[00:00:00] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer. My name is Jay Aigner. Today. I am very excited. This is a new
format for us. we're chasing down some successful Shark Tank folks, and I could not be more excited to have the first one. I didn't even tell you. that you, are the first one. I have a bunch lined up, but you're the first Shark Tank contestant on the first customer podcast.
So thank you for being on. This is Sam Chason like Jason. He's chasing down the leads. and, it's great to have you on brother. Thanks for being here. Yeah,[00:01:00]
Sam: a beautiful day here in Austin, Texas. It's like 85 and sunny, so always in a good mood when it starts off with a sunny day.
Jay: you can't, you know, it's always
sunny in Philly. all right. so give me your elevator pitch background. Where'd you come from and grow up? And, did that have an impact on you being an entrepreneur?
Sam: so I grew up in Westchester County in Mount Kisco, it's about 45 minutes north of New York City. I'm youngest of three, older sister lives in Manhattan, older brother lives in Philly right now. My parents are both public high school teachers. So education was definitely very highly valued. But I started at an early age, even if it was like a lemonade stand, it wasn't like, oh, that's cute, whatever.
It's like, okay, I'm going to go out and buy the lemonade powder. I'm going to buy like the lemons, I'm going to buy the paper cups, the markers, the, you know, the poster board to be like 22 in debt. Right. And then it's like, okay, how can I make this artisan lemonade, get a chef's hat, invest five bucks, stand in the middle of the road and just start hustling.
So even making a couple hundred dollars in the lemonade stand to then. Arizona iced teas and like [00:02:00] airheads out of my locker to then lawn mowing and pet care to then flipping dirt bikes, ATVs, lawn mowers, cars, get to college, got to pay my way through school, parents supported a bit, but definitely where I went to Wake Forest was Around 70, 000 a year.
So it was more like, Hey, I'm going to get the best education possible. I'll figure it. Not like I'm going to figure it out and take out a bunch of loans, but I'm going to figure it out and just find a way to pay it off. This is a bill. This is a debt that I have. How do I pay it off? so got to work, October of freshman year, probably.
30 days since starting school, had two international homemates. One was from China. One was from Ethiopia. And they kind of looked at me and said, they're stereotypical, like American friend, like, well, what do we do with our stuff, man? Like,so they would bring their two big check bags overseas.
They put them in the closet and then they'd buy their mattress topper, their bike, their plastic bins, whatever in the U. S. So I asked some upperclassmen, like, does anything like this exist? They go, no, which was totally not true. There was a bunch of companies on campus like this. but ended up printing out some flyers, went door to door.
Our target customer for a summer storage service on college campuses was [00:03:00] freshmen. So just went door to door and started selling myself. it was called Wake Storage at the time. Because I went to wake forest and I figured maybe people will think we're affiliated with the school and maybe we'll get some more customers that came back to, I wouldn't even say bud is in the bud, but I can tell kind of that story later, but yeah, that was 64 customers, your one 18, 000 in revenue.
So, okay, well, I have a cool opportunity. let's go for it.
Jay: first person that said yes.
Sam: 1000. So I remember the first person, like no one like said yes, in terms of went door to door, like, do you want to use this? And they're like, yeah, it sounds amazing. Like here's my credit card because I wasn't set up to do it like that, right?
It was more just building brand awareness and we built the website. I 100 percent remember the first two customers that I went to. So the first customer, like I was doing all the moving myself, right? We had, we shipped a tractor trailer where the boxes to the dorm, I put them in the hallway. Kind of like an ask for forgiveness before permission.
Like my RA was 22. So he was the one that like actually helped me rent our first box truck. We had CubeSmart self storage down the street. First month free. So like, [00:04:00] you know, May was free, and just rented some dollies like through, through like the rental truck as well. So the first customer I get to the door and he's got like six items and the bill was going to be like 385.
So I'm like tallying it up. I'm like, it's going to be 385. And he goes, okay. Like, can you do better? What do you mean? It's like, well, can you give me a better price? Like, can I get like 15 percent off? And I'm like, I guess. I mean, I negotiate all the time. Like, sure. Is this the way this is going to work?
But sure. Here's 325. She's like, great. And then we go, okay, that kid ended up actually coming to work for me, like the next year, because I was not the average customer persona of someone that, uses the service like ours. And then the next customer gets the room now a bit nervous because I walk in and the person, the girl has.
About three times the amount of things. and the, her mom is helping her pack her up her stuff. So like they paid for a service for us to come pick up their things, but the mom flew down to pack it up and she was leaving, the girl who was leaving to go abroad in the fall, but she was going to be gone for not just the [00:05:00] summer, but the fall as well.
So it was double the storage period, which means double the cost.
Jay: So I'm calculating up this number, having just been negotiated with in the past, and the bill is gonna be like 1, 300. Which is absurd, right? and I'll go, Hey, it's gonna be 1, 327. And the mom goes without even blinking. Okay, who do I make the check out to?
Sam: And I go, Sam Chason, let's go. And that was that I knew like we were ripping out for that. So
Jay: Wow. Damn. well, so has that, I mean, that's a, like, You know, entrepreneur one on one, right? Like you, you start by doubting how much you should charge and you think that you're going to get lose business or whatever, because you're going to charge too much. So you go too low and then you eventually go, well, holy shit, I can charge a lot and people will pay a lot because this is a premium service or something that I've done differently or whatever has that continued as you guys have gone on as you standardize your prices.
Do you kind of continue to keep it at the, you know, the more premium side of things because you know, it's worth it. Right.
Sam: yeah, so to your point, when I first started, there was competitors in the [00:06:00] space to what legitimacy they were. I didn't really know at the time. but I was okay, great. They're charging, you know, let's call it. You know, X for the boxes, you know, 12 bucks, I'm going to charge 11. 50. Like I'm going to undercut them.
Like, cause we're not legit yet. Like, why would anybody go with us? And definitely the single, like one sentence, best piece of advice I've received from my entrepreneurship professors in college was don't be the cheap offering, be the premium option. Charge the highest price, which also then in turn allows you to pay your people and pay the best people and like have them come back and be excited to work for you Because if you're charging the cheapest price, it means you're also paying your people like the least amount so, yeah, so I ended up after year one Either matching the price and then now eventually now had the lowest price You know, get more confidence in, making, becoming probably one of the more expensive options in the market.
that said, we also don't have these, like, it's like a classic, like Southwest versus, or maybe Spirit Airlines versus like American, right? We are the American, like people know what they're getting up front and, you know, you could use Spirit. Maybe you get away with paying 50 percent less or you get screwed and you get charged X amount of fees [00:07:00] for them to like come to your door and like pick up at this time and ship this.
So it's going to be a Versus that's like, Hey, we're the premium option. This is the cost up front. Like We'll handle it on time.
Jay: So how, I mean, did you bridge that knowledge gap with your competition? Like, have you taken it? How seriously do you take it now?
Sam: Take our competition
Jay: Yeah. Like just the process of understanding your competition, I guess.
Sam: yeah, I would say very seriously. I mean, what we've, the bet that we've kind of made is that, you know, number one, customers are probably not that sensitive to price in a situation like this, and let's pretend we are. 600 to use the service, which is give you the free supplies, boxes, tape bubble, you pick it up, store it for oftentimes four months of the summer, we deliver it.
in comparison to like, if you were going to hire a moving company, that's actually a very good deal in comparison to maybe what some of these services and the entry costs, maybe we're 10 percent higher, right? So it's okay. Like it's relatively similar. And for us, it's like, we [00:08:00] don't. Not that we don't care about the competition, but it also is like, if you're a student, you're not really price calculating the four different competitors in the marketplace for somebody that mom and dad is probably going to pay for you to store your seven boxes.
Some people do. The ones that do, oftentimes they come work for us and then they get storage for free. or it's fine. Like we're happy to lose those five to 10 percent that like really need a good deal. and we provide a really high quality service and then in turn, you know, it's going to be a premium price.
So we can actually pay. Like the reason this whole business kind of came about is that I need to pay my way through school and working the average work study on campus makes 7 an hour, like you can't actually pay off school with that. So when we pay our college students, we're not paying them minimum wage, right?
We're paying them upwards of 20, 30 bucks an hour. Yeah, it's not a easy job, but like we're not just like exploiting that either. So that's going to come in. We have to then charge a certain amount of people to come work too. People use the service. I apologize.
Jay: No, I like the, charge premium prices so you can have premium employees. Right. And it all [00:09:00] just kind of, it's like a big cycle that feeds back into itself. all right. Tell me about Shark Tank, you know, I mean, I've read, you know, online, how you kind of came about, but just, what was the real experience like getting, you know, getting on there and then being there and would you walk away with, and do you still kind of engage in the pipeline with Mark?
Sam: Yeah. I mean, high level, biggest takeaway from that experience in general and just in life is no one's going to do the work for you as simple as that, right? So when it came down to, it's like, not like somebody called, like, you guys are a cute, great college business. Like come on the show. Like I searched our tank application, like applied, right.
Then like submitted, you know, 150 page application for me and my business partner, 150 pages and a 300 page business application for the company combined, then you do. Video submissions, interviews, you're going to sign a casting director. Like you make your own set. And then I go, what do you want your set to look like?
And you have to drop in links from Google of like what you want to do. Then you purchase it and you ship it out to their address. You fly [00:10:00] early, put it together. Like no one's going to, no one's going to do the work for you. and then even so much so where we actually got on the show, we got offers for most of the sharks.
We got an offer from Mark. We took the deal. We're super excited. They send a, a psychologist, in afterwards. Cause it's, you know, it's. TV, you could have sold half your business. You could have gotten embarrassed. So, and then when it's like, you know, how are you, how do you feel? Fucking awesome. Like, what do you mean?
Right. And we're about to go out to dinner, celebrate. It's now 10 PM at night and they go there. Oh, hold on. Like, and they hand us a drill. They go, you know, go break down your set. so full spectrum, incredible experience in terms of what we got out of it. Like it gave us a brand right before we were storage scholars.
Storage and moving company. And when we're trying to hire college students at in the hundreds and now the thousands going online and be like, come work for the storage and moving company. Not that cool. Come work for the Mark Cuban back Shark Tank company. Sweet. Our application funnel TEDx. So from that effect alone, and also created the level of like brand trust and allows us to [00:11:00] charge a premium too.
It's like, Oh, well, smart Cuban believes in you. Like, sure. Like I might as well use you to move my stuff. Right. But even so too, when we get a partner with him, it's not like Mark's picking up the phone and being like every school in the country come partner with these guys, you know, he's an incredible partner with us.
He's an incredible mentor. kind of like a father figure, especially having like gone and like grown up and watched the show forever. And we can email back and forth on a weekly or even daily basis if we wanted to, but it's not like you have a team assigned to you that's going to do your marketing and like do your accounting and like make sure shit doesn't go bad.
Like you still have to do it all yourself. So that's definitely a bit of a misconception. I think kind of just in life, especially in business too, like it definitely doesn't get easier, you know, the problems and stuff you have the ability to handle and when they come at you more effectively and efficiently, just because like you've been there before, but you still got to wake up, you still got to like, Put your big boy pants on and like actually work every day
Jay: let's tie that to this question. if you had to start all over again with everything you've known so far, what would be step one?
Sam: [00:12:00] with this business. You're just
Jay: just this business specifically, you're going to start it back over.
Sam: Instinctually, I want to say I feel like everything kind of happens for a reason like we asked for a ton of Forgiveness before permission like okay baseline. Who's your customers? You want to talk to the person like how does the operation work? We kept it as simple as possible who hired our friends. We hired rented trucks And then we even named the name of the company something that we got end up getting a cease and desist letter for because like it was illegal and that as a result had an ability to talk to the head of residence life, the head of housing, the head of procurement, the head of legal as an 18 year old in the room that being like shut down this cute business.
So I've been like, okay, I guess this doesn't exist. What is storage scholars? Led to our first contract. So,I don't know. I feel like I was pretty dialed. of course, there's different avenues you could have gone about it. But I think in terms of with the resources that had available, at any point, I mean, definitely would have loved to Go [00:13:00] quicker.
But I mean, first year was at one school. Next year was at three, then nine, then 15. Like we were never really scared. It was just kind of impossible. I was a full time college student to like taking my own exams. So what would I do different? I think having some perception of built to scale, like every single year we've had to re redo our entire technology stack, like payroll system, onboarding system, just because what we could afford at the time, like It doesn't scale up to 50, then 100, then 200, then 500 people, but at the same time, it's also, that's what we can afford.
So maybe having the foresight to be like, okay, actually, this is something we should splurge on because it's going to take us an extra 100 hours to revamp and get everyone on board to a new system every year. Maybe, but we bootstrapped the entire thing. So, plus I was using the money to pay for school.
So I don't know. I think the lessons learned initially were like when I was, you know, Six to 18. And then when I got to college, I'm like, this is what I want to do. Of course, you can always go about it in a better way, but I think we were pretty risk heavy And just kind of sent it [00:14:00] and definitely we're definitely got to get kind of get our hands dirty and do the work ourselves
Jay: yeah, I mean, but there is something that has to be driving that, like you are dialed and you're like dialed in, you're locked in, like you've got, there's like, not everybody has that. Everybody says they want to do something. There's like, you have a crazy drive of like, especially like a young. Guy to be locked in talking about, you know, the thing that I wish I would improved was my ability to scale.
Had like, these are things that are like, you know, it takes people a lot of time to learn or they have something that's pushing them really hard to do it. Like, do you think that came from anywhere growing up? You know, where does this drive come from?
Sam: Yes, I think it all comes down to some level of fear basis right and a need Right. If I wanted to, and at this point now, like, why do we need to make 10 million? Because we have a 4 million payroll. We hired all these people and we promised them. And now we have their families and their salaries and [00:15:00] their kids and their educations.
Like, that's like the fear base. Like you can't screw this up for them. And in the early days, it was like, Hey, I don't want to be 150, 000 in debt as an 18 and 19 year olds. The fear is there's no other option. Like the priority was. Business, school, social life. Versus for some other people it would have been like the priorities.
College is going to be the best four years of my life, like let's meet a bunch of people, like try to get A's, you know, and like if I get some cool work experience and an unpaid internship out of it, like, great. And honestly, for some people that's totally fine. I just like, and I probably would have done that if I didn't have the need.
So honestly, like having my parents, put me in that situation purely just because they knew I could handle it, was amazing because when you have a need, you just figure things out. and it wasn't an option to succeed. It was like a necessary thing.
Jay: I love that.back to the business real quick. how is your kind of customer profile? Evolved as you guys have evolved. What is it? What is it now versus what it was [00:16:00] when you first were knocking on doors?
Sam: Well, I mean, we were selling directly to students, right. And then we quickly realized that. Most often in our customer, actually the parents. So it's like either how can we reach the parents directly or how can we find the messaging tailored to the students? And that way they'll reach out to their parents and tell them about this.
and then it was okay. Actually, the best way to do top down is to actually the real customers are the universities and they don't pay us anything, but can we make an agreement with them and that way they shoot out the messaging of saying, you should use this moving and storage service because. It you have to do a lot of effective marketing to get someone to trust you to handle their things personally But if the school that you're paying 50 60 grand a year or two says hey, this is a trusted vetted option That's the easiest way to sell a market.
Jay: Beautiful. All right. I have one other question, non business related.if you could do anything on earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?[00:17:00]
Sam: It's a great question I have been getting the question recently of what's kind of like after this? I think what I know what I desire to do, like all the time would be to run events and things within my own community. it's always like grass is always greener thing, but, you know, having a mom from North Dakota call me about her service for Sonic Crayton, there's just less of like a personal connection to it.
and all, most of our team is remote and stuff like that. So, Maybe more as like a passion project would be to actually run like adult field days and like color wars over the weekend at these like really nice like resort summer camps, but not just do the athletic part but also do a lot more of like, mental work and that kind of thing my One of my employees is he's laughing at me.
He continued talking about this. He was talking about this last night So yeah That would be like the dream to do that and do it very well and very effectively and be like one of the best people in the country that's doing that and that you have like either just friends and family members and like people in the community [00:18:00] or even like you make it like a You Like a CEO bootcamp, CEO Olympics, that kind of thing.
it makes it just a lot more like fun and whimsical nature to like life and sports and fitness and, mental awareness and that kind of thing.
Jay: CEO bootcamp or, CEO wars, is a first, for sure in that answer. So I love it. I will accept that as an answer. Sam, you were like, You know, I have to imagine your parents are very proud of you. I mean, I feel proud of you just as like my kids are almost your age. this is incredible to kind of see just like you said, the focus and locking in and the scaling up and all the things that you guys are doing.
So, keep up the good work, man. And it's a cool story to see. If people want to reach out to you directly to talk, you know, how do they do that?
Sam: Yeah. So me personally on Instagram is Sam J Chason. That's S A M J C H A S O N. Or you can just shoot me an email, sam. storagecollars. com. S A M A T S T O R A G E S C H [00:19:00] O L A R S.
Jay: Storage scholars.
Love it, brother. All right, man. Well, enjoy the rest of your week. and keep kicking ass. We'll catch up again soon. All right.
Sam: appreciate it. Thanks, Jay. Thanks for having me on.