From Hands-On to High-Tech, Rig Hut’s Rise

.🚛💡 Disrupting Truck Parking with Tech & Tenacity: How a Bootstrapped Startup Scaled by Redefining 🚏🚚 Parking Operations 🚀

March 7th, 2025

Welcome to Rig Hut - Striving to be the pinnacle of industrial commercial parking solutions.

Founded in 2021, Rig Hut evolved from managing truck parking through third parties to developing a comprehensive software solution that simplifies payments, inventory, invoicing, and communication for operators. The founders actively scouted locations using satellite imagery and cold outreach, expanding from local operations to 100+ locations nationwide, with a focus on high-demand markets. Career milestones include building a scalable business with a dedicated team, while early challenges in commercial real estate instilled resilience, patience, and an appreciation for cash flow management.

Lessons from the Journey:
  • From Hustle to Innovation: Rig Hut evolved from hands-on truck parking management to a scalable software platform, streamlining operations for multi-facility operators.

  • Rapid Growth & Market Position: The founders personally identified locations using satellite imagery and cold outreach. Rig Hut is one of just two dedicated truck parking software providers, competing primarily against repurposed self-storage and apartment management solutions.

  • Lessons & Insights: The journey taught resilience, patience, and cash flow management, with business influences including Grant Cardone for sales strategy and Alex Hormozi for a disciplined work ethic.

đźš› How Rig Hut is Transforming Truck Parking! đźš› Join Kris Bennett and Jake Guso, co-founder of Rig Hut, as they discuss truck parking challenges, how Rig Hut is changing the game, and key lessons in resilience & innovation.

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Transcript

Hey everybody Kris here with the storage investor show today I have Jake Guso the co-founder of Rig Hut, a technology company offering property management software that's purpose-built for semi-truck parking applications. He spent most of his career in the commercial real estate business where he's broken over 100 million real estate transactions in South Florida. He also owned and operated income-producing properties in the Midwest representing 125,000 ft of commercial space he has focused on building Rig Hut into the premier provides of truck parking software helping landlords automate and scale their truck parking operations throughout the country, Jake welcome to the show.

Thank you, Kris, thanks for having me.

Awesome man, appreciate you being here let's talk real quick about Rig Hut and a little bit about your background we'll come back to the commercial space I'm interested in hearing more about that let's jump into Rig Hut right away can you give us an overview of what Rig Hut is and your services?

Yeah, so think of Rig Hut as purpose property management software for semi-truck parking facilities right so what the application does it automate inventory management for semi-truck parking operators, it's got a built-in invoicing billing and payment system, it's got built-in—what we call driver relationship management tools which is internal communications within the facility between the landlord and operator, and the driver's status communications updates to the facility, discounts things like that, and we basically try to make the lives of operators a lot easier you'll find if you talk to a couple of different operators in the semi-truck parking space there's not a lot of software available that's tailored for parking applications and the short-term nature of semi-parking specifically so basically our goal is to help operators, operate their businesses in a more efficient manner and scale to multiple facilities if possible to help ease the strain on truck parking that exists today.

Okay, perfect so you guys are basically—you're a software- and I don't say it that in a negative way—but you are a software provider to the owners of the spaces the parking spaces basically, so you're like you're popular software like Yardi Breeze or Store Edge in the storage space that sort of thing is that the idea.

Exactly a lot of our customers that use software actually use those two pieces of software that they repurpose for truck parking Yardi Breeze and some of those storable products but you're 100% correct.

Okay, perfect—I'm curious when did you guys start the company?

You want the long answer or the short answer here.

Give me the long answer, it's always interesting to hear the story, so yeah when did you guys start?

Rig Hut has gone through a few different iterations, but I'll give you the story of how we got here—we were originally looking at truck parking and outdoor storage from the lens of a real estate operator, which is the short version of that part of the story. The first thing we did was we built what was a third-party management company for truck parking facilities so we were literally going out knocking on doors in 2021, trying to convince semi-truck parking operators to basically let us manage the facilities on their behalf where we were boots on the ground showing drivers where to park sending docu-sign license agreements invoices through QuickBooks and tracking inventory on Excel, and we built that up, down here in Miami and Broward counties, which is just north of that. My co-founder Jose has a background in Tech, he's built and sold a couple of software companies and we just saw this gap where we could build a solution for the problems that we were having in the management business if that makes sense, so that was we started managing those yards in 2021. Started building the technology stack in early 2022, the first version of the functionality that we built was a simple payment solution so we were just facilitating the transaction between driver and landlord, which got us off the ground, and then slowly we've been building the back end for parking operators to manage the facilities. So we layered in the inventory management, we layered in some invoicing, we layered in some communication tool and now that's become the core offering of Rig Hut.

Okay—so yeah, absolutely so—back to the 2021 situation, you guys were knocking, like you said, you were knocking on doors quote-unquote, to manage the locations for these guys. What made you want to—I guess— what kind of goes off in your mind saying "Hey, we should do this—we should call these guys and manage their Lots".

We want we wanted to learn the business specifically truck parking, we saw the writing on the wall, back then in terms of basically rates, we saw rates going straight up into the ray, from a fundamental perspective, especially down here in South Florida where very land constrained Market. To begin with, we got the Atlantic on the east side, we've got the Everglades on the west side, all the municipalities down here are fairly against most industrial uses, they're typically very against approving truck parking uses that aren't already in existence. We basically wanted to learn the business to buy, build, own, and operate our own yards the way that we thought we could learn the fastest way by convincing other guys to let us manage their facilities and basically feed us to the wolves and learn the hard way and we leveraged a lot of our past experience in terms of other real estate applications, but that was the original idea we just wanted to learn the business.

So how the heck did you convince somebody to let you do that? You had no real prior experience.

We got thrown out of more yards than I can count, but the first guy who gave us a shot was a Romanian gentleman out of Broward County his primary business is diesel distribution. I don't know exactly how that business works but essentially what he described to us is he's a broker right so he's buying a few out of the terminal and he's selling it to the retail providers, prior to that he actually had his own transportation company where he was also hauling the fuel he sold that business and he had three facilities, actually at the time he only had one that we could actually, use and he had this vacant land and we saw that he had parked a couple of units on it and it was a really nice looking facility and we literally just rolled into his gate, he followed a truck that was going in there, we tailgated him, knocked on the trailer door, he was there and after a couple of different meetings convincing him, and him beating us up on our management feed, he gave us an opportunity and he's still a customer to this day, we converted him to the software model, he was our first guy ever.

Wow! That's pretty amazing, that's how I was going to ask you guys. How you get your first really 10 customers, who made your first 100 bucks and that's really it, you are persistent and not giving up. I guess that comes from maybe the broker days back to your previous role—but I want to ask how many—so fast forward, how many locations do you guys have now, after a couple of years in the business today?

I just checked before we got on here we're up to 111.

Holy smokes, that's amazing!

Thank you.

So 111 and where are these located, across the country or Southeast?

Throughout the country our first sort of enterprise-grade client that gave us an opportunity on the software side was based in the Northeast he's out of Jersey so that gave us some density up there that we were able to leverage to gain more facilities up there but we're pretty much Nationwide, there are some gaps in the map—I'd say our densest presence is up there Northeast Jersey, Port Newark, South Florida, Atlanta. We're starting to get some facilities in the Southwest-West Coast, Phoenix, major port markets are like where we're getting the most activity. I don't know if there's necessarily Rhyme or Reason to that but that's where we are today.

That's interesting, so major port activity, wherever that is. I'm trying to think off the top of my head do you guys have anything I live in Charlotte do you have anything in Charlotte just yet or not yet?

I don't believe we have anything in Charlotte, I think we've got a couple on in Savannah that would be the closest to you.

Okay, sweet that makes a lot of sense, being right there, on the coast—yeah makes a ton of sense. Okay, how did you find—so obviously you're located there in Miami and you went to places locally. How in the heck did you scale them from—I'm assuming the the first few were more local, correct me if I'm wrong but then how did you end up scaling to the next 20 or whatever in different states and elsewhere? Did you guys fly in and knock on doors or was it word-of-mouth what's that look like?

Also very hard, the short answer is yes we literally flew all around the country if anyone would say "Hey, I want to meet with you" we would get on a plane and go meet them in their office or their trailer, their yard, their house, wherever it didn't matter back then. When we first launched the first version of the technology which was in 2022, it was almost impossible to find these facilities online. If you go on Google right now and go to a map and search "truck parking", and just fly around the country and hit redo search in this area you're going to find pins. Back in 2022, there were zero, I think there were like three or four operators that had an online presence so literally scanned satellite imagery manually, flying on Google Earth saying—"hey this is the truck parking yard drop a pin on it put the address figure out who the owner is, cold call him and whenever we got a positive response—okay, "can you meet us tomorrow", we're on a plane.

Wow so that is, I've done that before with storage facilities which are a lot easier to do you just type in self-storage and they pop up, and you try to sort for the mom-and-pop ones the small ones, not having that's a lot of work.  I don't want to say a whole lot, that's just a ton of work to do that and then to get potentially rejected after you do all that work because it's a numbers game and so maybe whatever the numbers look like I'm not sure but 1 in 10, 1 in 20, 1 in 50, that can be very disheartening. Now did you and Jose do that together at first? Did you hire some help later on? or what did that look like originally?

It was all us, I call my co-founder Jose, and I call him the hammer because I have yet to see a door that he cannot get through. He can get a hold of literally anyone in the world, I won't name-drop anybody specific but literally, anyone in the world that we've wanted to get in touch with, he gets us in front of them somehow. So originally it was us two, we would pretty much go everywhere together we even got in the car and drove all the way up to South Carolina ourselves, stopping at yards up the way and down the way as we came across them, and then we started outsourcing some of our marketing, we have a guy that we're very happy with, that kind of handles our outbound Marketing in a digital sense. Now we're leveraging some cold-calling solutions, we do a lot of cold-calling ourselves still, we have a sales guy based out of Charleston and then we have our engineering team.

That's amazing, so you guys have built it out bootstrapped, have you guys brought on any investors for this or is it all bootstrapped?

We did, so when we launched the first version of the technology in 2022 that was all bootstrapped, that was all us, got us off the ground, we ended up bumping into our current capital partners who have been amazing, the name of their company is Rizk Ventures, they're essentially a family office and it's an operating company, so they've got three different verticals one is real estate, the other one is technology, and the third would be health care, where they buy grow and operate different businesses themselves. They build out the infrastructure, they put up a lot of the money themselves, and they had this iOS fund named Blacktop whose founder there is Ricardo Cardoso, somehow we got in touch with him Ricardo flew down to Palm Beach and we did a tour we showed him some yards that we're using our software and we hit it off and Ricardo put us in touch with Rizk Ventures and about a year after that we had finally signed up a deal with them and they've been an amazing partner.

That's amazing I actually have heard of them because, I think they launched a fund it was mentioned in 2021 or 22 or something like that to do storage, if I'm not mistaken but they're based out of New York is that right?

They're based out of New York you're referring to SpareBox, Self Storage?

Yeah that's what it was yeah, cuz didn't they have a joint venture or something like I just remember it's RIS-z or RK-Z or something like that Ventures, I just remember going on their website when I heard about it so they have—

R-I-Z-K, that's it that was another kind of piece of the deal that made sense for a lot of us, right? They have a company named SpareBox Self Storage which buys owns and operates self-storage facilities and in secondary and tertiary markets, the kind of claim to fame there was they built a 100% unmanned model using technology that they built themselves so there's a lot of similarities if you're looking at self-storage and outdoor-storage, specifically truck parking so it's a natural fit given their experience in the self-storage space to work together on the truck parking side.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense uh and those guys came from Red Dot and they uh went out and did their own thing and they've been very successful ever since, I want to try and get them on the podcast. So we'll we can talk about that but I'm back with Rig Hut what you're a 100 locations. Are there any markets that you won't go to for any particular reason or is it just based on the operator and the user really? Because that doesn't really matter, right? as far as markets are concerned.

For us, the market is not really a concern, I would say the customers that find the most utility out of Rig Hut are either multi-facility operators or operators that have a single yard with more than 50 or 60 individual parking spaces less that you can get away with the invoicing on QuickBooks, taking Zelle payments and keeping track of it in Excel for the most part, but by way of example our two largest customers, each of them park over a thousand trucks on their facilities, there's no way those guys are going to manage that entire operation if they don't have a purpose-built piece of software and those are the guys that we have we're able to prove value really fast and so back to your original question, no. We're market agnostic, right? As long as there's a prospect or a customer that we believe, we can add value to we're going to find them.

Okay, that makes a ton of sense that's your software provided, I was going to ask you— like what kind of—is the cut-off for the ideal user or customer and you just mentioned it was only 50 or 60 spaces or less. Are you able to integrate this? I guess they probably—the answer is no, but I would assume that unless you have more than uh 50 parking spaces it wouldn't make sense to integrate this into your storage operations you could probably just use existing like purpose-built self-storage software is that right?

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If you have a self-storage facility, so we bumped into this a couple of times, most self-storage operators typically don't have enough leftover land to build a truck parking facility where you get economies of that type of scale, I may be wrong, but I don't think we have any live customers right now that are operating truck parking on a self-storage facility, I could be wrong on that and we can't integrate with other pieces of storage software right now, that's not to say we won't in the future but right now, no.

Do you guys do anything on the marketing front? Let's say a guy or gal has like whatever, 500 spaces do you guys try to integrate a bunch of different pieces of technology into an all-in-one solution is that kind of the direction you guys are going, do you guys do anything on the marketing side for owners to help them out or is that just not yet or maybe in the works?

It is in the work, so we do highlight facilities and we've got a pretty big user base, in terms of drivers, we have a newsletter, and we're on Twitter and all the socials. Highlighting different facilities that come online, where they're located, and the different amenities that they provide, the core functionality again is software for the landlords to operate the facility not necessarily the marketing, but they will get some traffic through our website as they find parking, as they search for a parking facility.

Okay, got it and you mentioned amenities that's one question ahead. What do people—I honestly don't know—this is a whole new world for me, but there is some overlap there with storage. I'm curious about what sort of amenities do truck drivers and yard owners provide, and what do they look for.

It depends on the use case, the landlord, and your market. So if you simplify truck parking into two different durations, there's overnight truck parking which is your guy going over the road from point A to point B and he needs somewhere to stop overnight, somewhere in between those two points, that guy is more like a hotel guest, because he's staying with you, he needs to be able to get out of his truck, preferably getting something to eat, he needs a bathroom if you've got shower is great, if you can refuel his truck with you even better, so those are more of the Loves, Flying Jay, Pilot travel centers of America-type operations and there are some local and Regional players trying to enter that overnight truck parking space as well where you have to have some amenities to retain that driver, attract them to the facility overnight. Aside from overnight parking, we've got monthly truck parking right which is very popular in land-constrained markets like Miami so that same over-the-road truck driver most likely if he's out of Miami he's going to pay for parking at home on a monthly basis because he needs to know that space is available when he gets back from his route, on those facilities you don't really need amenities, because the truck dropped or he's coming up on his vehicle dropping the personal vehicle, getting in the truck, running his route, comes back and drops a truck, gets in the personal vehicle, goes home. He's not staying, it's more of a storage facility, as opposed to a service facility, if that makes sense. So on those, depending on where you are there are some yards down here in Miami that are dirt with a fence, I don't recommend that but most of our yards are either an aggregate compacted surface or asphalt with a fence, lighting, and camera, no bathrooms, no mechanical work, no service facilities, no diesel, none of that.

Okay, that's interesting, so, I didn't realize it segments into two types of customers which makes a lot of sense, in the storage facility situation you probably wouldn't want an overnight person, obviously, you wouldn't be able to provide the amenities necessary, but yeah and you would have the space so that makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking through some of it as you're talking like I wonder if we could put some here, put some there—so maybe we'll be in touch after this one, uh you never know, but I'm curious to know what makes an ideal—when I go back to the owners of the yards, like what's the ideal customer for you guys? I knowsize is important, number of spaces of course, but what's an ideal customer look like?

Yeah, so size would probably be number one, right? either a portfolio operator or a sing single yard, that's more than 50 spites. Obviously multi-tenant, we haven't really discussed this yet but there are different buckets of outdoor storage and you've got traditional net lease iOS, where you've got JB Hunt, Ryder, or Amazon and they come in and sign a net lease, they occupy 100% of your property or a vast majority of your property, we cater to multi-tenant managed parking facilities where you need a system to operate unless you want to be sitting in a trailer at your gate checking everybody in and out but there's a better way to do that and that's generally it multi-tenant scaled parking facilities anywhere in the country.

Interesting, okay and to use the service —Rig Hut, is there like a monthly contract, excuse me, a monthly fee or is there an annual contract? What does that look like?

Yeah, it's a 100% fixed monthly flat fee, it starts at $2.49 a month and there are transaction fees on the landlord's side, we're not taking a percentage of your revenue, we want you guys to have a fixed cost, what it's going to cost you, drive your revenue, you mitigate your expenses and provide a lot more upside to those landlords.

Oh, that's great, that seems pretty reasonable. Back to —real quick— the partnership that you guys have, we mentioned briefly maybe expanding into some marketing or whatever, who knows how that looks because things can change, but what's the bigger picture, maybe two three four five years out? Like, what other things do you plan on adding and expanding Rig Hut into?

We've got a pretty wide road map in terms of features and functionality but the end goal is to be the dominant player in truck parking software, think of Storable for self-storage, I don't know if this is true, but online they've got supposedly 85% market share of the self-storage software market, they have that captive. I see truck parking and outdoor storage on a similar lens as self-storage looked a decade ago or 15 years ago, it's still very fragmented regional operators Mom-and-Pop style operators where you see this wave coming on, or if you're thinking about like a baseball game for example, I say we're in the first if not the second inning we want to be the dominant player in that space. We provide a lot of value it's a unique offering right there are not a lot of people chasing this style of business and we can really help a lot of these operators scale as the business evolves and institutionalizes.

That's great, are there any other competitors out there? What does that uh look like?

That we know of competing in the truck parking software space there's only one right now, most of like on our outbound if we run into a prospect that's using software to run his yard it's most likely either self-storage software or apartment software that's being repurposed and stitched together with something else to manage his parking facility, but it's still very early, I'm sure we're going to see a bunch of new entrance in this space but right now to my knowledge, it's us and one other guy.

Wow, so you guys might have some sort of first-mover advantage depending on the size of the market and all that so that's pretty cool being on the front end of that stuff.

That's awesome. I think we'll cover a lot of ground, let's jump into the final three questions, and then we'll wrap everything up here. Real quick what's a career highlight for you, what's a high point in your career and what did you learn?

The high points are tough for my brain to —you know, identify but the most fulfilling part of my career is certainly launching Rig Hit, everything I've done prior to this has been in the service business, where you're relying on your own performance. You're the so proprietor, is eat what you kill and if you don't eat you don't kill. The first opportunity that I stumbled across, was where Jose and I saw an opportunity to really build something that could scale impact a lot of people and we could really build a team where everyone moves towards a common goal, and we've done that successfully at this point and that's probably the most fulfilling high point of my career for sure.

That's amazing, I'm curious did anybody say that you guys are nuts for trying to do something like this?

People still do that.

Tell them to shut up, mind their own business, go do something else. So, all right what's been a career challenge for you, like maybe a low point in your career not to make you depressed or anything, when you think about it, but what's a low point and what did you learn from it?

Yeah those are much easier for my brain to identify, I thought about that question and so we didn't go into a whole bunch of detail, but basically, I had this transition when I first left College—I was working for—I was essentially a property manager where I was fed to the wolves so to speak and I learned a lot really fast and I was both managing and leasing in-house for a local guy, a portfolio of retail shopping centers and apartments and I like the transaction gig. I thought it was because I've always enjoyed transactions making deals so I left that company and I went into full-time brokerage, as I was entering that business I said—"This is going to be really easy, all I've got to do is convince a bunch of landlords to let me do what I did for this guy", little did I know at that age the commercial real estate sales cycle is incredibly long and it takes a long time to spin that flywheel of business up, so my first year in full-time brokerage—The Firm that I was with helped me and they gave me this deal in Miami that was a 100,000 square foot office building of executive suites, so I think 50 to 100 square foot offices, 25 bucks a foot, the annual rents —whatever—2,000 bucks more or less but I did 86 transactions that year and my take-home pay was $21,000 and change. Meanwhile, I was basically living my life on a credit card, so you can imagine what happened there, I was basically stressed out of my mind that I didn't know how I was going to be able to live but that was definitely the lowest point of my career I was like "if I can figure out how to get out of this" it can pretty much, I don't want to say conquer anything but it was definitely a huge learning experience. Yeah, it gave me a lot of grit it showed me the value of having cash in the bank and it showed me the value of being patient in things that take time, especially in something like commercial real estate, like there are things just take time, you're never going to meet someone and transact with them on the first occasion very rarely do. I look at everything now from a sort of long-term game nothing is viewed from a quick transaction perspective and it's because of that year that was a long-winded answer.

That's amazing, yeah those tough times like that no that's actually important for a lot of people to hear, some people want to get into brokerage and they want to go do maybe other things and they don't realize that in this space it does take a little while to get where you want to go but the payoff is worth it, I think in the end—I was listening to—I don't think you ever heard of the podcast "My first million", I just started listening to it, maybe two months ago or something and they recently had an interview with I forgot his name exactly, but it's like the Indian, Warren Buffett, how they titled it—

Monish

Yeah! Monish, yes, he has a book out, so I looked him up and all that, I've been listening to the interview, almost got it almost finished it today, but he said that when he started he was working for a company and he said —"okay, I can go start my own thing"—long story short—"I can go start my own thing, here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to do just enough to not get fired but obviously do enough to excel and become promoted to get more work and then I'm going to get as many credit cards as possible and leverage me to start my own business" and that's exactly what he did, his downside protection was "I can file for bankruptcy if it doesn't work out and then go back to work", that's what he was going to do, and it worked out for him, thank god it worked out for him. What you said reminded me uh of that, I think a lot of real estate guys and gals get into the business and do kind of the same thing, it takes a lot of risk on that front end, but hey! The worst that can happen is—if you don't have any kids or a wife—you can sleep on someone's couch and always get a job somewhere, so that's great. Last thing, sometimes you got to try a couple of things and maybe fail, and then you'll find out what works for you, last question here. Can you recommend a business resource? Could be a book, could be a person, could be a conference, whatever that you would recommend for the listeners.

I'm going to get a lot of flack for this but I'm going to say it anyway, I love sales, and I like the sales process, Grant Cardone was the first guy that I found in that space when I was much younger and I basically absorbed all of his material over the years. I think that's a good starting point if you're interested in sales like that guy is a master marketer, TBD whether or not he's got everything he talks about but when I was younger I really like Grant's stuff. I like a guy named Alex Hormozi, primarily because he just tells you to "shut up and work" which resonates really well with me. Those are probably the two that I would highlight that were impacted my frame of mind when I was a little bit younger.  

Hey, you know what those are influential guys whether you like them or not. Now, I'm not as much of a Grant Cardone fan but I completely get what you're saying about his stuff because it is extremely motivating. I used to watch a lot of Gary V, yeah Gary Vaynerchuk as well, and he's extremely motivating, maybe don't agree with all his advice—whatever I find that he is a little bit not quite as deep on the actionable items like when somebody asks him how do I do this and he's just saying just post just 10 times a day, 12, give your 180 and it's okay what else can I do. I like Justin, he's a good one uh who gives you actually actionable stuff that you can do online, his take is totally different he writes and does a newsletter and all that stuff, so he is different, he's out on video except for interviews but, yeah. I agree man those guys are great guys, sometimes we need them in a season in our life and some people just love them and become super fans so that's awesome. I appreciate it, I think we covered a lot of ground, Jake, thank you so much for being on. How can people reach out to you if they want to partner with you, use your software, maybe invest for the future, or just make a connection, how can they reach out?

I'd say the best way is probably to reach us on Twitter, that's going to be the fastest response we're always on there it's https://x.com/truckpark_king

I will put that in the show notes, Jake thank you so much for being on.

Thank you, Kris.

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