Are people making millions of dollars with boring, sweaty businesses? They are. I brought on Nick Huber, Mr. Sweaty Startup himself, to share what he thinks are some of the most interesting opportunities to build boring businesses. The wealthy people that I know, the wealthy people in my town, um the ones with giant beach houses in the Outer Banks and private jets sitting at the local airport, almost all of them did something boring. underground utilities, a surveying company, a HVAC business, real estate developer. So, you want to increase your odds of getting really rich, do something, do something normal, do something boring. Uh, enjoy learning how to be rich uh by building boring businesses. Is it possible? You tell me. All [Music] right, we got Nick Huber on the pod. Nick, sweaty startup, Mr. Sweaty Startup. You know, for people who make it to the end of this episode, what are they going to learn? They're going to learn how to make a make a million bucks the boring way if they're good. Of course, not everybody can do it. So, it's possible. Well, you know, a lot of people listen to this podcast, you know, building software startups, SAS startups, AI stuff. You're kind of the opposite of that. Um, and my hope is that by the end of this, people see some of these businesses and they're like there's an aha moment and they're like, "Wow, I actually see opportunity here." Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of entrepreneurs if you if you approach somebody on the street, they'd say, you know, they they'd start talking about Techrunch and Shark Tank and Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and change the world and raise money in San Francisco. But the wealthy people that I know, the wealthy people in my town, um the ones with giant beach houses in the Outer Banks and private jets sitting at the local airport, almost all of them did something boring. Underground utilities, a surveying company, a HVAC business, you know, a developer, real estate developer. So, new ideas are are good and I'm glad people start those things, but um you want to increase your odds of getting really rich, do something do something normal, do something boring. Okay, show us show us the way, man. So, you want to start with my journey? Like, I made a I made a million dollars. Uh let's go through I'm going to share my screen. This is I started a pickup and delivery storage business, meaning it was called Storage Squad. It's still around. I sold the business. Um, basically students when they went home for the summer, we stored their boxes in a warehouse and then we took it back to them where they moved the year before. At our peak, we were doing about 2 point 2.2 million a year of revenue and we I don't know made 400 500k a year and eventually leveraging that into building a self-s storage facility, which we can talk about. But my only form of marketing and my main form of marketing, we didn't do paid ads until 2017 when we were over two million a year of revenue. Um, it was sidewalk chalk, so we knew exactly where our customers walked. We knew where they lived. We knew where they went to class. Um, this picture is in Boston later on in the journey. But early on, I was at Ithaca and the campuses. There's north campus and and where everybody went to North Campus where everybody lived, main campus where everybody went to class. They walked across the same bridge, you know, every day to get to class. So, I put this ad that you can see here. Need storage squad.com. $29.99 per box all summer. I put that ad. I've written that ad personally 5,000 plus times on the ground. I've worn holes in in my knees of my, you know, the knees spots on the jeans. I've burned through hundreds of uh, you know, boxes of sidewalk chalk. Bought a cargo van on Craigslist for 1,500 bucks. This one on the right. Um, it had rusty panels. Bought this box truck on the south side of Chicago from a repair shop for $2,200. Drove it to Boston. We launched our business with these crappy bas basically bootstrapped our business with these crappy vans. Um, and man, we picked up a lot of stuff, dude. This is me sitting in front of uh the dorms at Boston University on Commonwealth A. This is probably 2015. And this is the warehouse. It was 35,000 ft. We fit 2,000 plus students items in here. 5,000 plus boxes. Sold the business in 2020 for 1.75 million. Um, had we had no debt. Me and my partner split the money. And it's not like you, you know, come from, it's not like your family were storage kings, right? It's not like you, it's not like you knew really what you were doing, right? You were kind of learning as you go. Oh, I didn't know. I had no idea what I was doing. I I posted an ad on Craigslist for somebody to lease my apartment. And they said, "I don't want to lease my apartment. I want to put my stuff in your apartment." So, I got sweaty, went and made 150 bucks. And I realized I couldn't lease my apartment. So, I filled the son of a gun up with other people's stuff. Um, and yeah, man, like three three weeks after the idea, I had $3,000 cash sitting on the bed in my dorm. So, we were profitable from day one. I didn't look I think one of my advantages here is I didn't consider myself an entrepreneur. I didn't study entrepreneurship. I didn't fall into the entrepreneurship trap or a business like this would not have excited me frankly because it was hard. All right, let's keep rolling because I want to I want to get into the tactics and the financials and stuff like that as you go. All right. Well, um later on in my journey, we bought a self- storage facility. This is 2019 Erie, Pennsylvania. We bought a self- storage facility at public auction for 625K. It was over 40,000 square feet, 180 plus units. Um, that's a picture of my partner grinding off locks because the person who owned it basically neglected it was making about $4,000 a month of revenue. Um, and there were over a hundred abandoned units. Literally, they did not have anything inside of them. This is me talking through, you know, going around and and uh basically sawing off these units. And today, see if I can fast forward. So, here's a self-s storage facility that my partner and I bought for $1.5 million in North Georgia. It was doing about $15,600 $16,000 a month of revenue when we bought it. It's doing $40,000 a month of revenue today. It's worth $4.5 million. We didn't do anything spectacular. We didn't um invent anything. We didn't raise any money. We bought this building and it's worth, you know, over $2 million more than what we paid for it. My partner and I own it outright. So these are some of the things that people don't realize are happening in plain sight to make really really good money. Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. So Startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you who want to build out their startup ideas. Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders. They're looking for uh tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what Startup Empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction uh that they need. So you can check out the link to startupmpire.co in the description. My brother runs a lawn care company. His only form of marketing is this these bandit signs. He posts them up on the side of the road. People call him. He gets 30 40 new customers in April, May every year. Then he stops doing it because his company's going to grow 30% that year. He's happy. He made over $100,000 last year and spent two months fishing in the Florida Keys in the winter time. So, not not huge money, but man, you make 100 grand a year working, you know, nine months a year. It's not too bad. Mobile detailing business. This guy came out, cleaned my car. It's called Detailed Dogs. Really good guy. His name's Jack. He shared he was lucky enough nice enough to share his profit loss statement. $17,000 in revenue in October of 2024. $10,000 in profit to him. Obviously, he's working a lot, but he's making 120 grand a year, one year out of college. It's my buddy who drives. His name's Jude. He has three other drivers in Atlanta. He gives high-end transportation to the airport and he does really well. These are some of the sweaty startups that people don't people don't realize are in plain sight. I think firewood delivery is a pretty cool one. If you got you don't have any resources or or money and you don't want to raise money. Normally you can get firewood delivered that's not seasoned and it's not going to burn very well. You can get it delivered for $300 $400 for a big truckload of it. I think if you build these things I built this u I built each of these in about an hour and a half with about a hundred bucks worth of material. If you build these on site, you could probably charge $800 to $1,000 and deliver the firewood. You could definitely do that twice in a day and make, you know, $1,000 profit in a day. It's over 100 bucks an hour. Not too bad. I would do that. By the way, in Canada, my house in Canada, I get I spend $500 for firewood delivery. And it and it's probably not it's probably probably not seasoned, right? You got to let it sit for before it burns well. Exactly. So, for for me, it's like I want this. I just there's just no way for me to do it. Like I mean I guess I can build one of these myself. Yeah. Yeah. There's not any there's nobody offering this service. And this maybe is a subscription service too where twice a year you come and fill up you know fill it up for the person you have that recurring revenue. Totally. And also it's a it's like an entry point. So once you're uh once once you've built this and you're delivering you know delivering the firewood then it's like oh hey by the way do you need your lawn mode? Oh hey do you need like snow clearing? Mhm. Tree work. Tree work. Remove the trees and then sell the firewood a year later. Yeah. Once you once you get these customers and the high-end customers who are willing to pay, you know, 800 to,000 bucks for something nice, um, a lot of other opportunity. I was at a bar in North Georgia and I noticed that this TV had rotating little ads. Um, basically you can advertise your business on this TV. It flashes like for 7 seconds and he's got about 50 of them running on each TV. Um, I found out he's got like 70 bars and restaurants in North Georgia on his on his plan. He charges $10 a month for the business to be in the bar. And he met he he nets $20,000 a month doing this. Pretty awesome. You know what's cool about this also is, okay, Nick, you own Bolt Storage, right? So, if you sponsor this for $10 a month, you're you're going to like call your boys up and be like, "Let's grab a drink at, you know, Country Boy Sports." And then Bold Storage is right there. And it's kind of like a funny bit. So, not only is he making money, um, but the bar owner and the bar is probably getting more revenue because it's just, you know, people are talking about it. Yeah. It makes it it makes the local business owners absolutely have some loyalty towards that bar. And even if they don't get any customers out of it, they love sitting there having a beer, waiting for their their sign to pop up. It's pretty cool. But there's his cell if you want to call or text the guy. When I posted this on Twitter a year ago, he got blown up and sent me sent me a couple notes that he's partnering with some people to grow the company. So, it was pretty funny. Yeah. He's probably like, "Why is Palunteer and Dropbox and, you know, these Silicon Valley companies, you know, advertising here?" Yeah. Um, I love putting green installation. It's a little bit higher skilled. You got to you got to know what you're doing here. But man, you can make anywhere from 30 grand to $200,000 on some of these high-end turf installs at people's houses. Tree removal, it's just such a good business. I mean, obviously, it's difficult, right? You gota there's a risk of injury. You got to have some very expensive equipment. You got to have skilled employees. But man, four guy two guys came out here and spent four hours removing two trees from my house. And I gave them over over $3,000 for four hours work for two guys. So it doesn't take a genius to do some math on what the hourly earning of these folks are. So it's pretty crazy. Christmas light install. I don't recommend doing this because you can fall off a roof and kill yourself. But man, you can make really good money. I have friends who spend an absurd amount of money to get Christmas lights installed on their house. I I don't I don't see the need for it. What's absurd? How much How much are they spending? $3,500. Four grand to get like a couple rows of Christmas lights installed on their house for 3 months. Is it worth $1,000 a month to see Christmas lights on your house when you pull up to it in the evening? Not to me, maybe, but people like it, man. To some people. To some people. Deck building. Power washing is a really easy one. If you have no skill and almost no money, you can get a hold of a power washer and clean some concrete, clean some furniture, clean some decks. This is concrete work, driveway, you know, driveway slab patios, bounce house rentals. I love this business. Um, so yeah, man. Lot lot of sweaty startups. I think an interesting one that I was thinking of and now that you have a kid, you might be able to relate to this. Um, I was looking for a nanny. my nanny quit and it was so much work and I actually looked in Athens for a local nanny recruiting company. Meaning like, hey, help me post the job on care.com, do the screening calls, set up, you know, do the background checks, set up interviews with people who who qualify and help me find a nanny. I think I would pay $3 to $5,000 for that. It's a great part-time great part-time side gig for somebody. Dude, I have an idea. I I don't know if I want to give it away. Okay, I'll give it away. I'm convinced. Okay, so let me share my screen. And who knows, maybe you and I do this together. So, I had a baby uh five months ago. And one of the biggest uh pieces of advice that I got, and I'm very privileged and lucky, but you know, someone said, yeah, someone says, you know, you need a night nurse. you need someone, you know, you it's gonna it's going to be incredible for your wife. Um it's going to be incredible for you. Um and at first I was a bit resistant to the idea. I wanted to like, you know, feel the pain, so to speak. Um but after speaking to people, you know, I did it and it was probably one of the greatest decisions for our family that I've made. So, and to let everybody know what that is, that means a a nurse comes to your house and watches your baby from like 11:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. so that you and your wife can get sleep. And it is total total game changer. It's a total game changer and uh not cheap. And the customer that is paying for it is a very high valued customer and you're getting them at the beginning of their journey. and meaning that uh there's probably a bunch of other things that you can sell them along the way. Now almost like home outfitting for you know babies. Exactly. uh when now the way to find uh some of these people there there are some marketplaces like care.com but care is very focused on it's not just uh night nurses there's nannies there's you know uh sitters there's um cleaners there's all sorts of different things and I couldn't find the de facto place for uh night nurses so let me pull up so do you now own night nurse.com. How did you know that this is that's where this was going? We think alike. Greg, we're we we actually think very differently, but alike at the same time. I think all entrepreneurs think very similar similarly about entrep about opportunity. There's a lot of people who are listening completing our sentences probably. So, I don't own nigh nurse.com and I'm giving this away and maybe we end up doing it together, but this is only available night nurses.com is available for $13,000. That's half of a new type Toyota Camry, less than half. And not only that, you can literally lease to own it if if you don't have the cash. So, what that means is uh you can basically pay $1,100 a month for 13 months and and own this domain. Build a directory. I would personally use AI to build the directory. Um, exactly. Blog, get organic traffic. What do you think? Product reviews, mom advice. Um, and you could do your advertising on that one pregnancy app that everybody uses that tracks the pregnancy. What's that app called? Where it says like your baby's the size of a peanut. Yeah. I mean, there's a few of them, but every every expecting mother has that app 100%. And so, you really get them at the very beginning of their journey and think about the businesses that you could leverage off the back of night nurses.com. the nanny recruiting service. A ton of affiliate traffic and revenue from product reviews that you do to help sell awesome products into, you know, families. Yeah. All the way through. It's amazing. So, I don't know what I I I don't know. Maybe I buy this domain and someone from the community ends up building it. I don't know. So, by the time this is live, I'm going to figure this out. Um, but I know that like that's a lowrisk. I mean, we talked about sort of sweaty startups, what you can do there. But also, you would also agree that this digital business in some ways it's kind of sweaty, right? It's like a sweaty digital business. Oh, absolutely. I love like somewhere.com is a sweaty digital business. Like we're working our butt off in recruiting, which is one of the hardest businesses in the world, but it is worldwide. I don't think you can necessarily, but I would start I would do, you know, what Nikita does and start in one town to get night nurses.com going. Probably one suburb and one school or one, you know, neighborhood of one town handing out flyers, putting out bandit signs. Um, I don't know about sidewalk chalk where all the moms walk, but if there's a place where the all the pregnant ladies get together to walk, you know, you you put a a sidewalk chalk ad that says, you know, need a night nurse, night nurses.com. Um, you bought somewhere.com. I don't know if you've publicly said how much it cost. Yeah, it was 450 grand. So pre before before somewhere.com with somewhere.com it was called support sheepard and then you spent $450,000 for the domain. So you're no stranger to buying good domains. Um how should people think about buying a domain for uh for their business? I think it's it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I'll ask you the same question, Greg, and like this is a thought exercise for everybody who's listening. People will spend I've spent millions of dollars on real estate. I just said I spent 1.5 million on that one building to run a self- storage business in. I've spent over 250k to redo the facade, meaning the front of one of my storage facilities just to make it look better. That's it. 250 grand on one property to make it look better. But yet, and many businesses do this, they pay a ton of money every single month to lease, whether it be a dental office, a warehouse, um, whatever it might be, but for some reason, spending more than a couple hundred on a domain is foreign to them. So, personally, I think it's an unbelievable investment, especially when you look at it as far as look at it for what it is, which is the digital real estate that your business lives. Yeah. I also I also think that LLMs are going to prioritize dotcoms over. And ios and stuff like that. So when you look at like a night nurses.com versus night nurses.co, you know, if a lead is worth $300 and you're going to get, you know, 10 extra leads a month, um, you know, you're looking at $3,000 a month. that more than pays for the $1,100 a month that you're paying for 13 months to to lease to own the domain. I bought I bought that domain for over $400,000 a year ago and I've already gotten more than $400,000 of value from buying that domain. That's crazy. And I still own it obviously and it's going to be the name and the and the home of our business from now until ever. I think Beehive is the perfect example of this. Did they upgrade their domain yet? Did they? Terrible, terrible, terrible domain. And all I did was chirp Tyler Dank on Twitter for a year and a half because he was he's great. Like he's an unbelievable entrepreneur, but he was uh he was running his business with a domain that nobody could spell and nobody could remember. Yeah. I mean, I've had Tyler on the pod. Let's see. I think it's still Yeah. B. It's still terrible. They need to do a total they need to do a total rebrand. Yeah. If I spell beehive um let me share my screen. If I I hate that we're picking on Tyler. It's all love. This is just an example. If I if I search Beehive, he has to pay to be at the top. This is a sponsored ad at the top. And everything else has nothing at all to do with what his business is. Yeah. Yeah. I think it just it hurts to spend a lot of money on a.com. I think that, you know, I think a lot of people in the comment section are are going to be like, "Yeah, but I don't have $13,000. I don't have, you know, whatever." I bought storage for $400. Bolt storage.com. I bought webun.com for Okay, I made I paid $9,000 for that one. I paid $2200 for ad rhino.com. Um, you know, it it's all relative. Totally. make make the So, you've kind of made the pitch around here's a bunch of ideas, you know, sweaty ideas that people can start. We're we're kind of in this golden renaissance or or, you know, yeah, I would say a renaissance of startups right now, AI startups popping up left, right, and center. Why should someone listening to this uh who knows how to use cursor and you know chatgbt you know and are becoming prompt engineers why should they like say like you know what I'm just going to put that on the back burner for right now and I'm going to go open uh you know Christmas lights company. Man, it's really it's a tough one. And I want your opinion on this too, Greg. Like, what percent of the AI? So, I've been pitched I'm in the recruiting business. I've been pitched 30 plus simply recruiting and sourcing AI models. I don't First of all, they all are absolutely terrible. No candidate wants to go through AI sourcing and AI interview. It's it's ridiculous. Um, how are any of them going to make any money? Like, for in every niche, there's 20 AI startups. Like if we if we just said if we took a thousand random AI startups, how many of them do you think will make it to like exit or profitability? I would say I mean it's it's like replace AI startup with like tech startup like most tech most startups fail and most tech startups fail even even you know greater. So you know I'm going to say 93% of them are going to not make it to profitability. Yeah, I would I would probably say 99% won't make its profitability, but and 90 but 90% will like be a loss for the for the founder, but those 10% at the top will either get aqua hired, like find the next opportunity that's unbelievable, like just skyrocket their career. So, I'm not saying that's the wrong way to go about it. But if you pick your competition wisely and you say, "Hey, look, I can compete against the Stanford computer science, you know, brilliant person who got a 36 on their ACT and has 20 million of venture capital funding and has a network all over Silicon Valley. I can compete against that person or I can compete against the person in my town who has a fax machine on their desk. They have no rep employees all over the world and they actually don't answer the phone on Monday afternoon when you call to try to become their customer but they have a private jet sitting at the airport here in Athens. Like which one of those two do you want to compete with? So when I was at a similar area of my journey and a part of my book that they wanted to take out, I say like do you want to compete against LeBron James or a fifth grade girl in basketball? The winner gets the winner gets something amazing. Like you beat LeBron, you get a billion dollars. You beat the third grade girl, fifth grade girl, you get 30 grand a month. I' I'd play against the third grade girl every time because my odds of having a win and making money um are higher. So like when I was in a really hard business, storage squad doing that moving, I realized that hey, this is not the business that's going to make take me to where I want to go. I got to figure out something else to do. And the first the top of our list when me and my business partner Dan were making our list was like, hey, where are normal people making a ton of money? And frankly, like where are the dumb people making money and doing really well? Well, it's a game that if we play this game, there's an 80% chance that we're going to win just because of the odds. And we looked at self storage and realized that, hey, these owners, they're sitting somebody in an office. They're not answering the phone. They don't do rate management correctly. They don't have any remote employees all over the world. Um, we can compete. It's a big enough market for me to compete. So, that's kind of how I think about it. Okay. So here's how I think about it and I think I think you'll appreciate this. So I think that some of the best AI startups are actually going to start as sweaty startups. Ah so let's just use night nurses.com. Let's say you know you and I end up building that business together. We create this network of night nurses. Um it's you know the de facto directory for for night nurses. Maybe we expand from there. Once we've built that and we've got the traffic and we've got the domain and we've got an email list of a million moms and dads, um then it's not so hard for us to vibe code a uh you know, payroll provider and and basically for $50 a month, you know, say like, "Hey, do you want to go now pay your night nurse or your nanny?" No problem. um you can now do that through us and then all of a sudden uh you know we're this fintech AI company but the foundation of it is the sweaty startup. Yep. So I I will go I'll go havsies with you on night nurses.com right now if if we do it one way to start obviously we invest in the blogs and we get the AI writing the blogs and we have a content team there but I think we start as we will find you a night nurse you pay us a onetime fee of $1,000 cash and we will do this is what we'll do. We're going to post thecare.com ad. We're going to put the word out in our network. We're going to ask for referrals. We are going to vet the person. We're going to background check the person and then we're going to set up only the highest qualified ones as interview to interview with you. And when you pick one and you have one signed on and they're going to work with you for the first 3 months of your baby's life, you pay us a,000 bucks and then you have the relationship with them directly and you pay them directly. Um I think a lot of people try to start the marketplace too soon where you need both sides. I think that's that's a disaster. But if somebody could tell me, "Hey, you don't have to post the care.com ad." And somebody else is going to vet all of these freaking candidates and I only have to pay a thousand bucks for that. We hire we hire a South African recruiter um through somewhere.com to do the actual work of vetting and sourcing these folks. And I think we would place 29 nurses into families a month and have a 20 20k a month, you know, revenue business to start to build on. I'm I'm interested, my friend. But I love that take. I think like the lawn mower, when the lawn mower was invented, everybody said the lawn care companies were going to go out of business, but it just became a tool that made the lawn care companies more money and less labor. And they are the ones who took advantage of it, not the homeowner. Actually, everybody thought the homeowner with the lawn mower was going to just be willing to go mow their own lawn now. And people are paying for their lawn to be mowed at a higher rate than ever before. So, totally. Yeah. I think I think AI will definitely over time make the business owners more money. not necessarily the AI companies. Nick, I want to end it here. Um, I know that you've got a bunch of ideas. Um, more ideas I've seen online. Where could people find some of your sweaty startup ideas if they want to? The the most visited spot on my website is a page where I had it's called 200 plus business ideas. Now, it's like 400 plus business ideas long, but these are all sweaty startups. you're either cleaning something, moving something, repairing something, doing some work for somebody. Most of them can be bootstrapped. U but it's at sweatystartup.com. So that's the that's the most popular piece of content that I've ever written. Beautiful. And you mentioned you've got a book coming out. Yeah. April 29th, um the sweaty startup is launched. It's it's uh how to get rich doing boring things. And we go through um how to pick an idea, how to vet an idea, how to assess demand, but then also how to hire, how to delegate, how to sell, how to make decisions, all those other things that are super important when it comes to operating a company and growing it. Cool. Uh I'll check it out, my man. Nick, always a pleasure. Uh I I love chat even though I'm not a sweaty startup guy myself. to me uh you know and I think this is why our relationship works so well is uh we might not always agree but I respect your opinion. I it it it challenges some of you know the things I'm thinking about. So I I love talking with you and so I hope you'll come back on again. Right back at you, man. I think we see the world slightly differently because our skill sets are differently but generally generally speaking I think we think about opportunity the same way which makes it fun. Absolutely my man. All right. I'll catch you later.