The founder’s dilemma: lots of capital or something even better?
While everyone’s buzzing about Marie Kondo-ing their homes, we’ve seen that instead of purging items that don’t spark joy, people are putting them into storage. One in ten Americans currently uses self-storage. And, the $38B storage industry continues to grow as urbanization increases, apartments shrink and consumption rises.
There’s one huge problem with self-storage: it’s a struggle. Even technology couldn’t seem to help.
That is, until MakeSpace set out to fix the problem six years ago.
Our mission was clear from the start: to make space easily accessible to everyone.
We designed an experience that allows people to store and retrieve their items on-demand, hassle-free. MakeSpace picks up your stuff, stores it and returns it when you need it. To support this solution, we built the industry’s first fully-integrated system, including back-end routing and warehouse logistics, in addition to a consumer app with a photo inventory of items stored.
Fast forward to the present: we have nearly 30,000 customers in 4 cities, a proven business model, and a customer experience (and team) of which I am incredibly proud.
Now is the time to throw fuel on the fire and bring this superior storage experience to more people. Two strategic options presented themselves for how to achieve this:
Option 1: Raise a lot of money.
What start-up founder doesn’t dream of that big check? It would solve all our problems, right? Not quite. The reality is that we would have to invest most of that money into building a massive warehouse network from the ground up (and learn how to operate it properly), and that would take a really long time and add a lot of risk to our business.
Option 2: Find the perfect partner.
While large sums of capital can certainly help, it didn’t directly address the problem we were trying to solve. What turned out to be best for our employees, investors and, of course, our customers was to find a strategic partner — one that could offer resources and experience to accelerate our growth much faster and more efficiently than we could do with capital alone.
Luckily, there was one company out there that met our criteria.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce a partnership with Iron Mountain, the global leader in storage. We’ll be combining MakeSpace’s technology platform with Iron Mountain’s operational expertise and capabilities.
This was the right choice for two key reasons: we can now deliver an even better customer experience, and we can reach millions more people across the country immediately.
Thanks to Iron Mountain’s 68 years of storage expertise, our service will continue to be simple and seamless, and will also be more secure than ever. Utilizing Iron Mountain’s existing footprint of storage facilities and operational resources, MakeSpace will immediately scale from 4 to 24 markets in North America.
We had the technology. They had the network. The result: a perfect partnership that has created the premier national storage enterprise overnight.
