People always ask me,
"Could you ever imagine that Museum Hack
would be what it is today?"
Hell no!
With millennial museum attendance declining,
you'd have to be a little crazy to start a business
in the museum industry.
Art museums are typically super boring.
We're taught be quiet in a museum.
It's this place of solemn and reflection.
And I said, "Why is it like that?"
Why can't we make this more fun and more accessible?
That's why I started Museum Hack.
To try to bring my friends and other young people
into museum spaces.
Museum Hack is a company that gives
unconventional tours inside some of the world's
most prominent museums.
When their greatest competitor was a free museum tour...
that the museums are already giving
by art history geniuses...
the unlikely odds that Museum Hack
could succeed, can teach an important lesson
to aspiring entrepreneurs.
If you can bring an outsider perspective to an industry,
people actually love that.
I think that truly helped create
what turned into a multi-million dollar business.
You just started your dream business.
How much profit would you need to pay your basic
living expenses like rent and ramen?
This is a show on the economics of entrepreneurship
and founders turning their dreams into reality.
This is Ramen Profitable.
Good morning.
I'm walking to the museum.
Let's see if I can move around here.
Meet Nick Gray.
It's 2013 and he's about to quit his full-time job
to build Museum Hack.
He has no investors, no profits.
Just some savings and a newfound passion for museums.
Museum Hack got started, well, this woman,
she took me on a romantic date
to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
And basically what was special was she talked
to me about the art at my level.
And that night really unlocked for me
this sense of curiosity about art and history
and museums that I never knew that I had.
Hello and welcome to my tour
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Some of my friends are here behind me.
I started to give tours of my own
for my friends for fun, just for free.
My tours were basically three cool things I found
and five things I wanted to steal.
And I did that for about a year or two.
I just became obsessed
with bringing new people to this museum.
Nick was getting really good
at giving these unconventional tours
and people were beginning to notice.
Nick, thanks so much for being with us.
We appreciate it.
One day a really popular blog wrote about us.
And literally overnight, over 1300 people emailed me
wanting to join one of my tours.
It was absolutely crazy, but I also knew
at that moment that this was bigger than me.
That's kind of when everything changed.
For so long I had done this
simply out of love and passion.
It truly was a passion project.
I was overwhelmed, I was anxious.
I literally lost sleep for several nights in a row
thinking about charging tours,
that I would be held responsible.
Would people think it was worth it?
I really struggled with the idea
of turning this into a business.
Eventually Nick got the courage
to charge money for the first time.
Well sort of.
The first time that I gave a paid tour,
I had so much fun doing the tour
that at the end of the tour,
I gave everybody their money back.
And people were so weirded out by it,
like they thought it was some scam.
That was the first time that I ever charged for the tour
but not the first time I took money, I guess.
The ice was broken, and in 2013,
Nick jumped into Museum Hack full-time.
Leaving my job to start this, it was scary.
We were literally operating hand to mouth every weekend.
We're like counting our tips to see what we can tip out.
The early struggles gave Nick motivation
to tap into new revenue sources
where they could charge more money per ticket,
like private tours.
Oh my God, we did so many wedding proposal tours
during the early days.
You know, I could lead tours for 10 or 20 people
every weekend, no problem.
But how does that scale up to 20,000 people a year?
And that's our tour guides.
These are the standup comedians, Broadway actors,
and science teachers who really are
the heart and soul of our company.
Because museums are busiest on the weekends,
Nick wasn't able to offer his tour guides
full-time employment. The regular tours just
weren't generating enough revenue to keep them staffed.
Take a $59 museum tour.
Those regular museum tours, they basically paid our costs.
They weren't going to grow us to that next phase
to hire full-time museum tour guides.
Because of that we knew we needed to grow
to something bigger and that for us
was business to business sales.
This meant doing corporate tours
during the weekday.
We could wrap in an element of leadership
that would help in the business environment.
And now our $59 museum tour is now $159.
And now instead of selling 10 tickets,
we can sell 50 tickets.
By 2018 Museum Hack's annual revenue
grew to $2.8 million.
They had a successful business model
and then Nick saw a unique opportunity
to grow the company even further.
When a business goes through life cycles,
it needs different things from different people.
And it's not always a guarantee that you
as the founder are going to have
or can develop the skills needed
for what the business needs.
You know, I'm good at starting things
but my skills were not in large management.
And so Nick appointed Tasia Duske to be CEO.
She had those skills to take the company
to the next level.
Nick, you will not believe it. We just hit 109 employees.
We have grown so much over the last couple years!
That's insane!
I never thought that I would be able to build
a multi-million dollar business out of a hobby.
I loved being a tour guide,
and then I started to love running and growing a business.
To do that and to help more people reach museums
was probably a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Entrepreneurs are inherently dissatisfied
with the way that the world works.
We're creating new things because
we want to see those things in the world.
Nothing is too crazy these days.
And in fact, the crazier, the better sometimes.
If I can create a multi-million dollar business out
of renegade museum tours, you can probably
create a company based on one of your wildest ideas.
Were you ever kicked out of a museum?
In all my years of giving tours,
I will respectfully say, "No comment," to that.
Oh my gosh. We got to go, bye.