Scaling Outdoorsy As The Largest Marketplace For RV Rentals

28 Aug 2024 · 2 min

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In this interview, an early Outdoorsy executive (who served as chief product officer and later chief revenue officer) explains the company’s growth strategy. While Outdoorsy appears as a typical peer‑to‑peer RV rental platform, its breakthrough came from recognizing a professional segment of RV owners who rent out fleets but lacked proper software. Outdoorsy built a SaaS solution for these operators, aggregated their inventory onto the marketplace, and combined it with traditional peer‑to‑peer listings. This dual‑supply model provided high utilization for professional owners and a high‑quality, instant‑book experience for renters, enabling rapid scaling of the marketplace.

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Could you walk us through, you know, your experience at Outdoorsy and then maybe even kind of touch on what you think, you know, led it to break through?
Yeah, no, I'd love to go deeper there. You know, I was an early employee, kind of the first executive hire, chief product officer, and then ultimately chief revenue officer for a couple years. And, you know, Outdoorsy, you know, I think at the surface looks very much like a peer-to-peer marketplace, much like others. But I think a lot of You know, what differentiated it was our early strategy, which was peer-to-peer, but an insight around, hey, look, there's people doing this professionally that are, you know, aggregating RVs in some way, whether it's through consignment or had a couple of them themselves and they were renting them out. And usually in rural places, they didn't have software for them. They're probably running it on a, not even on a spreadsheet, probably just on a clipboard. And so there was this insight where, hey, we could actually build them a software, they could run their business on it, and then we get all that inventory and we put it on the marketplace. And so that was really the big kernel of that we kind of unlocked that allowed us to really scale. And so the reason that's really important and what it's called a SaaS-enabled marketplace and why it's important is like you can go get supply that's already out there doing what you're doing. They're professionalized, so they want to get high utilization rates, they want to sell out, they, you know, like they want to be in business and they want to maximize revenue. And what's nice about that is when you distribute that inventory in your marketplace, you know, you're providing a really high quality experience for the demand side. These people want to essentially get their calendars filled. And so the demand side comes in, there's usually instant bookability, there's a lot of availability. And then on top of that, we start layering in the peer-to-peer side.