[HN Gopher] Launch HN: OpenUnit (YC W20) - Software for managing...
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Launch HN: OpenUnit (YC W20) - Software for managing self-storage
facilities
Hi HN, I'm Taylor Cooney. My co-founder Lucas Playford and I are
launching (https://www.openunit.com) - software for managing self-
storage facilities. Lucas and I met 5 years ago at a startup in
Toronto. Since leaving the startup, we've been looking for ways to
"get the band back together" ever since. I would hack on side
projects, such as an order-ahead food app and applicant tracking
system for recruiting tech employees, but most of these fizzled out
after a few weeks. Despite our best efforts to get something
started, we quickly realized that good startup ideas don't just
happen out of nowhere. Or do they? 12 months ago my landlord came
to me with an offer: they wanted to sell the place I was renting,
and they'd give me a surprising amount of money if I could be out
with just a few days notice. Pulling that off though meant finding
somewhere to keep all of my stuff while I looked for a new place to
live. Within the first hour of searching, I discovered how
antiquated the process of finding and booking self-storage is.
After digging in, I found that for many facility owners having the
time, technical skills, and frankly, money, to piece together a
system that lets customers rent online, is hard. If you've ever
tried to find self storage yourself, you probably noticed that many
of the small operators have horrendous websites that are slow, non-
responsive, and don't give you the ability to rent without picking
up the phone. After talking to self storage owners directly, I also
learned that they spend hours every single day doing back-office
work that really should, and could be automated. Since I was
actively working on side projects, and I had just had this terrible
experience trying to rent a storage unit, I decided to focus my
time diving even further into the self-storage industry. I took
time to research the tech used in the industry and connected
directly with storage facility owners and operators to get a better
understanding of the pain points of this large and, what appeared
to be, technologically-backwards industry. Wanting to take the idea
of "building something people want" a bit more seriously, I joined
the Y Combinator's online Startup School program (before it became
a Continuous Program) to work more formally on what would later
become OpenUnit. After Startup School, I was invited to take this
idea out to Mountain View for an interview with YC. Two months
later Lucas and I had quit our jobs, the band was back together,
and we were on our way to California. The initial idea was to
build a marketplace that makes it easy for people to find and
instantly rent a storage unit online. But after speaking with more
storage operators and hearing the same themes over and over again,
we thought, why not be even more ambitious? Why not build a product
that solves the problems of the renters AND facility owners? It
turns out that self-storage generates $48 billion in rental revenue
a year. But, while you might see big players - Public Storage,
Extra Space, CubeSmart etc. -- in downtown cores, 74% of all self
storage facilities are small and self-reliant. And they can't
afford expensive software. As a result, the bad software they end
up using creates terrible business inefficiencies and a lackluster
customer experience. When I rented my storage unit, I experienced
this firsthand. For the most part, large enterprises can spend
enough money patching together systems to deliver an acceptable
customer experience. But, for mom-and-pop operations, that is done
with shoe leather - or it's not done at all. Instead of just
building a marketplace, we were going to build a truly affordable,
all-in-one management ecosystem. So here we are. We provide self-
storage facilities exactly what they need -- merchant solutions,
lease agreements, websites and more to provide an amazing customer
experience. We designed OpenUnit so that a typical facility can get
up and running fast and with zero paperwork. We also tailored the
features we're offering to meet the unique needs of small operators
first. As a result of this, our hope is that the entire experience
is less overwhelming than competing management tools. Our
enterprise package for facilities with >5 properties is 15% more
affordable than anything else we've seen in the market and
customers get a lot more than what's included with the other
storage solutions. Surprisingly, we're seeing an increased level
of interest due to coronavirus. Many operators and facilities are
looking to adopt a contactless move-in process (think eSignatures
for rental agreements, with customers managing their own
profiles/information and payment methods), which is something we've
kept in-mind, and can be accomplished out of the box with OpenUnit,
keeping employees and customers safe. As a team, we're firmly
focused on the web: the core technology that powers our
applications on all platforms. It's hard to pin down a name for
this stack, but it's a majestic monolith, built using Ruby on
Rails. We embrace a "HTML over the wire" architecture, of server-
rendered HTML, and "sprinkle" bits of interactive JavaScript.
Season with Redis and ElasticSearch, we should have all we'll ever
need. For the foreseeable future anyways. We're taking a privacy-
first approach to customer data and use lockbox, which aims to make
encryption as friendly and intuitive as possible for Rails. If you
have experience or if you have close friends, relatives, or
colleagues that are in the storage space, please reach out! We're
keen to get the community's input, in the comments below or at
hn@openunit.com. After reading this, don't be surprised if you
start to notice the number of self-storage facilities in your city.
Thanks so much, and we can't wait to hear your thoughts!
Author : taylorcooney
Score : 79 points
Date : 2020-09-10 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
| benatkin wrote:
| I had a great experience with Safeguard Self Storage in Cutler
| Bay, FL in the Miami area. The only thing lacking that I could
| see was their website and automated emails sucked. It might be
| worth trying extra hard to get them as a client! I was just a
| small single-unit customer and didn't know them personally. They
| just did well on a bunch of points: proper billing, easy move
| out, security, cleanliness, price.
| lucasplayford wrote:
| We will definitely check them out. Thanks for the heads up!
|
| There are so many operators out there that are amazing at
| providing stellar customer experiences in spite of the tech
| challenges that they are facing.
|
| Many of the operators that we speak with just want to work
| smarter and not harder, as the old adage goes.
|
| Unfortunately, when your tech stack is lacking you end up
| working harder to provide a great experience for the customer.
|
| We designed OpenUnit to deliver on both ends of the equation
| with awesome customer-facing touchpoints and backend tools that
| automate workflows to help operators get back to provide those
| amazing personalized experiences like you had at Safeguard.
| mywacaday wrote:
| It looks like McAfee has listed it as a parked domain:
|
| Your requested URL has been blocked by the McAfee Web Gateway URL
| Filter database module. The URL is listed in categories that are
| not allowed by your administrator at this time. URL:
| https://www.openunit.com/ URL Categories: Parked Domain
| Reputation: Unverified
| taylorcooney wrote:
| Woh, are you familiar with this? I've never had to navigate
| around a flagging like that. Thank you for bringing this you my
| attention.
| verdverm wrote:
| Is this open source?
| taylorcooney wrote:
| We're not open source at this time but if there's a large
| demand from facilities we may consider open sourcing certain
| parts of the product (such as the CRM or bookkeeping).
| [deleted]
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| I notice you guys mix the .com and .ca version of the domain on
| your site. Might be worth running through and converting them all
| over to the .com .
| taylorcooney wrote:
| It took us a while to get ahold of the .com from the owner in
| Michigan. After numerous attempts to reach the owner -
| including a Postmates order, a flower delivery and a hand
| written Christmas card - we bit the bullet and grabbed the .ca
| to start. openunit.com eventually expired, went live on the
| GoDaddy auction site and I was able to pick it up for $400
| after a bot tried to outbid me. Over the next week weeks I'll
| consolidate the two domains - if developer operations is of
| interest, please reach out to me at taylor@openunit.com and
| let's talk DNS records.
| jpincheira wrote:
| congrats on the domain Taylor! Way to go man.
| jakearmitage wrote:
| Beautiful design, btw.
| lucasplayford wrote:
| That's our man Taylor. We'll be building out the rest of our
| design team in the near future.
| mb_72 wrote:
| Agreed, looks terrific. I found one small spelling error -
| "Digital recipets" - when I was looking through the page.
| mNovak wrote:
| Nice to see some work in this area--seems like one of the few
| industries still dominated by 'mom and pops' (my parents run a
| self storage too!).
|
| Definitely nice to see a company with a more creative business
| model than just charging $10/mo for some feature set, too
| thedangler wrote:
| Hello, I tried emailing you @ hn@openunit.com and got about
| bounce back from google. That address isn't setup for outside
| addresses. Regards
| taylorcooney wrote:
| Thank you.
| jmarchello wrote:
| I spent some time working for a company in this exact space. My
| recommendation would be to integrate a 3rd party
| accounting/ledger management product rather than building your
| own. That stuff gets messy real quick and next thing you know
| you're dealing with accounting more than actually improving your
| core value offerings.
| taylorcooney wrote:
| I got pretty in-the-weeds with the accounting stuff[1], and had
| thought about reaching for a 3rd party ledger, like Gnucash[2]
| or beancount[3]. The basics are pretty simple, but I've tried
| to be thoughtful about the kinds of details that most companies
| get wrong when they're trying to do things like track balances:
| using floats for money, allowing transactions to be amended or
| deleted[4], etc. There's two parts to this puzzle: the
| accounting method you employ that keeps an audit (whether it be
| single or double entry accounting) and the rules governing
| accounting events that get trigger by the system.
|
| The latter is where real difficulty and liability lies; an
| event, such as a rental payment, triggers a series of
| transactions that must be financially sound and sufficient for
| meeting the expectations of an audit. There were a few other
| considerations but that really is the core framework. Where the
| real work begins is implementing the triggers, or events (like
| I mentioned above), that sets off a set of entries and making
| those financially sound. I've been able to achieve some basic
| rules exclusively for the self-storage space whose types of
| business transactions are very similar, but the truth of this
| can only be revealed by third party auditors. It leads me to
| believe that it's very difficult, if not impossible, to come up
| with a universal system for all businesses and industries since
| the events that trigger entries are specific to each system.
|
| Happy to riff on this a little more if you're interested!
|
| [1]:
| https://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger/accounting/tutorial.ht...
|
| [2]: http://www.austintek.com/gnucash/ncsa-gnucash-talk.html
|
| [3]:
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/100tGcA4blh6KSXPRGCZpUlyx...
|
| [4]: https://medium.com/@RobertKhou/double-entry-accounting-
| in-a-...
| applecore wrote:
| Great to finally see some competition in this space.
|
| Like a lot of other lesser-known industries, private equity has
| consolidated all the top self-storage software management
| solutions.
|
| SpareFoot acquired SiteLink[1]. The combined SpareFoot and
| SiteLink were acquired by Cove Hill Partners[2], a private equity
| firm founded in 2017, and merged with storeEDGE[3], a third
| company, to form Storable[4], the company behind SiteLink,
| storEDGE, and SpareFoot. Storable just acquired Easy Storage
| Solutions[5], a fourth company, a few months ago. SpareFoot,
| SiteLink, storEDGE, and Easy Storage Solutions are now all the
| same company.
|
| [1]: https://www.sparefoot.com/self-
| storage/blog/20604-sparefoot-...
|
| [2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/cove-hill-acquires-sparefoot-
| si...
|
| [3]: https://www.storedge.com/merger
|
| [4]: https://www.storable.com/
|
| [5]:
| https://www.insideselfstorage.com/suppliersvendors/storable-...
| agent_007 wrote:
| Thanks for this post. I own a self storage company and use Easy
| Storage Solutions and had no idea Storable recently acquired
| them. I enjoyed working with a smaller, privately owned
| software company. Knowing this has peaked my interest in Open
| Unit. Taylor - this could be a good marketing angle to take.
|
| I have submitted multiple feature requests to Easy Storage
| Solutions but none of them have been acted on. If you guys are
| open to feedback I'd love to get involved. We could use my
| facility as a testing ground. I have 250 units over 15k sq ft.
| taylorcooney wrote:
| We should connect over the next few days. I think this
| warrants a further conversation between our groups. Please
| send an email when you've got a moment - I can be reached at
| taylor@openunit.com. Since Day One, Lucas and I have included
| operators in the discussion to dictate the functionality and
| we'd love to have you included at the table as well.
| lucasplayford wrote:
| You've been watching the space, that's for sure!
|
| We definitely see that there is a large opportunity given the
| recent consolidation.
|
| There's been a huge reduction in the optionality available to
| storage owners and operators when it comes to choosing the
| software they need to run their businesses.
|
| Often when there is consolidation in a market you end up in a
| scenario where customers' voices are lost in the cacophony of
| competing interests. Sadly, this is often to the detriment of
| the smaller businesses.
|
| We're hoping to change that and be the partner that smaller
| operators can trust to help them succeed.
| daxaxelrod wrote:
| Platform makes sense to me, great work putting it together. I
| notice that you're only charging for basically stripe's
| transaction fee. Can you provide a bit more color as to your
| monetization strategy?
| lucasplayford wrote:
| Great question. We recognized revenue from the difference
| between the volume discount we get on our negotiated
| interchange rate and what is charged to the customer. For
| larger customers with more than a couple of facilities, we have
| SaaS fees for gated and premium features as well. Because our
| focus is serving the long tail of the self-storage market -
| mom-and-pops - we understand that much of the software
| currently available to them is either too expensive or too
| complicated for their smaller operations. We want to make sure
| that they have a simple pricing model that doesn't nickel and
| dime them for the core features that they rely on to run their
| businesses.
| ianmobbs wrote:
| Have you talked to mom-and-pops about this pricing model?
| Though "2.9% + $0.30 per transaction" isn't difficult to
| understand, if they've never heard of Stripe, it is difficult
| to understand _why_ that's what they're being charged. It
| might be easier to digest if given a flat monthly fee based
| on usage (e.g. $X for 100 units, $2X for 500 units, whatever)
| sharemywin wrote:
| My first professional software job was writing a windows version
| of of self storage management software in the 90s. It was pre-
| internet so the last thing I was working on was using pcAnywhere
| to connect to a central location to upload the nightly changes in
| the database.
|
| I also remember connecting to the gates was tricky.
| lucasplayford wrote:
| That's amazing!
|
| You'd be surprised (or maybe not), that there's still quite a
| bit of legacy software kicking around on stand alone desktops
| out there.
|
| Most facilities have shifted to the cloud, but there is still
| the odd facility that runs everything locally and processes
| their monthly rent roll manually.
|
| Gate and security system APIs are also much easier to work with
| now for sure.
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(page generated 2020-09-10 23:00 UTC)