Show HN: StowShare – The Airbnb of Storage | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: StowShare – The Airbnb of Storage

getstowshare.com

59 pointsTristanMB64 comments

Out of college I worked on the finance side of a self storage investment company (thank god I left after 4 years), so I know the ins and outs of the business.

The number one deciding factor for customers is location. Coming in a close second is security. In a far distant third is price.

Self storage employees can only access your unit in the event of an emergency, eviction, or a warrant from law enforcement.

For self storage facility owners, one of the top up-sells is insurance. Almost everyone buys it, again, for security (and peace of mind).

Unfortunately, this idea decreases security rather than solving one of the biggest customer pain points of renting a storage unit.

Self-storage businesses are not universal. There are plenty of countries where they don’t really exist at all for individuals (only for corporate customers). There, people who are moving out of their flats and e.g. going abroad for a year and need to stash their stuff, are used to just finding someone with some spare space in his basement or garage. In my experience, people don’t really seem concerned about security; the real valuable stuff might be left with a family member while what goes into the storage space is just the furniture, kitchen stuff, and books.

But since finding a storage place is already a pretty standard part of the local Craigslist/OLX website in these countries, there isn’t much room for a new website to come in and disrupt things.

> In my experience, people don’t really seem concerned about security;

> But since finding a storage place is already a pretty standard part of the local Craigslist/OLX website in these countries, there isn’t much room for a new website to come in and disrupt things

it sounds like the markets you are describing only function for people who don't value security, which means that there is a potentially huge unfullfilled market for people who DO value security.

it soudns like there is lots of room for a new website to come in and disrupt things, as long as they cater towards the market that values security.

Hey man! thanks so much for the feedback. Eventually, I will have coverage for your stuff included in our services, for free. I would really appreciate if you had any ideas on how I could increase security - maybe with something like a security seal on all boxes?

> one of the top up-sells is insurance

That's because most storage facilities require insurance and no one is trying to buy it on their own, so they accept whatever the facility offers them.

That might be the case now but it certainly was not back when I worked in the industry 2005-2009

PS if you are Anand, I love my Kurt leather whites :)

Why wouldn't you be able to add insurance to an idea like this? Sounds like an obvious thing to me ...

Uh, lack of insurers willing to backstop this kind of nonsense: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276631

Interestingly the article linked to states that the company in question started providing relevant insurance in response to this case. So appears what you are saying is not entirely correct.

https://blog.kitsplit.com/announcing-kitsplit-theft-protecti...

They self-insured; different than finding an existing insurance house that would cover it.

Also makes sense as they are in the best position to estimate the risk.

There is a vast supply of mom & pop local self-storage (to say nothing of the giants like Public Storage). The US is flooded with modestly priced self-storage units. The market is hyper fragmented, which prevents prices from rising very much.

I don't understand where this tag line is coming from:

> Traditional storage units can be far away, overpriced, and have contracts.

Contracts are ideal, you absolutely want contracts. It's crazy to store your stuff with someone without a contract (that both spells out a period of time that you are guranteed to have the unit space, and makes clear all manner of liability and security issues).

It's unlikely that you have to go very far to find local self-storage, anywhere in the US, short of an extreme scenario like being in the middle of nowhere Wyoming. Even the smallest of towns in Appalachia will have numerous self-storage providers at a fair price.

"Hey bro, we aren't storing my drug-lab at my place" "Don't worry man, I know a place."

Good luck though. I'd much rather store some furniture for people than have them sleep in my house.

"Hey bro, awesome that you decided to store this expensive item X, I think I'm going to take it for myself, and you can't prove that you stored it or that you yourself didn't take it out".

Furniture full of drugs and money

Free drugs and money!

Free furniture!

very good point, I will have to think of a way to prevent this

Bufferoverflow raises a good point with regards to stealing too. How can you prove you left diamonds at someone’s place and they took them or the other way around that they didn’t take them?

I worked at an incubator with a peer to peer storage play about 6 years ago.

There were quite a few storage startups in other cities that were not peer to peer and, I contend, they had a better model as the costs made more sense when you centralize to a single facility.

GoBox was it's name: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/gobox

I don't know much about what they're doing today but it looks like their site redirects to a centralized traditional storage company. Perhaps the fate of peer to peer storage to come.

I would have a hard time trusting other people to store any more than useless garbage I don't need anymore anyway. What are the plans of the company to deal with possible huge amounts of theft complaints?

> What are the plans of the company to deal with possible huge amounts of theft complaints?

Probably "theft as a service", like KitSplit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276631

Voluntary Parting, baby.

As mentioned in response to your other comment KitSplit did appear to address this:

https://blog.kitsplit.com/announcing-kitsplit-theft-protecti...

> We’ve built an incredibly effective vetting system that has stopped the vast majority of voluntary parting thieves. As a result voluntary parting is extremely rare, .02% or about 1 in 5000

Is it just me or does this seem not rare at all? If you rent your gear 100 times on kitsplit, there is a 2% chance it will be stolen.

If renting a 3,500 USD camera costs 70 USD, the return is 2%, so less voluntary parting rate of 0.02% this is still 1.98%. Or in other words, KitSplit can theoretically cover the risks by taking an additional 1% of the profit earned by the person renting out the camera.

I think it’s hard to summarize accurately. Often you find a regular renter and they’re very reliable. Most of my rentals were repeat vs first time.

Would I be liable for illegal things I store for others that I know nothing about?

That's a fantastic question, I would love to know that as well. My worrying suspicion is that yes, you are. I've never heard of prosecutors needing to prove knowledge for drug posession charges.

Even if storers aren't liable, there's a very high chance you would be arrested and potentially charged, and the charges would later be dropped. Assuming we're talking about a big illegal thing here like child pornography or large amounts of drugs, that is. I don't see any way the police seize something like that and don't arrest anyone at the scene.

yes and this is a fantastic point. I will have to think of something to prevent or minimize this.

When I read the headline I thought this would be a sort of P2P Dropbox. Now maybe that's an idea...

Regardless, best of luck!

We are doing exactly that ;) Have a look, it might be interesting --> https://business.cubbit.io

this looks great. good luck to you guys

Thank you so much, to you too

Same here. For instance I have a server with 4TB of storage and use less than 1TB of that, it would be cool to be able to "lease" out a block of space to a company that would pay a few dollars a month. There would need to be speed minimums and such, but interesting idea.

Filecoin?

Site appears cut off on mobile Firefox. Also, spelling correction, the 'a' and 'part' should be apart.

It shouldn't be apart, meaning a way from. "Become a part of something great", not "become away from something great".

It could be phrased as "become a piece of something great"

Seems like a great idea but there seems to be no sense or idea of security at all.

How are you ensuring my items will be available at the same spot in the next x months? Do you have contracts in place that mandates the host stay at a certain location for the next year or length of my storage?

You should require hosts to provide lease and income statements to verify that they will be able to pay for their storage space. You should also require hosts to have basic security such as proper locks and cameras. It would also be a good idea to require pictures of the storage boxes with dates every month or so.

As for preventing illegal items from being stored, you shouldn’t look or inspect your customer’s items. You should have them sign a contract stating they didn’t store anything illegal and that you are not responsible for any such items as they do at self storage companies. You should definitely consult a lawyer before doing all this. Having no security measures in place is a great way to get sued in the future for damages.

Finally as someone stated already you need insurance. People will never store anything with you unless you have insurance and security. It doesn’t matter if they’re giving back to the community. People want their valuables to be safe.

Sorry for the rant but I just wanted to suggest a few things as a current customer of self storage.

Neat concept, best of luck! You may want to check out https://www.neighbor.com/ as well.

thanks! and yes, neighbor just didn't impress me, for the 3 years they have been around.

Storage units are fairly cheap and common pretty much everywhere (At least where I live) - so what is the advantage of using this?

- you can become a host and make money storing peoples stuff - the money would be going back into the community instead of a traditional storage facility - those who don't have storage units near them can now have access to affordable storage - no contracts, hidden fees, or BS.

I think it's the same argument as Airbnb made when people said hotels are fairly cheap and common everywhere.

> Traditional storage units can be far away

FYI you're competing with services that come to you, such as

- Taxibox

- Smartbox

You're probably already aware of those, but heads up just in case.

Also, since they are mobile, the long term storage doesn't need premium real estate / to be close to the customer.

Really nice looking site and an interesting concept. Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to trust a stranger with my stuff.

Good luck though!

thank you! eventually, we will have the host have their ID verified, much like airbnb does.

I think that would definitely go towards helping build consumer confidence in the service.

Did you make this with bubble.io? Asking because I get the same cloudflare notice when using Firefox tracking protection.

> Your browser was unable to load some necessary resources

If so, what was the experience like building something a bit more involved? (though I guess this would be possible using one of their templates).

I am by no means a coder, but I can use adobe applications with no problem, and this was very fun to use. highly recommend it

Cool, that is interesting. Nice to see it being used. I've been playing around with it and it seems very useful.

The bottom of the page notes "Built without code on Bubble" so it looks like you are right.

Also, quicklinks in message apps generate bubble stuff

This exact thing was on dragons den in the UK https://www.storemates.co.uk Didn't really do very well but is still going. There's also companies like stasher.com which started like this and pivoted.

I would use this, today, if it were in Auckland.

Chicken and egg problem - what I'm saying is hold on :)

Website doesn’t render properly on mobile Safari (iPhone) on first load.

Built with Bubble.io -- it's nice to see cool stuff being done in low-code.

it was really fun making it

there was a startup for this in germany called shelfsailor they became lagerfinden.com afaik

great idea

thanks!

"Airbnb for storage"

i knew you were putting in the hn title, so we could all relate, but you have that quote right on your site... are you even allowed to say that? aren't you infringing on Airbnb?

i don't know about this... as others have pointed out, i wouldn't want someone sending me something illegal and getting int trouble for storing it. best of luck though.

It's only infringing on airbnb if it confuses the consumer into thinking that the service is offered by airbnb.

Pretty sure Airbnb owns the trademark on "Airbnb" so you can't use it this way. You might be able to get away with comparing your service to Airbnb in the context of a "testimonial" or something, but almost certainly not in a tag line.

will change it now

edit: it is changed now

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