When Joe Nigro was but a freshman in high school in Winchester, Mass., he started a car detailing company.
“Instead of getting a regular job at a pizza shop or something freshman year of high school, my family said we’re going to give you a couple hundred dollars so you can start your own business,” explained Nigro.
The 13-year-old entrepreneur put the money toward buying “the cheapest car wash supplies” he could get it. With a growing list of returning customers and referrals, he was soon reeling in cash and clients to the point where he had to bring a few friends on board.
Now, years later, with much more startup experience on his resume, Nigro is returning to what he knows best with his startup unsully: delivering premium car service and building meaningful relationships.
“I’m building my own business in this unsexy industry that no one would ever assume to build it in,” admitted Nigro with a small chuckle. “unsully...is like what I was doing in high school, but now we’re going right to you.”
Nigro first gained entry to Boston’s entrepreneurial community in 2010 when he began working at former Mayor Thomas Menino’s now-shuttered economic development initiative Boston World Partnerships, at which he met local serial entrepreneur and mentor Dave McLaughlin.
After brief stint in Los Angeles, Nigro heard news that McLaughlin had sold his company Fig Card to eBay.
“This was before tweets and texts were a big thing, so I called [McLaughlin] to congratulate him,” said Nigro, adding that McLaughlin told him that he had applied to the then-nascent Seaport-based MassChallenge to build out a new video messaging technology, which soon became Vsnap.
Upon hearing that McLaughlin new project, Nigro returned to Boston and started to offer his time as a volunteer at local accelerator MassChallenge, which was then in its nascent stages.
“I got hooked on MassChallenge’s feel and vibe,” shared Nigro, who also began to pitch in with Vsnap’s business development under McLaughlin’s vise.
“Dave [McLaughlin] has been someone who really took me under his wing, teaching me everything from funding to operations to selling,” said the entrepreneur. “The mentorship of Dave and others led me to the point where I had to jump and do my own thing.”
And jump Nigro did. After two years of raking in new business accounts for Vsnap, he decided to leave the company in July to try his hand at launching his own startup unsully.
unsully seeks to provide people with top-of-the-line, interior and exterior car detailing. Using an online platform, users simply enter their vehicle information, select their desired service and declare their location and preferred time, and a member of unsully’s network of high-quality car detailers will do the rest.
unsully uses eco-friendly products and practices, from the hand-washing to the waxing. “We’re basically making your car look like it came right off the lot,” said Nigro.
A premium detail from unsully runs around $100 per vehicle, which clocks in at least $200 less than what you would expect to pay at a regular garage or dealership.
Though the company has only two engineers in addition to Nigro at the moment, the platform taps into networks of car detailers across Massachusetts and Florida, unsully’s first two launch sites. Nigro claims that the detailers unsully selects are “the best of the best,” which, given his history in the field, is hard to dispute.
So far, 30 percent of the customers have been repeats, while 50 percent of new customers are coming from referrals. Over the past four months, the company has washed more than 100 cars in Massachusetts and Florida.
Nigro recently presented the startup in November at the TechCrunch Boston Pitch Off. Using the Seaport's District Hall as the startups base, he is also currently making the rounds between Boston, Los Angeles and New York in hopes of raising some seed funding to keep up the company’s momentum in 2014.
Though he has assumed the role of founder and CEO, Nigro continues to do details himself to supplement his startup money. Said Nigro, "I find it kind of therapeutic...All my values and everything I learned building my first company has really come back into the fold with unsully."
