SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 407: 10,000+ $50 Museum Tour Tickets Sold with Nick Gray of Museum Hack
04 Sep 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: How did Nick Gray get into the museum business?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 3: What is the revenue model for Museum Hack?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Zach Faron. He's a 22-year-old Apple employee, and he's listening to the show and loving it.
Chapter 4: How did Nick initially attract customers to Museum Hack?
For your chance to win $100 every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now, and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it to enter. Folks, many of you heard I made a big league acquisition of a business. NathanLacka.com forward slash send later is the name of the business.
Chapter 5: What challenges did Nick face in the early years of his business?
And I didn't want to give up equity to a developer because I'm a business guy. So what I did is I used a website to find a guy named He Sheming. I paid He over $12,000 to help me build send later. And the site that I am using now is called Toptal at NathanLacka.com forward slash T-O-P-T-A-L. I will build SendLater into a big business, and I will take it public by the time I turn 30.
I'll tell you more later on in the episode. Top Tribe, this is episode 407. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll hear from Cole Hatter. He has $100 million in funds, $30,000 per month in real estate cash flow, and conference sales through the roof. Top Tribe, good morning. Grab onto that coffee this morning. We're gonna have some fun with Nick Gray.
He is the CEO of MuseumHack, a million dollar per year business with 40 plus employees that was created to eliminate museum apathy by giving unconventional tours at the best museums. He also does corporate and nonprofit team training, teaching how to amplify the customer experience via storytelling and audience development.
Chapter 6: How does Museum Hack ensure customer satisfaction?
Nick, are you ready to take us to the top? Let's rock this. Let's do it, man. We're going to have some fun. I know it. I know it. I know it. So first things first, museums are usually boring as heck. What on earth drove you into that space?
Chapter 7: What strategies does Nick use for marketing and growth?
Oh, hell yes. I think museums are super boring. And that's why I started this company was to do renegade museum tours. We're like the Cirque de Soleil of a museum tour. So you make a boring museum like shine with polish and it's a lot of fun, right?
Chapter 8: How does Nick manage his team and operational costs?
That's exactly right. Okay. So tell us the revenue model. How do you make money doing this? All right. We charge for our tours. They're expensive. They're about $59 each. and we sell a live museum tour. This isn't like an app. No, you're going on a private tour with a guide, usually about seven people per tour, and we make money from selling those tickets.
Okay, so the tickets are 59 bucks a pop. What year did you launch in? Launched in 2013. They start at $59. They go all the way up to $200 sometimes. Okay, and since 2013, how many total tickets have you sold? Last year, we did over 10,000 tours. I don't know the total since 2013. Okay, so well over 10,000 tours. And in 2015, what was total revenue? Total revenue, $1.3 million. Unbelievable.
So, $1.3 million and you said you have tickets that range in price. What was the average ticket price in 2015? Do you know? I guess the average is about $75. Okay, $75. Very cool. So, how do you... I mean, I imagine you have costs on this. You have to actually hire a human to put at every museum and give the tour. I mean, how do you manage that? Yeah. We actually pay our tour guides really well.
They each make $32 an hour. A tour lasts about two hours, but we pay them for... 2.75 hours of work. So right there, our labor cost for each tour starts at about $88 per person. Okay. And I'm sure the museum is getting a cut here. The museum does get a cut. Say we sell a $59 museum tour ticket at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, $25 of that goes to the museum. $25. Okay.
So what are, on average, what is your kind of net margin per ticket? Like 30-ish percent? It depends. We really excel and where we make money is on those high dollar tours. We're talking private tours, bachelorette tours, VIP nighttime tours. Our $59 tour, we do basically a break even to one, provide shifts for the tour guides and two, just to get the word out there about what we do.
And tell me how you get new customers. Are you spending money on paid ads? How do you do it? We started out all by word of mouth. So I spent the first year building the business. I did tours for free. 2011, 2012, the beginning of 2013, did it purely for fun. for my friends for free because I just wanted to do something fun. You say, no beers tonight. Instead, meet me at the Smithsonian.
I'm going to give you a tour of your lifetime. Dude, that's exactly right. Like I moved to a big city to go to great spaces. I think, I mean, I could go to a dive bar, nothing against dive bars, but, or I could go to this awesome museum. I said, I want to go to the museum. What city are you in? I live in New York city. Oh, very cool. Yeah. Yeah. Plenty of museums there. Okay.
So, so you start doing it, you rock and roll. It's word of mouth first. You remember what your first year revenue was in 2011? Yeah. 2013 is when we started to charge for the tours. And I think, yeah, 2013, our first year revenue is about $60,000. Yeah, I always love that because it's always embarrassing, right? So what is the, what about repurchase rate?
Do people tend to buy multiple tickets over time or is it kind of a one and done thing? Good question. The goal of Museum Hack is to really attract new people to come back to the audience. I would say the majority of our customers are visiting the museum for the first time, and we're so young as a business, short answer, no.
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