Kyle
Chuck Gordon (L) Has recently lost the Justin Bieber-esque mop top (photo: forbes.com)
When you think about tech startup and storage nine times out of ten you think about cloud storage, or flash storage, RAM, DDR and any number of things. Well Austin Texas startup SpareFoot is about real storage.
Think Uncle Fred’s Storage on the side of route 40 or Grandma’s Attic storage facility tucked away behind the rest stop. Those storage facilities, the ones featured on Storage Wars, are what SpareFoot is all about.
It’s understandable at this day and age you don’t have time to go up and down the highway trying to find the best deal for your extra things. That’s why SpareFoot allows you to go to one website, figure out where you want to store your stuff, how much stuff you want to store and how long you want to store it for. After you input a little data the magical SpareFoot platform comes to life and serves up suggestions for the best self storage facility and option for you.
Two UCLA implants into Austin; Chuck Gordon and Mario Freghali are the brain power behind this startup that is firmly entrenched in the $22 billion dollar storage industry.
SpareFoot is an alumnus of the Capital Factory accelerator and is funded to the beat of $4.5 million, not too shabby, or as Dave on Storage Wars would say “yuuupppppp”. We got a chance to talk to the SpareFoot team in the interview below.
SpareFoot is the world’s largest online marketplace for consumers to find and reserve self-storage units, with comparison shopping tools that show real-time availability and exclusive deals. We also offer web marketing solutions for storage facility owners and operators. Our AdNetwork tool helps facilities modernize their marketing and win new tenants online. SpareFoot AdNetwork listings get more traffic than any comparable directory, featuring software integration and ROI-proving analytics. This fun tech startup works hard and plays hard in Austin, TX.
Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
Co-Founder and CEO Chuck Gordon holds a fine arts degree from UCLA. After taking entrepreneurship classes while studying abroad in Singapore, Chuck founded SpareFoot and has led it from inception to $4.5 million in funding. The 25-year-old leads a tight-knit team of expert employees, who work hard and play hard in Austin, TX. SpareFoot is disrupting the $22 billion self-storage industry to become its thought and tech leader. Chuck believes in sacrificing everything for the company— he recently shaved off his infamous Justin Bieber-esque mop when the company achieved a major milestone.
Co-Founder and COO Mario Feghali has a bachelor’s degree in psychobiology from UCLA, and previously worked as a researcher at UCLA’s Brain Mapping Center. Originally a scientist in training, Mario now oversees SpareFoot’s sales and account management teams. During his third year as an undergraduate, Mario helped write the initial version of the business plan that aimed to bring the self-storage industry into the 21st century. While some may find self-storage boring, the 25-year-old is excited about taking an old-school industry into the digital age. When he’s not at the office or flying to trade shows, he’s typically playing guitar, reading or growing out his facial hair.
Downtown Austin, TX
We feel very advantaged to be here in Austin. Not only is it an incredibly cool and fun place to live, but it’s growing every day and is perfect for startups. There’s a creative buzz in the air and a very skilled workforce with great ideas and passion. The city is very supportive of entrepreneurship, so our startup scene is strong. It’s enabled us to work with so many talented, experienced individuals who we’ve learned from along the way, from fellow entrepreneurs to our awesome board of advisors and investors.
Shopping for storage the old-fashioned way is a headache— you can easily waste hours calling facilities through the Yellow Pages, getting spammed by “free quote” services or clicking through clunky, outdated websites. SpareFoot solves the problem by organizing every facility in one simple marketplace online. In just a few minutes, you can find and compare storage facilities in your neighborhood, check out photos and read customer reviews. Once you find the perfect storage unit, reserve it online for free. It’s that easy! Customers get access to exclusive special offers and a $20 rebate just for booking online.
On the B2B side, we help self-storage business owners market their facilities more effectively than ever. We’re getting them a ton of online, where modern consumers are looking, with a ton of visibility on over 60 high-ranking partner sites.
Our people and culture. It’s an incredibly smart and passionate group, truly obsessed with modernizing the storage industry and building the best business we can. As a venture-backed startup, we subscribe to the well-known “work hard, play hard” lifestyle, but we take both pieces of that to extreme levels. We work so many long hours and have a team full of sharp-as-a-tack employees cranking away and loving it. Most of our employees are friends outside of work, and the company hosts a handful of social events per month.Our clients trust us because we take care of them, because we are technology and web marketing experts, and because we increasingly deliver more value with our products. Our partnership model is also unique, benefiting both storage business clients and storage-seeking consumers. This is especially true now that we can deliver on both storage and truck rental needs of DIY movers with partner Penske Truck Rental.
We are in a very niche market that’s decidedly unglamorous. To that end, it’s challenging from a consumer side to get people (and journalists) super excited about this new product, when you only need storage a handful of times per lifetime at very specific points. So we try to emphasize how fun our company is, and how easy we make it to find storage during the sometimes difficult life transitions that necessitate it. It’s also quite fascinating how self-storage is this “hidden giant” of a legacy industry— you hardly notice the storage facilities you pass by every day in your neighborhood, yet the business is worth $22 billion.
From a B2B perspective, our target audience tends to be unfamiliar or even uncomfortable with technology tools. So general education around web marketing is a huge piece of our sales process.
Chuck and Mario didn’t know anyone who had started a tech company before, and were basically flying blind in the beginning. They didn’t start getting advice from experienced mentors until they were accepted to Capital Factory, and wished they had sought such advice earlier. But they moved forward from there, and a huge lesson was learning to “fail quickly.” They spent months perfecting the first version of the site before launching. All of that work was basically scrapped in Capital Factory, where they built a completely new product and website that launched in under two weeks. It wasn’t perfect, but they were grateful to get something live that customers could use, then iterate on it from there.
We can’t reveal too much, but we’re moving forward fast and knocking out big goals. We are currently hiring in sales, support and development.
