Raul Cunarro jokes with his wife that she’s lucky to be married to someone famous.
Cunarro, who resides in West Des Moines, has built an online following for his storytelling around buying dilapidated homes around Des Moines.
“I specialize in transforming distressed properties into quality homes,” Cunarro wrote in an email. “After renovating them and placing long-term tenants, I refinance the properties based on their increased value, which allows me to reinvest the same capital into future projects. Today, I’m also helping other investors — from across the United States and even from other countries who learn about me from my content — successfully invest in the Des Moines market and build wealth through real estate.”
Cunarro is a Spanish immigrant who moved to the Des Moines area after meeting his wife, who is from Huxley, while she was studying abroad in Spain. He produces all his videos in Spanish and monetizes them by selling courses to people who want to learn about the topics he’s posting about. His courses include financing, construction and analyzing a deal.
“A lot of people were sending me messages, like, ‘Hey, do you have a mentorship? You have a course? Like, do you have an academy? Can you teach me how to do this?’ And that’s where I was like, ‘Ah, maybe I can make money with this.’ … When YouTube started growing is when people started texting me to teach them, so I saw the possibilities.”
He said his content speaks to immigrants in the U.S.
“One of the things for the Latino community is that we don’t have much education in finances or starting businesses, so I create a lot of content about credit, how to improve your credit, how to get loans, how to start a business and LLC, insurance, all those things,” he said.
Cunarro, who also runs a commercial cleaning company that started in Des Moines and has expanded across the Midwest, including Nebraska and Kansas City, has over 93,000 subscribers on YouTube, with over 900 videos. He’s also active on other social platforms, especially Instagram and Facebook.
Cunarro sat down with the Business Record to share five of his ideas for growing online content.
1. Start with a compelling hook that will entice viewers to watch an entire video.
“You need to start telling things without telling the end of the story if you want them to keep until the end, because the main thing that you can do to create social media is making sure everybody stays until the end,” Cunarro said. “If you can keep that interest to the end of the video, and then … [they] go and watch the video again – it will probably blow up.”
2. Be authentic. Share the problems you encounter.
Rehabbing dilapidated properties is serious business and often comes with unexpected problems. Cunarro does not shield his viewers from those problems, which come with headaches and extra costs.
“My first five viral videos that went over a million views were with problems that I had,” he said. “So it seems like everything that you create that is negative, people will stay to watch more than you put something that is positive.”
In one of his first videos that went viral, the team was having problems with the key that opens the water line, he said.
“There is a key that connects the house with the main line of the city, and there is a key that a plumber needs to open,” he said. “When I called the water company to open a key, they told me the key is broken, you need to pay for a new one. So that cost like $1,500, $2,000 to change that key.”
In the video, he said he chose to record right at the part of the property where they needed that errant key.
He recalls saying, “This, that you see here, it cost me $2,000.”
“And you couldn’t actually see anything, because it was just like a thing on the ground … and I was there recording myself, so I think that’s why it went viral, because people were like, wait, what … cost you $2,000? So then the hook was good, and then I started the story without telling the end.”
3. Get help.
Cunarro hired a video editor from Venezuela “from day one,” he said.
“All I was doing is record myself, upload to Google Drive, and he was watching the videos [and] posting them,” he said.
4. It doesn’t matter what time you post; all that matters is that you’re consistent.
“Some of the times, I post a reel, and then it goes viral five days after,” Cunarro said. “Some of them, they go viral right away. … For YouTube, in the long view, we are still trying. … You need to be consistent on YouTube. YouTube only awards you if you are consistent.”
Cunarro compared YouTube to people watching shows on TV. He said he posts his video every Friday and it has 10,000 views that day, “so it’s like people [are] waiting for their TV show to watch it on Fridays.”
Many people are unaware that they have to create content for a long period of time before it monetizes, he said.
“I didn’t make any money until a year after I was creating content,” he said.
5. Be someone worth following.
Cunarro, who was an entrepreneur in Spain before coming to Iowa, is creating content based on his own life experiences. For example, he wants to create an online course to teach Latinos how to start and grow a business.
“I think first you need to do something worth sharing, and then start sharing it,” he said.