Marcin Drozdz

08/07/2026

For a long time I thought the same thing. Online marketing is a scam. Everyone selling courses is full of it.

Some of them? Absolutely.

But here's what I didn't understand about the people selling $47 products and $97 webinars. They're not trying to get rich off your $47. They're liquidating their ad spend.

It's called a self-liquidating funnel. The low-ticket sales cover the cost of the traffic, which means the audience they're building costs them a fraction of what it costs everyone else — and they're getting paid while they build it.

That's not a scam. It's one of the more sophisticated lead generation models in existence, and most serious operators dismiss it without ever looking at how it works.

I stopped dismissing it and started studying it. That was the more useful decision.

08/06/2026

Would you rather keep 50% of a million dollar deal, or 10% of a hundred million dollar one?

Here's what most people miss when they answer that. The closing process on a large deal looks almost identical to a small one. Same financing conversations. Same paperwork. Same due diligence. A few more reports, a few more line items, and bigger numbers on the page.

The work barely changes. What changes is the size of what you decided to go after.

So the question isn't really about percentages. It's about why so many people default to the smaller version of the same amount of effort.

08/05/2026

I sat down with Ken McElroy recently and one of the filters he keeps coming back to is replacement cost.

The concept is simple. If the building burned down tomorrow, what would it cost to rebuild it today? Lumber, concrete, labour, appliances — all at today's prices. That's your number.

In a lot of markets right now, existing assets are trading well below what it would cost to build them new. That's a real advantage. But Ken was clear that buying below replacement cost is one filter, not the whole decision.

If it also cash flows from day one, now two things are working in your favour at the same time.

That combination is rare. When it shows up, it's worth a serious look.

08/04/2026

I asked an operator a question recently: before the raise got bigger, did you become a different leader first?

He didn't hesitate. The jump didn't come from a better deal or more leads. It came from becoming someone who could carry the weight of a larger raise, different conversations, different standards, different tolerance for pressure.

That's the question almost nobody asks. Not "what do I need to do next," but "who do I need to become to handle what's next."

Raising your first commitment asks for a different version of you than running a real capital pipeline. At every stage, the ceiling usually isn't the market or the deal flow. It's the identity you haven't grown into yet.

The outcomes tend to be a byproduct of that, not the other way around.

08/03/2026

In this conversation with I described a night most founders would recognize instantly.

Something comes back half-right. You tell yourself you'll just tweak it. Two hours later you've quietly rewritten the whole thing yourself.

That isn't a work ethic problem. It's a standards problem. Nobody ever wrote down what good actually looks like here.

So every draft routes back through you.

07/31/2026

07/31/2026

If every deal still requires your own money to close, that isn't a strategy. It's a ceiling. It feels responsible skin in the game, alignment, credibility. But writing the cheque yourself caps your next deal at the size of your bank account.

And investors aren't underwriting your deal first. They're underwriting you. Whether you execute what you said you'd execute. Whether you protect the downside before chasing the upside. Whether you pick up the phone when something breaks.

Personal capital doesn't answer any of that. Behaviour under pressure and a record someone can check do and both get built inside other people's deals long before you fund your own.

The operators who plateau are the ones still trying to buy credibility they could have earned.

07/30/2026

One of the biggest limitations of raising money through promissory notes or joint ventures is that without a deal, there's no conversation to have.

A fund changes that. With the right legal structure, you can accept commitments for deals you haven't found yet.

What this actually solves is timing. The operators who lose good deals usually aren't outbid, they're just too slow to move because the capital wasn't ready before the opportunity was. Building the fund first means the money is already standing by when the right property shows up, not scrambled together after.

07/29/2026

Most people told him he wasn't ready.
No network. No track record of raising. No investor list to tap into.
The conventional advice was to wait get more connections, build a bigger audience, then launch.

Instead he just started showing up. A LinkedIn newsletter. Real lessons from his own deals. Consistent, every week, for months. No ask. No pitch. Just value delivered to the people already paying attention.

When the $3M fund finally opened, he didn't have to chase anyone.
Investors reached out to him. Referrals came in from people he'd never spoken to. $2.2M raised in 3 weeks built almost entirely on trust that was already there before the raise ever started.

The capital didn't follow the pitch. It followed the attention he'd already earned.

Comment TRUST and I'll show you how to build a raise that works the same way.

07/28/2026

Most new investors chase deals that already look good, fully occupied, rent growth already happening. To me, that's actually more risk, not less.
The better play is finding something broken and priced below replacement cost. Not projections three years out, just what it's worth today once it's fixed, using today's rents and expenses.
Work backwards from that number. What are you paying, what does it cost to fix, and is there enough margin left. That's the whole game.