266 - "My college hustle now makes $300M/yr" | Nick Friedman

So give me the early days story.

You're working with, I guess, a co-founder, a buddy, a friend, and you sit down one day and decide, "We're gonna start a small business together"?

Yeah.

So, you know, really, we were home for summer vacation.

We were just kinda scratching our heads what to do to keep ourselves busy, maybe make some money.

And, and you know, my buddy from high school, Omar, his mom had this beat up cargo van, like I said.

And, and she, you know, I think, was hoping to keep us out of trouble, let us borrow the van to move people's furniture, kinda gave us that catchy moniker, College Hunks Hauling Junk.

And very quickly, I realized, you know, this is, is not something we learned in school.

You know, there was never anything like that was preparing us to do this.

And we went back to school our senior year of college.

Uh, Omar wrote a business plan.

It won an entrepreneurship competition at University of Miami, and so that gave us a little more confidence in the idea.

And, you know, most college kids would quit doing that after college and, and go do something in the, quote-unquote, "real world." And we did try our, our hand in a regular job briefly, and then said, "You know what? Let's go back to this business that we had done last summer and try to make it a year-round venture." And of course, a lot of skepticism from our friends and family.

They thought it was okay when we were doing it in college, but now we had just graduated, we were gonna do this full time.

And, uh, I remember emailing Omar from my, you know, cubicle right after college and saying, "Hey, what's our timeline for starting College Hunks on a full scale?" And he emailed me back all capital letters.

You know, "My timeline's right now! Let's do this." And so, uh, you know, we j- just kinda jumped into it sight unseen really.

We had had the experience the summer before.

We'd had the business plan, uh, but we decided we were gonna make it a year-round venture.