Three years ago, entrepreneur Sam Rosen had to deal with a lot of stuff. Literally.
When Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast, his ex-girlfriend had to move out of Hoboken, N.J. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had condemned her home, and everything she owned was being packed into boxes. Rosen remembers the whole ordeal being a logistical nightmare.
“I moved out all of the stuff she had into a traditional public storage building,” Rosen says. “And when I asked her where her snow boots were, she had no idea. We couldn’t go back to storage and look because it required so much effort. In traditional storage, you just put things in a box like a big closet.”
That’s when Rosen realized that most public storage isn’t focused on the customer. On top of that, it’s costly and time-consuming to pick up and drop off items, especially without a car.
So Rosen and his co-founder Rahul Gandhi launched MakeSpace, a startup that provides on-demand pickup and drop off to their storage units. They currently have warehouses in several cities across the U.S., including Jersey City, Brooklyn, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.
When Gandhi jumped on board three years ago, he was the father of one-year-old twins. Going from a cushy job at a venture capital firm to driving a van was tough, but what convinced him was his longstanding friendship with Rosen.
“For me,” Gandhi says, “it was always about the dynamics of the team, whether they care about disrupting the market and are they going to be the ones to break down walls.”
The company tracks all your packed-away belongings, making it easier to find not just your snow boots, but anything else. You can snap a photo of each individual item, or the company can take an aerial-view photo of all your stuff.
When you need something from storage, the app and website let you highlight the item and schedule a drop-off time. A rating system similar to Uber lets you rank the drivers.
“With traditional self-storage, it’s like driving your car to a parking lot,” says Gandhi. “With MakeSpace, it’s like someone driving your car to a valet.”
As the company has added more customers, the original team of two has expanded to 75.
“There were many challenges,” Gandhi says. “But the moment we knew there was something big was when more than 20 employees were pounding the table saying, ‘This is real.’”
Photo credit: Makespace