Max Brun founded Bounce, a "cloud storage for the physical world" for travelers. He tested the idea with a landing page and AdWords, then personally picked up bags on Citi Bikes to validate that customers would trust a stranger with their luggage before building any software.
Chapters
Before we really dive into the latest with Bounce, I think it might be great if you can start off by sharing your background as a quick refresher, and also for those that might have just joined us here in the community.
Yeah, early in my career, I was traveling a lot and living in a lot of different places, and every time I moved, I would get rid of all the things that I didn't use since the last time I moved. I think my track record in most of my 20s was that I hadn't lived in the same city consecutively for more than 9 months. A lot of it was, I was in San Francisco and then I left and I came back to San Francisco. I had the opportunity to live in a few places in the States, New York, Southern California, of course San Francisco. And then I also lived in India a couple of times for 6 months and then London as well. And yeah, every time I moved, I got rid of stuff and then I had 2 suitcases and 1 backpack of everything I owned in the world. And I loved that sort of minimalist lifestyle. I sort of went a little crazy with minimalism and I was like, wow, I have so much freedom if I don't have that much stuff. A new career opportunity somewhere else, like let's do it. And so yeah, I, with that mentality in mind, I, and that feeling of the freedom of not being held down by your things, I just saw all around me how common it was for people to plan their days around their things. And over and over again, I saw this. And then the idea came to me one day when I was going for happy hour drinks with some colleagues after work on a Friday and someone said, oh, I'm going to go home and drop my bag off and then I'll come back. And I thought, there it is again, you know, planning the day around the things. And then I thought, you know, what if we could build this network of locations all around cities add delivery integration and we just build this sort of cloud storage for the physical world. Balance becomes the app where you can summon your things away from you and back to you. And I was just so obsessed and excited with that idea. And so I was sitting on that idea for actually a couple of years. It sounded really hard to build. You need delivery drivers, you need all the locations, just like So difficult. And so I thought, all right, maybe this will be a good company for like a second-time entrepreneur. So I'll come back to this later. Fast forward a few years and I was thinking about what I was gonna work on next. And a friend said to me, hey, what about that idea of Bounce that you were so obsessed with before? And I was thinking about it and I was like, maybe there is, maybe there's a way to test this and get it off the ground faster than I think. And so I'm really grateful for that friend because then I had started tinkering around. I put up a webpage, probably spent $20, $50 of AdWords to just see if people would come to the site. It said, you know, we'll pick up your bags and bring 'em back to you for $7 or something like that. And then to my surprise, the phone rang and someone said, hey, can you come pick up my stuff? And I was like, wow, there's There it is. There's the demand. Let's chase this. So then we had a fun MVP building story from there. I was riding around Citi Bikes in New York City, the public bike share, picking up people's stuff. If they had big luggage, then I would take it back in an Uber Pool. I did this for about a week. It was one week of validating the first hypothesis, which is, will people hand over their bags to a stranger? That they, you know, from the internet. And then we had like no reviews, nothing. So it seemed kind of sketchy, but people did it. I quickly learned moving stuff around was really hard, as I had initially expected. And so hypothesis number 2 was, can we, can we do this? Can we solve this customer need in a way that is more economically viable? And so that's where the idea came of using shops as the pickup and drop-off points. Which would drastically simplify logistics and therefore the costs. And so week number 2, the test of bounce was, it was a landing page that said, we have stores all over New York City, give us a ring. And it just had a phone number and it said, store your bags and have them delivered all over the city. And people called. from that website too. And I remember the first call, someone said, do you have a location in East Village? And I said, where exactly do you need it? And she told me, and I said, oh, I think we're opening some new locations there soon. Can I call you back in 15 minutes to confirm availability? So I spent those 15 minutes calling every store in that area until I got one to say yes. And I did it within 15 minutes. I called the lady back. I said, oh yeah, we actually have a new store opening up. Right here, Upper East Side, 77th Street. And actually, because it's a new location, I'm actually going to be there like opening it, so I'll be able to greet you. And so I give, I give her the address and then I ride on a Citi Bike as fast as I can to that location. I beat the customer there by 2 minutes, and then I got to ask her all kinds of nice customer development questions like, what made you need the service today? What made you trust Bounce, what made you almost not trust Bounce. And I learned all, all this stuff. And so from there, I quickly learned that there are a lot of people willing to drop off and pick up from the same place. I didn't need to build delivery right away. And then I just started signing up more locations. Started then after that point, we started writing the first lines of code and then it all started coming together.
