A Crystal is Born From the GEM

I started objectively covering the real estate industry back in 2007 via the Geek Estate Blog with a goal to keep tech savvy agents, brokers, and executives on the cutting edge of real estate technology and marketing. The term proptech didn't exist back then.

Fast forward ten years, I made the shift from blog to business in 2017, creating a private community called Geek Estate Mastermind for technology founders, execs, VCs, and practitioners (now called the GEM Diamond). The values that guided GEM's creation were inspired by past failures. While GEM Diamond is now more than 625 members and has events taking place across the United States, we ceded early member value with email newsletters containing ideas, analysis, and commentary on big industry developments. All those great articles that I used to write for free for the industry on Geek Estate Blog were put behind a membership wall.

The problem: the newsletters were only made consistently available to GEM Diamond Members, which required an application and verification to ensure they were a fit for a community of the boldest proptech entrepreneurs in existence.

Wider access to our best-in-class inspiration, analysis, and objective takes will have immense benefits to the entire real estate sector.

• Real estate agents and brokers can implement new technology to streamline operations.
• Educators can use our resources as a launchpad for forward-looking discussions on the industry.
• Potential founders can gain inspiration to disrupt long running practices.
• Junior VC's can use our analysis to conduct due diligence, to make guided investment recommendations.

Those are just a few of the outcomes that we hope to achieve by making Geek Estate's analysis more widely available.

There are effectively now two tiers of GEM: Crystal and Diamond. A comparison is here (can also be seen on our about page detailing the what and who):

Here's why we are doing this now.

First, I speak to a lot of people who are not a fit for GEM Diamond membership. They are super, super early stage founders (often with only an idea), an associate at a late stage startup or venture firm, a consultant, or otherwise too junior to join a community full of the most experienced operators in the industry. We have had no way to serve them today with an on-ramp to GEM Diamond.

Second, we’ve been sending lead-nurturing emails to prospective members for a couple of years: one Monthly Transmission and one Monthly Radar. Open rates are extremely high: Many people stay on the list and remark to us how much they value the content—but they never pay for or apply to join GEM Diamond.

Third, in order to be the best source of proptech business intelligence and inspiration, we want contributions from even more talented voices. Doing so requires a larger revenue base to fund it. If we can’t be the best at something, why do it?

Given Geek Estate is not a media company that cares about audience size to sell ads against, we're consciously pushing people toward either becoming GEM Crystal or GEM Diamond members.

We hope you join us for the ride. If not, please just follow the public blog to stay abreast of what we do but don't have budget to spend on inspiration, analysis and curation.

We're offering the first 250 GEM Crystal members more than 50% off yearly/monthly membership. A 30 day free trial makes it zero risk.

Any questions or comments, shoot us a note at community@geekestate.com.