In this interview segment, the speaker explains how Outdoorsy’s founder Jeff Gavens emphasized relentless customer engagement, leading the team to discover a critical obstacle for RV peer‑to‑peer rentals: personal auto insurance policies contain a commercial‑use exclusion that leaves owners uncovered when their RVs are rented through a marketplace. This exclusion created a liquidity barrier that prevented owners from listing their vehicles. Recognizing the barrier, the team set out to build a new insurance product—Roamly—an insurtech offering that provides best‑in‑class commercial‑use coverage for RVs on the Outdoorsy platform. The discussion highlights the importance of customer‑first product development, the challenges of moving slowly within the insurance industry, and the strategic focus on removing supply‑side barriers to enable a thriving RV sharing marketplace.
Chapters
Yeah, could you share a little bit more about, you know, what led to Roamly? I know you just kind of briefly touched on it. Yeah, our, you know, Jeff, Jeff Gavens, the founder of Outdoorsy, or one of the founders of Outdoorsy, you know, he always is like, impresses upon us to talk to customers like as much as humanly possible. And I literally can't say that enough myself. Validate everything you're doing with customers, right? I mean, that is just important. And it's a muscle that if you get reflexive is pretty easy to do. But part of that was, you know, we have a large community of owners that was, I think, in part, a big part of success of Outdoorsy too. Yes, as Shane said, start with the customer and work backwards. And that community, you know, as we started going in and, you know, talking to them, learning, was that people were renting out their RVs and we started to see instances where people would be dropped from their insurance. And so what the interesting thing about the peer-to-peer side was that personal insurance is non-commercial insurance, right? The whole point is it's not used for commercial activity. And so people's personal insurance products have a commercial exclusion clause in them saying if you use your RV for commercial use, it will not be covered in the event of a claim, right? And that's your personal use, not like they got in an accident and they found out that it was on a marketplace, they would not cover you. And so that was a light bulb moment for us. That was like a clear need and what I would call a liquidity barrier for the marketplace. Right. And I think this is really key for people in marketplaces that are managing them is to identify your liquidity barriers and try to essentially remove them. Right. These are all of the reasons not to provide supply on a marketplace. Right. And try and itemize and remove those as much as humanly possible. And so this was a big one for us and it took a lot of time, like, I'm gonna be perfectly honest, like, Insurance industry does not move quickly, and going and convincing people that there needs to be a new insurance product to allow for people to let other people take their RV out, it's kind of like the Airbnb thing of, let's let random people sleep on our couch kind of thing. It's like, at first it sounds crazy, but now we found ourselves here and we have launched Roamly, which is an insurtech business. It does more than just personal lines insurance, but one of the big innovations that we've been working on is providing best-in-class RV insurance that allows you to put your RV on an RV market, RV sharing marketplace, and rent it out. And so that's a big innovation for us and also easy sell to people that are coming on. And so we obviously want to have every RV on our marketplace be insured, And, you know, safe and covered. And in us providing that, we can kind of help ensure that that happens.
