The First Steps For Starting Neighbor As A P2P Marketplace For Self-Storage (Joseph Chat Clip)

So I guess kind of though, going back to the early days, when you saw this kind of problem firsthand and experienced it and wanted to build a better way, what were the first steps that you actually took to starting it as a marketplace?

So we built this very much following the MVP model. Our first website was a landing page. It was like a WordPress landing page that had 2 links, become a host, become a renter, and they'd both take you to a Google Form. When we'd get the Google Form, we'd call the renter and we'd say, hey, what do you want to store? And they'd tell us, and then we'd call the host and say, hey, they want to store this. You know, you look like you're close by. How much do you want to charge? And we'd call the renter back and say, hey, they want to charge this much. And then we'd agree and send out a PDF. And then we'd tell the renter to Venmo us a certain amount and we'd Venmo out the host the rest of it.

And we got like all our Venmo accounts shut down because we weren't supposed to do business transactions. transactions on Venmo.

And so that was the original MVP. We then— that got to be too, too much work, as you can imagine. And so we built a slightly more robust website where you could actually create a listing and browse on a map and people could find each other. And so that took that part off our plate. It still didn't manage payments, so we still had to process all the payments manually. And then there came a point where we couldn't process all the payments manually. So we built, we actually scrapped everything and built a whole new website. We'd raised money at that point. So we built out a little bit of an engineering team and built a whole new website that integrated with Stripe to manage payments.