Quick note:
I've hired 100+ employees outside the US and it has been an absolute game changer for my companies.
70-80% lower cost than US based employees and often times MORE efficient. This includes:
- Sales reps with perfect English from South Africa for $1,700 per month.
- Executive assistants from Latin America for $1,400 per month.
- Customer service reps from the Philippines for $1,100 per month.
Click here if you want to hire someone like this. I’ll give you $500 off.
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When I started Storage Squad, my pickup and delivery student storage business more than a decade ago, I had very little resources.
That meant that doing marketing for our business in the early days was very difficult.
We didn’t have any money and what little we did have we spent on a beat up cargo van. (see below)
Yeah, it was really bad but that's me. I found it on craigslist for $1500 so we could haul our first few customer's things to and from the farmer’s pole barn we rented in exchange for farm labor a few weeks later.
So how did we reach our customers?
We had a major advantage in that we knew exactly where our customers were. We knew where they lived. We knew where they hung out. We knew where they walked to class.
We thought about standing there and handing out flyers as they walked to class each morning but that would be too time consuming and we couldn’t possibly reach enough people.
So we decided to go buy a few $4 boxes of sidewalk chalk and put some simple ads all over campus. Like these below:
And we thought we might as well advertise for employees while we’re at it too so we made ads like this:
Instead of doing one big elaborate drawing in a high traffic area we took the high volume approach.
About 75 text ads all around campus like this could be done in around 3 hours.
My partner and I did these ourselves. I literally wore out several pairs of jeans the first season doing this because each time I knelt down to write one, my knee would rub the concrete and eventually my jeans would tear.
April and May is the rainy season so each time it would rain we would have to go out and do it again.
When we launched in Boston in 2013 we bought this beautiful truck on the south side of Chicago for $2,200.
Two days later I filled it with supplies and drove it to Boston and lived there on my girlfriend’s (now wife) couch for two months.
I covered that entire city with chalk ads.
Tufts. Harvard (they kicked me out in 2 seconds). Northeastern. Emerson. MIT. BU. Brandeis. I was everywhere with boxes of chalk on boxes of chalk. 4 weeks straight of chalking several hours per day.
It worked incredibly well. This is what the sidewalks looked liked at 8am as students walked to class. They would all walk directly past our ads.
We got 1000 customers the first year in Boston and overflowed our warehouse and had to get more space at the last second. We filled that one up too. This is what it looked like:
My wife even had to help!
The next year we went to a few more locations and chalked the heck out of them too. Then a few more.
People laugh when I include chalk in my little startup inspiration stories.
But honestly, I credit that tactic to really allowing us to grow and build up a fairly large customer base quickly for basically free.
$200 of chalk made us $500,000 in revenue.
The point is:
When you are starting with nothing, you have to get scrappy.
Low budget, high volume guerrilla marketing tactics can work.
This could be sidewalk chalk, bandit yard signs, taping basic ads to telephone poles, handing out business cards on the street, etc.
Whatever it takes to get the ball rolling as cheaply as possible so you can get some customers and then get word of mouth marketing working for you after that.
I hope this inspires you to get out and do some scrappy, low budget guerrilla marketing that your competitors aren’t doing.
It's the best way to get started, especially if you have very little resources and next to no cash.
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A few posts from this week:
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P.S. I wrote my first book. It's coming out next week on 4/29/25.
I recorded the audiobook myself.
You can order it here.
Onward and upward,
Nick Huber
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