SpareFoot found its business in the wrong customers

Before Chuck Gordon could leave for Singapore, he had to find somewhere for his belongings to stay. A UCLA student preparing to study abroad, he encountered the familiar pleasures of storage shopping: scattered websites, telephone calls and prices that required investigation. His friend Mario Feghali had access to spare space. There was a business idea in that arrangement. Unfortunately, it was not quite the business they first imagined.

The people who weren't in the plan

Gordon and Feghali founded SpareFoot in 2008. Their first proposition was peer-to-peer storage: somebody with excess space could rent it to somebody with excess possessions. It had an appealing symmetry. A garage would earn its keep; a student would avoid an expensive storage bill. But symmetry on a business plan does not settle a customer's anxieties about access, locks or strangers near their belongings.

A retrospective in Modern Storage Media describes those objections and the surprise that followed. Independent storage operators were signing up. They already had buildings designed to hold possessions. What they lacked was an efficient way to reach the people who needed them. In 2009, the founders redirected SpareFoot toward traditional self-storage. The change of mind came from watching actual participation, rather than defending the elegance of the original idea.

The booking engine was a person

The next version did not begin with a grand software apparatus. In a 2011 Mixergy interview, Gordon described a page listing facilities with what appeared to be a reservation function. A customer's request produced an email. Gordon then called facilities to connect the request with a unit. He was testing whether people wanted to make that transaction before building the machinery to handle it.

“I was the back end”

Chuck Gordon · Mixergy, 2011

Eventually, the manual process became too much to handle and cost the company business. That failure told the founders something useful: there was enough demand to justify automation. An early facility that received a paying tenant also began recommending SpareFoot to other operators. A completed rental made a persuasive sales pitch.

There is a practical lesson here for anyone building a marketplace. Start by identifying a transaction people will finish, then learn what prevents the next one. The part worth copying is the demand test and close contact with both sides. A founder making every connection personally works only while volumes are small; once requests outrun response time, the experiment itself becomes an obstacle.

One sofa, two customers

Today's consumer product begins with a location and a choice: self-storage, car, RV or boat storage. Renters can compare participating facilities, unit sizes, prices and features. The audience includes movers, students between terms, households making room and businesses needing additional space. Their common problem is finding a suitable unit without turning the search into a second job.

The operator sees the same transaction from the other end. An empty unit needs a tenant. SpareFoot supplies listings and a route to consumers already looking for storage. Within Storable's marketplace network, those listings can reach SpareFoot, SelfStorage.com and Storage.com. The three addresses belong to the same family; each comparison site need not represent independent suppliers.

Booking directly with a chain such as Public Storage or Extra Space Storage is an alternative. SpareFoot's proposition is comparison across participating operators. It does not mean every unit everywhere is listed. Nor does a marketplace reservation make SpareFoot your landlord: its consumer terms place the rental transaction with the facility. The search can be shared; responsibility for the physical space remains local.

Free to search has a price elsewhere

SpareFoot describes consumer reservations as free. Operators finance the channel. Its published client terms specify no setup fee, a $50 monthly subscription and a transaction charge based on the reserved unit's price multiplied by the facility's bid modifier. Supplemental terms and order forms determine the actual agreement. This is customer acquisition with arithmetic attached.

The distinction between a reservation and a move-in matters. Published terms also allow additional charges when a facility's move-in rate falls below a communicated threshold. An operator therefore needs to examine conversion and rental economics, alongside the headline fee. A stream of enquiries has limited value if customers never arrive, or if acquiring them costs more than their tenancy contributes.

That ambition required capital. In February 2014, SpareFoot announced $10 million from Insight Venture Partners. The following March brought the $33 million round, with Monkfish Equity and Insight participating alongside Revolution Growth. The company reported cumulative venture funding of $59 million at that point. These were investments in the marketplace business, not the price of constructing storage facilities.

For a renter, the sensible sequence is to compare the unit that fits, check the access arrangements and read the facility's charges before completing the lease. Eligible online move-ins make that last step more convenient, but eligibility is facility-specific. A low displayed rent is a starting point for comparison, rather than a complete description of the rental.

When the listing meets the ledger

The next obstacle sat inside the operator's office. A comparison page is only useful when its prices and availability agree with the facility's records. SiteLink integration sends that information to SpareFoot and brings reservations into the operator's existing workflow. Eligible SiteLink and Storable Edge facilities can also offer online move-ins, including lease signing and payment. A listing becomes part of an operating process.

In 2018, Cove Hill-backed transactions brought SpareFoot together with SiteLink and storEDGE. The Storable platform launched in 2019; Storable acquired US Storage Search, including Storage.com, in 2021. The logic had expanded from finding a customer to connecting the software around that customer. SpareFoot remained the consumer-facing doorway into a wider storage technology business.

The early company made room for some less solemn pursuits, too. SpareFoot won Austin's charity Startup Games in 2014, a competition involving such corporate disciplines as ping-pong and shuffleboard. Its published values emphasize teamwork, customer focus and learning from mistakes. The pivot supplies a concrete example of that last value: the company had to admit that its first audience did not want what it was selling.

In May 2025, Storable appointed David Collins general manager of SpareFoot Marketplace. His background included leadership roles at Store Space and Public Storage. For renters, the useful question remains wonderfully ordinary: can I find the right space, understand the charges and complete the rental? SpareFoot's history suggests that progress often begins by noticing who needs your help, especially when they were absent from your original plan.