Unemployed and depressed, Robert Samuel turned to Craigslist.
It was iPhone release day in 2012 and, looking to make a few bucks, he offered to hold an Apple loyalist's place in line for $100. Apple fever was strong, and Samuel quickly found a taker and rushed to the Fifth Avenue shop in New York. The man who hired him ended up being able to score the smartphone online but paid him anyway.
"I was going to leave," Samuel recalled. "It was actually a customer who prompted me to stay," proposing, "Why don't you sell your spot?"
Samuel realized he had stumbled on a moneymaking scheme and called his friends to join him in line. By the end of the day, the crew had sold four spots and five milk crates, which exhausted Apple fans bought to sit on. The day of waiting earned Samuel enough money to buy an iPhone 5.
"I always call myself an accidental entrepreneur," said Samuel, 41. "This was never meant to be." Today, he's the chief executive officer of Same Ole Line Dudes LLC, a professional line-sitting service with dozens of employees, all independent contractors.
A Brooklyn native, Samuel went to the city's public schools and left Pace University three semesters short of graduating. He spent his career working a slew of customer service, retail, and security jobs, which he credits with preparing him for the customer-facing business he now runs.
Same Ole Line Dudes, or Line Dudes for short, charges $25 for the first hour of waiting and $10 for every additional half hour. There's a minimum of two hours and a $5 hourly surcharge for inclement weather, either below freezing or about 100 degrees. The line sitters get 60 percent of the fee, plus tips. Line Dudes fields 60 to 100 requests a month and experiences an uptick in the summer from tourists.
At first, Samuel wasn't sure the business was sustainable. It wasn't until the summer of 2013, a year after the iPhone sit, that he started actively using the Line Dudes Twitter account, which he had set up a few months earlier. "I wasn't even taking myself seriously," he said. "I was throwing paint on the wall and calling it something when it dried."
Then the Cronut was invented.
Samuel's business surged when Dominique Ansel, a world-renowned pastry chef, combined the croissant with the doughnut and started selling an extremely limited supply at his SoHo bakery. Every day, Samuel would post on Craigslist offering to stand in line for the thing. With more clients than he could handle, he recruited his friends to stand in line with him, since the bakery limited the number of Cronuts per customer. He charged $60 to purchase and deliver two Cronuts, which retailed for $5 apiece.
Hamilton was Samuel's next Cronut. The Broadway musical about the American Founding Father was selling out, and scalpers were making thousands of dollars a ticket. People desperate to get in would line up at the midtown theater, even in the dead of winter.
That's when Samuel ordered the Line Dudes-branded tents that became his company's calling card. Line sitters take these along when they have to spend at least eight hours outside or wait overnight, and in bad weather. The bright yellow little tents are a fixture at sample sales and Instagram-famous restaurants, as well as Broadway ticket lines.
Despite his large staff of contractors, Samuel is very much a one-man operation. He maintains the website, assigns line sitters to jobs, handles the finances and fields press requests, which are frequent and often international. A handful of more senior line sitters help handle the flow of emails and phone calls from customers. Samuel has declined to take on investors, though he said he's had many offers.
"The beauty of this is that it's low-overhead," he said. "I work out of my living room. We pay for branded hats, we pay for the tents, the business cards."
About 40 percent of Samuel's business comes from waiting in line for confections (note the Instagram generation's love of sweets) and restaurants, 30 percent from Broadway tickets, 20 percent from sample sales and the rest from concert lines. Because most of the Line Dudes' time is spent at retail spaces, they often get to know the staff and can develop mutually beneficial relationships.
These businesses "know the money [people] spend on us -- imagine what they will spend once they get in the store," Samuel says. "If there's a party of 10 people, that's a big tab, that's a huge tip for the waitress. One hand washes the other."
SundayMonday Business on 06/18/2017