Hello everyone, welcome back to another blog post! Sorry I know it’s been a while since I’ve uploaded a post I think it’s been about a month. School has been super hectic but I just finished my first quarter so I’ve had a little bit of down time and so I thought it would be a good time to post.
Today I’ll be talking about something I started during the summer and I think I have enough experience to talk about it now as I have been doing it for about 4-5 months.
During the summer I had a quite common high school dilemma; how do I make money? While not having to travel far distances as I don’t have a car. So I did some research and came across this platform called Peerspace. It is essentially a website/app that allows people to rent out spaces for events. For a bit of context I just moved to Palos Verdes this summer, and now we had a much nicer house so I thought that people might want to rent our backyard for all sorts of events from baby showers to birthdays.
Once I came up with a general plan of how we would manage these events I brought the idea to my parents and they gave me permission to set up a Peerspace account to rent out house out. To date we have done about 10 Peerspace rentals as they tend to be the whole day and quite expensive so we get on average 2-3 a month. So in order to increase our income on days where we didn’t have large Peerspace rentals we set up a Swimply account.
As I was looking for Peerspace I also found Swimply but I didn’t want to do too much at once and I also thought that Swimply wasn’t as viable. I then realized that a combination between Swimply and Peerspace was perfect to keep a consistent cash flow or “side hustle” going. Swimply was simply a pool rental service so it was overall less work but we also made less money. So I once again pitched this idea to my parents and they said it was fine as long as I managed the bookings and blocked off days where we were too busy to have the pool rented.
Fast forward about a month to mid September and I’ve now been in school for about 2 weeks and our rental services were going well but we learned somethings that I would consider cardinal rules of any rental service. The first is you absolutely must have rules in place for your space.
If you don’t have rules clearly displayed somewhere then there is nothing you can do if someone does something dangerous or harmful, like for example throwing rocks in the pool. Secondly you should have Wi-Fi and other amenities like a bathroom for your guests. These small things make the experience better for everyone and also helps grow your reputation. Finally ask for reviews and be polite hosts. This may seem obvious but being kind/polite goes a long way in growing your business and will make people want to give you good reviews. So far we have gotten a 5 star rating from every single one of our bookings on both Peerspace and Swimply. An example of something that would show your courtesy as a host is the following: you have a booking for 20 people but the guest counted wrong and has 21 people at their event. A bad host would increase the price of the booking to account for that guest and have a bad attitude about the situation. A courteous host would notify the guest and let them know that it is fine and would be ok with it because people can make mistakes no one’s perfect and it is not a reason to ruin your relationship with your guest(s).
I hope you guys enjoyed this blog post and I’lol be making this a series so be sure to come back next time for another side hustle post!