FounderBuzz

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Scott: Hi, I'm Scott Olson with FounderBuzz, and I'm here again today with Chuck Gordon, the founder and CEO of SpareFoot. Thanks for joining us, Chuck.

Chuck: No problem. Hello, world.

Scott: Yeah. We recently featured you, and it sounds like you guys have been doing great. I know that you had some recent news you put out. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that?

Chuck: We recently took over, or partnered with, Selfstoragefinders.com and Selfstoragedeals.com. Self Storage Finders is the largest independent self-storage directory site in the world, and adding them to our network basically catapulted us to number two in terms of total self-storage traffic to public storage. So we have more than all the other publicly traded routes, which are billion dollar companies. Really just second to Public Storage now. We have the largest advertising network for self-storage operators in the world and the biggest selection of storage facilities for consumers, as well.

Scott: That's great. That was a partnership, not an acquisition of the brand. Is that right?

Chuck: Yeah. The best way to think about it is kind of like an advertising network, but a little bit more complicated. We actually run the site, but we don't have a structured partnership with it.

Scott: Okay. You guys have only been around for three years. So to get to this position so quickly, maybe you could share a little bit about how much this factored into your strategy when you started, and how'd you get to this position so fast?

Chuck: Well, actually, it's really only been two years that we've been focusing on self-storage proper. The first year, we were still in college, and we were kind of doing the whole person-to-person storage thing, which is a little different.

But our strategy from the beginning has always been let's get the inventory and then present it wherever the consumers might be, whether that's on SpareFoot.com and whatever we can generate to our site, or whether it's on Selfstorage.com or Apartments.com or any of the other apartment or moving-type sites whose storage sections we power.

Our approach has always been let's go build tools that let us present the storage inventory wherever the consumer is. So the first step was go partner with the apartment and moving sites. Then we started approaching the other self-storage related sites, who obviously have the most relevant traffic, and have been pretty successful in partnering with them.

Scott: Right. Now I saw from your press release, as well, you guys have raised $4.5 million to date.

Chuck: Yeah.

Scott: It sounds like this might not be that capital intensive. Is this a strategy that you're going to continue moving forward? That you're looking for these types of partnerships to grow? What's going to fuel your growth going forward?

Chuck: That is the nice thing about partnering. If you structure it the right way, you can capture a lot of the revenue and not have to spend any cash. That has worked well for us. I can't go into too much detail about what we're planning on doing in the future, but I would say partnering and acquisitions are going to be definitely a part of it.

Scott: That's good. Business development is such a critical element of a lot of startups, and it's hard to know exactly who to partner with and how to get those deals done.

Chuck: Yeah.

Scott: Maybe you can discuss a little bit about the process that you guys went through to identify and then go after these partnerships and what it took to get it done.

Chuck: Well, it's all about looking for the most relevant traffic that's going to convert the highest. The only thing we care about is consumers who need a storage unit. Whatever sites have those, that's what we want.

Scott: And then you're generating your revenue through advertising? Is that primarily what you do?

Chuck: Yeah. The storage facilities pay us when we send them a tenant that moves in.

Scott: Okay. Then did you have a dedicated individual inside to do that? Or did you do that yourself? Or is that in the sales group? How did you get that done? How did you identify them?

Chuck: These specific deals?

Scott: Yeah. It's interesting, because did you have a business development, somebody dedicated to business development?

Chuck: Yeah, we have a VP of Business Development, John Durrett, who's kind of in charge of all these deals.

Scott: Okay, great. This is something that's faced by a lot of startups, the balance between business development, sales, and the executive team, and how to get deals done.

Chuck: Yeah.

Scott: It sounds like you guys are having a ton of success, and that's great.

Chuck: Yeah.

Scott: Well, I appreciate you sharing your news with us today, and I hope to have you back sometime in the future.

Chuck: Absolutely. Thanks, Scott.

Scott: Thanks, Chuck.

Chuck: See you.