From Broke To Bugatti | Inside The Millionaire Empire Of Doug DeMuro

This is the like button, and you should hit it. So when you think of a self-started multi-million dollar business that's accumulated one and a half billion views and outpaces the ranks of even the top-rated television hits, your mind doesn't think of this guy here but it is.

"Hey ladies," um, but he ended up eating it all. So I don't know, but he wouldn't have to like jump up. This is Doug DeMuro, and he's not like any other businessman I have ever seen. He hasn't changed his look in seven years. He still films his videos with an iPhone by himself. He doesn't have a team or an assistant or a fancy office or any kind of special equipment. Yet he somehow managed to create one of the largest automotive channels on the internet.

And even more surprising is that he gave me the rare opportunity to sit down and pull back the curtains on the business behind who many believe is one of the most mysterious creators on YouTube. Because Doug DeMuro never does collaborations. He never interviews about himself and he's never talked about his own finances until now. So for the first time ever, he'll be sharing how he was able to leverage his bare-bones approach into a multi-million dollar business of reviewing some of the world's rarest and most expensive cars in history with plenty of quirks and features.

But before we start, if you guys enjoy this content and want to see more like it, make sure to subscribe and hit the like button. And then I could give it a Gram score. Okay but seriously, it helps me out a lot if you like and subscribe. So thank you so much for doing that, and now with that said, let's go to San Diego and meet up with Doug DeMuro. Enjoy!

"So tell us first of all, have you always been interested in cars?"

"Yeah, pretty much from day one. My parents aren't at all, and so it was kind of a weird thing. And so when I was a kid, it was kind of... I didn't really fit in quite as much in terms of my interest. But as an adult, I've been able to kind of expand it and now here we are."

"And then what about after high school? You went to college?"

"I went to college, yes. And I had an Audi A4 when I was in college that was also really cheap. And then once I got out of college, I started working for Porsche at their corporate headquarters in Atlanta, and I got a company car, which was the coolest thing in the world for a 21-year-old to have: a brand new company car, Porsche 911. I was responsible for allocating the cars to the dealerships, so making sure, you know, the 911 GT3s went to the right places and the Cayennes went to the right places and that sort of thing. And I got to learn about how dealers work, how automakers work, how the production process works, the whole logistics process, and I think that really informed kind of my understanding of the car business today."

"Why did you leave your job?"

"At some point, you pick up the sixth rental leased Porsche from the manufacturer that uses your company car and you're just like, I want to be in a position where I can do more than this and like own one of these and like have a try at something. And I'm 24, and I'm sitting in a cubicle, and I'm like, I think I don't have any mortgage, I don't have any responsibilities, I don't have kids, I don't have my dog. I can just try something. And so I decided I would try writing about cars, which was an odd decision because I hadn't really done that much. It really was just a... I could always go back to an office. I want to try to see if something else might happen."

"We're here in your studio, or what is this?"

"This is a storage facility where I store my car, and I only have a two-car garage at home, but I have like seven cars, so some of them have to live here."

"You have seven cars?"

"I think so, yeah, seven. Early on, I just took a lot of it was like hit like throwing stuff and seeing what worked. Some articles people really liked and some they didn't get that much traction. Then I realized, okay, that sort of thing is what people want to hear about. So I'm going to try this more, and it just sort of informed all my content. And that's the same with the YouTube channel. The YouTube channel is the funniest thing of all. I was writing these humor columns, which was different from what most people on Jalopnik were doing. They were more just writing like car news and reviews, and some guy emailed me one day and said, 'Look, you're great at writing. Have you thought about video?' And I hadn't, which is insane to think about now because of course everybody has pivoted to video and writing has kind of become a secondary thing."

"And so I thought, 'Huh, that’s an interesting idea. I’ll give that a shot.' And so I went out with my wife and a camera and a tripod, and filmed a video with my Nissan Cube, which I had at the time and that was a disaster. That video did terribly. Creating it was terrible, it was a horrible process, and I never uploaded it or edited it. But it was the beginning of, okay, here's how this works. And I went out a second time with a different car and tried it again. I did upload that video as my first one, and then it just kind of went from there."

"So where I first found you is with the Ferrari videos."

"That's right, Ferrari 360. I think about this now, and I think to myself, it was the stupidest thing I ever did, but the car cost $83,000 or something, and I didn't have $83,000. And just as a pro tip, if you don't have the money — like even if it's tied up somewhere else or whatever — I would suggest not buying the car. Like I didn't even possess the amount of money in order, you know, so I had to take out a loan, obviously, as people do, and my credit was such that my parents — I wasn't bad, but I had just never really bought anything — my parents had to co-sign a loan, and they did that, which I think is insane, but they believed in me."

"But I had bought the car really just to write about on Jalopnik, and I thought that that would continue to excel, and it did really well. The content on Jalopnik in '14 did really, really well, and the videos were almost like a secondary thing that I was doing as a kind of a companion piece to the written stuff. But I was scared every day I drove that car because I could not afford to fix it — pretty much the situation. I registered in Montana so I didn't pay sales tax. I did everything that sketchy people do when they don't have money: I did. See, this is practical. You know, back then on YouTube, you could buy a Ferrari and it was a big deal, and so a guy on YouTube has a Ferrari was like a thing. Now, there's fragments got a Veyron, like it's not anything anymore. No, that wouldn't be enough now, and so it wouldn't be worth stretching your budget. But at the time I really thought if I could just do this it might make something, and it did. So in the end, I guess it was the right... this is probably the best investment I ever made even though it seems like a really stupid one."

"So is exotic car ownership worth it?"

"Hell yes! As long as you stay away from roads, other drivers, potholes, parking lots, street racer wannabes, camera phones, speed bumps. It was in the spring of '15, and I'll never forget this. I was sitting — I lived in Philadelphia — and I was sitting on my couch and I was looking at my article numbers. I was thinking these just aren't doing that well and how these spreadsheets tracking and at some point it hit me that I should check the YouTube channel's analytics, which I had not done until that point. And I looked and I realized that the videos were actually getting more views than the articles were. And I was like, 'Oh!' Like, there's something else here that I've been missing for the last two years."

"But I do remember, I think it was that winter, I like reviewed a Tesla Model X for the channel and I put the video in December not realizing that what happens in December is that the ad rates shoot up, and that video made a ton of money. And that December, I made a lot of money for what at the time I considered a lot of money. I realized like, 'Oh wow! This is real!'"

"Yeah, and that was the beginning. I think it was the end of '15 where I realized like, 'Okay, I can actually do stuff on YouTube now.'"

"January of '16 comes, of course, I didn't know anything about ad rates since the whole thing was completely unbeknownst to me. January of '16 comes, all the money goes away because the ad rates drop, and I was like, 'Oh, I think that was just a fluke.’ I didn't realize for like another year what had happened there."

"And so now I focus on December every year. I really focus on really good content to take advantage and it is quite simply one of the most breathtakingly insane cars ever manufactured in the entire history of sports cars. In the summer of '16, I launched a blog with Autotrader called Oversteer. I've never only had one job in my entire life. I had a compass. I was writing even then and still doing the videos at that time. And I only left the Oversteer blog to start Cars and Bids. And so even there was no point where I was doing one thing."

"How did you figure out the equipment that you were going to be using? Because you've taken a very unique approach that's very different from everybody else that I've seen."

"Yeah, um, the key for me was always to like streamline it to make it as easy as possible. Not necessarily on me, but like in order to be able to go to some of these cars and do kind of what I wanted to do, I just want to make it as simple as possible. And if you have a big setup and you have a big situation and you need several people with you and all that, it just becomes challenging. My theory has always been the more people you have, the more drama, the more scheduled problems you run into, all of this stuff. And I just kind of felt that it made more sense to stay simple and so simple I did."

"So what do you have? Just one camera?"

"An iPhone. Yep, that's it. So basically what happened was I was writing the scripts, filming the videos, and editing all myself until June of 2020, which was 18 months ago basically. And then we launched Cars and Bids, and I took a very active role and still have a very active role in the day-to-day operations of this, and I just couldn't edit the videos anymore. You know how long it takes to edit? It's a process. I actually love editing; it's maybe my favorite part of the whole thing because it's like a puzzle that you're putting together and it's really cool to see the finished product, but it just wasn't gonna happen."

"And so I hired part-time an editor named Nick, who's great, and he does a fantastic job. He was exactly what I needed in the moment. If you watch the videos, you will never notice a difference between when he started and when I was doing it. I don't know why I thought that; no one was... it's not like I'm like I'm Spielberg. I'm not doing crazy stuff here, but that's the team. That's it, me part-time, Nick, who lives in Arizona, and then my best friend Melissa, she reads my emails. So, like, people email with their car offers and she reads them and puts them in a spreadsheet."

"Now how did you start this? Where did this... I don't know. I'm from... I have no idea. I started early on like this is whatever and it just, I guess it just kind of snowballed, and it just has gotten bigger and bigger somehow."

"I think that one big reason that it was so small in the past was when I started this that no one in my family has ever done anything on camera or radio or anything like that. And so when I started this, I was an anxious dude. I didn't know what I was doing on camera."

"On days when I'm shooting, there's a video I always shoot. I try to shoot first thing in the morning when I'm like freshest, and then in the afternoon, I'll either work on Cars and Bids or pretty much that. It's pretty much just working on Cars and Bids and trying. So there's kind of two masters in my life, two jobs, which is crazy because there was a seven-year span where it was out of control. Like we lived in... my wife and I lived in Philadelphia for four years and I didn't really leave the house. I didn't meet friends. Those were four work years. But it paid off because it was an investment in the future that I'm now reaping the rewards, and I get to not live in Philly anymore, which is the greatest benefit, and I get to... and I get to have like a more normal life because my channel has kind of grown to this point."

"I think that every YouTuber who's smart is thinking to themselves, 'This can't be my only revenue stream.' You know, my channel is big, I get a lot of views, and I make good money, but all of us in this space are thinking how long do we have? Does this last two years or does it last twenty? If it lasts twenty, Cars and Bids is probably going to stay because it's a lot of work, but it may not. And I think of myself more as a pro athlete where you make a lot of money really fast and it could end. I mean, a lot of those guys' careers are five years, and so Cars and Bids seemed like a pretty good idea to take this audience that I had and like do something with them that may be more sustainable and more long-term than YouTube. And off the platform on YouTube where I'm sort of beholden to the algorithm and that sort of thing."

"Every car that sells on the site, the buyer pays a fee to us which is four and a half percent and it's capped at $4,500, so obviously that's our entire revenue basically as the cars sell. And then we get a commission, a buyer's fee, and then, you know, whatever's left we put back into the business or repay ourselves."

"Is it profitable yet?"

"Yeah, profitable. Almost within maybe six, eight months we were profiting."

"No way!"

"Yeah! Those first few months were terrifying, but we're making money. And that's one of the reasons why we kept me out of it. It's not like called Doug's Auctions for a reason. My face isn't all over the main page for a reason; we want it to kind of be a separate entity that could live on its own in case, you know, the channel never slows down."

"I do like the fact that you've reviewed cars that are for sale."

"Yeah, it was an interesting idea, and it has given me a vast array of cars that I can like, the car will come in, and it's like, 'Yeah, I'm interested in that.' Have you noticed that those cars sell for more?"

"Yeah, I don't want to like publicize that because, but like, yes they do. They bring... because obviously, a lot of people... I don't want people to think that I'm just going to review their car. Yeah, I only am doing it when it makes sense for the channel, truthfully."

"Are you concerned that you launched during a time where shutdown happened and cars just exploded in value?"

"Yeah, that's a fear, which is one of the reasons why I want to try to make it as good as possible, as big as possible, and as well known as possible so that when the inevitable pullback comes, you're already an established player to the point where you don't just get swallowed up."

"So you told me originally that you watched the Stradman video and you wanted a chance to talk about personal finance and investing."

"Yeah, that's how all of this came up. I love Stradman; me and him are buddies, I text him. But you have to invest your money, so you interview the Stradman, right? And I just... I was telling him that I... my friends and I still watch and talk about this video, and you say to him, 'Hey, you know, you've made all this money. What if... what are you doing with it?' And he said, 'I just have it sitting in a savings account.' Right? That was like the general basic, okay, just... just..."

"I try to impart financial advice occasionally in my channel, I'm like a like dollar-cost average, Vanguard, like just let it sit. Like I'm part of the reason I think that Stradman had chose to do what he did in terms of investment and saving just cash. When you are in our world, and I think about this a lot, when you're in our world, your goal is you're so focused on the next video, the next content, the next whatever, that it's difficult to think about anything else, including like investment strategies. The last thing that you want to have on your mind, and so it's easier to just, you know, you're making so much it doesn't really matter if you lose some money because it sits or whatever. You just, you've got so much coming in and you can probably make more by just continuing to stay focused."

"I try not to make stupid decisions even when it comes to buying cars. People will laugh at me and say... I'll say, 'Oh, I can't afford... I really want a Mercedes E63 station wagon, a brand new one,' and I've always said on my channel several times that I don't feel like I can afford it. People are laughing like, 'You have a Ford GT! Of course you can afford it!' Well, okay, but an E63 AMG wagon is gonna lose a hundred thousand in value in three years, and I'm not in a position where I feel like I'm comfortable with that."

"But depreciation is not something that normal people think about as often as they should. This is a 1994 Audi RS2 station wagon, which you would think is not a particularly special car. Just looks like an old Audi."

"What did you pay for it?"

"Um, seventy-five thousand dollars, which is insane! Yeah, I should have... I thought you were gonna say like twenty thousand, twenty-five."

"To seventy-five? I'll tell you all the cars that I own. This is the one that I think is gonna be worth the most."

"But I really try to save and invest a lot because you look at investment calculators when you're 30 and what's it going to look like when you're 60? I don’t know what the number is but enough to get a couple houses, an F40, and that’s the end. I don’t have like... look at me! Like, I don’t have lofty goals here. I’m not sitting here looking for watches. I don’t care about clothes. I only care about the cars that I like, which happen to be increasing in value anyway."

"So I don’t know if I have a specific number in mind, but it ain't a billion and it ain't even 500 million; I don't even... 100 billion? I don't need that."

"What are your thoughts about the current state of the market, both in terms of stocks, in real estate, or in terms of cars?"

"I think that we're certainly in a bubble with cars in as much as we have this chip shortage that has caused a massive shortage of new cars, and thus that has also caused a shortage in used cars, and that has raised prices. I think that car prices will contract as far as daily driver normal rational cars, because of course they will once the chip shortage are solved. I think the really special stuff is in a different league now, and I think people need to get their minds around that."

So overall, after spending an entire afternoon with Doug, it's easy to see why he's successful. He only focuses on the essentials; he never gets caught up in his own image, and he always puts the viewer first every single time.

But now it's time to give him a Doug score starting with styling. Doug has a no cares wardrobe for an affordable cost. I'll give it an 8 out of 10. The fun factor is strong; he's always lighthearted, carefree, and not afraid to laugh at himself. 10 out of 10. Cool factor is unmeasurable and therefore I'll rate it 11 out of 10.

In terms of features, Doug is an encyclopedia of knowledge combined with a sensible investment philosophy, but he could probably splurge on the E63 station wagon and still be okay. So I'll rate this a 9 and a half out of 10, for a total Doug score of 96.

If you guys appreciate the review, I'll link to his channel down below in the description and make sure to subscribe if you want to see more content just like this. So thank you guys so much for watching, and also make sure to claim your free stock down below in the description that's worth all the way up to a thousand dollars when you sign up for Public using the code Gram. You may as well do that if you want to get a head start, investing long-term just like Doug DeMuro.