In this week’s Niche Pursuits podcast, Nick Gray and I discuss turning personal passions into sellable businesses, the trust-building power of books, and the modern role of personal websites in SEO and reputation. This unusual interview challenges standard marketing ideas and explores unconventional paths to authority.
The first part followed a familiar path: Nick shared how he built Museum Hack from casual museum trips for friends into a company that sold millions. The second half turned into a back-and-forth conversation about personal websites, authority, entity clarity, and what business owners may be missing if they focus only on their company site.
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How Museum Hack Became a Hobby
Nick Gray didn’t plan to become a museum entrepreneur. He moved to New York City, began visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and showing friends around for fun.
The Met gave them plenty of material to work with:
- 2.7 million square feet space
- Approximately 50 acres inside Central Park
- Enough scale to make casual visitors feel overwhelmed
- A reputation that can scare off those who do not see themselves as “museum people”
Nick was not trained in art history. He has never been a tour guide. That became part of the profit. Instead of designing tours for art lovers, he created tours for people who thought museums were boring. They focused on stories, gossip, money, romance, rivalries and the pesky details that traditional tours often leave out.
How charging changed the product
At first Nick gave tours to friends. Then, friends referred other friends. A blog wrote about his tours, calling them one of the best things to do in New York City, and over 1,000 people wanted to join.
That demand forced a tough decision: charge the money or keep treating it like a hobby. Nick started small, about $19 or $29 per person. On the first paid tour, he gave everyone their money back because they enjoyed the experience so much.
Charging still proved to be one of the best business decisions he ever made. Once people paid, they treated the experience with more respect. Some pricing details revealed:
- Museum hack tours were later sold for $79 to $99 per person.
- The company targeted people willing to pay for experiences such as concerts, Broadway shows, sports and other city activities.
- A standard museum tour might include 5 or 6 pieces per hour.
- The museum hack tours included approximately 15 pieces per hour.
- The pace, humor and storytelling made the product stand out from the start.
That situation mattered. Nick wasn’t selling access to the museum. He was selling a more entertaining way to experience it.
The business that transcended Nick
The hardest part of any personality-driven business is getting the founder out of the delivery role. Nick faced that problem early.
A friend told him that the business would never get big because Nick was the product. Instead of accepting this, Nick hired people who could carry the energy of the experience. His recruitment strategy was unusual:
- stand-up comedian
- broadway actor
- Freelancers are used to flexible work
- People would like to have a drink after the tour
That decision helped Museum Hack grow beyond a guide and a city. The first expansion was Washington, DC, partly because it was close enough to New York to manage.
The cities that worked best had two characteristics: large visitor demand and a deep freelance labor pool. New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco all had people with side gigs, performing backgrounds, and flexible schedules.
How Muse Hack worked with Muse
Museum Hack started as a renegade tour company, which meant museums didn’t approve. Which created tension. Museums sometimes tried to shut down the company. Nick and his team had to work around regulations, deal with uncertainty and find ways to keep the tours running.
Eventually, the relationship became more collaborative. If Museum Hack sold a $79 tour, it would cover the entire museum admission price for each guest, which is typically about $25. This made the value clear:
- Museums received ticket revenue
- Tourists came who might not have come otherwise
- Museum hack takes over the guest experience
- The tour company took control of its distinctive style
This was not a friction-free model. Yet the arrangement showed how a company can move from outsider to revenue partner given incentives.
nick’s final exit
Nick never expected to sell the museum hack. It was labor-heavy, unusual, and not the kind of clean-cut software business that many buyers pursue.
The company grew to multiple cities and reached multi-crore revenues. Nick said that he worked hard to make it a $5 million to $10 million company, yet he could not surpass $3 million in annual sales.
By then, he had freed himself from daily chores. Their leadership team was running the company and they eventually approached them with an offer to buy it.
The deal used full seller financing, which is not common. In Nick’s case, the buyers put up zero dollars and paid him out of company profits over time. That structure worked because of trust:
- Buyers were already running the business
- they knew numbers
- He had a deep understanding of the company
- Nick believed they were committed to continuing to grow the
He sold the business in 2019. Then COVID came, museums closed, and company revenue dropped to zero.
New owners turned to remote team-building experiences. Nick described that painful restart as a blessing because it pushed the business toward better margins and a more profitable model.
A book created a different kind of wealth
After selling Museum Hack in 2019, Nick launches 2-Hour Cocktail Party in 2022. He wanted to write a book for branding reasons, yet he wanted it to be more of a thought-leadership project.
He wanted a strategic, workbook-style guide for hosting small gatherings. Organizing events for 15 to 25 people was his specialty, and the book gave him a way to teach that formula on a larger scale.
The financial side was less attractive. Nick spent approximately $60,000 on top-tier design, layout, and publishing support. Some book details revealed:
- It took almost five years to write and release
- it was self-published
- Nick wrote it in collaboration with a team of writers
- Design and layout were major investments
- Direct financial ROI was not the main reward
The book built trust in a way reminiscent of podcasting. When someone spends hours with your thoughts, they form a deeper connection than a short post or social update.
llm changed book question
Nick also discussed whether commercial non-fiction books still have the same value in the age of the LLM. This question matters to entrepreneurs who are thinking about writing.
A book can still establish authority, build relationships, and give people a structured way to spend time with your ideas. The tough question is whether a book is the best format today. Other formats may compete for attention:
- blog series
- online courses
- short video
- podcast
- email newsletters
- AI-assisted learning path
Nick said he was glad he wrote his book. If he were comparing it to the new formats, he was less certain that he would still choose the same path today.
Personal Websites Became the Next Business
Nick’s latest project is PersonalWebsites.org, a service that creates and manages personal websites. Their basic offer is around $29 per month.
This passion comes from his own experience. Nick has had a personal website for 25 to 26 years, and he credits it with helping him meet people, build relationships, and shape the way he appears online.
The logic is simple: people Google names. They also ask AI tools about people, companies, founders, service providers and potential partners. A personal website gives someone the space to tell that story directly. Use cases include:
- Business owners who want a profile beyond the company site
- Professionals who want to put their name online
- Parents who want basic public presence
- Founders who may sell the company someday
- Buyers are reaching out to business owners
- Speaker, Author, Consultant and Operator
Nick stressed that this isn’t about eliminating negative search results. This is active reputation work, focused on giving people a reliable source about themselves.
How did Jared’s website become part of the interview?
The interview took an unexpected turn when Nick slammed JaredBauman.com and delivered a live critique of sorts. This shifted the conversation from a standard interview closer to the old Niche Pursuits news episode.
Nick liked that Jared’s site included powerful photos, a speaker highlight reel, ads, testimonials, and authority signals. He also suggested breaking the site into more pages. His main suggestion was to create more “surface area” around the person:
- A separate page about this
- a contact page
- a photo page
- Pages dedicated to speaking or media
- More indexable pages related to name
The point was not to convert a personal site into another company site. Its purpose was to provide search engines and AI systems with more structured signals about the person, their work, and their relationships with other entities.
Nick’s take on how personal websites support SEO and GEO
The conversation turned to SEO, GEO, AEO, and the role of individual websites in helping machines differentiate between people and brands. In this context, Jared Bauman, as an individual, is one entity, while 201 Creative, as a business, is another entity.
This separation makes sense when founders and companies are closely related to each other. Many local businesses blur the line between owner and company, making it hard for Google and AI systems to tell who is who. A personal site can help clarify:
- career history of the person
- the individual’s current company
- previous ventures
- Podcast Appearance
- speaking experience
- Union, education and public work
- Relationship between individual and business
Nick shared that his team migrated about 80 individual websites from WordPress to a stable setup using Payload CMS and Astro. Their PageSpeed Insights score increased from around 87-88 to around 99.
That technical improvement matters because personal websites are often simple. They can be quick, stable, clean, and easy for search engines to process.
Nick’s new business is growing
Nick tells PersonalWebsites.org about being in business for about a year. He compared it to Museum Hack in its early stages, when they experimented with it for years before considering it as a big company.
At the time of the interview, he had approximately 80 clients and was earning approximately $3,000 to $4,000 per month. The business is still finding its sharp market focus. Potential customer groups include:
- real estate professional
- lawyers
- doctors
- trade buyer
- business salesman
- local business owner
- professionals with public reputation
Nick wants the service to remain personal while also finding ways to make it more scalable. That tension mirrors the same issue he faced with Museum Hack: How do you evolve something without losing the quality that made it work?
final thoughts
The episode started with a highly unusual business story, turned into the value of books, and then turned into a live discussion about personal websites, authority, GEO, and how people look online.
There is a clear thread to Nick Gray’s career through all three projects. He takes things that seem neglected, like museum tours, small gatherings, and personal websites, then makes them more useful, more fun, and easier to work on.
The biggest learning is that personal reputation is becoming a more visible business asset. Whether someone is selling a company, building authority, winning over local customers, or trying to make sure AI tools accurately describe them, owning a clear personal website can be more important than many people think.
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