If you’ve ever been to SXSW or any other major festival that involved going from venue to venue in one city, you probably had the problem of extra baggage that you were forced to drag around with you. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a place you could inexpensively ditch it while you continued on to various panels, screenings and concerts during the day?
There is! A new startup called BOUNCE has launched in Austin – a platform for booking daily and hourly storage for people to leave their things when they’re out and about in the city. The company has 50+ locations currently in New York, Chicago and D.C. hosted by small businesses that have extra space designated for storing things securely with Bounce and has launched in multiple locations throughout Austin, TX. The locations can be accessed on the web app at http://www.usebounce.com or through their mobile app.
Co-founder Cody Candee, along with co-founder & CTO Aleksander Rendtslev, started working on Bounce last August after realizing how much demand and interest there was in a solution to this problem. Candee said he had always wanted to go to SXSW and thought there was a perfect opportunity to pitch BOUNCE. He said “I always wanted to go, so I thought I should just go ahead and pull the trigger. So the week before, myself and a colleague dialed a bunch of places in Austin and invited them to sign up for BOUNCE. And then I showed up to Austin. I actually brought a big outdoor sidewalk sign with me, the one you see outside of Austin Mac Works.”
He continued “I brought the sign on the plane with me, and then we started writing content for the Austin landing page, and there it was.” When asked how it works, he said “Basically, we partner with local hotel and business owners, and if they have extra space, they can host a Bounce.”
Bounce’s app is straightforward, you simply open it on your phone and designate which city you are in. Currently there are six locations in Austin that have signed up with Bounce, hotels and retail stores from downtown all the way up to the Annandale area in north central Austin. For example, one location is a retail store in the Seaholm District, but the exact location is not revealed until the bags are booked. It costs $5.90 per day for one bag, and $11.90 for 2.
That’s a small price to pay to reduce the hassle of extra luggage, and has encouraged locations all over the country to sign up as locations to drop off.Small businesses also gain extra sales from additional foot traffic for being a partner and location on the Bounce platform as well as a commission for every bag stored.
Candee said “you can open the app and find the location most convenient to you. You pay and reserve online and then it tells you exactly where to go and what to do.” A store employee will tag your bag “and then that basically works like a coat rack. You’ll have a unique number, so when you come back to retrieve your bags later in the day, you just show them that number.”
If a location wants to be added to the Bounce website, they apply to be a store partner through the website
Candee said “It’s only a couple of questions. And then from there someone on our team will get in touch and we’ll make sure they have good space. It really doesn’t take a lot from folks. You know, we’ve had folks who have a small space that really want to do it and can only store a maximum of 10 bags, but if they’re a great location, we’ll still let them on the platform. We make sure their hours are good and interesting and we’ll also look at their Yelp and Google reviews to make sure that they have good customer service. There’s no recurring costs and we give them revenue for every item in store.” A major benefit to the smaller stores is they get valuable foot traffic through the door.
Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio and McAllen locations will be launched later this year.
