Link to Devpost: https://devpost.com/software/openspace-xztbmf
I’ve spent a lot of my time in the last few months developing a startup. I was lucky enough to participate in the Melissa and Doug Entrepreneurship program last summer which gave me a grant to work on the project full time. Below you can find a photo of me pitching at demo day (we recieved our first investment!). This past weekend I built part of the web app at Hack Duke. It was a ton of fun, and my team won “Best Project Hack”. I’m a huge fan of hackathons, its always fun to come together with a group of people who are as passionate about something as I am. We are building the website using Meteor, which is a full stack JavaScript platform that uses MongoDB for its database. It is a really cool framework, great for prototyping rapidly. In the future we might try to port it to something more efficient/less buggy, but for now I’m having a ton of fun working with it. This is how the main user interface currently looks:
In any case, here is the “pitch” for my idea:
Anyone who has dealt with self-storage knows how painful the process can be. While current storage options all have positives, each has their flaws.
Renting a self storage unit generally comes with peace of mind and ease of access, but also inconvenient locations and high prices. Lots of surprising and increasingly obscure charges generally get added onto the advertised rate. In addition, a customer might pay for a 5’ by 5’ space, but only need a fraction of it.
There is also the option of using an “On Demand” storage unit. A team of movers arrives to pick up your items, which are then stored in a warehouse until needed. This removes the user from having to directly interact with the storage process. It is convenient, but with a price. Prices are generally almost double that of a self storage unit for the same area, in addition to paying per mover per hour during for the service. There are also constraints that come with standard sizing (similar to self storage units) and duration of storage. Access is also limited to appointments that must be generally made at least two days in advance (at the minimum).
As students, my team is confronted with moving every year. We are well aware of the pitfalls that come with each scenario. We felt that there had to be a convenient way for us to store, without sacrificing price. We also wanted to provide people an easy means of earning a passive income. When looking for ways to solve this, we found that people were often most satisfied with their storage experience when they left their items with a friend for the summer.
My solution is based off of this idea. We are building a peer to peer storage marketplace that allows users to find nearby space at a much cheaper rate. network of “hosts” will be leveraged to create a more personalized and dynamic experience for the user. Users are only charged for the space their items take up, so they aren’t paying for any wasted space that might occur when renting out a traditional (5’x5’) unit. Our platform works to provide a secondary stream of passive income for those who might have extra space. We want to help people reduce the amount of wasted space in their homes, and put all of their resources to work.
My platform functions as a marketplace for storage, it allows “hosts” to list their extra space, which “users” can then use to store their items through the website. The hosts list space ranging from an extra room, empty garage, attic, or even a partially full storage unit and it is presented to users on the website. Users then reserve space via the website, and drop off their items in a specified time range. Both the host and user agree on the number of items being stored, and the user is charged for each item they store, not a set square footage like 5’x5’, or 10’x10’. The user pays through the website, which takes a commission for each item and then pays the host half of their total compensation. When it is time for they user to move out of the host’s space, they indicate the range when they will be arriving and move out their stuff. Once the user and host agree on their move out, the host is paid the remainder of their compensation.
Update: August 2019
This summer we scaled up our operation to see if our framework could handle +100 users and multiple locations. One component of this was starting an ambassador program at Wake Forest and UNC to drive user growth in both of these locations. I set up weekly communications with each of these teams and developed a process for each ambassador to market the service on their campus. Another component to this growth was more aggressive marketing for both users and hosts. We did some testing to discover our target market for hosts, and were able to increase the affectiveness of our advertising by narrowing our efforts on a subset of people. For user marketing we took a different approach, it seemed that our message was only reaching a fraction of the potential market. We used a script to mine student contact info, and imported this to mailchimp to develop an email campaign to connect with our audience. In the end, these methods were pretty successful and we increased our profit for the summer by almost 10x with over 10k in revenue from just Duke.