The Shopify for Rentals Is Here

You right click and delete all. I just have to sit there and watch the bar progress as they deleted many copies of the game I made. If you want to be a side hustle, the first thing you do is open a Shopify account and stop drop shipping. I think the default becomes no, I want to open a rental business. I grabbed a security guard, walked over to him. I put my hand on his shoulder and I said, "Hey mate, what are you up to?" And he's like, "I'm watching how people are using my ass." We've helped create multiple millionaires out of rentals now. In 2 months, he'd gone from $0 revenue to 10,000. In practice, you all loses every single time.

And like reliably at scale, you all loses. that rentals are the future of e-commerce. The whole world is going to move towards rentals. Just go and do it and see what happens. Ideas are worth like jack Absolute jack Like if you can't execute there's nothing. Just take that initiative to actually take whatever crazy ideas that they might have and just try to see what comes with it. Don't be afraid of ambition. Chase it. Love it. Wrap your arms around it and and say it out loud. New Zealanders don't know any better. They will just get up and give it a shot. That's why we were first to get to the top of Mount Everest. go to dream that ultimate dream like what is it that you ultimately want to do and it's all achievable.

All right, cool. Uh I want to start somewhere a little bit weird. So I believe when you were around 14, you build a shooter game um and that had no title and you just kind of build it um and then it was banned at the namespace level across every school computer in Australia. Victoria. But uh yes, I maybe maybe maybe maybe maybe the the same database, but I think it was the the Victorian one. Yes, that that got me in a lot of trouble. I like no one from the the government came to me, but like the school IT level stuff was they were very very upset when they when they brought me to the uh the IT office and I was great mates with them.

Like I spent a lot of time in the school off the IT office sitting there chatting with them for no other reason than was a nerd and like chatting stuff. But they they bought me a one day and I searched up the name of my game on the school hard drives and from memory it was something like two terabytes worth of copies of the game I'd made across all the schools like you know home drives you get when you're in your school so it went viral. Yeah. Yeah. He control A right click delete and he did it right in front of me like it was such I remember his name. David. David. He he right click delete all.

I just have to sit there and watch the the bar progresses. I deleted many many copies of the game I made. But yeah, no, I I loved playing little video games with my friends at school. We were in a group that's affectionately called the super nerds by the school teachers. And we would sit there at lunch and recess in the little shaded area just out outside the the rooms and we'd have our laptops and we'd all sit there and play games for the 20 minutes or so of of of recess and the 40 minutes of soft lunch. Sit out up to where our laptops would run flat, I guess, cuz we had no power out there.

They wouldn't let us play in the the library. And we'd sit there and play a Halo custom edition, which was way before my time. Like I I played it a lot, but it's actually a game way before my time. But it was the only thing that would run on our completely potato laptops that we'd got given. And I got really really good at Halo Custom Edition. I just I put so many hours into it. Got it had none of the stuff we have these days with like recall and stuff where it, you know, it takes real skill. It just was like, you know, if you know where to play the gun, you're done. When when did you learn how to code?

When did you learn how to code? cuz when you were 14 to build a game like that that's yeah not easy. Well yeah so I I decided I was bored with Halo and was like all right I'm going to I'm going to build my own game you know it need cuz we couldn't run the modern games that were coming out. They were all too you know powerful to run our on our little computers. So I was like I'll code my own great and I I downloaded Unity and I I pulled out all the YouTube tutorials I could possibly find and just started building things and I I built a lot of really bad things. Like I think I started my first game I was going to make was like a massive MMO RPG like you know the the biggest million dollar budget type thing that you need and um and I built I wonder how

many projects ended up on my hard drive. Probably 50 or so little tiny games that never made it past more than a week of building. But all of them like I'd learn a little skill like how does physics works? You know how how what is a vector? How do you how do you apply rotation to items? All these other things that you know I just kept learning cuz you try to do something fun in in this new game you're building and it would go wrong. And I think after like maybe six to nine months of like hacking together little things, I'd I'd learned enough to put that all together and actually make, you know, one complete game that would work.

Were you a good student or were you just focusing on building things that you liked? Depends which teacher you ask, but I spent a lot of time I would sit uh very strategically at the back of the school the school rooms with my back up against the wall so they couldn't see my laptop screen. and I plug in my laptop to the charger because my laptop wouldn't run for long enough to to to do anything otherwise. And I do all my school work in like 10 or 15 minutes at the start of the class. So, you know, if it was maths, you know, they gives a section of the workbook and you just any questions that were meant to take an hour and I just y Okay, done.

And then jump back to to to what I were coding on what I whatever I was coding on. Start building stuff and I just got really good at alt tabing. Whenever the teacher poked their head around, oh, just just Google it. Just cool math games, whatever. They I I know they all knew, but it was kind of like, look, he's getting his work done. Like, you know, do you want to do the extension tasks, B? No. No. I'm just going to keep working on my other stuff. I think year 10 or year 11 and year 12, I was no longer a good student. Mostly because I'd never learned the study skills and all the other stuff that, you know, you learn by doing homework cuz I'd always did all my work done in 10 or 15 minutes at the start of the class.

I never had to extend myself by going home and doing homework. And so I hit yeah probably year the end of year 10 and all this you know I was falling behind on a lot of things and not not able to to keep up with all the stuff that you know other people learn by doing studying. I got I got by I passed I I made it through high school. Well that's the most important thing. Exactly. But I left with multiple apps built you know multiple apps on the app store. I'd learned how to you know code servers and backends and and all these other things. And like even in my last year of school, my teachers were awesome and they let me kind of bail on a few classes so I could I think I only had three or four classes for the entire year, which was very out of the norm, but because

they knew I was doing stuff and they knew I was working stuff. Yeah. Yeah. They were like, "Yeah, he'll be fine. You know, we'll just let him get away with the the the bare minimum possible." Yeah. And is it true that after the game got banned in your school and in Victoria that a few years later, you walked past the lab and you saw some people playing the game? Yeah, I walked past the the school lab. I don't know what I was back there for. I think I was maybe doing a school ICT day or something to come and just speak to speak to the kids. And yeah, I walked past the computer lab to see I what was this terrible old game?

I could see the bright purple textures from when the the textures have been deleted or files have been deleted from the game, but they were still running around shooting each other. I didn't even know the server still existed. I think I went and found the old server login and logged in to see I was like, "Oh yeah, there's a couple people still playing it every Hey, every now and then they'd think they'd gone and then changed the executable name and a bunch of other things to try and get around the block. What did that feel like? I mean, must have been great to build something at 14 that went viral like that and still exists over the years even if it got banned.

Yeah, I I love I mean just why I do what I do. I love when people use what I build. I don't don't really care that much else about it other than, you know, people get use out of it and enjoy it and and I remember just looking at them going walking past them going that's mine. That's I did that thing. They like it. I I couldn't I couldn't do much else at school. I couldn't play sport, couldn't impress anyone else in any way, but people could play my games and enjoy it and that was awesome. Yeah. And that maybe is also a good um kind of bridge to how you got started with Locky.

So, there's the story that you always tell about your uncle wanting to rent out paddle boards and you were kind of wondering how the hell do we do this and can we build a vending machine for pedal boards? Yeah. Can you take us back to that moment and talk about how you thought about this back when you were 17? Yeah, my uncles are are both really entrepreneurial men and have have taken many stabs at many things throughout their lives and you know succeeded in in a at a great great majority of them and it was not uncommon, you know, Christmas time at Easter to sit around the fire chatting about crazy business ideas and the amount of business ideas that that family wrote up as we were kids to do all sorts of crazy stuff.

I distinctly remember a spinning vehicle at one point in time being thought of. And one day my one of my uncle's ideas was I want to I want to turn my my my ski business into like an automated rental business cuz he he was taking people out in the boat and skiing up and down the river with them. Paddle boards were taking off and he was like I want to automatically rent paddle boards and like I can't be there and and I was like oh that sounds cool. Don't know how you do it though but and he was like well yeah that's your job to figure out as often the tech conversations in our family went yeah will figure that out now.

speaking to the tech. And so I went away and um I remember trying to code a version of it over the Christmas holidays while I was still at school and I I built like a very very terrible I think a PHP scripts connected to a lambda function which connected to like a hosting SQL database and I didn't know how to use any of them properly but I knew how to string them together in a very basic way to like make them speak and make them do something that you know was vaguely like a rental system. And um and so I built the first version of this rental system. I hooked up some smart locks to it.

You could generate pin codes for that we found online and and it works. I mean kind of there was a bunch of double bookings. I don't think I actually knew how to code an availability system at the time. You know how to how to properly detect greater than less than. What was that? I don't know something. There was a few double bookings but it worked. And eventually we kind of moved over the backend rental system to an existing rental software and we hacked on top of its APIs to kind of build it into their their stuff for a little while. But yeah, for a good I think it was probably a year and a half that it ran before CO really hit and the whole thing just got shut down.

People were able to go, they'd walk up to it, they'd rent it and and take it out and enjoy it and bring it back. The worst problem we had was, you know, when people would leave a bit of dirt sitting on top and didn't wash and clean it off, but otherwise like people really enjoyed it. And we we started dreaming of like, oh my gosh, we can expand this. That's, you know, we were we we started in Nuga Mama on the May River, but you know, gosh, we could put 10 more of these down my river. And I'm sure there's many places that want this. There's so many people that want to do paddle boarding.

And of course, those hopes were very much dashed when CO hit, but I'm pretty sure Michael had already started welding together a second box to to do the the second location type stuff. Does this rental business still exist? No. No. I I honestly wish it did, but I think I think CO was a was a bit too much for my uncle to survive on the on the business side of things. I was still a bit too young to be able to run stuff on completely on my own at that point in time. And the by the time CO kind of came out, paddle boards had become a lot more publicly available around the area. There's a lot less rules about it.

It was a lot easier to get and you know a lot of people had the the kind of crappy ones from Bunnings to go up and down the river. He started doing some stuff again recently though. So I I I'm excited. Maybe we can get it back up up and going again. And back back then when you were 17, did you already see the potential of, you know, if you can enable your uncle to run his business like that, maybe you could enable other people to run a business? You definitely didn't when I built the first first version. I did when I kind of the second person talk to me about it though because I built that kind of first paddleboard vending machine and and then I had a bunch of other people reach out to me.

I kind of got known by the lock distributor in Australia as kind of that automated rental guy and then when people talked to him about I want to do this what you can can I use these on my trailers or on my bikes. He would go, "Oh yeah, there's some kid quite literally a kid at that time in um in regional Victoria who's done something like that." chat to him and gave gave them my phone number and you know started chatting to them and he was like I could use this for this and I was like and I could use that for that or and I guess he could use it for that and and then suddenly you know people started coming to me and with ideas and more items they wanted to do and for each of them I was like oh yeah I'll custom do this I'll custom do that I'll you know

you pay me 10 grand I'll put together this system to do this and and I did a lot of that for like a year or so right out of high school before I eventually ended up being stacked up by a startup and um and taking off into that life yeah we're going to talk about that in a moment, but it's probably a good moment to also talk Yeah. to kind of give the pitch on what's Locky actually doing and um what's your vision for enabling people to build their own businesses? Yeah, Loy's a completely automated rental system that takes humans out of the process completely so that you can kind of scale up from from a small little business with with two trailers to 600 paddle boards around an entire country if you'd like to.

Our kind of biggest dream here has always been kind of helping and empowering entrepreneurs to to build and scale rental businesses. Rental businesses have always been, you know, quite a nice lifestyle business for people to run. You know, you you know, the local hardware store that rents out a few things, local party events place that rents out some some tables and chairs. Rental businesses have always been fun, but they've never been kind of scalable. And so, you know, Shopify came and and it's kind of going now and and you know, allowed people to build and scale these e-commerce businesses, but that never happened for rentals. And I I've always thought it's because rentals are too much hard work and they're too hard.

They're too expensive to get started. And so what Lucky does is make it possible for anyone to start their rental business as a side hustle and then scale it up to be, you know, a business processing hundreds of bookings every day and millions of dollars every year. And we've already done that a couple times for people, you know, built these million dollar businesses. And, you know, we're on the track to build many, many more. What's your favorite success story? Garage rental place. Funnily enough, this guy came to us. He was like, I want to rent out mechanics garages. And I was like, more what does this actually look like? And he was like, well, you know, mechanics, your part-time mechanics or hobbyists really want to get in and maintain their own car.

They don't want to take it to to a mechanic to do it for them. But none of these guys can afford to own their own car lift, right? It's super expensive. It's it's a pipe dream for a lot of them. But there's all these old mechanics sitting next to gas stations and petrol stations that, you know, are bought up and and never get used. And so he was like, "What if I can buy these locations, put a car lift in them, put some tools in there, rent it out, then you know, people can come and use these and can maintain their own own cars and the hobbyist revolution as he calls it for for car mechanics." And I was like, "That sounds awesome." And like we can automate that, I'm sure.

And he was like, "Yeah, well, cuz otherwise we can't make the business work. The model doesn't work. If you have to have a guy stand at every one of these gas stations and mechanics garages and hand over the keys and unlock it for them, like the business model makes no financial sense. But if he can have 50 of these locations around California, well, suddenly that's that's a that's a big ass business. Amazing. And so this guy already scaled it up to 50. He's on his way. He's on his way. He's not at 50 just yet. I think he's on he's on track to opening his fifth now, but he's got each of them. I think he has two to three kind of bays that he rents out at each garage.

And yeah, he's he's making a killing at the moment from what I've heard. So what does the world look like where Loy becomes as successful as Shopify? I think it looks like the new default for running, you know, being an entrepreneur entrepreneur online becomes not opening a Shopify store. It becomes opening a lucky rental store. Currently, you know, if you want to be a side hustle, the first thing you do is open a Shopify account and set up drop shipping. And that's why, you know, so much of the e-commerce industry is just so saturated, right? There are so many drop shipping stores and it's so hard to compete. I think it the default becomes, no, I want to open a rental business.

I want to rent out my guitars, my car, my trailers, my my bikes, whatever you can think of. and I want to scale up a business like that. I think that's the the the default where the industry should go. Especially because, you know, rentals bring something that e-commerce doesn't. It's it's local, right? You being a good business operator, kind one, a a responsible one actually makes a difference. With a drop shipping store, it's basically just how cheap can you make the shipping and how cheap can you make the item. With rentals, it's like, no, they're going to come back. How good can you make the experience? How quality can the item be? How close is it to the customer starts to matter again?

I think local businesses can can start to matter a lot. What vertical do you think is going to be the biggest ones or Yeah. Which ones are you most excited about? Honestly, don't think we will be able to know. And that's the the most fun thing about it. I think the biggest ones that are going to continue to appear are the ones you and I couldn't even dream of. I mean, the garage one is already one that I went, where the heck did that come from? Like, who's renting garages out? Sports equipment. Uh we just had a couple guys in in Europe start renting out like dumbbells from from workout parks. Like all these things that I just couldn't we couldn't dream about.

My hope is that it becomes power tools because I hate owning power tools. I have no space for them, but I need them, you know, once every couple of months. And the funnest stat about them is if you buy a drill, on average, people can use it for like 12 minutes for its entire lifetime. You buy a drill, you're going to use it for 12 minutes. So, I'd much prefer to be able to walk downstairs, you know, go down the road and pick up one from a little rental locker that's run by Lucky, bring it back, use it for a couple hours, and then take it back. Hi Bod, what do you think about kind of like what what your business like how well your business does, how how well how good of an indicator that is for how well the economy is doing, right?

Because like when you when you think of a business like Airbnb and like a part of the reason that it took off was it kind of came about during the whole like kind of postGFC, you know, you know, sort of financial troubles and uh people just were like open to making a few extra bucks renting out their couch, right? Whereas like if that didn't happen, maybe maybe the whole idea of renting out your couch and having a stranger sleep, you know, in in your house would be very very strange. So kind of I guess two questions, right? First, like yeah, do you think that yours is a similar business? And I mean, are you kind of like seeing any benchmarks around like, hey, has the economy sort of slows down in certain places, things like this pick up?

Yeah, I think as the cost of living grows and and yeah, the economy does what it's doing right now, we're seeing more and more people want to start these side hustles. I'd like to think that, you know, when the economy is healing is when Lock is going to be doing the best, right? As as it goes down, we're going to continue to grow, but I think as it starts to heal again, we're going to see the biggest success success stories appear out of Locky. We're going to see the the guys that who make make billion dollar businesses out of automated rentals are going to come in that healing phase. that hope as of right now.

Yeah, I think as the as the economy continues to go down and as cost of living goes higher, we're seeing more and more people want to open side hustles and and start to own their own income and their lives and and yeah, and that's that's helping us get more and more customers every day. I was just wondering if like Airbnb was a weird business. So So was Uber right in the beginning. Yeah, people were like this is these are strange businesses like we would not naturally want to jump into a stranger's car or sleep in a stranger's house. deliver certain but but but certain technologies made it possible like I guess you know just mobile phones everywhere being able to track where a phone was through GPS but also just economic financial factors that made people open to doing these side gigs and side hustles because they just needed to make a little bit extra

money. I'm just wondering if like I guess there's two questions in there. The first is like why hasn't this already been done at scale? And two, like do you think the growth you're seeing now? Is that is that a function of the fact that we're kind of in in maybe a similar time? Yeah. Yeah. I I do agree that it's a weird business in a lot of ways. And you do get the same response as Airbnb did back at the start of automatically. I'm not going to be there to hand it over. Like I can't look at the guy and judge whether he's going to be a weirdo that takes my item and drives it off a cliff or you know I can't I can't gauge those things.

You get those same responses. But it's interesting for consumers, you know, the people renting these things, you get a similar response to Airbnb, which is like, my god, this is so much easier, right? This so much more convenient because so so much kind of, I guess, pent up frustration with the rental industry in in general, right, with with the big hardware stores that rent out things. There's so much frustration around how they manage things and how inconvenient is inconvenient it is for for kind of normal people that customers are so happy when they they find these things exist and they're done properly. They they think it's so much easier. It's so much more convenient for them.

they they'll choose it every time over kind of a standard old rental business where they have to wait in line because it's rather than kind of rental businesses being built to run conveniently for the business. You know, doing it automatically is is running a business in a way that's more convenient for the customer. And that's a lot of how we build Locky in our mind is like, okay, yes, we need to make this easy for the operator, but first and foremost, we've got to make it really, really convenient for the customer. They've got to want want to choose this process o over anything else. I think all the economic factors combining at the moment are yeah very similar to what happened with Airbnb at the time with people really wanting to be able to to own their own income to to build their own businesses to feel a bit safer in these times and with

you know e-commerce going the way it is with Shopify you and the reputation of drop shippers and stuff going the way it is rentals is really the new way to start that sort of side hustle over starting another drop shipping business. I want to go away from rentals a little bit. Um, and we'll come back to it later, but um, you already alluded to you taking your first job at another startup. So, we want to talk about a different physical world problem, which is nightclubs. You were working as the founding engineer at a auto service software company. Tell us what you what you did there and what that was about. Yeah, it's about as far as we can get from from what I do now in a lot of ways.

But it that side was was completely built around the idea that the the bottle service industry comes with a really complex process that needed to be simplified somehow and need to be made scalable because every bottle service venue ever. That's after like 6 months or a year. Like they open, they run, they make a bit of money, they close back down. And you know, in our eyes, a lot of that comes from the fact that the whole thing was is too human driven. And the second one of those humans that kind of is the crux of the entire upside down pyramid leaves to get a better job or to leave the industry in general, the whole process kind of collapsed.

And so our our thought was, okay, can we can we turn this into a reasonable thing and scalable thing that people can use all the way all the way around the world. It was a very interesting first job as as kind of an engineer leaving school. I remember kind of one of my first nights going into one of the clubs to work there. I was sent in to go buy some random bottles bottles of champagne. like was literally just give her the company card and like go buy these people with some some champagne. I was like, "Okay, sure." He's like little 19-year-old me, longest hair. I was a I I did not belong in these clubs along alongside the people spending, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars on things just sitting there next to the to the, you know, 6'1 models going, "Here's some pure paint marketing for what we're doing." But it was

a it was a hell of a way to learn how to listen to your customers in a in a in a a really big way. Like I went into those nightclubs on a regular basis, probably once a month, and would just follow around the people using our software and and learn the process, which and they'll tell you this, it's very much like a process you only get to know if you work in the industry and you're there. Like there's so many intricate pieces that that kind of mesh together to create this choreography of that is bottle service. And so sitting around following them around and going, how the heck do we codify this? Like how do we make this simple?

How do we make it so anyone can pick this up and learn it and run it? And I think we ended up doing a really good job. What were you looking for specifically? I think kind of the things that that they do by yelling across the room, by screaming into radios, by putting spreadsheets that with whiteboard markets markers on the wall. Like every night they would go in there, they would a couple of the businesses would print out like 30 different pages of paper, you know, one to give to each of the girls and a bunch of information. A couple to stick on the wall and write things off and then another one to cross out what's been ordered and what's not being ordered.

another one to stick receipts to and like another one to kind of tally up how much you give to each promoter. It's it's a mess of like processes and money like substantial amounts of money like flying all over the venue very very quickly. Um and you know it wasn't uncommon to see $1,000 go missing here and there because someone forgot XY Z, someone forgot to put a transaction through. Someone gave out a bottle without you know a ticket being paid. And unfortunately in these situations where it's so much money and the people are who they are, it's tough to kind of chase them down a week later, weeks later and go, "Oh, hey, you know, you're in our venue two weeks ago.

Can you send me $1,000 for the bottle we you we gave you and you're already drank?" No, sorry. I would chase around one of the nightclub managers here in in Melbourne, Nikita. We're still a great friend to this day now, but I chase around the nightclub and kind of learn exactly how she's doing doing everything. And and kind of the biggest thing for us in the end was safety because with bottle service, you're putting these people in the middle of a nightclub and and their job is to be a bartender and to to pay attention to the to the people that are serving the table. But they're also in this incredibly unsafe environment surrounded by hundreds if not thousands of partygoers in a very small enclosed space with security maybe not able to get to them super quick and with no clear lines of communication from them to kind of the back of house and

security. like the best you can do is yell into a radio on on your shirt, but like there's a nightclub pumping at 1:00 a.m. No one's going to hear And we find that so often was just like, I need help, you know, I need table one, table one, please. Can you can you send a manager? I need what security. Even if it did get heard, half the time it gets forgotten because, you know, oh, they're dealing with something else. They're dealing with another client and they missed the radio call. Yeah, it was it was chaos and and it was a very interesting industry to try and I guess I I guess automate. I can imagine.

And you you saying that it's very far away from what you're doing at the moment, but in a way it's also kind of like observing the physical world and trying to automate processes. Is there anything you learned from that time um that you're now taking back to Locky? I think the biggest thing I learned was that I do love automating physical processes like dealing with things that are outside of my control and software's control. Like there's so much in what we do at Locky that is completely out of our control. So much. There are so many edge cases for items. We have, you know, and any single item can be in one of up to like a couple hundred states nowadays.

And it's how do you take that and kind of merge that down to something that you show to a to a user that's incredibly simple and easy to follow. You know, for an end consumer, it's got to be one button, right? A page. That's all you can really give them. You can't give them 10 options. It's got to be one thing. So, how do you take all these different states and edge cases and convert them down into a single happy path that means that, you know, the operator never needs to get bought into it? I was just going to ask what what did you end up building for the for this bottle service company business product?

What was what was the final like what did you learn about the actual like problem space and the users and how did you end up solving that problem? Yeah, so we ended up building a mobile app um was was the main thing. So it was it dealt with everything from being able to keep track of every single table, every single item ordered, building in effectively what is very simple like a bump screen, the Mac McDonald's bump screen that sits back behind the bar to be able to kind of put those through and then kind of the system that was different to kind of the pod system is that a different person deals with every stage.

show. A different person orders it. A different person collects the payment for it. A different person prepares the bottle. A different person gets it out there. And a different person maybe handles finding the dancers who, you know, come out in their their crazy outfits with two bottles of champagne with spark clothes on top. There's like six, seven, eight people who were involved with every single order that flows through those businesses. Especially in some cases, you then have like a promoter and like the the greeter and all these other people involved in a process. So, how do you turn that into Yeah. Yeah, a simple bunch screen that would basically every single action would kind of fan out to one, two, three different people to tell them what they needed to do.

You get approval from them to kind of tick it off and go, "Okay, yeah, I've done my part. I've done my part. I've done my part. Okay, now we can get the dancers. You ping the dancers on their phone. They can come out. They can get the bottle. They can dance it out." Yeah, it's it's a bit tough to break down what it did cuz it did so much. Like it was very much a vertical sass that just did everything it possibly could to try and automate it all together. Interesting. And you and you would sell this to venues. Yeah. Yeah. We'd go into venues and and kind of sell them a monthly subscription to the the app.

We'd help them take bookies cuz we we needed part of the problem was turning what was very unstructured data into something that kind of needed to be quite structured and AI did not exist at the time to be able to kind of turn turn a simple email into kind of very format formatted stuff. Um so we we kind of help them take bookings as well and yeah we sell a monthly subscription to them. We got it in there like 350 venues around the world in the end which was which was massive. But we kind of getting kind of middle of last year starting to realize like no matter how much we build onto this nightclubs are just a very tough business.

As I said before they open and close really quickly, right? They they change ownership constantly. Staff turnover is so so so so high. Um and and you know it's hard enough to pay to get into one of these venues, right? you turn up there with a lot of cash on a Friday night and you're like begging them to let you in, let alone turn up there on a Friday night and ask them to pay you money to give them software. So, the sales cycle was long. The uh the clients lifetimes were dubious. It was it was it was very much a hard line for a lot of different things we did. What what is kind of bottle service and what what was the kind of fundamental problem I guess?

What is the user experience and what were we like how did you come up with like the problem statement that you were trying to solve? So I didn't actually come with a problem statement. I was the fanny engineer. I I got told the problem statement when I first joined and the problem statement was that they had built the first ever contact us ordering software in 2012. They're a tad bit too early by like you know 10 years. And somehow that had gotten picked up by a couple nightclubs around Melbourne who gone oh we could we could use this for us. And you know they kind of just kept coming back with can we add this?

Can we add this? Can we do this? And when I joined they just kind of found the point where they realized that you the core problem was the core thing we wanted to focus on was nightclubs. that was we really wanted to nail doing bottle service and nightclubs. And so my job was basically to go in and go, okay, well, we've we've hacked a product together that works for them, but now we need to find a way to make this, you know, scalable and something you can take to other other places. So the problem was solving lost money, a lot of lost money, lost profits, lost upselles and safety on the floor. And so I just went and sat in and I I learned what those processes are.

These venues, the ones that are running for a while, have really really cool detailed processes on how they do certain things, how they protect the the people on the floor, how they make sure money doesn't get lost. It's just an incredibly manual thing. As I said before, like up to 30 different pages of paper printed on a given night to try and look after everything. Tell us tell us some of those things like how do they protect the workers? How do they make sure they don't lose money? Yeah, it's part of is having so many different people involved. People love to steal money from nightclubs and people like we were involved in so many scandals where people like staff were stealing money from nightclubs.

So they they make things separate out like three different people. You have the manager, you have a person who's just in charge of payments who sometimes paid directly by a separate thing, not just the venue like paid by the owners and and then you have the runners and then you have the girls on the floor who actually, you know, take the orders. So everyone's kind of responsible for a different step to try and protect everything. So part of us then was like, okay, this is incredibly inefficient. This is costing them so much money. This is costing them upselles. Like upselles are the biggest part of bottle service that makes a difference between a venue that kind of exists and a venue that kind of grows and becomes famous for it.

It's, you know, how much how how can you make sure the client's having an amazing time and then be right there at the moment they're going to be running low on a drink and get another one sent. And if you're a few minutes late, too late with that, right? If you're a few minutes too late with being there to upsell that bottle and the payment isn't taken and you know the group comes back from the dance floor and they ah actually we're going to leave. we don't we don't want the bottle anymore. Like bam, there goes your upsell and and really there goes the majority of your profit on that table cuz venues a lot of the time make their profit from the upsells rather than just the upfront booth cost which goes to promoters and things like that.

Body, I mean just a dumb dumb question, but like wouldn't it be easier to just put a a like a ordering screen there on the table for them to just order? Yeah, you'd think that, but these guys are put disrespectfully rude in a lot of cases. Like the staff that are in these venues are the loveliest humans on the planet. The people that go into these venues to book bottle service weren't exactly the type of people who want to be tapping in on an order screen on tables, right? They don't want that. No, no, no. They're there cuz they're rich and they want to look like it. They want the private the bartender standing in front of them.

In Australia, it's a legal requirement, but they also want the private bartender there cuz they want to be seen as having, you know, having this important kind of person to have their own personal staff member, all this other stuff. Like that's part of the experience for them. It's also a legal requirement by the way. you have to have a staff member there, especially in Australia for for responsible service and alcohol reasons. So they have to be standing there regardless but it is it is just generally part of the experience in most of the world and in other parts of the world where they didn't have staff members there they made remark remarkably less money. So when when staff members were instead you know sitting back at house only coming out every now and then to check whether you want more they made less money just flat out.

Fascinating. Fascinating. It's it's a fascinating industry and I had a blast trying to figure out how to how to automate it and how to codify it and how to make these processes work everywhere. Like it really was a fascinating thing to work in and especially as your first job like being sent to a nightclub to to buy model champagne and to follow bartenders around and to and to just be there in that environment as a software engineer. I can't imagine too many other kind of first year software engineers sitting in a nightclub learning how to do their job. There's include a couple photos of me in LA in a nightclub coding. It's funny. I kind of wonder like did the founder of this company like he built a comp contactless payment solution did he you know did he personally just want to spend time in nightclubs and he just fit fit the solution to the

context. So I said I the running joke was they just wanted to be able to tax deducts at bar. Like that's why they started the contract ordering solution was they wanted tax deductible drinks. Right. In the end, I think it was just where the where the industry took them. Like they started in contactless ordering and the the the nightclub industry needed like software. They needed the help. There are so many solutions in the in kind of the event space for ticketing and for guest list. But beyond that, it's a pause system or it's a booking system. That's it. There's nothing that helps with the operations there. And so he was just pulled in that direction by the nightclubs quite forcibly like we'll pay you more money, but we need you to just do this.

And so we ended up being there. I can't say we didn't have a good couple fun nights being, you know, out in the nightclubs building software and learning from people, but it definitely wasn't my by the end of it was not my favorite thing. I'm not a nightclub guy. I don't go to nightclubs. I don't I can't dance to save my life. I don't I don't know, you know, I don't know how good that I mean, I don't know. I the quality of that software might be dubious. Stuff that you were coding at 2 2 a.m. after a couple of drinks. Yeah. Look, there was some there were some dubious functions in there. There was some there was some I look I never wrote money calculations when when we'd had a drink.

That was that was a flatout rule. You were never allowed to do anything to do with money. [clears throat] Did you get any girls sitting there coding? No. No. No. No. No. No. Because I'd sit there I'd be like a little nerd in my like nerdy outfit like sitting in the nightclub chasing around the bartenders. Like I looked nothing like anyone ever wanted to talk to. And in fact, I almost So the funny story of how I got into that startup was I was working in a nightclub as a lighting guy. So, I was tapping the strobe button at the back of the nightclub and I turned around and I saw this kind of what I would describe as a creepy guy sitting at the back of the club just eyeballing the out of the bartenders like completely just eyeballing them and I was like, "This guy's creepy.

I'm kicking him out." Like, these bartenders are my friends. Yeah, I can't have him eyeballing them. And so, I I walked over to him. I grabbed a security guard, walked over to him, I put my hand on his shoulder, and I said, "Hey, mate, what are you up to?" He's like, "I'm watching how people are using my app." What app? And 4 days later, I joined the startup as the founding engineer. So, you tell me who got there. I think it was me. But to be fair, that that guy is is now the founding sales of Lucky. He's he's a plenty good salesman. Wow. Did people ask you did people ask you what the you were doing?

Sitting on a computer on Totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's there's plenty of situations for Why are you like what are you here for? The amount of security guards I almost got kicked out of the venue by cuz they're seeing this like tiny kid run around with a with a laptop with no interest in partying. Um, and you look probably rather sketchy. I the you might have not cards that would like stop me. What are you doing? What are you doing? Like was was really really annoying actually in the end, but the venue staff were amazing and what a hell of an experience to to write your first code sitting in a nightclub. Cool.

Well, I'm sure Mark has never been to a bottle service nightclub, so I think that's why he's genuinely curious about it. You you're in Miami though, Mark, aren't you? No, no, I'm I'm in North Carolina. Okay. Okay. Okay. I thought you might be in Miami. And I was saying if you if you live in Miami and haven't done bottle service like come on. But uh no I want to come back to Locky. So yeah we we kind of learned how you identified the problem. Um but there was a specific week from when we first talked to you told us the story. There was a specific week where this stopped being kind of like a contracting business and became really a company.

You said last year that you had six rental operators called calling in on the same week. Those were I think like trailer operators from Australia and New Zealand. um and some pedal board operators from the US and they were all asking the same thing. Yeah. Take us take us back to that week. What what were they asking? Yeah, it was a it was an interesting week. I'd um I'd been doing some contracting work on the side and was starting to get to the point with nightclub software. We were like where's this going? Are we going to get see the growth in the long term that we want to see? And I got on a call with someone who I'd been like building some of those automations for for a couple years.

And he was like, "Hey, look, we we really want to grow. We we're going to add another couple locations this year. We we'd really like to go quite fast. The software is like it's fine. works, but it's not we can't scale this up. It's not going to work. Could you kind of custom build something for us? I'm good. I'm working at a startup. Like, I haven't got time to to to custom build this for you. Like, doesn't make any any sense for me at the moment. You know, that's me in a few months. And then I got a call the next day from one of my other integration clients going, "Hey, so we we you know, we're scaling up a little bit.

We really think we need to build some more. This needs some more features behind the scenes. It needs to be easier for the customers. It's a bit complex. There's all these edge cases." And this is the thing with all these automations I built. the core worked, but the the volume of edge cases with physical goods is just so high. And they were like, we really need to start to solve all these edge cases, otherwise we can't scale this up. And I was like, oh, you know, okay, maybe I can do a contracting gig for you at the end of the year. I've got a few months, yeah, it might be a little bit free, we can put together a deal or something.

And then it just kept coming that week, and I have no clue why. I got a I got a an email from the one of the panel operators in the US saying a similar thing just like, oh, this is great, but it's starting to become a problem. And then I took a meeting with uh someone who hadn't previously done integrations for yet. This is a new customer who was kind of wanting me to build them. He was kind of listed off what he wanted. It was very similar to what the other ones had wanted. And I was very conscious in the back of my mind that, you know, if I was going to code him this custom thing again, he was probably going to run into all these same edge cases as the other guys.

And so I was kind of just kind of talk him out of it almost. And he turned to me and he was like, "How about I pay you like nine bucks a trailer? You know, we've we've looked at every single other solution. We've we've tried all every other software. you seem to have the best understanding of what we actually want here. You just don't have the stuff. Can can we just pay you per trailer rather than paying you like a thing and also had a key set because they didn't have the money to pay you like the 100 grand to build the custom system. And I was like, "That's a business." And and I went away and I had a a really long sleep and I got a similar call from another customer the next day and I said, "Would you pay $12 US?" I think they were they were paddle boards per paddle board

and they were like, "Yeah, of course. No, no, of course we will." I was like, "Oh, that was a very quick yes." And and I called one of the existing integration operators. I said, "Would you pay $5 per trailer?" Yep. Done. Um and did did at any point in that time did you think maybe I'm underpricing it? Maybe I should ask for $13. I No, I think I realized that about a week later that that perhaps there was some some underpricing being done. But at the same time, you know, these guys don't have one or two items. These guys have 5000 items. And so at that case, at that price, like this is already so expensive in my mind.

Like we're already at that point almost coming in as one of the most expensive rental platforms you can actually buy at all. And I was like, this is this feels crazy. I'm asking for like $1,000 a month or $2,000 a month from these guys. No way they're going to do that. And and they all agreed. And so I think it was Saturday night. I said, let's just see what I can put together. And so I started building out a rental system. Billy me thought it would take a night. the it ended up taking about six months to actually get it to the point where we could solve all the things that need to solve because as I said this didn't this couldn't just be what I the the existing rental software we've been integrating with plus an integration on top this had to be an actual full solution it had to do everything it couldn't

have the edge cases that come from kind of hacky integrations they just couldn't happen there's we can't afford 1% of rentals someone turning up on the item doesn't unlock and they have to contact customer support because at scale for some of our bigger operators that just that becomes completely untenable and so we spent six months kind of running down these edge cases just completely trying to solve every single single one we could and and we put it out late last year and immediately obviously those those first customers all came on board as did I think another maybe 10 or so no seven or so come on board just after that of other people I kind of built integrations for who I reached out and said hey would you be interested they're like yep done here's my credit card and so we ended last year with our I think our first 13 customers or so which

is right as we got into startmate and And then it kind of just took off from there. And did you did you solve all the edge cases or were there new ones coming up that you didn't anticipate? So many new ones. It continues to be so many new ones. You solve one and and that's great. It solves you maybe you have a problem that affects 1% of of bookings, right? You solve that and then there's three problems up here that affect, you know, 0.2% of bookings. Um because like each of these as a physical hardware, there's so many things we can't control. So you're basically just playing whack-a-ole. But every month that's kind of what we're working on now.

And you were we were talking about this earlier and kind of number one thing that you you care about is reliability, right? Because this is the income from the operators, the entrepreneurs that are running their businesses and you some you have an alarm system. So if something goes wrong, you sometimes get up at the middle of the night to fix stuff. Tell tell us what you what you told me earlier um about when when you get up this morning. Yeah, my 3:00 a.m. alert this morning that came through for one of our databases running 100 milliseconds slower than it could than it should. Great fun. my girlfriend very unhappy with that this morning. But yeah, we very early on we tried to figure out what what's kind of our core kind of KPI we want to focus on when building Locky because MRI doesn't seem the right one to focus on completely from the start,

right? We need to focus on making sure that people are going to build businesses and because of the way we're priced, if they grow, we're going to grow too, right? That's the whole thing. And so we kind of took this page out of Stripe's book, which is the bad day metric. What what do you consider a bad day for your customers and how can you optimize for it? And we kind of went back and forth for a while on what a bad day looks like for our customers, whether or not it was, you know, them having to deal with, you know, five bookings that had an issue or 10 or 20. And eventually we realized, no, no, it's if if they have to do anything manual on any booking, that's a bad day.

And so that's the metric we live and die by. It's it's if if something goes wrong and they have to do something, that that metric ticks down. And you know that's what we spend a lot of our time solving those edge cases for because every edge case adds another another another percent to that to that meter that means our customers are happier and happier and the more that it's automated the more they have the ability to grow. Like it's very common that a customer comes on board with us and a month or two later they they call us and they go I've done nothing this week. I think I'm going to have to buy more paddle boards.

I think I have to buy more bikes. Like I'm doing nothing. And and previously these rental businesses like ruled their lives and they'll tell you themselves like they they would spend all of their time dealing with maybe even just having seven items because it was too much. They couldn't deal with anything more than that. It was just it was a lot of work. Especially if they're already working a full-time job. And so, you know, they they spend a couple weeks with us and they realize they're doing, you know, 1% 2% of what they used to be doing. What else are they going to do than then turn around and start putting that money into growth?

What how does So, I this is something I couldn't wrap my head around at the beginning. How does your product actually work? How do you actually allow someone to rent something to somebody else without being there? Yeah. Um I mean the start of it is just booking, right? Every rental system has that. Go online, book an item, right? Then the next step is verification. So it's it's my understanding that that human who's saying they're going to rent the item is who they are. Unlike e-commerce where you give the item you don't want to back, right? With rentals, we kind of want to get our things back. So we we need to have some a set of things to try and hold the customer accountable for bringing their item back.

Whether that's just keeping their credit card file on file, whether that's keeping a security deposit, or whether that's going as far as verifying a driver's license. In the US, we even can verify social security numbers, all that sort of stuff. So, we we verify everything and and that happens before you can pick up. You cannot touch an item until you have done all the verification steps that the the rental business finds relevant to them. And then the next step after that is kind of the pre-pickup process of doing like the legal handover. And so in person, a lot of that looks like, you know, the operator will take a couple photos of the item. They'll make you answer some questions, maybe sign a waiver.

And so again, we converted that all to automatic. And we convert that down from, you know, what used to take a five-minute process with the staff member to a 30-cond photo, photo. Yes, I agree. Done. Yes, the trailer's in good condition. Yes, the bike's got a chain on it. Yes, I will wear a helmet on the road, whatever. And then after those they've completed all those steps, we then actually give them access to the item so they can unlock it. And we do that by a variety of ways. We use like IoT locks. Yeah. How do you how do you actually give them access? Yeah, depends on the item and how big they are or how small they are.

But in some cases, we use IoT locks whereby we can trigger them to unlock and and relock remotely and we can check that they're locked or that there's something in the box and those sorts of things. On bigger items, we can sometimes use things like padlocks or key boxes um that we can give pin codes to that are timebound. Yeah, there's we've got ebikes now where we can cut off the power remotely. We have bike stands whereby the bike stem will only unlock once it's once you've paid for it and done all the other steps. depends on the item, but generally it's just some form of physical release so that the customer can't take the item without that kind of Right.

So, so it's kind of like Turo or Zip Car or something but just for anything basically. Yeah. Um and we've got people building car rental companies on us like Yeah, sure. You can rent them through Turo, right? But you're giving away how much of your business to a company to to to kind of just take bookings for you when you can do it through us, get it cheaper in a lot of ways than paying that x percentage and build your own business rather than build someone else's. We integrate with marketplaces like we work with lots of different marketplaces to allow our customers to rent their items through marketplaces, roti and stuff like that. But generally the the idea is the reason Shopify is bigger than Etsy in my opinion is because people want to build their own business.

They don't want to they don't want to be building my business. They want to build theirs. And so we spend a lot of time making sure that you know the the pro rental process is theirs. It's their choice how they want to do it. It's what their choice what questions they ask, what photos they request. How they want to verify to what level they want to verify, right? With the verification steps especially, it's a trade-off. How secure do you want the the booking to be versus how easy do you want the uh the experience from the customer to be is a massive trade-off. So they get to set those trade-offs from what makes sense for their business and their risk profiles.

What's the hardest vertical you you ever try to operate or to automate? Oo, that's a great question. We're working on a couple now that I I think will take an extra few weeks to to get some things together. Cars were probably are probably the hardest one in a lot of ways just because they're so high value and you really do want to make sure that everything everything's before they can drive away with them. But in some ways because they're so big, they were also one of the easiest ones to put together. They're just the scariest. I think cars are the scariest vertical in a lot of ways to to do the hardest physically. I've got to say bikes.

Bikes are just they they're an absolute pain, but they make so much money. So it's the tradeoff of like of that they they do really well but so many edge faces so many maintenance issues right like massive pain but I I don't know I feel like most industries have similar levels of of of pain generally just kind of differences in how risky it is and and how much money you'd stand to lose and all. Got it. And what's the ver is there a vertical that you'd love to get onto your platform that you don't have yet? I'm just trying to think personally what do I what do I want to rent out? I think the ones we wanted to get the first one we really wanted to get on that we didn't have for a while was power tools.

Like I really don't want to be buying power tools. I want to be renting power tools. And conveniently we now have a couple that are coming on board to do that. So I feel like we've satiated that for now and I don't have to go buy my power tools anymore. Gym equipment is a fun one. I'm really excited. We've got a few more rental businesses. Renting rooms started to come on board now in terms of renting like golf simulators is a fun one that's just someone set up. Even someone else doing like full gyms like private like gym studios type things. And we got some sauna coming on in Europe. Like some floating sauna. They're a fun one.

I think for those ones I just want to make sure I get a coupon code that I can go use when I'm there next year to get a get a free sauna floating on the river preferably. Very cool. Um awesome. What's the number one thing that um people mostly get wrong about your business? They think we rent houses. Like that's the get wrong about our business. They think we rent houses out and we're Airbnb. I get that on occasion. Like yeah, can I rent my house? Sorry, can I rent a house through you? Do you guys have houses on your platform? Uh the second one is that that they think we're a marketplace. And and that was a really clear distinction for us at the start was we didn't want to be a marketplace.

As I said before, we want people to be able to build their own businesses and not build ours. And that's why we didn't go the route of building a marketplace first and foremost. That that's probably the the big most common one we get nowadays is that people think we're a marketplace. And they say that's a bad thing. Like when they ask that, they're like, "Oh, so you know, you're the you're the marketplace, right?" They don't say it like they want us to be a marketplace. They say it like they don't want us to be a marketplace. So it's always a good answer when you go, "No, no, no. your business like your your logo, your name, you know, you're you're there.

We we don't need your customers to know who we are. We just need to you to know who we are and you to be happy. And yeah, that that's probably the most annoying thing we get. K Bod, what was the kind of consideration kind of on you know, deciding whether to be a marketplace versus to be sort of a I guess a what would you call it a SAS or service provider white labeled for other businesses? M yeah, I spent a fair bit of time at start thinking about this to be honest about whether we wanted to go the marketplace route or whether we wanted to go the the direct to consumer or the direct to business route.

And the thing I came to was what would I want? What do I when I'm building rental business? Do I want renting through Lucky Marketplace? So, do I want to rent under my own name as a as an entrepreneur myself? Like, do I want to rent my items through a marketplace or do I want to build a business? I want to be able to put my name on it, right? I want to be able to put my leg on it, my colors, my style. I also want to be able to define my own process. the world is littered with kind of the bodies of marketplace rental platforms, right? There are so many and there's a few that kind of continue on to this day and you know have some slight success, but the the field is is littered with the bodies of of rental marketplace companies.

And while we think they'll have a resurgence in future years when they connect to Locky and customers can choose to rent out their items through them as just another channel, for now I think that the goal is really to kind of help people build their own business, especially with the way the economy is going, right? You do want it to be yours. You want to be able to scale it up. You want to be able to feel like you can turn it from a one item side hustle, right, to a thousand item big business enterprise. That's that's the goal for every customer we get on the phone to the first question we ask is like, "Do you want to grow?

Do you want this to be bigger?" And I'd say 90% of the time they say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If I could grow, if I could quit my job, if this could be my full-time thing, right, I'd do that." And you know, the amount of times you get that answer as a marketplace is a lot lower, right? They're there. Oh, no, no, I'm, you know, I only just want to rent one. No, I'm just trying to make a little extra money on the side. I don't want this to be actual thing. That's the the people you get over there that it grows fast and they're not just committed to it. We we get the people who are like, "No, no, no.

I'm going to make a million dollars out of this." You know, that's that's my next thing. What are you seeing kind of just more broadly? Are are people Is this something that is renting things? Is that something that's becoming some people's jobs, right? Are you seeing kind of those kinds of changes? Yeah. Yeah. I think I mean we we've helped we've helped create multiple millionaires out of rentals now. Really? We've also helped a couple people quit their jobs. Yeah. To to just start growing their rentals full-time and and that number will continue to grow. Like we I think I posted on LinkedIn a few months ago like listing how many we created millionaires at that point in time and how many we thought we'd create in in our first year of full operation.

And I think we're that at this point in time. How many? I don't remember the exact number. So I can go check if it was just what I published at that time, but I think we're we'd be at two or three now. Um if I can't remember what I published that time whether we were still What are these guys what are these guys rendering? Trailers. They start off with trailers. They're our first our beach heads. These guys start off with trailers. Yeah. And so we we're going to see that in some other industries for sure. We can already see like we can see from the metrics who's who's doing really well. And it's the people who are, you know, going all in and committing and and you know really are not just there for for few extra hours.

They they're throwing in the the limb here and night. Like I open up my metrics and they're still on it right now, but they're based in the US. Like that's that's when we know they're going to do. Like we have one guy who would go from one trailer in one month he started with us. The by the end of the next month he had eight and his second month he made $10,000. two months he'd gone from $0 revenue to 10,000 and you gone from one trailer to to 10. That's right. [clears throat] But hold on. But I guess how like on a scale I don't know 1 to 10 where like you know one is like you bring kind of just a little bit of value versus 10 is like they could never do this without you.

Where does L key fall? Like how critical is it to allow them to do that? I'm an Australian. I'm too humble to answer these questions. Look, I think for a lot of our businesses they could they could probably still operate without us but they couldn't scale without us. So some of these guys could start their side hustles, their retro side hustles and and absolutely run run without lucky. But the guys who are doing going from 1 to 8 and the guys going from 20 to 50 in a year, like those are the guys that like I mean you can ask them yourselves. They'd tell you they wouldn't leave us in a heartbeat. They've been approached by one of them got approached by kind of a standard legacy rental software a few months ago and he took a meeting with them and they um they were like, "Yeah, so it's going to cost you like $800

less a month, right?" And he was like, "Cool, cool, cool." And look, we did a feature stand. At the end of the meeting, he turned around and was like, "So, to switch to your rental software, I would save $800 a month in software costs. I would then have to hire approximately 10 staff, which would mean monthly you would be costing me $30,000." And they were just like, "Yeah, all right, cool. So, we'll chat soon." Like, it's just that like, yeah, I'm sure they could exist without us, but they'd be very different businesses and they wouldn't be scaling. Yeah, that's why we exist because we really we want these guys to scale. So, so the the legacy software requires you to hire like a bunch of extra people and you guys empower like the individual to basically do it.

Yeah. I mean they they talk about the what is it the the $1 trillion startup or the the billion dollar oneman unicorn startup that that's coming I think in rentals right the $1 million rental startup is a crazy thing like to talk about like in the rental industry that's a massive number to do in your first year as a oneman startup and we've se seen it happen. So it's like and we're going to see it happen again and again. We're going to see it happen more and more over time as these guys continue to start all these crazy ideas. I mean, what do you think about how does where does this industry go? Like does it at some point these smaller kind of guys get consolidated to bigger players?

What is are are there bigger players? Yeah. Like what's the broader kind of macro in which they're operating? Yeah, I think there's going to end up being a lot of mediumsiz players and and and a lot of smaller ones doing more boutique stuff at this end of the market. I think generally as was talking about earlier with I think rentals are local, right? They're a lot more local than Shopify. And that comes with a lot of advantages, right? People want to start an e-commerce business in in America right now. They're competing with the guys out of China who's selling the same item for $2, right? It's a tough fight for them. And so Shopify, I think, and e-commerce businesses in general are becoming less and less attractive to start because it's just so freaking hard to compete.

Local doesn't matter, unfortunately, online in that way. With rentals, it it matters again. And so I think that the idea of the local kind of rental entrepreneur having their items at a bunch of 7-Elevens around their city, right, is going to continue to grow and there's going to be a whole bunch of those and there's going to be a whole bunch of guys who take over a state with trailers or take over a whole bunch of natural national parks with their bikes because unfortunately local will matter. And you know they the guy from China can't compete on the same level because he can't be there to provide that same customer support the guy from Australia can't run the rental business in the US.

So anywhere near like the guy in the US can and vice versa in Australia. Cool. Because because actually my next question was going to be like, you know, if you can automate it or one guy can do it, can can like AI agents just do it? I unfortunately AI agents don't yet have hands and one of the biggest things about rentals is is maintaining your items is is is really I see. But can't you hire but can't you hire people to come to maintenance? Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of what we do is is like one of the things we've been building out is helping our customers build out like a network of people that are maintaining the items when they're geograph geographically distributed is being able to kind of have a marketplace of people who can come up and and repair the tire on the on the bike, etc.

And I think that will continue to grow over time. Yeah. I if you can negotiate the the location deals and and negotiate the human side of it, I feel like an AI agent one day could pull off a rental business of scale. Maybe we should do a a test like the traffic guys did running cafe. see if an AI agent can successfully run a rental business. Yeah. But wait, wait. I didn't know they they ran a cafe. Yeah, there was a there was a whole thing. One of the I think one of the labs or some research thing ran a cafe with AI and let it order all the things. Let it like do it out.

Let it set the prices, all that sort of stuff. It was a fascinating video to watch. Actually, it did not go well, but it was fun to watch. Oh, it didn't go well. Why didn't it go well? No. No. Still too suggestive. I think I think it's still a bit too easy to kind of almost prompt inject the eyes to do what you want them to do. Like at the end of the day, the consumer has to be able to communicate to the operator what the consumer wants and what would help them. And unfortunately, AI is a bit too quick still to go, "Oh yeah, let's implement that. Let me purchase $10,000 of Rubik's cube so you can rent them." Like, but I that actually does sound like a fun little project to do for for a few weeks is set up a rental business and let AI fully run it.

So, so which which kinds of things and tell me if you have to jump off, but which kinds of things are you seeing most in demand kind of through your platforms like in terms of like you mentioned trailers, you mentioned few other things like is it like and I guess why like is it because these things are just not being like why they why is there demand for these things? Is there no kind of like larger players that are doing this? Like where's the where's the demand coming from? Why is not why is it not being served? It's interesting that you mentioned like the larger player thing there because trailers being like the first vertical we started in, right, is is completely saturated by U-Haul in a way, right?

U-hole has 10 trailers in every city on the planet basically, right? And yet somehow these guys are setting out and they're winning. They're beating one of our customers got an offer from U-Haul like to acquire them. Like they're they're beating U-Haul. And I think that kind of goes back to what I mentioned before about local matters. Like having a quality item, having a great maintenance setup matters and U-Haul is not executing on that. like our larger customers are executing on that. They're executing on maintenance at scale, on customer support at scale, on on providing a good experience at scale. And U-Haul and the other big providers are not delivering that at all. And you know, I can imagine it being really hard to pull it off.

Like we we heard in Australia, U-Haul had two maintenance techs for like the entire east side of Australia or like 5,000 trailers. Like wow. I don't know how they even managed getting between other locations at that rate with the other trailers we know they have. They'd be getting to the trailers like once every four years. And not only that, but they have a terrible system for tracking how maintenance works and all this other stuff. So, how are they going to know even when to get to the items? One of the things Locky does really well is is being able to correlate like customer support conversations and issues on rentals and and other sensor data to be able to prioritize.

Okay, this location needs a needs a tech today. It needs a tech yesterday and and reordering and shuffling that as as conditions change. So, yeah, I I think I think that the small providers will continue to beat out these larger ones, especially this the quality they're offering right now. That's for sure. Hm. That's so interesting. It's interesting, right? Because, you know, I think a lot of the conversations that are happening now around AI, it feels like we're like on the verge of AGI or ASI, whatever you want to call it, where kind of like AI like selfursively improves and we reach like this beautiful utopian world and then and then you kind of like you're running this business where like it's a local guy renting some trailers to another, you know, 20 other local guys and and kind of becoming a millionaire off of that.

And it's it's just it goes I think so contradictory to what a high narrative is, right? Like like it's it it's like well in theory you should have an economies of scale. In theory these problems aren't that hard. In theory U-Haul should win. But but you're seeing something different. Yeah. In in practice U-Haul loses every single time and like reliably at scale U-Haul loses. And I'm sure they make lots of money, right? There's not they're not doing bad, [clears throat] but like we moved over a location that was you a gas station somewhere in the world that was doing was renting new old trailers out, right? The new old trailers at that location. They swapped it out.

One of our customers kind of won the the location over and they swapped in their trailers running on Bucky. And our the our trailers at that location made three times the revenue of the old trailers that previously existed at that location. And the guys still did know and and the location did less work than they were previously doing. They were having to like hand over keys and unlock trailers and check trailers and stuff. And the reason being that you guys provide intelligence, you provide analytics, you can provide a better system where the owner can just provide a better product and service to the end user. Yeah. By by a mile, it's can it's faster. It's more convenient.

It's simpler. Like in the day where anyone can make anything, right? Like anyone can code something together. Making something simple is harder than ever before in a lot of ways. Like making something that people can easily use, understand is so much hard. We the amount of AB testing we do the amount of changes the amount of we talk to end customers so not just the businesses that operate with the amount we get permission to and then speak to the end customers to go hey what didn't you understand like how could this be made simpler what didn't you get so that we can then spend time just iterating on how that process works and making it simpler like we spend absurd amounts of time making that process simple and and you know we we talk about a lot with our operators like yes lock is really really convenient and easy for operators to use but even

more so it's actually even more conven convenient for the customer. We just make everything so simple for them and while protecting the operators, it's just it's just so much nicer. You can extend a booking with three taps. You can reschedule the next week in two. You can cancel a booking in two if you really want to, provided it's in line with the company's policies. Like all of these things are so simple. If you don't know how to tap the the extend button, you can chat to the AI bot that again will just do it. Have you ever tried to use any of those big companies AI support chat bots? They go great you can contact customer support to extend your booking.

It's like you are customer support. You're the AI customer support bot. Like there's so many things like this whereby you know when you really actually execute the tech properly customers prefer it and they they will choose operators who run unlucky over inperson operator over people who stand there and hand over the trailer to them. They will choose lucky companies. That's cool. Back to that point of like you know U-Haul losing the local local guy winning. Do that's very different from software. Do you think that's a function of the fact that the physical kind of world of atoms is so heterogeneous that it's really hard to have one scalable solution in the way that you do with software?

You think that's the reason they haven't executed well. Honestly, I think they had such a great opportunity all to to really nail this and to keep up with the tech and I think like a lot of legacy companies have, you know, no no or very little interest in maintaining the quality they need to. Like they've built tech, they have tech. It's just terrible. And you ask any customer, I've sat at the front of a gas station and and talked to people renting U-Haul trailers or and gotten their feedback on it. And it's just hilarious the the differences and the the feedback they give and and it's it's honestly I get why it's a really tough thing to execute on.

Like rentals are a complicated thing. As I say, Locky has hundreds of states for each item that we kind of dutifully bring back to the happy path time and time and time again. and executing on that without, you know, doing what we do. Like I I love standing in nightclubs and learning about the nightclubs companies that use us. I do the same for the rental industry. I stand there. I I figure out what customers are thinking, what they're not understanding, and we improve it so that it works. I I don't think that that you or anyone else like that is is executing that at scale. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's that's interesting. That is so interesting.

Huh. And besides trailers, I mean, it sounds like you should just maybe just go for trailers. Why why are you doing everything? Like cuz you know these things they're usually kind of like a power law distribution where like one or two things kind of drive 90% of your of your revenue. Is that is that kind of what it is? And if so then why go after longtail? Because it feels like you have to do so much work if you figure if you solve trailers then like paddle boards are so different. Bikes rental bikes are sort of power tools. I think you'd be surprised. I think you'd be surprised how much is it actually in common with these things.

Like I think the thing we've solved is is renting or or you solved well is is is renting physical goods. That's the hard bit. The taking that process and adapting it to the different industries we're working with has actually been like honestly surprisingly easy to us. Every now and then there's a few extra things you have to build in to support it. But that that kind of customercentric pickup process, you know, can be very similar across all the industries. And what we've seen is that, you know, people have tried to build automated pickup processes specific for trailers and it just ends up being more complicated in the end anyway. Like the the the thing is because we've stripped out so much of the chaff, so much of the process which is, you know, arcade or inconvenient for the customer, as I say, keep going back to this, but we that that bad day you not

only does it affect the operator, that bad day metric is one thing going wrong and that also that so that same bad day metric affects customers. So, has an end customer had a bad day renting one of our items? Well, we've failed. We need to improve something. And so, because we've simplified that so much, that process can be really easily applied to all the other verticals we're working in. And to be honest, we haven't pushed these other verticals. Like, I've not made a single outbound call to the other verticals that are now using us, right? They find us and and they come having tried every other tool imaginable, right? Um because we're not exactly ranking for, I don't know, golf ball rental, right?

They've tried every other purpose-built solution or halfbuilt solution or and even tried building things themselves in a lot of cases. But it turns out that you know the process we've got just carries over so seamlessly and so well they switch up with us and suddenly I get the email say, "Oh my god, why didn't I do this earlier?" It's it's throughout all of our reviews. Every every public review that's been posted, we we put on our site. The thing we get quite reliably is, "Holy cow, why didn't I do this sooner?" That's cool. But but does is I mean isn't there some like again with all startups like kind of usually startups fail for a lot of reasons but one of the main reasons is because they kind of don't focus right how do you justify kind of not just focusing and just becoming like literally maybe the U-Haul the distributed U-Haul of the world

versus just a platform for rentals right I think that rentals are the future of e-commerce that's that's my belief here that the the whole world is going to move towards rentals especially as the cost of living changes as more people want to start their own businesses as people want scale those up. Rentals, I think, is the is the next generation of e-commerce business. And and so I think there's going to be a Shopify for rentals, right? And I think that's going to be us. And so that just means executing incredibly well on on just general automation for rentals. And there's so much we have yet to build. And and there's so much we are building every single week to try and solve more of those edge cases, right?

And and they are really, as I say, very similar between all the industries. The edge cases we're dealing with now, now we're, you know, a bit of time into this and in time to building are massive, right? They're they're tiny. They affect.1% of bookings, but they require months of engineering work to solve. But because we've already we've got those base processes down now, we get to sit here and go, okay, how do we solve this edge case that's so painful for operators, so painful for customers, that generates so many bad days. How can we solve that seamlessly across all of our verticals? And that's and that's what we get to solve now. Like we've started releasing some of those features over the last month or so.

And like the response from operators has just been I didn't think this was ever going to be possible. Like I just accepted that on one in every hundred bookings or one in every 200 bookings I was going to have to deal with this and now I don't. That's fascinating. You started coding pretty young. I think I think Henrik asked you about the video game that went viral, right? That you built. Yeah. Yeah. And so I mean going from that to now, what is your setup like? Are you just running agents 24/7? Do you have other developers? What is that just on the development side and building stuff? How's how's it changed on the on the development side?

Yeah, I do run a fair few agents nowadays as should everyone I'm sure. I spend like the the biggest bottleneck for me with development which I think probably the interesting thing people talk about these days is isn't quality because I can code so many features and you know we have a big back backlog of features. I can go into linear and I can assign all of those tickets to agents and have a thousand features built tonight, right? That's that's not hard. And I tell this to our customers sometimes. Yeah, I can I can build everything you want. I can build everything that vibe platform has in a day. The problem is it would work maybe 50% of the time and that just doesn't that doesn't work for our customers anymore.

That that that oh it works sometimes isn't what creators are wanting. And so the the biggest bottleneck for us for me specifically is just quality. So everything we build we yeah we'll code out there the basic prototype with with AI of course and and we'll use it to keep tuning things. But I I still have to sit there and and spend I mean hour on every single feature just going okay well how does this UI look? Does it does it meet kind of our our requirements? Is it good enough? I mean, I don't know if you saw the the drama last week on Twitter with Cloudflare releasing like a completely vibecoded page for for their site, but like the uproar on that was crazy.

And the uproar from our customers would be the same. Like they they don't want a vibecoded new feature. They want something that that works reliably that we test. We advertise with all of our features. Every time we release a feature, we test it with 10,000 bookings first. We have a couple customers who I ask to to kind of run test with new features on their fleets. We will sit there and run 10,000 bookings with that and figure out okay did our our automation percentage meaningfully increase or meaningfully decrease by adding this feature and only after that do we then go all right you guys can have it now because it works scale or if it doesn't we released a feature recently for late automated late charges right really common feature that's appearing in lots of yeah rental software and you know the feature the feedback we've gotten from people when they moved to us is

they wanted that and then I asked more about it and they're like oh yeah didn't really work but I like the idea of it and we were like Okay, Grace. So, no one's pulled this off yet. Let's figure out how to do it. We built three versions of it, completely different each of them. Released it, tested on bookings, watched how it was used. I I literally sat on the shoulder of people using it to see what they what was going wrong and what they were stepping in. And on the third version, only then did we actually see a meaningful change in the amount of automation across bookings. And now it's a it's a really meaningful change.

Like any booking that's running over due, we now have a whole system that seamlessly handles it for both the customer and the operator, that deals with recovery, that deals with all the other things that come along with it. and and it works and that's people move to us and they go oh yeah my last my last rental of software had something that did that like it kind of it's just it was just like I had it on like you know yeah that's so you're saying the the bottleneck is is basically is it is it taste or is it kind of like user testing or what exactly would you say it's quality and user experience I think is the is the bottleneck that I see all three at once I just I I cannot you I can do some great prompting I feel like I've gotten pretty good at prompting these days but at the end

of the Like nothing beats watching a user get frustrated by tapping the screen 100 times when it doesn't work they work the way they expected it to. Nothing also beats just seeing a c an operator so one of our operators you know see the automation run and then go in and make manual changes afterwards. That's the most infuriating thing for us. So we we track how many manual changes made to bookings and when manual changes being made we're failing and and so commonly with those late the late charing as an example again they would yeah the late charge automation would run and then they don't make manual changes to the booking anyway. like that's a failure.

Like that that feature is not doing enough. If they're having to go in and change something manually, we failed. And now we've released it and like I think 60% of our customers turn it on like in a week and it reliably gets used again. We monitor the bad day stuff. Those bookings it's it's running. Customers using it. It's not going wrong. They're not touching having to touch up the booking manually and it all happens seamlessly. And that's that's when we know, okay, we've made a meaningful contribution. We've ripped features out of Locky a couple times now because we've just seen like it's yes it's automated something but it's just generated manual work for them as well.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean this is great. Maybe to like zoom out and to sort of wrap up. You know, you you sort of stumbled into this a little bit kind of accidentally in some ways, right? Like your uncle was your uncle who asked you to to automate the paddable rental and then and I think you you've executed this very correctly like frankly, right? That you've I mean that the business, right? Like talking to customers, understanding what people want, building towards that. But in some ways, you kind of got lucky cuz like the problem kind of found you. You kind of became known for this thing and people came came after you. for entrepreneurs that are building today, wanting to build today, wanting to, you know, create products and features in a world where kind of anything's possible to create, but but but at the same time, it feels like everything's a little bit

kind of saturated. Feels like there's products for everything. What what advice do you have? Quality. Like honestly, it's the it's it's the biggest thing that sets us apart. It's the thing that people go, "Wow." When they watch the first demo with us, they they go through a demo with us and they see something happen, they go, "Wow, how did that what?" Like, and they're just confused by the fact that it say Apple here, but it just works. So, you know, yes, the the old age-old startup line of like talk to your customers is is so important, but talking to your customers and building what they want versus building what they need is is very different.

And then building what they need with taste, with quality, with obsession to to build something that just is is completely unparalleled on user experience. Like that's our customers will choose us time and time again. Even if someone was to build the exact same platform, right? V code it all together today. none of our customers would move because they would they would look at the quality and they go h you I'm gonna stick with the one that just works right and it's why we've we've moved I think this month alone we moved six customers over from bipod solutions they built themselves to lock right something that's in in general should be more feature complete for them like it's got exactly what they want they've coded to build themselves and yet they're choosing to move to locky because it it works it's it's quality it's tasteful all that sort of stuff so I think for new people

building like yeah trying to understand what the customers want is is super important. But then yeah, executing on in a way that no one else can because you know how to build. Yeah, anyone can build these days. You said it very well. Anyone and everyone can build. Very few people can execute on taste and quality still. And and that's why engineers salaries are still going up, right? Like that's why software engineers are not getting cheaper by the month. They seem to be getting more expensive from my latest hiring conversations. Like I think I think if if AI could do it all at this point, like engineer salaries would be through the floor, right? I'd like that.

It'd be so much cheaper to hire some engineers to come work for us. But instead, like what I'm finding is just the engineers who I actually want, like the ones that are executing so well. So expensive. So expensive. So that money we gave you is going to good use. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's awesome. No, Bodie, this is great, man. Appreciate your time. I think what you're building is incredible and I think it's a very interesting business that I think Yes. Well, definitely has the potential to be the next next Shopify. So, congrats on pursuing that and building a great company. We certainly believe in it. It's uh it's been a very fun ride and it's I mean I'm not sleeping at all so it seems to be getting more and more fun by the week.

All right, man. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to TechMates. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with friends. We'll be back soon with more stories of Kiwi and Aussie founders reshaping the future and disrupting Down Under. Until next time, keep dreaming big and daring to disrupt.