It's a storage company that provides free pick-up and paid drop-off. How is that "Dropbox For Real Life"? Can I "sync" my stuff between multiple apartments?
These "It's like X for Y" comparisons are so frustratingly dumb.
I'm Sam the founder of MakeSpace. It's been a long day so my apologies for the delay.
3D printer jokes aside, I had the problem of not remembering where things were in my girlfriend's storage unit. A lot of storage customers have trouble remembering what's in the storage unit in the first place! (The lifetime average $PSA customer is 3 years and 50% of customers > 1 year). So the "access anywhere" analogy to Dropbox is what people (and not just tech people) like to reference when they hear us talk about it.
Also, to your point about "x for y," it works only for a certain type of crowd if both things are well known (and Dave McClure mentions that here: http://image.slidesharecdn.com/howtopitchavc-090321140851-ph...). A lot of YC companies do it when they pitch investors because it's a great way to connect quickly to their audience. When customers call up my 1-888 number; however, "Dropbox for real life" aren't the first words out of my mouth.
> A lot of YC companies do it when they pitch investors because it's a great way to connect quickly to their audience.
It works really well when there are strong parallels. When the comparison is weak (such as in this case) it can serve s a distraction with the audience spending time dissecting weaknesses in the metaphor.
If your metaphor sets up false expectations, explaining that 'actually, it's not like that' becomes a burden.
In support of this viewpoint, I offer an anecdote about the development of our product messaging.
Our product is a software + services reverse auction procurement solution (go, go enterprise market!). When we started out, our sales staff used a metaphor: "like eBay, but in reverse". Our current training instructs sales staff to avoid that metaphor at all cost, because there are more differences than there are similarities.
Your description is concise, and incredibly apt. That metaphor became a burden. Time during a pitch is incredibly valuable, whether it's in front of a VC or a customer. Time spent explaining how your product is not like something else involves a lot of negative language.
It's not like this...
... only it's more like...
You don't want to spend your time on these conversations. That's why we now train staff to avoid the metaphor, and to shut it down immediately if someone introduces it.
Great observation. You should take that to another thread where people are lamenting that the "It's like X for Y" pitch has jumped the shark. You've added nothing of value to the conversation with respect to this company's business model or the problem they are tackling.
People please don't upvote this stuff. You're hurting HN.
Unlimited upload, paid download. Definitely sounds like these guys were in the tech space before getting into the storage game. It's a good model for them.
And since this is being pitched as a real-life Dropbox, can they "sync" my things between different storage facilities using 3d scanners and printers? ;)
Manhattan Mini Storage does free trips to/from your storage unit, you just have to book in advance and fit into a van. It was awesome when I was using them.
Manhattan Mini does provide a free storage taxi, which I presume you got into and moved your stuff. We're trying to make it so you don't have to ever visit the storage unit again. So the van got you there, but you're still spending that beautiful saturday inside the concrete storage prison climbing over boxes to find that one thing you're looking for.
Also, from MMS regarding the van:
Keep in mind that the Storage Taxi provides a one-way trip, not a round-trip. For example, if you need to bring more items into storage, you would book the storage taxi to help you get the stuff there; getting home, though, you'd have to rely on the subway, a cab, your bicycle, or your own two legs to carry you.
Yeah, it's not the best, but it was good enough for my needs. If I was looking again I'd probably choose your service if you were cost-competitive.
Another place I looked at did storage by the cubic foot, so you'd never see the stuff in storage (and they could presumably save money by packing it better). Seems like that would be a great model for you to use for people who never actually go to their unit.
"long term storage. Cheaper than regular storage but not as accessible." We've thrown around "amazon glacier for storage" analogy a few times -- but only with the right crowd :)
Won't people just use them to store their junk and never ask for it back? How is that business model sustainable?
"Honey, where's that extra photo album?" "It's in storage, do you want to pay $29 to have them bring it over?"
The real problem is people have too much crap and are unwilling to get rid of what they don't use. I'm a data packrat but at least it only costs me a $100 3TB drive every few years.
EDIT: I should have read the article. The parent comment didn't mention the annual fee. That makes more sense.
For those of you in the Bay Area who want to try this out, Boxbee (https://boxbee.com/) is a similar service that operates in SF. Self-storage is a massive industry ($22B) and if you dig into the numbers they're pretty wild. Best of luck to them!
- Total self storage rentable space in the US is now 2.3 billion square feet
- 9% of all American households currently rent a self storage unit
- 7.3 sq.ft. of self storage space for every person in the US
The best part for operators (and the shitty part for consumers) is after you have their stuff, you can increase their rates every three to six months! What are they going to do, take it all back?
The real thing I love about it is that it's per-box pricing. The thing I hate about storage spaces is that if you get rid of some stuff in it, you are paying exactly the same amount. With Boxbee if you get rid of a couple of boxes, your bill goes down the next month.
If only we could. I could put one box at home and the other one on my desk. I could call my wife at home and ask her to put an awesome sandwich in the box, and then I could open my box at work and bam, there is my sandwich. Sweet.
But that's not what they did. Where's the "here's to the crazy ones"?
The pricing is definitely geared towards city living. $300/yr for 12cu ft of storage. I paid $600/yr for 600cu ft of storage at my local U-Haul. So about 25x wholesale/suburban prices. For the price, you get really easy web interface and almost no hassle pickup/delivery. If I lived in a city and had no storage, I would consider it but I don't know how much one can pack in just 3cu ft boxes.
I hope they offer larger boxes or rather, standard pallets. After all, the boxes will be storage in typical bins in a warehouse. Industrial warehouses rent out indoor pallet-sized bins (4ft x 4ft x 5ft = 80cu ft.) for about $12/mo. If they charge a customer $25/mo for 12cu ft and stack even 5 customers in one pallet (60 cu ft), they make $25*5 - $12 = $113 => 90%+ gross margin. This is just monthly storage. Of course the warehouse charges handling fees but they would certainly offer price breaks when 1000+ bins are rented out.
This can be a very profitable venture if the marketing and customer service is done right and their small apartment dwelling customers wouldn't have to rent a car or ask friends for a ride just to storage the christmas decorations each year. All in all, just what a real-world startup is supposed to be.
About four years ago, I used a service like this to move between homes [1]. It's particularly useful if your move out dates don't match up with your move in dates, and if you want to load/unload at a more leisurely pace. At first glance, the only difference seems to be the size of storage units, and maybe a bit more automation in the web interface.
The Pod moving/storage unit was basically in units of half-size shipping containers. They would deliver on a date, you'd move your stuff in, and schedule a pickup. Keep the unit in their facilities as long as you care to pay the rent, then kickoff the "download" process whenever you were ready.
$6.25 for a 3-cu ft. box (presumably something close to 18" per side) sounds like a really terrible deal.
Put it this way: as long as you let me look inside first to make sure you aren't storing anything that will get me arrested or burn my house down, you're welcome to store four 18" cubes in my garage for $25/month.
Sure, subject to reasonable limitations on the delivery radius. As long as I can call a cab and have them deliver your box(es) for $29 or less, we've got a deal.
I like the idea a lot, in principle, but the rates amount to robbery. Hopefully some other competitors will disrupt this particular "disruptor" by offering the same service at a more reasonable price.
I don't think this is a new concept. I used "The Box Butler" when I moved to NY about 4 years ago. They would pick up and drop off and even supply boxes to store the stuff in. It wasn't the cheapest thing ever but it was convenient.
There's something of a win here for just not having to deal with the storage facility, at all, yourself.
The contracts for those things are long and confusing, the people I've dealt with there are incompetent, and the one on 12th Ave in Seattle smells like piss pretty much constantly.
Thats probably more money than the size of the whole European self-storage industry. I'm really curious, why are these services so popular in the US? What do you store there? When? E.g. when I have something I don't want to get rid of just yet (furniture, spare parts...), I put it in the basement of our apartment house. Although, I can imagine using self-storage when moving.
New York apartments can have very little storage space when I was looking for a studio some had one small closet and no bathroom storage at all. People I know use them for out of season sports stuff and clothes, especially couples where two people are sharing one small closet.
Tom Litton, for example, still keeps four storage units himself, at two facilities, all of them 10-by-30 units. I asked what’s inside... “I’ve got some of my old clothes that I probably wouldn’t wear anyway,” he continued, and some trophies from college. “I also have some old cassette tapes that I produced.”
The cassettes are like audiobooks, he explained — tutorials on how to get into the storage industry and succeed. He made them before the storage-facility building boom ended a couple of years ago. “They didn’t sell,” Litton said, “so they’re all in storage now.”
All right, so I faced the storage problem during last year. I moved 2 times and I will move a third in March. I am single, live in Europe, I change countries a lot.
I would use this service if it were more flexible. For instance, I have a 20kg inflatable canoe that I carried around from Frankfurt to Munich, from Munich to Bruges and in March from Bruge to Munich. I use the canoe only few times a year. If I could pay few bucks per month to live it somewhere and then ship it with UPS (at good prices), it would be big for me.
More importantly, if I had a place somewhere in Germany, I would buy a foldable canoe. The same with other stuff like furniture and all, all stuff I would have liked to buy but I couldn't as I move so much.
I am sure they are really taking advantage of single instance storage here. If they get two copies of the same thing there isn't any reason to keep both around.
These "It's like X for Y" comparisons are so frustratingly dumb.