In 1979, the average college kid had a problem.

If you wanted a cold drink in the evening, you were out of luck.

Unless, of course, you had a mini fridge in your dorm room.

Hey, it's Kevin Beach and this is a special archived episode of Akembo.

My business partner Steve Dennis and I set out to solve this problem at the little college we went to near Boston.

Here's the deal. In those days, you could buy a mini fridge if you bought a few hundred at a time for about $85.

You could also rent a mini fridge for $85 a year.

For the $85 that the student would pay, they would get a clean, working mini fridge delivered right to their dorm room the first week of school.

And then, at the end of the semester, we'd pick it up.

It turns out that the $85 paid for the entire fridge forever so that the second year, all of the reorders basically paid for our maintenance and our storage.

Year after year, an entity could live on that.

And I'm guessing that 30 or 40 years later, those very same fridges are still being rented out.

To deliver the fridges that first year, we rented a U-Haul.

We didn't buy a U-Haul. We rented one.

Unfortunately for me, we took out the insurance because as we parked on the steep hill at College Avenue, the emergency break on the U-Haul didn't hold.

And the U-Haul door open went backwards if you feed, and eight mini fridges fell out of the back of the U-Haul crushing the Ford Mustang that was parked just behind us.

It's worth understanding what do we make, what do we own, and what do we buy?

Should we start our own insurance company when we need insurance?

Should we buy a U-Haul to own forever every time we need it?

If we're starting a business, who do we hire, what do we use?

Back when I started YoYoDine in the early 90s, there was no such thing as MailChimp.

It cost us half a million dollars to build the software tool we ended up using to send millions and millions of emails every day.

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