Just Go Grind
Posts
How Nick Huber Built a $100M Empire with "Unsexy" Businesses

How Nick Huber Built a $100M Empire with "Unsexy" Businesses

A conversation with the entrepreneur, investor and author of "The Sweaty Startup"

Erika Braza & Justin Gordon
May 01, 2025

Hey, Justin here, and welcome to Just Go Grind, a newsletter sharing the lessons, tactics, and stories of world-class founders! Premium subscribers get full access to this newsletter, exclusive events, event discounts, and more.

Did you listen to last week's Just Go Grind Podcast episode?

Nick Huber had an early start in entrepreneurship as only the author of The Sweaty Startup could have.

Back in his hometown, Tell City, Indiana, Nick had his first ever job as lawn mower and didn’t ever stop until founding his first company, Storage Squad, in college.

After growing that business into 12 different states and $2M in annual revenue, it was sold in 2021. From then on, he has skyrocketed his presence online and has built The Sweaty Startup’s brand, including a thriving newsletter and podcast and over 300k followers on Twitter.

Nick’s also the owner of Somewhere, Bolt Storage, and RE Cost Seg and considers himself an opportunist; the so called ‘boring’ and ‘old-fashioned’ businesses are what fuel him, both spiritually and financially speaking, considering they’re jointly making more than $30M in revenue.

Listen to Nick’s interview on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Thank you to our sponsor:

Rho - A business banking platform, purpose-built for startups.

Let’s dive in.

Rho is a business banking platform, purpose-built for startups and they work with everyone from two-person YC startups with world-changing ideas to publicly-traded enterprises.

With Rho, founders get:

A single pane of glass they can use to run and scale their business from Day 1: Bank account, corporate cards to start running – and expense management, bill pay automation, and accounting to help you move fast as you scale.
The big thing with Rho: Every customer has a "person" at Rho. 24/7 customer support - phone, text, email - they will be there at every critical milestone in your startup's journey.

To learn why startups choose Rho, visit www.rho.co today.

When it comes to growing a business, Nick embraces being scrappy and frugal. Along with giving out flyers under students’ doors, the entire marketing plan for Storage Squad was one simple sentence: “Need storage? StorageSquad.com, $29.99 per box all summer”. Nick himself wrote this same 8 words in chalk in over 5000 Boston sidewalks. Chalk and flyers did the trick—they grew to over $2M annual revenue.
“Nobody’s ever going to give you permission. You have to give yourself permission”. When raising capital, Nick’s been rejected more times than he can count. But if it was all about the experience, the resumés and the ‘pedigree’, nobody would ever do anything. He willed himself to still go forward with expanding Storage Squad into a self storage business and prove himself to investors instead of patiently waiting for external approval.
Social media had an unthinkable impact on Bolt Storage. With no barriers, he started sharing on @sweatystartup on Twitter what entrepreneur life looked like—the good, the bad and the ugly. Transparency at its core. By early 2021 they had gathered 750 investors, raised $20M and gone from 8 to 25 employees. All this only one year after Nick’s Twitter account first blew up.
Your startup’s have it rough to compete with all the already established companies in the market; that’s just what it is. But to Nick, your startup does have two very important advantages you can’t squander: you can move faster, for one. Decisions can be made from one day to the next if you say so. Secondly, you can -and should- hire international talent to grow your company at a lower cost.
Though Nick’s realized that building businesses is truly his driving force, The Sweaty Startup as the media aspect of his brand has been crucial in his entrepreneurial journey. First, because a strong social media presence makes for a great platform to actually grow the business. But also because by becoming a good communicator, Nick has become a better founder and leader as a result.
Nick encourages all founders to stop seeing their first company as their ultimate cash cow. Your first company should be all about acquiring skills, connections and mainly capital. You’ve got the rest of your life to aim higher and take bigger risks.