This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello and what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is Chris Guillebeau. Gonna give you a story about the sharing economy today, about someone who creates their own network in the sharing economy. 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. Then we had another episode 151 about Airbnb for beer. That was a fun one. And today's story is about Airbnb for adventure experiences.
Now this project was actually started by a student. I'll tell you how he got the idea and how he made it happen. Now I also noticed that this episode's gonna 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. 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.
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. [Music]
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 on what seemed like an incredible adventure.
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. 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. So 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. He headed back home to do a little research to see if something like this existed. And when he couldn't find one, he got to work making something himself. 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 driveway. So he decided to focus more of his idea on these smaller pieces of equipment, categorizing them into water, air, snow, road and sand. Now with no experience in web development, Dane knew that he was gonna have to outsource to make this idea work. Finding a developer proved to be much harder than anticipated and required a bunch of research as well as a number of false starts. After a few long weeks, Dane finally came across the perfect person for the job, nearly 6,000 miles away in Finland.
Because of the amount of research they'd done, working with the developer was much easier than finding them in the first place. However, it did eat up a large chunk of toy room's total $7,000 startup costs with the rest being spent on design and hosting for the website. 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. And he also created a unique payment system for the site that integrated fully with PayPal and Stripe.
Because there are so many moving parts to this project, Dane opted to keep the business model simple. Toy room takes a flat 15% from each transaction. They also decided to let customers set their own prices and charge their own rates, and toy room would just recoup the 15% of whatever that price might be. Due to that initial large investment, at least relatively large, Dane sought out ways of marketing the site for free. He tried a bunch of different stuff.
The most effective strategy he found is what he calls Facebook group targeting. This involves joining relevant Facebook groups in different niches, such as adventure, travel, or snow sports, and then working hard to become an active part of that community. This can be done by answering questions, sharing thoughts, and participating in discussions. Then when the time comes, you can share your product as a solution to someone's problem. He says if you want to try this yourself, it's important you don't miss the stage of becoming active in the group.
That's critical because if you miss it, it's an easy way to get yourself marked as a spammer and kicked out of the group forever. But if you add value and actually help people, that low-key product placement is totally cool. Now we're talking about renting lots of different kinds of sports equipment and active, adventury equipment. So this does present a question, what does toy room do about liability? Well, Dane did a couple different things.
He said, first of all, he covers himself through the terms of service and renters agree that toy room isn't to blame for any accidents or any injuries caused. However, just to be safe, Dane also took out a liability insurance policy. If any equipment is broken, the renter will be charged through their credit card, which is kept on file, meaning that someone who lends their equipment isn't gonna lose out on any money. And also if the item you're renting requires some kind of license or permit, you actually have to have that license or permit before renting the item. Because of how nervous he was in the beginning, Dane spent a lot of time following up on each step of his early customer's rental journey.
The insights he gained were valuable. He was able to notice the pain points and worries of people, both the renters and customers, which allowed him to create a number of improvements in the platform. Now this is still in early days. Right now, toy room is making between 700 and $1,100 a month. It's a part-time project.
Dane is spending about 30 hours a month on it. And the majority of his customers so far are coming from around Southern California, his base, where he's been able to make offline connections with people. But there are new listings coming up every day. He's seeing customers and renters pop up in faraway locations like Lebanon. Dan plans to keep hustling on this project, keep connecting more people with affordable adventures.
He's also now enlisted the help of a business partner to help him grow the idea further and to complement the skills he's weakened. [Music]
Awesome, well congratulations to Dane on this start. Definitely a lot of work for a project like this. This is one of those things that actually has the potential to be a real startup or a real business. Not to say a side hustle is not a real business, but if you've been listening for a while, you know what I mean.
But the challenge with these things is velocity, momentum essentially, like getting enough people to use the service to where the service actually becomes valuable. 'Cause if you hear about this cool platform, like whatever it is, the Airbnb for beer, the Uber for lawn care, whatever, you go and check it out and you see the concept, but you don't actually see any listings or you don't see any customers, like if you're the one who has the listings. Whatever it is, you really need to build that user base. And that's why this tends to be more of like a startup-y thing because they have lots of money to kind of put toward that and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars on marketing so that there's an active customer base right there from the beginning. But so far, it looks like Dane is doing pretty good without doing any of that because he's based in Southern California.
I went to look for the Portland Oregon listings. That's my hometown. And I saw a whole bunch of kayaks, like two dozen kayaks, a whole bunch of standup paddle boards, lots of things like that that are available to rent. And like I said in the story, people can choose their price. If you have a kayak, you can choose how much you're willing to rent that out by the hour of the day.
So it does seem like he's getting at least some kind of momentum, which I think is pretty amazing considering not spending any money on marketing. So who knows, we'll see what happens next, but I definitely think it's an interesting project. And if you're out there and you've got a kayak or a paddle board sitting in your garage or some kind of adventure sports thing, maybe you wanna log in and create a listing so that whenever you're not using that thing, which is probably the majority of the time, it's available for someone else to come and use and pay you for it. Just a thought. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.
Today's show notes are online at sidehustleschool.com/321. Thank you for listening. I'll be back again tomorrow with another story. I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
