This California Ghost Town Earns $30K a Month

It’s an old mining town called Cerro Gordo, located in the mountains of California, not far from Death Valley (map link).

Brent Underwood and a few friends bought the town for $1.4 million back in 2020 💰

One of those friends is Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit.

A few weeks ago Nathan was on a podcast where he revealed how they’re monetizing the town 🤑

Paraphrasing him from about the 37-minute mark (transcript)…

You have this piece of property up in the mountains of California… it’s in the middle of nowhere. 

What could that be worth? 

You could rebuild this old hotel, maybe you could run an Airbnb business. 

[But] I don’t think people realize that the business has 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube.

It has an email list of a hundred thousand people. There’s a podcast coming out soon. It does $30,000 a month in merchandise sales.

Here’s the YouTube channel, featuring 79 videos, including the first one from April 2020…

That’s about 2 videos per month on average. 32 of the videos have more than 1 million views 👀

Cerro Gordo also has 112K followers on Instagram, and Brent himself has 214K.

And here’s their online store, where you can buy products like…

• T-shirts / hats / hoodies
• Mugs
• Coins
• Pins
• Patches

For $10 apiece, they were even selling old square nails from a hotel that burned down in the town.

Those are now listed as sold out, but there’s a photo showing 100s of them in a couple of buckets. So they could easily have made a few $1000 from selling some 200-year-old scrap metal 🤯

Or, as they pitched it, “a piece of American History” 🇺🇸

Ultimately the key to making this kind of thing work is storytelling.

Brent does a great job sharing the story of Cerro Gordo and his efforts to rebuild it.

Another factor here is simply showcasing a place and/or lifestyle that’s very different from what most people are used to.

3 other examples of that…

• Cecilia Blomdahl
  600K YouTube subscribers documenting her life in Svalbard, an island close to the North Pole.
• The Sheekoz Family
  280K YouTube subscribers documenting everyday family life in Russia. The channel started with the guy giving a tour of his $100/month apartment in broken English…

• Brian Barczyk
  4.6M YouTube subscribers sharing his love for reptiles. He was earning $20k/month last I checked.

Do you…

• Live in an unusual place?
• Have a strange hobby?
• Follow an atypical lifestyle?

If so, you could probably build a big following and earn a good living by sharing online 👍

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