“A Network of Luggage Storage Locations At Local Shops & Stores” with Cody Candee of Bounce Inc.

Jeffrey (0s):
Well, welcome back Radio Entrepreneurs, listeners. My name again is Jeffrey Davis. I’m the host of Radio Entrepreneurs and also founder of Mage LLC management consulting firm since 1985, working with over 700 leaders of private family owned businesses. Non-profits for the development of their organizations, our next guest, Cody candee CEO and founder of Bounce, Inc. Welcome Cody. Thanks for having me, you know, Cody, I was reading about the business and it was quite interesting, but I couldn’t completely figure out how you’re doing what you do. So why don’t you describe it to our list?

Cody (41s):
Yeah, absolutely. So our core business is luggage storage and local shops and hotels. So when you’re traveling maybe on checkout day or check-in day, or even just when you have a layover, you might find yourself in a situation where you have all your bags with you, and maybe you checked out of your hotel and are going to a different part of town or you’re staying in an Airbnb. What do you do with all your stuff? You know, maybe you’re going to business meetings. Maybe you want it to be more sightseeing as to when you go to our app bounce, you can find this bounce backstory, or you go to our website and basically you can find locations all around the city. So in New York, for example, we have over a hundred locations in Boston.

Cody (1m 21s):
We have over 25 locations. So pretty much every neighborhood. So yeah, you should open our app, find a place to store your things, walk on and leave your bags. They’ll tag them. There’ll be backed by our $10,000 insurance policy. And off you go, and all the shops are powered by local businesses that have, you know, existing local businesses that have opening hours. So you just hop in whenever, you know, whatever’s convenient for you and they make extra money out of the deal. So an extra foot traffic. So it, it works well on, on both sides.

Jeffrey (1m 54s):
I can see that benefit. So do they help finance the whole thing? B shops?

Cody (2m 0s):
No, we, we, our, our sell to them is they never, we never charged them a dollar. We just literally send new customers straight into their door and then pay them a commission on every bag that they store with us.

Jeffrey (2m 12s):
So, but the people storing the bags pay a fee, correct?

Cody (2m 16s):
That’s correct. Yeah. We charged her ah, about $6 per bag per day know

Jeffrey (2m 21s):
Quite interesting. You know, you don’t think about someone starting a business like this, what’s your background that led you to this particular point?

Cody (2m 31s):
Yeah. So two big parts of my background. One is I was working in tech my whole career. I started my career in product management into it, big fortune 500 tech company out in the San Francisco bay area. And through that experience. And also personally, I traveled a lot when Intuit, I lived in India and London and a couple of places in California, and then personally I’ve traveled to over 50 countries. And so through all of, I just kind of a really stopped owning a lot of stuff because I was moving around so much really adopted this minimalist philosophy and basically saw over and over again, how often people plan their days around their things and thought that’s, that’s crazy.

Cody (3m 15s):
And you know, let’s build, let’s build something to solve that you do this all by yourself. I started with a co-founder. You still have a co-founder he’s he’s not a, he’s not a part of it anymore, but now we’re 19 members. Wow.

Jeffrey (3m 33s):
That’s interesting. And how many cities are you in? 300. So how do you plan that rollout? How did it all work? And what’s the plan? Yes.

Cody (3m 45s):
So it started, we officially launched February, 2019 and we were, we did a product hunt launch. We’re lucky enough to be the number one product of the day. I think we were in three cities at that time, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. And then throughout the rest of 2019, we expanded all across the us covering most major cities, maybe all major cities. And yeah, basically folks were saying, oh, I love bounce. I just wish I could use it in more places. And so we got really aggressive on expansion. And then last year, 2020, despite this pandemic, we actually expanded all across Europe, Australia and a little bit of Asia. Wow.

Cody (4m 25s):
So how big could this be? Yes. So there are, the travel is a massive, massive multi-billion dollar industry. And we estimate that just a luggage store short part of it would be in the single digit billions. But quite frankly, when we, when we kind of really win the luggage storage market and accomplish our goals there, that’s really just the first step for us. We see ourselves powering this network of storage locations far bigger than Starbucks or McDonald’s or any other big chains out there. But we want to have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of locations, and then build services for consumers.

Cody (5m 7s):
On top of that, this year, we already launched a new service package, acceptance and local shops. So now if you live in a city like New York, where maybe you’re in a building that doesn’t have a doorman and you have issues with package theft or missed deliveries, you can ship your packages to a nearby bounce location and never have to kind of go chasing around the city again for your packages. And again, it makes the stores extra money and extra foot traffic. And it’s easy for us to add on top of our existing storage network.

Jeffrey (5m 37s):
Very interesting. We’ve been speaking to we’re speaking with Cody candy CEO and founder of bounce, Inc. Is there a lot of competition in what you’re doing

Cody (5m 48s):
In the luggage George market? There’s a couple of players, particularly in Europe,

2 (5m 54s):
But

Cody (5m 55s):
Yeah, we’ve, we’ve been able to kind of really hit the ground running and, and not have to worry about them too much. What’s do you have a competitive advantage? You know, I think a lot of the things that have really helped us execute have been a lot of the, a lot of like mentorship and a lot of just learnings from my career in tech and tech around just like building from asset scale, thinking really big lean based testing. And so, yeah, I think those are the things that have really propelled us.

2 (6m 32s):
Wow. And

Jeffrey (6m 35s):
Again, you know, I know I’m going back a little bit. Was there something that happened the moment that sort of it sprung to you to create this idea? What was the impetus for all that?

Cody (6m 46s):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So with the context of the travel and the, the, the work that I started with the sort of light bulb moment was when I was living in San Francisco and I was getting, I was going to a happy hour with some colleagues after work and someone said, oh, I’m going to join, but I’m going to go all the way home first, just to drop off my backpack with my laptop, because I don’t want to, I don’t want to have it with me the rest of the night, who knows where we’re going afterwards. So he went, he went like 30 minutes each way, a couple of taxis or Uber’s. And I was just like, wow, what a waste of time and money. And it’s crazy that this hasn’t like, it’s crazy that there are really like no good alternatives to this. Either carry your bag or you bring it all the way home.

Cody (7m 28s):
And so that was the moment where I was like, oh, wow. Yeah, there should definitely be something here. And also, I, I sort of came up with the vision of, you know, can we build this sort of crazy network called computing for the physical world of distributed storage everywhere and the ability, the ability to summon things away from you and to you instantly.

Jeffrey (7m 47s):
Interesting. Interesting. If people were looking for you, how would they find you?

Cody (7m 53s):
Yeah. So our website is use bounce.com U S E V O unc.com. And then the app store it’s bounce bag storage and yeah, I’m on Twitter, Cody Candee. That’s two E’s at the end. C O D Y C a N D E E. And yeah, we’d love to hear from folks.

Jeffrey (8m 13s):
Very good, very convenient. And as I hearing from people we’re starting to travel again. It’s quite, quite nice to have that happen. I just went to New York a couple of times and other cities, and it’s good to have this. We’re speaking with Cody candee CEO of founder of Bounce, Inc. And if you want to find Cody after this interview, you can also find him on the radio entrepreneurs.com a website on radio entrepreneurs on LinkedIn, Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, iTunes, Google podcasts, and Stitcher, which I’m sure Cody is going to join the radio entrepreneurs network. So Cody, I want to thank you for being on the show today. Bernie interesting idea. I like it like shepherd, remind everybody.

Jeffrey (8m 54s):
This is Radio Entrepreneurs.