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Side Hustle School

#321 - Student Gets Paid to Help People Rent Adventures

Side Hustle School

Chris Guillebeau / Onward Project

Business, Entrepreneurship, Careers

4.83.3K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2017

⏱️ 8 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

After feeling jealous over a friend’s boat outing, a San Diego student creates a sharing economy platform to connect adventurers with gear. Side Hustle School features a new story EVERY DAY of someone who started a hustle without quitting their job. You’ll learn how they got the idea, how they overcame challenges along the way, and what the results are. Share: #SideHustleSchoolShow notes: SideHustleSchool.comTwitter: @chrisguillebeauInstagram: @193countries To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello and what's up? Welcome to Side Usal School. This is Chris Gellibot. I'm going to give you a story about the sharing economy today, about someone who creates their own network in the sharing economy.

0:16.0

We've had a couple of episodes like this in the past. Episode 123 was Uber for lawn care. These guys who want to revolutionize the lawn care industry, make it easier for homeowners to connect with landscapers directly.

0:28.0

Then we had another episode 151 about Airbnb for beer. That was a fun one. Today's story is about Airbnb for adventure experiences. This project was actually started by a student. I'll tell you how you got the idea and how you made it happen.

0:42.0

I also noticed that this episode is going to break the streak of $0 startup costs that we've been having this week. We've had several stories this week that had no startup costs whatsoever or something like $20 or less in startup costs.

0:53.0

This one is a bit higher, but that's why I like to present a range of different stories so that you can hear what people will do if they have a few thousand dollars to spend or what they might do if they have nothing to spend.

1:02.0

Lots of different ways to make your side hustle happen today. I'll tell you about one of them. That Airbnb for adventure story is coming right up.

1:09.0

While checking out his friend's Snapchat stories one day, Dane Baker was overcome with jealousy. Some of his friends were out on a boat, catching the sun, diving in the water and sharing a few cold beers and what seemed like an incredible adventure.

1:31.0

Naturally, Dane couldn't help but feel he wanted some of that for himself, but there was a problem. He didn't have access to a boat nor the funds to rent one in his hometown of San Diego.

1:40.0

Trying to shake the feeling, Dane headed outside for a walk where he noticed his neighbor's boat sitting on the driveway. It hadn't been used in months and the owner rarely had time to go out on the water. Most of that boat's life was spent just taking up space.

1:52.0

Dane thought what if there was a platform that connected people who had these cool rides to people who would want to rent them, for less than it would cost to rent a boat from the marina or another traditional source.

2:02.0

He headed back home to do a little research to see if something like this existed. When he couldn't find one, he got to work making something himself.

2:09.0

He began to work on his model of Airbnb for adventures, which he called toy room. He figured that most extreme and action sports equipment, like snowboards, kayaks and surfboards, all met the same fate as the boat he'd seen in the restaurant.

2:21.0

So he decided to focus more of his idea on these smaller pieces of equipment, categorizing them into water, air, snow, road and sand.

2:30.0

Now with no experience in web development, Dane knew that he was going to have to outsource to make this idea work.

2:35.0

Finding a developer proved to be much harder than anticipated and required a bunch of research, as well as a number of false starts.

2:42.0

After a few long weeks, Dane finally came across the perfect person for the job nearly 6,000 miles away in Finland.

2:48.0

Because of the amount of research they'd done, working with the developer was much easier than finding them in the first place.

2:53.0

However, it did eat up a large chunk of toy rooms total $7,000 startup costs, with the rest being spent on design and hosting for the website.

3:00.0

But that money bought a lot of intensive work from the developer. He had them create an internal messaging and booking system, so people could communicate freely.

3:07.0

And he also created a unique payment system for the site that integrated fully with PayPal and Stripe.

3:12.0

Because there are so many moving parts to this project, Dane opted to keep the business model simple.

3:17.0

Toyroom takes a flat 15% from each transaction. They also decided to let customers set their own prices and charge their own rates.

...

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