The Storage Investor Show
Learn how to turn your cash into cash flow with self-storage and small bay industrial. If it has a roll-up door, The Storage Investor Show covers it. Your host, Kris Bennett, will ask the right questions to help you find, fund, and close your next deal. New episodes every Tuesday.
The Storage Investor Show
AI in Self-Storage: A Conversation with Mason Levy, CEO of Swivel
BBi Constructors provides expert GC and design-build services for self-storage and commercial real estate, delivering projects on time, on budget, and with confidence.
Learn more at: https://bbiconstructors.com/contact/
DESCRIPTION
In this episode of the Storage Investor Show, host Kris Bennett welcomes Mason Levy, the founder and CEO of Swivl. They discuss Swivl's innovative AI-powered platform designed to enhance customer interactions in the self-storage industry. Mason shares his entrepreneurial journey, from his background in conversational AI to launching Swivl and integrating it with facility management systems. They explore the practical applications of AI in self-storage, from answering customer queries to facilitating rentals and payments, and the potential for technology to drive both cost savings and revenue growth for operators. The conversation also touches on the challenges of building a tech company, funding strategies, and the importance of having a supportive team. Tune in to learn how Swivl is revolutionizing customer engagement in self-storage and how operators can start implementing automation in their facilities.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Mason Levy, CEO of Swivl, is passionate about solving customer problems in the self-storage industry utilizing AI. His team leverages cutting-edge consumer technologies to empower and engage with customers and employees.
https://www.tryswivl.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/masonlevy/
BOOK A CACTUS DEMO
Cactus will save you hours per deal with clean comps, rent data, and intuitive analysis tools—all in one sleek platform.
Book a free demo using my link and see why top investors are switching to Cactus: https://www.trycactus.com/
NEWSLETTER
Get tips to help you turn your cash into cash flow with The Storage Investor Show Newsletter
https://storageinvestorshow.com/newsletter
Welcome to the Storage Investor Show. My guest today is Mason Levy. He is the founder and CEO of Swivel. You can visit their website, trieswivelcom. Check them out. They're not sponsoring the episode I wanted to have him on. We actually tried numerous times to get him on the show. I think his automation with customer service et cetera is very, very cool. For you guys who own self-storage and for those of you guys who are looking to get into self-storage, this is a tool that you should really really check out. So we'll talk about the ins and outs of it, what it is, how it helps owners, how it helps investors bring that money to the bottom line, which is also very, very important. Given the time that we're in In self-storage, it's pretty difficult to make some deals work.
Speaker 2:But Mason, welcome to the show. Oh, Chris, I appreciate you having me Next time.
Speaker 1:maybe we'll just let the AI systems coordinate for us, since we're both busy people. That's it, man. For some of you guys who don't know, we tried like four times. I think we've been working on this for like four months or something ridiculous, so last time I screwed up. So I do confess that I messed up the schedule, but glad we're here now. Mason, give us a quick 60 seconds on your background. If I look at your LinkedIn profile, there isn't too much in there about storage. I'm just curious how you got into the business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I'm a serial entrepreneur, so Swivel's my third startup. All three of them have been conversational AI driven. Really early on in my entrepreneurial career, I fell in love with just understanding how humans communicate and that's what I've dedicated my life to or my professional career to, at least and we got into the industry, like a lot of people, through stumbling. I've been a customer of self-storage for a really long time. I've crossed state lines, I think going on like 10 times in the last like nine to ten years. So, like, I've used it. I still use it every day. Um, but yeah, like, like a lot of like entrepreneurial stories.
Speaker 2:We we stumbled into it. Um, extra space was our first customer. We uh got contacted by their uh marketing or like external marketing team in order to build a bot for them on their uh like marketing and blog pages, and so we started there and, like most good entrepreneurs, you try to figure out if you can resell the thing. And StoreQuest William Warren, was our number two customer and it was all downhill from there. We've really loved being in the industry since, like I said, about 2018. Completely verticalized Late 2019, started integrating into all the facility management systems, and so it's been a really fun journey. I'm sure we can dig into all the nuances of all of that, but that's kind of the shortest version of how we got here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you were building. I want to make sure I understand. So you were building chatbots previous to the storage industry and Extra Space contacted you kind of randomly. Is that how that started?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I mean to be a little bit more specific. You know, my first business was in healthcare. Second company was in the horticulture space and, like after we exited that company, we realized that, hey, we want to go sell a horizontal platform with kind of two big hairy assumptions. The main kind of problems that we saw building conversational AI was like number one in yesteryear, when you wanted to build response mechanisms. Everything was hard coded, so when you wanted to go and make changes to it or hit database to get real time information, you needed engineers in order to go and do that. And so we started building a system that allowed for, you know, semi-analytical people that have non-technical skills to build and adjust these things on the fly, really experiment with workflows and different things within the response mechanisms. And then the second kind of big hairy assumption that we wanted to go solve was really how do these systems learn? And so ChatGPT has made the system kind of famous, for lack of a better term, but we've been doing it for about eight years. It's reinforcement learning with human feedback. This is how they train very large data models. And so we started building an interface for again, to allow these non-technical teams to engage and rapidly deploy new versions of machine learning models.
Speaker 2:And I have a mentor advisor who you know. He always tells me whenever we launch a new feature or product, you got to go find your dirty dozen. And what he means by that is you got to go find your first 12 paying customers understand the correlations between them, understand why they're purchasing, why they're not purchasing, and the whole point is to try to find patterns in that early stage. And we were horizontal. Our assumption was we were going to sell into enterprise customers. Extra Space was one of them, but Cox Communications out of Atlanta, huge Telecom was another one, jb Hunt was another one. We were building machine vision models and audio models for those two companies respectively. We had the Gore companies, a financial institution out of Baltimore, so we had kind of customers all over the place.
Speaker 2:And you know, again a third party marketing agency that works for Extra Space contacted us through one of the other systems that we had deployed on another company's website, saying, hey, we like this tool, can we see it? And that was kind of the start right. And again, part of that dirty dozen is to try to find repeatability. And so you start building use case documents. The model started getting really performant really quickly. And then we went to an SSA show in Vegas, I think around 2018 or 19. And we just walked around the floor and we're like man, there's something here that we can go and do. And again, all of kind of my co-founders also have some relationship with the product. Right, I've crossed state lines a lot.
Speaker 2:I have a co-founder who you know spent most of the pandemic with his now wife living the RV life. They use self-storage a lot to allow for that type of a lifestyle. We just fell in love with the industry. I ask people a lot of times how they get in it and you hear similar stories. You stumble in it and then you never leave.
Speaker 1:Exactly, yeah, most people don't try to get into self-storage. I think when you guys were probably starting out, you were like, hey, we could build this for a storage REIT. That probably never crossed anybody's mind until they reached out to you and then you realized, hey, there's a whole ocean of people in this industry who, like you said, stumble into it and never leave. I love it.
Speaker 2:It's really exciting from a technology perspective too. I think even pre-pandemic, I'd say. If you asked most people they'd think from a technology perspective, self-storage is a laggard industry on that crossing the chasm curve. I love talking to operators because I really do think in five years we will be on the innovation curve. We were one of the first spaces and industries to move to remote, virtually managed. There's big pushes in that. I think the technology is coming along that's going to allow for us to lead other verticals later on, and so it's just a really exciting time to be building tech for self-storage operators.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so talk about let's apply it to self-storage now. What do you guys, in a nutshell, elevator pitch, what do you guys do and how do you do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're a AI-powered engagement platform and that's kind of a little bit of word soup. At the end of the day, you can think of us as an intelligence layer that engages with your customers, regardless of what channel they're talking to you at. So we have QR codes at the location that people can scan to start an interaction with you.
Speaker 2:Obviously, web chat is what we've become kind of known for. It's how we introduced ourselves as that chat bot in the bottom right or left corner of the website. But we'll pick up the phone and answer the phone for you with an AI voice agent. We'll send emails and our agents, our AI agents they're the first line of defense for your human team. So every action that your human team could potentially do, we're going to try to deflect. But the key kind of component here is, ever since day zero, we've always had a big belief that you know at any point in time that somebody wanted to get involved with a human. The ability and mechanisms needed to be built into the system, and so you know escalations from an AI perspective, a customer perspective or a human agent, like in your contact center, are all super, super easy and seamless to ensure?
Speaker 1:Okay, give us an example. So somebody is on the website, they want to rent a unit. Do they then interact? Can they then interact with Swivel and one of the AI agents at that time? And then what are some of the? I feel like using chatbots in the past. There's some limitations there with what can be answered in the questions. It will say you know you ask a question. It says you know, wait while I'm connecting you with a customer service representative, and they're kind of limited. How does Swivel work when a customer wants to rent a unit online?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love digging into the specifics. I appreciate that. Let's talk about the rental process, right? Like a lot of times, this is going to start not even just by them saying hey, I want to chat. You know, we're going to have that little widget down in the bottom right and we're going to pop up a call to action. You know, after some amount of time somebody spent on the website or some, you know, action that they took on the website is going to trigger this thing to pop up and kind of start the engagement. So it's proactively engaging this kind of persona already and you're going to ask, just like you know a human would ask I described this as kind of the Apple store employee for your website right, hey, how are you doing today and how can I help you?
Speaker 2:When you walk into an Apple store, you're always greeted by a blue shirt, very similar, and in this instance, maybe you know, the customer says I'm looking for storage. What size do I need to store a two-bedroom apartment? I've got a couch, I've got a TV, some other large furniture and a number of boxes. Our model's going to understand somebody wants to check inventory. They want to understand storage size. We're going to reply back in context with that appropriate size, probably a 10 by 15, maybe a 10 by 20, depending on what large appliances you have. We'll collect a zip code, show them locations around that zip code. They can select, you know, to change that radius as much as they want. And then we're actually pulling real live inventory from your facility management system. So we're going to show, filtered, you know, those 10 by 15s, 10 by 20s at that location they selected and the system will even allow for a follow-up question. Right, and understand that context. So you know an example that I love to give.
Speaker 2:Maybe somebody comes in after that initial statement and says you know, this unit's actually for my mom. She recently broke her ankle. Do you have any units that I could drive up to? And again we're going to show that empathy and we're going to say you know what we have, drive up units at location A at Hoover Properties. This is perfect for easy loading and unloading for somebody that's in your mom's situation.
Speaker 2:And then we're going to show that inventory carousel, again with active inventory, real-time pricing from your facility management system, already filtered so that 10 by 15, 10 by 20 drive up unit is going to be showcased. They hit that reserve now button. You know, when we show that inventory carousel, we we see about a 23 to 25 percent click-through rate on that button. Uh, that means we're collecting contact information which, even if they don't complete the purchase at that point in time, then triggers a whole bunch of other fun interactions that we can do with abandoned carts. We can do automatic outreach via text, email, phone calls, all with our AI platform. So it's super engaging for just that salesperson.
Speaker 1:Are there any limitations? And when the limitations are reached, what is the protocol that Swivl takes to help answer those questions that the customer may have?
Speaker 2:Sure, every technology has limitations. I don't want our bots to answer questions about elephants or what color the sky is or how the weather is looking today.
Speaker 1:So random yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, you maybe are, or would not, be surprised at the types of questions people ask in those boxes on a website at four o'clock in the morning, yeah, but we see everything, but there are some limitations, you know. The statistic that I'd give you is you know, in 2024, we did about seven and a half million self-storage conversations and a half million self-storage conversations. Our automation rate so how often we're able to respond to a customer's question is around 85% to 90%, and so there's 15% give or take that we're not answering. And these might be very, very specific questions like hey, I just got a divorce, we share a unit. I need to do X, y and Z, I need to lock this person out.
Speaker 2:It's like you know those intricate things. We want a human involved there, regardless, right, it's complicated, and so what we're trying to do is not be 100% all the time. What we want is to take the gate code of inquiries, the size questions Do you have an available? Five by five? Is it climate controlled? Do I need to wrap, like all the things that we see all the time in this industry, that we just know that you know somebody that's a new customer that's never been or never stored before just wants to understand. Another, you know, very regular indicator that we have a lot of first time shoppers interacting with our platform from a sales perspective is you know they're interested in. You know the contract length Is this month a month. Can I store for six months? Do I get a discount if I assign a 12-month lease? These are very common questions that we're going to have built into the system and ready to answer and obviously the operators have the ability to adjust those responses appropriately, layered with large language models to give context and empathy to the conversation as well.
Speaker 1:So then, how does? I'm envisioning two scenarios one where you have someone on site, fully staffed, and one where you maybe run it remotely. How does the interaction there work between Swivel, the potential customer, and then the manager, whether they are on site or it's a remotely operated location? Where does the human touch kind of come into play?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wouldn't think of it any differently than you know our AI agents are doing the same style task that a human agent is taking right At any point in time that a human wants to be involved, the operator can get them involved A lot of times. That's, you know, reviewing a driver's license, you know, maybe e-signatures and making sure that that final, you know, last mile of the purchase process is there. Um, but even on move-in day we're going to automate a text message to Chris and say, hey, welcome to Hoover properties. Uh, we're excited to have you here. When you get there, your gate code is, you know, pound one, two, three, four, star. You've got dollies located right after you enter the building. If you've got any questions, let us know. Right, and now just web chat.
Speaker 2:That SMS message is an open channel for our AI systems to respond as well. So you know, I'm on the way, I have my dog with me and I want to ask hey, can I bring my service animal into the facility? You know our systems should the way. I have my dog with me and I want to ask hey, can I bring my service animal into the facility? You know our system should be able to respond to that appropriately. If not, we'll escalate to a human.
Speaker 2:Basically, you've got contact center agents, you know, or third party, you know, people that are helping you respond to things that get a ding in our platform. Hey, somebody needs help, They've got a question that they want to be answered, or they want to talk to a human. Um, I say accept, and now I'm, you know, having a human, human conversation, just like we were texting back and forth. Um, the beauty here is that we're also have technology in place for the agents to do their job better, right, and so we're pre-writing those responses. We're pulling all the information from the knowledge graphs to say, hey, this location does have dollies because we know it's in our platform and, you know, pushing that in front of the agent, even with a human to human touch. Point too.
Speaker 1:OK, that's. I mean, that's all that. All makes sense. I envision this is kind of an amazing technology that you can utilize. I'm thinking of remote operations, but of course you could use it in a traditional managed setting to free up the manager's time. I'm curious how does it translate to, you know, either cost savings or additional revenue for the owner, because obviously there's a cost to set up and all that kind of stuff. You know, how do we see savings over the long term?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know I'll start with the. You know revenue generation, right, we call them pajama shoppers, like as like, hey, this is somebody that's shopping at you know two o'clock in the morning when you don't have a human staffed anyway, that might be a lost opportunity. People rent from the first person that picks up the phone and answers their question, regardless of time, and so the revenue generation is hey, I've got a system that is always going to pick up the phone, it's always going to try to get a response. It's always going to say hey, chris, I'm listening to you and I'm going to try to help, even if it needs to get a human involved. You've just at least got that first line of defense to have that touchpoint.
Speaker 2:On the cost savings, there's lots. I mean, when we look at our portfolio today, we service over 5,000 locations across the United States and Canada, the industry, I think on average it has like an 80% leased up rate, right, so there's more already existing tenants than potential tenants, and so, on a service perspective, we are really really good at automating service request, gate codes, payment. You know, helping people make payments, doing all the things that you know we don't want humans to do in general, or you know, the human doesn't want to do a hundred times a month.
Speaker 2:Right, Um, but it's not my job to have a cost savings right, Because at the end of the day, that means I had to go fire somebody, Um, and if you already had somebody staffed, I'm not asking you to do that when I'm. I think what we kind of talk about is that person is now able to do they're not making that one cent decision, right, they're. They're not, uh, giving out the gate code. Now they're able to do dollar decisions, right. They're able to greet that person, solve the problem with the divorcee, um, maybe make them happy and customers for life, and so I think we always talk about this is just like a kind of like, hey, you're not having to do these remedial, repetitive task, let's go do some higher level task, you know, and make sure people are happy and coming back as well too.
Speaker 2:But yeah, there's obviously some cost savings there too. You know we've got customers that have gone from a 12 person contact center down to two because they have our technology in place contact center down to two because they have our technology in place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're not trying to get rid of jobs, but we are trying to optimize the jobs that are already there, right? Nobody likes to sit in. For example, actually just today I was looking up I got a buddy of mine who uses motion I think it's motionai and then I've used otterai for note taking in meetings and creating task lists and all that stuff. You know, I don't want to sit in a meeting and take notes as we're trying to figure out what I need to do next. I'd rather have AI do that for me create a task list, email it to me and then I can just check it off easily, or I can go back and look at the transcript to remember what so-and-so said.
Speaker 1:So AI, like you said, it's not necessarily like I'm paying for it, it's adding to my expense budget, my business budget, but it's saving me a tremendous amount of time and brain power, right that I can. Then it's freed up to go do higher level, higher dollar tasks. So I think that's where it's not a savings. That you see, where it's like. Oh yeah, you know, I'm saying I paid 15 bucks a month and I'm saving 150 bucks a month and I can see that in the budget. No, you're paying whatever the number is 15 bucks a month, whatever it is 20 bucks, 50 bucks a month for like motionai or Otter, but you're saving when it comes to the time, the dollar, like the. You're saving on your tasks. Like the, you can do higher level tasks, collections, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all these movements moved out Like other things you can do higher level tasks, collections, exactly. Yeah, all these movements moved out. Other things, yeah, other things that truly mattered, like you said, not giving up the gate code necessarily, or answering maybe a question, a simple question on a 10 by 10, whatever that may be.
Speaker 1:I've gone in numerous times to facilities when I've secret shopped in the past. One time I timed it and they were busy, granted, but it took me 45 minutes to actually get a conversation going with the manager After walking in the door, and I literally just sat there, very patient. He said you know, a couple times he acknowledged me being there. He said thank you so much. I'm sorry, I got this and this and I literally just wanted to know basic questions, basic answers. I'm sorry to my store, and so that may be an example of like, hey, he's busy getting a gate. He was literally getting a gate code and doing something else for somebody else, whereas I'm a potential paying customer and I did rent a unit from them during that secret shop where they got me in and out a lot faster. Had I not been a secret shopper and just a regular person from off the street, I'd have been out of there.
Speaker 2:There's no way Anybody's going to wait around 45 minutes to talk to a manager just to find out how much a unit is and then rent it. That's kind of a needle. It's about augmentation, right, and I think, like a lot of operators, right, whether you've got one location or two or you've got 15 or 30, right, you're probably the goal is to get more. Right, like hey, I've got one, but you're probably the goal is to get more right. Like, hey, I've got one, but I want the second one. Hey, I've got three, but I want the fifth one.
Speaker 2:And I think you know the augmentation here is well, you can manage those five locations with the same staff that managed three, because now you're using an AI team member to kind of fill in the gaps. Right, you start to move to that augmentation role, that co-pilot role, start to move to that augmentation role, that co-pilot role. It's not about not that we can't replace, right, but that's not again, from a technology perspective. Our objective, our objective is to make your business more efficient, to make sure that we're putting the customer at the center of the universe and allowing them to always have some channel, regardless of how they want to reach out to you, that they can talk. You know, talk to your business, ask the question. Purchase the unit, do that task.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, I think of it. I just now was thinking of it as almost like having a virtual assistant, where that virtual, that VA, helps me with those tasks that I need to get done. They're important, but they're not the things that really, you know, maximize my brain power or my dollar per my dollar per hour, uh, income. So, yeah, it's super important. I'm curious, when you were, um, when you first introduced Swivel to the industry, I know you kind of had an in with extra space and then, uh, william Warren group story quest with store quest, which is obviously very helpful, uh, but was there any um like pushback or any kind of resistance from the skepticism maybe from the industry that you had to find out you had to kind of overcome?
Speaker 2:I mean, that's you know, it's, it's. It's been fun, excuse me, uh, you know, in 2018, 2019, 2020, you know, pre-pandemic really, uh, the fight was just like convincing people that like, people wanted to talk to an AI system. You know, 2020 was obviously an interesting year and operators were willing to start to try things because, you know, we're in this very unique time period in history. But post that right, chatgpt came out and blew the covers off of everything and everybody. There's no questions today that people are willing to, or want to, chat with these systems, right, and so I think the initial pushback was like oh, are people going to engage with it? Do they want to do this?
Speaker 2:You know we have data that just showcases that. You know, people, they don't care most of the time if they're talking to a human or an ai. They, they don't want to, one, be fooled and be told that they're talking to one, you know, an AI when or sorry, a human, when they're talking to an AI. And two, they just want their answers, their questions answered. You know, as long as you're transparent and you're getting them the response they need, they're happy.
Speaker 2:Be, you know and I think there's just a lot of other touch points that we have generated where it's like, hey, this is, this is great. It's really nice to have an automated text message or an email that's coming in with a really nice design when I'm asking for it, not having to wait on a call queue.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah, sometimes I just want the answer and I don't want to talk to somebody, right? I think of how many times I go to the grocery store and walk past the people. Unless I have a lot of stuff in my cart, I will walk past the people that work there and just go to the automated, like the self-checkout, because it's just faster. I want to get in and out and be done with it and not talk to anybody, which it is what it is. But if you were going to like, if there are operators out there, let's talk about like implementing, like some automation. If somebody's out there, they want to get into the business or maybe they want to add more automation to their facility. What are some of the things you've seen where you can point them in that direction? What would you recommend? Where would you recommend that they start if they want to automate their facility?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think, like, automation is everywhere, right. So it really depends on what is the goal that you're going for, right? If you got a really large building and you're spending a lot of money on, you know, electricity every month, like a really simple way to start automating is putting some you know motion detectors in there, turning the lights on and off. You know an automated gate system is awesome. These are great. You know, customers love them. They always want to know if there's safety. And how easy is it to get into the building, you know, at night? I think these are great places to start, you know.
Speaker 2:Another one is like hey, how do I ensure that people can make payments 24-7, like, really easily, like really easily. Most of your FMSs have some type of a login platform. So how do I get somebody from a point of frustration? Maybe they're at the facility they're trying to get in their gate code's not working because their account's past due? You know QR codes. It's a really easy solution to start automating that workflow, right, and so I wouldn't think of it as like this huge task, right? Like we know what people are doing in a self-storage facility they're moving in, they're moving out, they're making payments they're renting. They're asking questions about transferring from one lease to another. Like, well, which one of these is causing you the most frustration as a business owner today? And let's start there right.
Speaker 2:Obviously, we believe communication is at the core of all of those things. It's really easy to get up and running in our system. Again, seven and a half million conversations in 24. We've done a lot of work to make sure that the system works out of the box. Extra space it took us six months to launch. Right, we launch in 30 minutes today with most operators, um, and so I'd always just say, like, let's look at the business.
Speaker 2:What's causing the most frustrations? At a small mom and pop, like maybe you're the the only person picking up the phone, the automation is like, hey, can I get something to answer the phone for me? Right, Um, right, I don't want somebody calling me at 10 o'clock at night or 8 o'clock at night when I'm having dinner. You know, I'd love for that gate code and that payment request to be deflected and automate. You know if that's the pain point, like let's start there and go.
Speaker 2:I mean, you just touched on a number of really great automations. Operators are having meetings all the time that's with vendors, whether that's with other operators, you know an automation of having a note taker. That's a really great place to start. You know, pain point of like uh, I know a lot of these note takers will generate task right follow-up task for you so that I know exactly what I need to do after the conversation with chris, uh, etc. And so I think it's really about like those pain points, like let's not, I don't like to start with the tech, like let's not start with this, we're going to Mars objective. Let's start with like the nitty gritty and go like what's causing pain today and like how do we solve that? There's going to be a vendor out there that's going to be able to help.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. That's a good one. I never thought about that. For owners who are having meetings with their managers. They should use something like as simple as otterai and use that to take notes for the meeting, like if they're on Zoom or whatever Teams call, and then that creates all your task lists and you can always refer back to it. So there you go, listeners or watchers, use that one there, obviously, and also sign up for Swivel as well.
Speaker 1:But I'm curious to know in the early days, as we kind of wrap up the episode here, when you started Swivel I know you came out of, I think, two other startups you mentioned there. Doing something like this for the storage industry is a little bit different. It takes some time, some capital. How did you guys approach the funding? Did you already have? Were you guys with the other two exits? Did you already have funding run way to build the system out and then with the customer like extra space? I assume you know maybe there's like some upfront deposit and then going on, you know from there. But what was funding like in the earlier days of Swivl?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know I use a term called fund strapped. That's what we did with Swivl early on, so we didn't go out and fundraise and we're not like completely bootstrapped right. We did have some capital from the exit that we doubled down on and put back into the business. And then I went out to you know my friends, my family, my best friend's dad, you know my uncle, my brother, you know people that I've just known personally and said, hey, you know, I'm going to do this other thing. I'd love if you jumped on the bandwagon with me. And so that was kind of the starting capital for us to go.
Speaker 2:And we've been scrappy, you know, ever since. We never wanted to go get into the VC ecosystem where it's boom or bust and you're, you know, putting yourself under pressures to do things like be a unicorn. You know that wasn't the type of business that we wanted to go and build. I think there's a really nice noodle ground for tech entrepreneurs to go build a capital-efficient, sustainable business that everybody that's involved wins. And that was kind of, from day zero, what we wanted to go and accomplish. And so bringing in people that were in my network and again doubling down and betting on ourselves was how we got off the ground and running.
Speaker 1:With the first startup. I'm just curious. You see Shark Tank and some other ones out there and I'm sure some of the listeners may be curious how does someone pay their own personal bills when building a startup? Because if you're raising capital, generally speaking, they're not investing in your company to pay your electric bill, your personal, and buy you food and all that kind of thing. They want to return on their capital. They're investing it into your company, et cetera. What kind of advice do you give to folks who are trying to start a startup, maybe a storage management company or whatever and they're trying to figure out how to do that? What are the first steps you'd recommend for them and, obviously, how they can cover their personal expenses while they're trying to build this uh startup machine?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think everybody's slightly different.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, and, and what I would say is like I have every entrepreneurial story under the book, right Like I could sit here, and tell this, tell the story about, uh, you know, moving to Boulder and sleeping on an air mattress for three months that, within like 10 minutes of being on that air mattress deflated. Um, you know, my mom and dad came and visited me and they were like this is disgusting, and went to Walmart and bought me a new air mattress. Right, um, you know, and for a while, like I didn't know, you know, ramen noodles and the free, uh, hot dog or, uh, you know, appetizers at networking events. That was dinner for that night. And so what I would say, number one is, if you're looking to take that leap again, everybody's different, everybody's got a different situation. I love having those conversations. My email inbox is open to have those conversations, but having a support network around me, I think, was like the biggest thing.
Speaker 2:Right, my best friends, my family, they just believed in me, uh, and empowered me, and I think, like, having that like allowed for me to persevere through some of the hard times and have confidence that, uh, you know, I was going to be able to get to the other side. Um, you know, outside of that, you, you, you've got to go find a team. I started as a solo entrepreneur Really the greatest accomplishment that I've ever done is recruit and convince three guys to build Swivel with me. I joke today that I'm married to three grown men that also have significant others, because we've been together for eight plus years now and we really are not a family specifically. We love each other and we care about each other, but at the end of the day, we're talking about money, we're talking about growth, making decisions together and supporting each other, complimenting each other's skill sets, you know, and picking each other up when we fail, etc.
Speaker 2:And so I think, just having that support group there and knowing that it's not going to be easy, I think, specifically in the United States, like we glorify entrepreneurs as like an overnight success of you know you wake up at four o'clock, you outwork somebody, you stay on the. You know you stay at the factory overnight like Elon Musk, and then success happens. You know I'm 10 years into my entrepreneurial journey and I wouldn't say and you know that we're successful yet, like, obviously we've kind of gotten over the hump per se, but you know we've still got a lot of growth to go. And so you know, but knowing that the overnight success takes decades to go, and just being prepared with that by having you know that support group around you of laying on it completely deflated, which was kind of funny at the time, but then it's not funny after a little while.
Speaker 1:So that's great man, it's a good story. Let's wrap everything up with the final four questions brought to you by our sponsors. Check those guys out in the description. Usually there's a discount code if you want to use their services. The sponsors change for each episode, so check them out down below. But talk to us real quick, Mason, about a high point in your career and what did you learn through that experience?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's great. I mean, there's so many high points that I have but I'd say post-pandemic the SSA Vegas, I think it was the end of 2020. It was the first time I saw my co-founders in person in 18 months, or something like that. We all work remote regardless, but we had broken even that year. We all work remote regardless but, um, you know, we had broken even that year. Uh, and so I think just being able to like, hug each other and clink some glasses like what a what an awesome celebratory moment to to put together after you've gone through, you know, the ringer of not only a pandemic but, uh, you know, three, four years of of trying to figure out how to build something that was going to be sustainable, so I'd say that's like one of the highest points is just being able to celebrate those successes with co-founders.
Speaker 1:What was one of the lower points in your career? What did you learn through that process?
Speaker 2:Outside of the air mattress. You know, in my first company we started, we were fundraising, we raised, you know, tens of millions of dollars and learned how to blow it really quickly. Um, and I remember very vividly I was living in Chicago at the time, uh, you know, walking around the, the, the lakefront, uh, with a book bag on that, had my, my computer, and just like not knowing how I was gonna, uh, you know, survive throughout through the winter in Chicago, uh, and I just remember, like this kind of like sometimes at those points, like you've got to like really look inwardly at yourself, and I just had this like realization that I could accomplish a lot with just the thing on top of my shoulders and the book bag on my back. Right, I had this computer that I could go build, and you know the courage and the, you know self-belief that I could go and accomplish it if I wanted to continue to do it.
Speaker 2:And so I'd say, like something like that where everything feels like it's crashing down, uh, but you've got this moment of like enlightenment, of going. You know what. I really don't need all of these things that you thought were important, uh, and I'm ready for the next challenge and I'm going to wake up tomorrow and take one more step forward. And, uh, you know, eventually one step leads to hundreds, and hundreds leave to thousands, and that's you know. I think that's the entrepreneurial journeys you just got to continue to figure out. You know how do I take a step forward today?
Speaker 1:Absolutely, man. That's excellent advice. What would be a one recommended resource for investors to check out whether it's book, podcast, conference, person, anything?
Speaker 2:For investors I love. I actually have a couple of books next to me, One of them. These are my two favorite books. I love the idea of Crossing the Chasm. It's a classic business book, but just what it allows me to do is think about products and investment areas of like where is it in the chasm?
Speaker 2:You know we talked about laggard industry, like where is technology and self-storage or where is whatever we're thinking about going to do in this industry, and I think that's really exciting. And then I really love Steve Case's the Third Wave obviously the founder of AOL. Love Steve Case's the Third Wave obviously the founder of AOL. And it just really talks about how technology goes through these waves that mimic each other. The first wave, the second wave was the internet and then we're kind of going into this third wave. I think these are really great books that get inside of maybe a technologist. I know a lot of your listeners are probably more real estate, investor focused and so kind of given a little bit of a how did the internet get built up and where's the technology going? I think those are two great resources that I love to kind of always go back to.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, man. Sometimes it's good to read things outside of the industry that kind of open up your eyes. I remember I read Blitzscaling. I think it was I forget the guy's name now but Reed Hoffman, I think, the co-founder of LinkedIn. That was a very interesting book. You talk about unicorns. That book is about blitzscaling to build a unicorn as quickly as possible, company as quickly as possible, and how they do it. We talked about Airbnb and all that stuff. So those are very interesting. Another good podcast is Acquired. I talk about it a lot but it's just a business. They do like four-hour episodes diving into companies Nike, starbucks, tesla, whatever Microsoft and just talking about those companies, and it's actually very interesting. It's outside of our little worldview of self-storage. I think it's always good to get an outside perspective and a different look at things. So very good, man. Last and final question man at the final four, how can listeners get in contact with you and hopefully book a demo with Swivel?
Speaker 2:Yeah, always reach out to me via LinkedIn. Email is just mason at triswivelcom as well too, and you guys can engage with us, you know, on just about every social platform. But you know, go into our website. You know, we'd love to love to show you what we're up to and how we're helping operators. You know, from one location to hundreds of locations. You know, make their lives easier every day.
Speaker 1:Great, I'll have those links in the description for the episode Mason. Thank you so much for being on the show, Chris I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Uh, we'll have to do it again in two years, when technology's changed again or something.
Speaker 1:That's right, man, 100%. We'll schedule it for next month and then we'll get it done actually in about two years, so that sounds good, I love it. All right, thanks, man Appreciate it, of course.