Bounce founder explains how the luggage storage startup went from perfecting its model in New York to expanding across 2,500 cities and 12,000 locations. The company signed up 20 stores in San Francisco in two weeks with a tiny team, then rolled out to major cities. Bounce now has more locations than Taco Bell nationwide and more than Starbucks in New York.
How'd you think about that? You know, when the right time was to expand from New York into your kind of like second and third market?
Yeah, so the conventional wisdom, which I think is actually correct, is to really focus— correct in most cases— is to really focus on, you know, one market, really make sure you can build that into a big, big market and then expand. What I saw, which was different than that, was a lot of our customers were travelers. They would use us in New York and they would say, I want to use this in Miami. Are you guys in Miami yet? Or whatever city. And the answer was no. And I felt like after a while, I felt like we were not serving the number one customer request, which was, can I use this in more cities? And so still we focused on New York for the first, probably at least 6 months. Just so we, you know, we were still in the pre-product market fit, making sure this was a real business. And then I flew out to San Francisco where I had lived before and was familiar with the city. And I felt like that would be the true test of if Bounce was just a New York thing or if it was a bigger thing. Because I was looking, I was talking to investors lightly at that time trying to understand, hey, should we raise VC money? Or not yet. And a lot of folks were like, oh, like, I don't know about this thing, or, oh, maybe this only works in New York because of how dense New York is. And so then, yeah, went over to San Francisco and I called a friend from college, my friend Bob, and I said, hey, he had some availability. He was on the job hunt at the time. And I said, do you want to work on a project with me? And I said, let's do this as fast as we can because that really proves our model. Let's spend 2 weeks trying to sign up all like enough supply to have San Francisco really get going. And so me and Bob, we went all around the city, we called a bunch of stores, and in 2 weeks we signed up probably 20 stores, which at the time we were really proud of. Now we'll sign up that many in like an afternoon. Not with one person, but with a few people, a bit bigger of a team. But yeah, I was like, wow, this works. And then we were getting bookings in San Francisco and it was like, okay, wow, I think we can really make a playbook out of this and scale it across the US. So then from there we started looking at the rest of the United States. Chicago was the next market. Then we looked at Los Angeles. Basically every, every, all the big cities and then spent a lot of 2019 going all around the United States.
Yeah. And I guess it's worth noting, this is the scale you're at today, which is pretty incredible. I believe it's over what, 2,500 cities?
Yeah, we're in over 2,500 cities. We have over 12,000 locations. For context, that's more locations than Taco Bell. In New York City alone, we have more locations than Starbucks has coffee shops. So if you think about, you know, if you're ever caught with your bags and you want to drop them off somewhere, I think you can think that, you know, you'll be more likely to bump into a Bounce location than a Starbucks location. Not all of our stores have really prominent signage. So that's where, you know, you can see more locations on the app. But yeah, we built it to a really nice level of ubiquity and more to come as well.
