This guide is based on Mixergy’s interview with Chuck Gordon.
After wasting six months developing a product that nobody wanted, Chuck Gordon built a successful self-storage marketplace that raised $4.5 million in venture capital. It was all done with clever hacks and a shoestring budget, so we invited him to teach you how to do it.
Chuck is the founder of SpareFoot, the largest open marketplace for self-storage.
Here are the actionable highlights from the interview.
Chuck launched with a one-page site that was just a form collecting names and phone numbers, and he personally took customers’ calls on a cell phone.
Chuck asked storage companies if they could use a landing page for their Google Places listings, and he signed up some customers before he launched the product.
Chuck went back and forth on the phone to get a quote from a storage company, learn how to book storage space, and collect the required information from the customer.
Chuck offered storage companies a feature for their websites that didn’t take off, and he realized that he should have first checked if the companies would use it.
Chuck offered to pay Apartments.com for any storage bookings that came from their traffic, and the partnership brought him new customers.
Chuck built his team to 25 people while using borrowed furniture and borrowed computer monitors.
Chuck insisted on a scrappy business model in which he did all the work himself before scaling up, and it won him support from the Capital Factory and other investors.
Watch the full interview now
Written by Sarah Brodsky, based on production notes by Jeremy Weisz