Jasmine Roth Got Her Hit HGTV Show Because of an Instagram Hashtag

From The Pioneer Woman

Help! I Wrecked My House star Jasmine Roth's TV career didn't just happen overnight. The California-based designer and new mom recently detailed her journey to HGTV on her blog JasmineRoth.com. Spoiler alert: similar to Netflix stars Shea and Syd McGee's big break, Instagram lent a helping hand.

Jasmine's story began in 2010 after she and her partner, Brett, purchased a plot of land in Huntington Beach, California, to build their dream home (which is currently in escrow after eight happy years spent there). They also planned to build a second house next door as an investment to offset the cost. The couple had no experience in building—albeit they both had their real estate licenses and business degrees in entrepreneurship.

Jasmine and Brett enlisted a team of builders to work on the houses they had drawn out; however, the situation was not ideal. "Our builder started asking a lot of questions that we couldn’t answer and since we were both working full-time in other jobs, being home developers on the weekend was starting to wear on us," she wrote. So Jasmine decided to leave her corporate job in social responsibility to work on the homes full-time. "I really enjoyed going to the jobsite everyday," she writes.

In 2013, the couple moved into their dream home. By this point, Jasmine had started her own company, Built Custom Homes, as well as a corresponding blog. The home built next door was the company's first big sale. She continued to keep building custom homes for clients and buying land—ultimately growing her portfolio.

In 2015, Jasmine took on a fun project in Park City, Utah, called the #TinyMountainHome. She documented the whole building process through her Instagram account, which she had never done before. "The videos were raw, real, and showed the progress as it was happening. In retrospect, I’d accidentally put myself on a TV timeline without even realizing it," she writes.

After wrapping on #TinyMountainHome, she started working on a beach home in the area. For this project, she used the hashtag #beachbuild on Instagram. Fortunately, HGTV was looking to produce a new series about building beach homes, and a production company that develops shows for the network stumbled upon her post and reached out via email.

"That first call was surreal. I’d never considered being on TV and knew nothing about it. I asked how they’d found me and was so surprised when they said… Instagram," she wrote, revealing "I had less than 1,500 followers at the time, although I was posting away like I had a million!"

Now if you’ve been following Jasmine’s HGTV journey from the start, you already know that she never starred in a show specifically about beach homes. Jasmine says that the show had been quickly taken off the table, as another candidate had sent their footage to the network before her. "For many, that might have been the end, but luckily for me, it was just the beginning," she explains, ending the post on an absolute cliffhanger!

Jasmine writes that she'll finish the story and go into detail about how she actually landed her first pilot for HGTV after missing that first opportunity in her next blog post. We'll keep you updated on part two! But for now, there is one important lesson to take away from her story: always use hashtags—you never know whose sleuthing around on the 'gram!