Unconventional Business Ventures

Nick shares several stories about his unconventional business ventures and how they led to success.

"I tried to move to India to start a software company and hire people because I thought I could bootstrap it farther there. It was a terrible success. I hired 2 people - one of them was in Poland and one was in Boston. I outsourced myself to the wrong place, but I did develop a really nice relationship with the people in the country.

After that, my dad started a business in the basement of our house. I came home from India not sure what to do next. My dad had been working on this business that did in-flight entertainment equipment for small jets. Even in those early days, search engine optimization played a huge role. Searching for 'FAA certified in-flight monitors' was such a niche thing, yet all we needed was one result. We really got a million-dollar deal from the SEO because I bought every domain name. I was creating fake blogs, I had everything pointing back to our company. We dominated not just the first three results, but the first page of results.

Later, I started my Museum Hack business. I was a tour guide - I built a multimillion-dollar business out of being a tour guide. Every Friday and Saturday night, I was literally leading people at the museum, and I did that for 2 years before I even hired my first person. Each ticket was like $80, I would tour for 10 to 20 people a night. We would do different nontraditional things in a museum space to really do museum tours for people who didn't like museums. We would lay down on the floor to look at the ceiling, we would sit down to talk about the art, we would talk about how much the paintings cost, which is a very taboo thing in the art world."