How Nick Huber Built A $100M Self Storage Empire (#420)

He describes going from about 15 properties and $20M of storage to 61 properties and 1.8M square feet, acquired for $103M, funded partly by raising $41M from investors. He emphasizes real estate’s lack of clear mark-to-market pricing and says six months earlier they might have sold the portfolio for around $190M.

He says 90–96% of the capital raised for Bolt Storage came from Twitter, driven by people DM’ing to join the investor list after he tweeted about deals and properties. He reports $40M raised from 320 people and a 2,000-person distribution list.

Huber recounts first using Support Shepherd to hire $5/hour Philippines-based team members, then expanding to 15 hires and later putting finance roles in Colombia. He says his promotional tweets created large impression spikes and helped accelerate the company’s growth, leading to him negotiating a 15% ownership stake instead of an affiliate cut.

He explains RE Cost Seg’s service: engineers split a property into components with different depreciation lives to increase first-year depreciation, producing documentation for IRS filing. He says the company uses FaceTime-based property walkthroughs to avoid travel costs and be cheaper than alternatives, and reports being nine months old with $250,000 revenue last month and 23 employees.

Huber says he’s buying and rebranding a Kansas City insurance brokerage as Titan Risk, motivated by how slow and outdated brokerage workflows are (printing, slow responses, inability to pay online). He frames the key asset as the acquired carrier contracts and expects to staff with a mix of overseas hires (via Shepherd) and Americans.