?

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  So every year, I would say, I started diverting a little bit less time to the cosmetics business and a little bit more time to the studio. But keep in mind, I'm not making any money at this point. So I'm still relying on the cosmetics business in order to pay for all the content that I was creating. But at this time, our videos are starting to get more and more popular. They were getting shared by thousands of people. Each one was consistently getting millions of views. Around the same time, I remember randomly checking my bank account. And when I look into my bank balance, I saw there was a Facebook deposit for like $20,000 or something.

• 1:08:50Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  So I was shocked. I hadn't even been paying attention to my earnings. So once I saw that deposit, that's when it made me think, hey, maybe this idea is scalable.

• 1:09:03Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Darr starts to build a following on YouTube and eventually expands his studio from one living room to 40,000 square feet. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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• 1:11:04Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2019 and Dar's videos are growing in popularity with millions of views. And he's making enough money from ads to hire more people, a sound guy, and then a social media manager.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  And one day he asked me, Dar, do you think we should post the videos on YouTube? And I thought about it and said, I guess, why not? I didn't think anything of YouTube at this time. I was 100% focused on Facebook. So when we started posting on YouTube, my videos would get around 1,000 views, which was low for me because my Facebook videos were now all getting millions of views. So for two years that happened from the middle of 2018 when we started on YouTube, all the way to 2020, they stayed at around a thousand views. So I completely disregarded YouTube. But on Facebook, we were experiencing rocket ship growth. So we kept up four postings a week

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  all the way through 2019. And by July that year, we hit one billion views. So it took us just over a year from starting to hit that milestone. But by October 2019, three months later, we hit two billion views. And then two months later, by November, we hit three billion views.

• 1:12:29Guy Raz?

  But still YouTube, you weren't getting many views at all?

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Hundred percent Facebook.

• 1:12:34Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  So then 2020 came and that year changed everything because COVID hit.

• 1:12:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:41Speaker 01

  We're still filming most of our productions in my apartment, but we'd also just started renting film sets to do some of our stories. But when the lockdown was announced, suddenly it became impossible for us to rent film sets. So I had to make a big decision. Was it time to rent an actual production studio to operate out of?

• 1:13:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  We weren't even two years in and I had people in my ear telling me that the success wouldn't last. Social media is so finicky. Influencers don't have a long shelf life. Facebook is a dying platform. Plus, the cosmetics industry was getting hit hard by COVID. So that business started declining. Then add on top to that, that I was also about to be a dad, which adds financial pressure. So there were just a lot of things on my mind that made the decision to commit to a commercial building hard. But I decided to take a leap of faith and I found this gym that was going out of business right next to the Burbank Airport that was trying to sublease their space out.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  So the building was around 40,000 square feet, a big space.

• 1:13:49Guy Raz?

  And it was an empty warehouse.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  It was an empty warehouse. We create this floor plan for all the sets we'd build. I think there were six sets that could fit in the space I had allocated for ourselves.

• 1:14:01Guy Raz?

  And what were the sets gonna be? It was like-

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  A low-income apartment, a high-income apartment, a school, a restaurant, a hospital, and a courthouse.

• 1:14:10Guy Raz?

  Do you remember how much it cost you? Because again, like, you were still financing. You did not have investors, right?

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  When I saw the bid for all six sets, I think it was around 250,000, which I didn't have. So I asked, what were the cheapest three sets to build? And the contractor told me it was the two apartments and the school. So I said, all right, let's start with just building those three sets. But since I had this school set now, I had to come up with storylines for it. That's the only reason that I decided to write my first stories catered towards young people, simply because I had the set.

• 1:14:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  So I remember after we recorded a bunch of school videos, I didn't want to post any of them because I thought they would all flop on Facebook. And they did. But Tony, my head of social, messaged me and said, even though Facebook views were low, the first school-based video we did was our top-performing video on YouTube. Our videos were starting to get hundreds of thousands of views there. And that's when it hit me. Young people watch YouTube.

• 1:15:20Guy Raz?

  Kids, do you remember around 2020, how much roughly was coming in from Facebook every month? Was it, I mean, you mentioned $20,000 earlier. Was it like tens of thousands of dollars in revenue coming in from Facebook?

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  In 2020, I think we were bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars from Facebook.

• 1:15:38Guy Raz?

  A year.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  No, it was around six figures a month.

• 1:15:42Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  On Facebook.

• 1:15:44Guy Raz?

  But you started to see with YouTube that something was changing and it was kids or young people who are watching the videos, they were resonating. I think this is important because tons of people out there don't like your videos, who criticize them, and not just mean people, but people who are like, oh, these are overly simplified, the dialogue is so hokey and it's cringey and all this stuff. And you've seen that. And I've watched the videos and they are very simplistic. They are, it doesn't look like an Oscar-winning film, but the point is it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter what I might think, or a critic might think, or even you might think. What matters is how understandable it is, right?

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  That's a great point. So in my experience, the more successful anyone becomes at anything, there's always a certain amount of criticism that you're going to receive. And the important part is that you listen to your audience that you're trying to serve. I saw a stat early on that a good percentage of our audience watches without sound on, because again, these are living on social platforms.

• 1:16:50Guy Raz?

  They're reading the subtitles, the captions.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  That's why we have subtitles on every video. And a lot of folks don't speak English as their native language. So because of the simplistic language, it actually helps us cater to a broader audience. So now that is designed on purpose. But as soon as it started hitting on YouTube, that's when I realized the next iteration has to be me writing scripts with YouTube in mind. And then this is where we go from three-minute videos to eight-minute videos, because our audience on YouTube wanted longer content.

• 1:17:28Guy Raz?

  And longer content on YouTube, as we know from other conversations we've had, also means more ad revenue, potential ad revenue.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:17:36Guy Raz?

  So Dar, here's my question. I mean, how did you start to think about, okay, now we need to think about a diversified revenue stream. We can't just focus on the money that might come in from Facebook and YouTube. We have to think of other ways to, maybe we bring in our own advertisers for these videos. When did that, when did you start to think about, about that? Because again, now you've got employees, you're running a business, it has to make money. So how did you start to think about ways to do that?

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  I was not thinking about any other revenue source. I was only focused on creating content for Facebook and YouTube, and our business completely relied on us being able to generate revenue from those ads.

• 1:18:19Guy Raz?

  And it worked. You were getting big checks every month from YouTube and Facebook, which could finance this stuff.

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  Yes. There are so many people that said YouTube is just a fad. Facebook is just a fad. And that was a worry of mine. So every year, I treated it as if that may be my last year experiencing any sort of success. But YouTube is now the most watched outlet on TV.

• 1:18:48Guy Raz?

  It's amazing.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  I believe the stat is half of YouTube's US viewership is now on TVs. And YouTube gets more views than any other single network or streaming service, even more than Disney+ or Netflix. So the creator industry is experiencing this rapid growth. It's an incredible opportunity, and it is very scalable.

• 1:19:14Guy Raz?

  So as you sort of naturally had to hire more people, how are you managing the business and also being the writer and even directing? How are you in hiring and bringing people in? How are you doing all of that?

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  During this time, when I started leaning into YouTube, I made one more important decision. I cut myself out from the videos.

• 1:19:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  So you know how earlier I was saying I would pop on at the end of each video?

• 1:19:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah, you're not in them anymore.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  Correct. And that was all based on looking at YouTube analytics. And so I was humbled really quickly when I saw our audience retention would tank as soon as I would come on to tell the moral. So I literally had to fire myself. And that's one of the great things about being a digital media creator is that it doesn't take us two years to work on a film like traditional film companies. I could write a script and one week later, two weeks later, put it out and have real time feedback from my audience. So I could see what they like, what they don't like, and then I could double down on what's working and cut out what's not.

• 1:20:20Guy Raz?

  By the way, this is this, out of all the YouTube conversations we've had, this is a huge differentiator because Dar Man Studios doesn't actually need Dar Man. There is a formula that a viewer can expect. They know that it's going to be a redemption story. But that's really what you guys leaned in on. That's what you focused on, not on, hey, it's me, Dar Man here today with another, because if that was you, as you mentioned earlier, the brand would die if you stopped doing it.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the reason I mentioned this.

• 1:20:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Is because that became a very important part in being able to scale our studio. So once I made all these changes, I focused more on young people. That's when I started really caring about YouTube and our YouTube exploded. So we went from hardly getting any views our first couple of years to 2021 finishing as the number two creator on the platform globally and number one in scripted.

• 1:21:22Guy Raz?

  Dar, I went to visit you. I went to LA to see my dad and I popped in and I was absolutely blown away because now it's what, 200, 300,000 square feet of space, right? Something like that?

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:21:36Guy Raz?

  And you've got a full town square. You've got a supermarket, like a Target-like superstore set. You've got police cars. This is a massive production. I mean, over 100 employees now working around the clock, plus freelancers around the world, working around the clock, making three videos a week. I mean, this is a production studio like, and so. What I wonder is, when did you start to sort of say, this isn't just me putting out YouTube videos every week. This is actually a much bigger idea. When did that start to click in your mind?

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  That happened in 2022. In 2021, what I didn't expect is while COVID had a negative impact to the cosmetics industry, it had a huge positive impact for the media industry because so many people were at home watching videos.

• 1:22:30Guy Raz?

  Watching, yeah.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  So that year, our YouTube got to 500 million monthly views and our Facebook was still getting around a billion monthly views. So in 2022, we start putting out four 20-minute videos a week compared to four eight-minute videos. But since the videos were getting more complex with longer runtimes, we had to hire more people. In my apartment, we operated two-person crews, but now we needed five-person crews.

• 1:23:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  But to put in context of traditional media, that's still teeny tiny, right? We operate on tight digital budgets, far from traditional media complexity and staff sizes. The downside was that it started taking twice as long for each crew to make one video. So we, again, had to double the number of crews we had from two to four. And to keep up with that growth, now we need to hire specialized people and build infrastructure. So that year is when we got a second building next door and built out an entire neighborhood block, just like you see at Universal Studio sets, which you've seen, Guy.

• 1:23:42Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  So that gave us around 30 film sets in total. And then we get into different languages. And by localizing our content, it added around another 250 million monthly views. And we got really good at also repurposing our content. So we started posting our videos on every social platform.

• 1:24:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right, so 2022, I mean, it sounds like, you know, like everything is going pretty great, right? I mean, you're, you're expanding and hiring and, and making money. I mean, just incredible growth. But there's also a lot of stress that comes along with that. And I think it started to take a toll on you personally, right?

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:26Guy Raz?

  Can you tell me a little bit about that?

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  So as you can probably tell by everything I've said, I've always had this insane work ethic and I was neglecting my health. I was neglecting my family. I had no life outside of work. I was so obsessive that there was no convincing me of anything else until COVID hit my whole family on Christmas Eve 2022. So all of us were sick. So I remember Christmas night, I was working through my sickness on my laptop and out of nowhere, my breath starts changing. It felt like it was becoming hard for me to breathe. Now my heart start beating really fast. I had to close my laptop, call the doctor.

• 1:25:12Speaker 01

  And after explaining all the symptoms, the doctor says, he's just having a panic attack. But these kept happening every couple of hours for a month straight. And so all my problems were stemming from me not eating right, not sleeping right, not having work-life balance. So going into 2023, I knew I was going to completely change my lifestyle. I started removing a lot of my responsibilities from work. And you know how stressful it is when you start removing yourself from any sort of decisions. But fortunately, I had Laura and Ruben, the two people that were there from the very beginning, to step up to the plate. Laura took over all of human resources and finance, and Ruben took over all of production and operations.

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  But the craziest thing happened. While the first half of 2023, the business really slowed down, the second half of 2023, the studio grew faster than ever. So it turned out by removing myself from lots of different decisions, I created a domino effect. Ruben and Laura had to relieve themselves from certain responsibilities to take over mine, which meant more mid-level managers had to step up to the plate. And it helped be a big step for us to create brand-new content divisions that did not rely on me and also develop our own in-house agency.

• 1:26:41Guy Raz?

  Like a creative agency to do ads or content for brands and clients?

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:26:46Guy Raz?

  Dar, I want to sort of get a sense of right now, how you earn revenue? Is it, are your revenue streams still primarily from YouTube and Facebook?

• 1:26:57Speaker 01

  It's still 97% through ad revenue coming from Facebook and YouTube. And the remaining delta is us having brand sponsorships in certain videos.

• 1:27:13Guy Raz?

  And how, on average, how much does it cost to produce one 20 minute video or 25 minute video?

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  So for our main channel, which we do 25 minute videos, our cost is around $25,000.

• 1:27:26Guy Raz?

  So at what point does it become sustainable? Does that, like, how many views do you need for that to become sustainable? Like 5 million or 2 million or?

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  A good rule of thumb is a creator will make around $5,000 per every 1 million views. And that's the reason why we have to operate on digital budget. So we have to break, you know, I would say like 5 million views just to break even.

• 1:27:54Guy Raz?

  Because this industry is maturing, the YouTube content creator world, there are like consolidations and acquisitions and some really interesting things happening. And you actually were offered, somebody offered to acquire you. In the end, I think you decided not to go in that direction. But I guess the idea was, there's a bigger private equity or investment firm or whatever that has a portfolio of companies and to them, you are an opportunity to, to build out something even bigger. Tell me about why you decided not to accept the offer.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  In the beginning, we almost did. But ultimately, I just thought the regret of me selling was much more likely than me feeling good about making that decision. And I'm someone who takes such the long view. In the creator economy, I feel like we're just getting started. We have new content divisions that are launching. We're going into different genres. All these different aspects where we're barely scratching the surface. So ultimately, I decided to turn it down.

• 1:29:03Guy Raz?

  I mean, it sounds like you guys are becoming much more of a traditional Hollywood-style studio where you're like doing all kinds of stories, maybe even feature-length films.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Correct. So just to kind of fast-forward to where things are today. We've outgrown our space again, our three studios and the house that we have. We're now looking at a five-plus-acre campus to expand into.

• 1:29:26Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  We currently have eight production crews, but before the end of the year, we're going to take that to 16 production crews.

• 1:29:34Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  And that's going to allow us to put out 25 new long-form videos a week.

• 1:29:39Guy Raz?

  Is that entirely self-financed, by the way? Or did you bring in, are you bringing in investors?

• 1:29:43Speaker 01

  It's all self-financed, all bootstrapped. It all made possible through Facebook and YouTube.

• 1:29:48Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  And now, by the end of 2024, we should be at 200 team members. And a lot of folks we've hired, it's incredible. They've come from Disney, Universal, Pixar, top media companies in the world.

• 1:30:04Guy Raz?

  From Hollywood. People are now going from traditional Hollywood studios to YouTube studios like yours.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Guy Raz?

  With that great success comes all kinds of arrows. And some of it fair, you know? You're a public figure, and so you're going to be criticized. You've had some actors in the past, you know about this, who've complained, have criticized, saying they're underpaid, you know? And Hollywood is a union town, but you're not, for a variety of reasons, you're not working with union actors. It's what you're feeling about that is, I mean, do you, would it be impossible for Darmen Studios to work with unionized actors, for example?

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  That experience was definitely a tough one. What happened was in the beginning of 2023, there was a small subset of our actors that were unhappy and they felt they wanted to be compensated more than the business could support. So some of the things that were being asked for, we just couldn't provide, which put us in a hard spot because ultimately we were no longer able to work together. But that's not to say that we didn't learn anything from that experience or make any positive changes from that. We upped our actor pay rates. We implemented minimum day rates.

• 1:31:18Guy Raz?

  And in terms of like, working with unionized actors, is that just cost prohibitive? I'm just curious, is it, would it be almost impossible for you to do that?

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  For us to continue on digital budgets, but we do have ambitions to go beyond just digital. You know, later this year, we are planning on syndicating our content on traditional media platforms.

• 1:31:39Guy Raz?

  Are you in conversations with, I mean, we're talking about like, streaming services, like Netflix and Hulu and those kinds of places?

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've had really interesting conversations with different streaming platforms. So I think a world in which you can see Darman content outside of YouTube and social media is going to happen sooner than later and even on the big screen. And so as those opportunities arise and our team gets bigger, I definitely think we're going to be working with all folks from Hollywood. And then at the start of next year, we're also taking our content on the road and we're doing in-person Broadway style shows.

• 1:32:20Guy Raz?

  Wow. Dar, when you think about like, the journey, you're almost 40 and you know, not that long ago, you were at really a rock bottom professionally, personally, your reputation was in tatters, you made a bunch of mistakes. And now you are overseeing one of the largest, you know, digital studios, YouTube studios, whatever, Facebook out there, right? I mean, with hundreds of thousands of square feet of sets and you know, now a guy like you can come out of nowhere and build a really significant studio. I mean, when you think about it, I mean, you put a ton of work into this and methodical work, but how much of where you are now, do you think is because of work and how much do you think is because you were lucky?

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  I don't take this success that I've been able to experience for granted because the videos, they wouldn't be able to exist without platforms like Facebook and YouTube. In the past, if you wanted to bring a film to life, you'd have to go get a big media network's approval for everything. And do you think there was any chance that they'd agree to greenlight my idea, an entrepreneur with no film experience?

• 1:33:30Guy Raz?

  Never.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  And a troublesome past, wanting to inspire others with life lessons?

• 1:33:35Guy Raz?

  And they'd say, no, these are hokey, or whatever. Yeah, nobody would have greenlit it.

• 1:33:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. And being able to do what my community loves and what I love doing every day is a blessing that I definitely appreciate. It's what drives me every day, and I've never lost sight that you can make mistakes in life and you can learn from them. You can overcome hardships. And most importantly, you can turn your life around. And that's what I did with my life, and I'm not going to stop helping other people try to do that with theirs.

• 1:34:09Guy Raz?

  That's Dar Man, YouTube creator and founder of Dar Man Studios. By the way, as a privately held company, they don't disclose the revenue numbers, but Dar will say that annually, it's in the eight figures.

• 1:34:25Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. This episode was produced by Alex Cheng and Casey Herman, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant, with research from Katherine Seifer, and engineering help from Gilly Moon and Josh Newell. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, John Isabella, Kerry Thompson, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, and Chris Messini. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.