Everybody is convinced that if they’re building a company, it has to be a billion-dollar unicorn.
While I was building this newsletter (thanks for 11k subscribers btw), I was reminded constantly of doing things that don’t scale.
That’s where Nick Huber comes in
How many influencers are willing to tell you how they actually make money?
Or the names of their companies?
Well here goes:
I own the following businesses:
50% of Bolt Storage - real estate private equity and property management. 47 employees, 63 properties, 1.9 million… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Nick Huber (@sweatystartup)
4:13 PM • Feb 18, 2024
He goes by the Sweaty Startup on X and has over 350000 followers.
How did he do it? By talking about things that don’t scale.
Other subscribers of mine have given me great reviews about the business news at It’s The Mix-Up (over 120 of you have used it!). Get informed, join them there.
He owns stake in a lot of traditional “boring” businesses – storage, cleaning, real estate and worker outsourcing.
His first business was a self-storage company for students for the period of a day.
Imagine if you were a student who landed in New York City for a conference and had to wrap up your work and get back ASAP.
You can’t show up to your conference/meeting with 2 suitcases.
Either you could get a hotel room just to keep your bags in or ask a friend if you could drop by their place to keep your stuff.
Neither option was exactly ideal.
Nick sought to correct this gap in the market but starting a storage business required permits and capital – a lot of capital.
So what did he do? Put an ad out on Facebook for anybody who was interested in storing their luggage someplace for the day, when one person booked his service, he got on bike, cycled to their location, picked up his bag and stored it in his car.
At the end of the day, the student came by to pick up his stuff and paid Nick for his service.
And just like that, with a $20 Facebook ad, he had verified his idea with the market (what over-complicators call “product-market fit”).
A lot happened since then, Nick built a large portfolio of SMBs (Small & Medium Businesses) and recently hit $400k in personal profit per month!
Now I’m not even in the same dimension but even I was reminded of the power of doing things that don’t scale.
I’ve recently been paying 2 guys to go around different colleges pitching my newsletters and getting interested people to sign up which has continued growth for my newsletter.
It’s not fancy, I haven’t gone viral on any platform but I just closed my first month of monetization just shy of $600 and my target for March is $1000.
Which would you rather be? Fancy bells and whistles or sweaty but profitable?
Do things that don’t scale
Best of luck.