Author: Shrey Agarwal

Hello and welcome to my blog! Today I’ll be explaining to you all how I find time in my busy schedule to manage our Peerspace listing so that I can keep my business running successfully.

If you are new to the blog or are unaware I am a high school sophomore taking 1 AP class and all honors as well as a national-level debater, and robotics business manager of a team going to the world finals this year go team 2637!, and I am on a national level Cyber Patriots team who placed in the top 200 worldwide last season. I “work” about 75-80 hours a week and I often have tournaments for my activities on the weekends.

With all of this going on you would think it is hard to manage our listing at the same time but, I’ve learned some key tips that will help any host improve their guest retention rate.

First, a good way to find time to respond to guests on Peerspace is by turning on notifications for the app. This may seem extremely simple but it is very helpful as it will notify you whenever you get any message from Peerspace just as you would a text. this will allow you to respond to guests frequently which increases the likelihood that they will book with you. A quick response rate is also a requirement to become a power host.

Next, I recommend that you spend at least 1 hour a month planning out the following month so that you as a host know when you can rent out your space. This will save you and potential guests time as they will not have to guess when you are available. If for example, a guest book with you on days you are not available and you cancel it will be noted by Peerspace and any more than 1 cancellation per quarter (90 days) will result in an inability to become a power host until the next quarter rolls around. This is a huge detriment to your listing and reputation as power hosts receive significantly more bookings and advertising from Peerspace.

Finally, I would recommend that you don’t stress about getting a lot of bookings early on and instead focus on making sure that the bookings that you do get go extremely well. This will lead to higher reviews and more bookings as you will become more well-known and those high ratings will move you up in the various categories in your area.

I hope you all enjoyed this blog post and I’ll see you next time!

Hello everyone and welcome back to another post! In todays blog post I wanted to give you all some insight into how and why I setup my Peerspace account under my father.

There were 3 main reasons that I chose to do it this way. Firstly was the fact that I am of course, still a minor and it would not make sense to most people that I am running a business like this. Which would lead to less bookings and less trust in our listing. It also would seem suspicious to anyone looking at the property if it did not appear to be under an adult.

Secondly we chose to setup the account this way because of our banking and tax situation. I have my own bank account however, I do not use it frequently and I certainly have no clue how to file a tax return. But thankfully my dad does file his taxes yearly and so it makes it considerably easier to manage all the money we generate by having it under his name as he can include it in the taxes that he already files.

Finally we setup the account this way to essentially keep my online image away from others. While I do have a youtube channel, I don’t have that much of an online presence. The thing I am the most related to is this blog post but, other than that I don’t really make too much content, or many appearances on the internet. So my parents felt that it was best for it to stay that way at least until I am an adult. Which is why our account is under my dad. I still am able to manage bookings and send messages to guests that way my parents don’t have to with their already busy schedules. And they make sure I help out by cleaning up after the fact.

If you are a minor who is also interested in starting a business like this, then I would sincerely recommend that you setup your account in a similar way so that you can avoid any issues I mentioned above.

I hope you all enjoyed and I’ll see you next time! If you found this post interesting make sure to check out one of my other posts, like the one where I explain how I became a Peerspace power host in my first 6 months using the site!

Hello everyone and welcome back to a new blog post! Today I’ll be going over the specific requirements that need to be met in order to become a power host on Peer Space.

There are 4 main requirements that Peer Space has set to become a power host. They are as it follows A high response rate, A high review score, # of cancellations, and # of accepted bookings per quarter.

For the response rate it must be over 90% and we met the threshold for this requirement barely. By only 1% as we responded to 91% of messages.

The next requirement, Average Review Score, talks about the average rating of your property by clients on a 1-5 star scale basis. The best way to achieve this is to be extremely kind and patient with clients. We make sure to accommodate all of their needs during all bookings.

The next criteria is # of cancellations. the goal is 0 but 1 is ok which is what we have currently. Make sure to not accept any bookings that you are unable to accommodate which is basically the only way to prevent having cancellations.

The final criteria are the number of accepted bookings per quarter. The benchmark is 5 bookings per quarter. we hit 6 this quarter and we are looking forward to continuing with these numbers in the future.

Sorry that this post wasn’t that long but I will be making a new one shortly.

I hope you all enjoyed, and I’ll see you next time!

I’ve recently been making a bunch of blog posts about our Swimply and Peerspace progress and I’ve been giving anyone out there tips and tricks to make income the same way. Well its been almost 6 months and some of that work has lead to some recognition from Peerspace.

We have now joined the Peerspace Power Host program. Which gives lots of benefits to start with it helps build an extremely good name for your listing as this achievement adds a special badge to your account and all your listings that signifies this huge achievement, next it also gives you access to priority support completely eliminating support wait time.

Along with this there is also special filters to select for power hosts and there is in general more traffic directed towards our listing. This is especially true as we are now not only the #1 Party rental space in PV but we are also Power Hosts.

These 2 traits combined leads to roughly 5 TIMES more bookings. This is an absolutely momentous increase in traffic to listings and leads to a massive increase of business which is explained with data and other information on the Peerspace website.

We also get access to special events and promotions that Peerspace offers as we are one of their top hosts and are a part of this program. We hope that in the near future we can also join some sort of program like this with swimply as well. Currently though this is a huge achievement for us and I am so glad that I’ve been able to share this journey with you all so far.

On a slightly different note I just wanted to say that I know it has been a long while since I’ve posted about coding. This is of course because I have been focusing on other things like Peerspace and Swimply, but I will be posting more about coding as I am a part of the Cyber patriots team at my school where I learn all about cyber security and system hardening. I will start incorporating this into my regular posts as this coding was what really started my blogging and I think that it is a good thing to reincorporate.

Let me know if this would be something interesting for you guys to read about because it is a great topic that I am interested in sharing with all of you. But that’s all for today’s post thank you all so much for reading!

In my next post I’ll go over the requirements to be a power host specifically and how I recommend attaining some of the harder requirements. After that I will make my first Cyber Patriot. See you all next time!

Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post! I finished finals a little over a week ago and have been on winter break. Sorry that I haven’t posted I have been busy spending time with family for Christmas and New Years. I hope everyone had a great break. This year I have set a couple of goals, the first of which is to make more blog posts I’m aiming for about 100 posts this year which is about 2 a week and my other goal is to increase our Peerspace and Swimply revenue this year.

Without further ado lets get started! Now normally in the beginning of a new month I would be posting about our total revenue for the prior month. However December quite unsurprisingly was quite slow and we only had 1 event. So instead of focusing on one booking we decided to use this month to advertise our listing and acquire booking for this year.

So we invited all of the people who were potentially going to book events at our house. To come and check out the space and get their questions answered. By doing this we were able to build relationships and trust with many potential guests which helps our business grow and even gets our space prebooked. The reason this is important is because when others come to book it shows them what days have already been booked which of course shows that many people our interested in our space.

Aside from prebooking however it is imperative that you get good reviews on your space because this puts you on the Swimply and Peerspace leaderboards of sorts. An example of this is on Peerspace where our property is ranked #1 for party rentals in Palos Verdes. We have only been doing Peerspace and Swimply for a couple of months and we are already at the top of party rentals because of our reviews and great customer service.

This aforementioned customer service is an extremely important part of any business but especially the service industry. Space rentals are a service that we offer via Swimply and Peerspace and as such we need to have excellent customer service so we actually get bookings.

Finally in terms of advertising I would recommend asking previous guests to share your space information with friends and family who may be interested in booking events. Also placing advertisements in things like this blog for example are a great way to get the word out about your space.

Thank you everyone for tuning into this blog post. Once again I hope you all had a wonderful break and i’ll see you in my next post!

Link to our peerspace listing if people are interested: https://www.peerspace.com/pages/listings/629958302705a7000eb60104?sort_order=1

Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post! I haven’t posted in a while because I have been extremely busy with school and finals are coming up so I probably wont post anything until winter break, but after break I should be more active. With that out of the way lets get into todays post!

I’ll start with my earning summary of Swimply for the month of November. Unfortunately because it is getting colder here, and because our pool isn’t heated, we only got one booking in November for a total of 60$.

The booking lasted for one hour and the family had a good time and left us a great review. We sincerely appreciate their business!

Fortunately however November was an EXCELLENT month for Peerspace. As we had two bookings for a total income of 4,615$! This is why I would recommend that you should have both a Swimply and Peerspace account if possible as it is extremely beneficial when one is slow the other can essentially “pick up the slack”.

We had one booking on the 14th and one on the 15th of November so it was quite a busy week for us. The first booking lasted for 10 hours and had 74 attendees. It was a busy night of hosting but it was totally worth it.

The booking on the 15th was much of the same as it was 8 hours long and had 65 attendees. This party was a little easier to manage because the guests left around 10pm versus later at night as they did on the 14th.

Overall novemeber was a great month with a profit of 4,675$. We look forward to hopefully doing similar numbers in December. Thank you all for reading I hope you have a great day and I’ll see you next time!

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!

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. It’s been a little while since I posted because I was on vacation in Ireland. Now that I’m back I thought that it would be interesting to share my itinerary of all the things I did while I was there. So lets get started!

On my first day in Ireland I went to the Epic museum which is a museum on Irish emigration. It was a very interesting experience and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who goes to Ireland. Avoca was nice as well however it was very expensive.

The next places that I went to were Trinity College, Leo Burdock’s, and Grafton Street. Firstly Trinity College was very interesting and had a lot of history as it has been around for over 500 years. We toured the entire campus and went to their massive library which housed the book of Kells. The book of Kells is an ancient religious manuscript that is kept in a special weather controlled case. Leo Burdock’s is considered Ireland’s best fish and chips and it definitely lived up to my expectations.

Finally we walked around Grafton street which was a large outdoor marketplace with hundreds of shops to discover. It also had lots of restaurants and great views of the city.

On Wednesday we went to the George Street Arcade, Ireland’s Creative Quarter and a monument known as the Spire. George street arcade was very similar to Grafton street however, it was indoors and had less shops. Overall it was a great experience. Ireland’s Creative quarter Was a massive street of shops that sold unique goods. One or two blocks over from there was the Spire. Originally the Spire was meant to be completed in 2000 to celebrate the millennia but due to delays it was completed in 2003.

On Thursday we went to the Temple Bar district and watched River dance (a famous Irish dancing show). Coincidentally when we went to Leo Burdock’s we stumbled into Temple Bar. Today however, we actually went to the original bar that was bright red in color. At night we went to the Riverdance 25th anniversary show. It was an amazing and unique experience. The dancers were all unbelievably coordinated and the whole show was visually stunning.

On Friday we went to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and the Ha’penny bridge. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral had astounding Gothic architecture that rivaled even that of mainland Europe. I would strongly recommend everyone to visit this cathedral if they come to Ireland. After this we went to the Ha’penny bridge which is a pedestrian bridge that was built in the 1800’s. It got it’s name from how much it used to cost to cross it which was half a penny. It was a cool bridge with lots of steps and it was very different from all the other bridges around it.

On Saturday we took a full day tour to the cliffs of Moher and Gallaway city. The bus ride was about 3-4 hours and I mostly slept. The cliffs were extremely windy so it took us a while to get to the top but once we did our jaws dropped. The view was unlike anything I had ever seen and it was just cliffs hundreds of feet tall with crystal clear water smashing up against them. We trekked around the cliffs for about an hour and then we left for Gallaway city. Gallaway city was quite similar to Grafton street but it was even more busy and it’s streets were narrower. I quite enjoyed walking around and shopping as well as eating lunch at a cafe.

On Sunday we went to the Guinness factory, The Dublin castle, and the red Torch ginger restaurant. First we went to the Dublin castle which has been visited by many famous people such as the Pope and Queen Elizabeth. It had lots of art and a museum which contained lots of religious texts and artifacts. Next we went to the Guinness factory which was very interesting as we were walked through the whole brewing process. We bought lots of souvenirs and then we went to the Red Torch Ginger restaurant. It is a highly rated Thai restaurant and I really liked it.

I hope you guys enjoyed this blog post and I’ll see you next time!

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post about macro friendly meals so today I’m coming back with part 2 of this “series” with a bunch of new recipes lets get straight into it!

My first recipe is really simple and I often eat it as a snack, breakfast, or as dessert. It is my nonfat Greek yogurt parfait. I simply take about a cup of Greek yogurt put it in a bowl and add blueberries, raspberries, and or strawberries. I also sometimes add a pinch of cinnamon to add some more flavor as Greek yogurt is a bit bland. The whole bowl ranges from 150-180 calories and has 18 grams of protein and 8 grams of (all natural) sugar.

My next recipe is my sweet and sour grapes which are really easy to make and taste great. To make this I first grab about 2 cups of grapes and wash them thoroughly. After which I coat them with a bit of lemon juice and freeze them. These grapes turn out great and have an amazing crunch that satisfies your sweet tooth. There are about 200 calories in all the grapes.

I really enjoy baked potatoes however the way that most people make them they can have upwards of 400 calories and tons of fat. Which is why I made a modified recipe. First you take a potato and cook it in the microwave until it is soft. Next you split it about 80% of the way down the middle. After that you add 2 tablespoons of Greek yogurt and salt. Believe it or not \Greek yogurt gives the potato a nice creamy texture and it doesn’t load up on calories and fat like cheese and butter. This potato has about 200 calories and is way better for you

My final macro friendly meal for this post is my salsa chicken. As the name suggest it is essentially cooked chicken with salsa and it is super flavorful. To start add some chicken to a hot pan to reheat it, then add some salsa and mix them well, finally cook for about 5 minutes and serve. Per every 100 grams there are about 190 calories and about 25 grams of protein.

Thank you for reading this blog post I hope you all enjoyed and I’ll see you next time!

I recently moved and in my new house I have a pool. As such I’ve needed to learn the basics of pool care so that I can make sure to maintain it well. I figured some of you may want to learn how to take care of pools SO i figured I’d share the basics.

To start there are 3 keys to pool maintenance known as the 3 C’s: Cleaning, Circulation, and Chemistry. If you can get all of these to healthy levels then you will have no problem maintaining a pool.

Lets get into cleaning. There are a few steps to properly cleaning your pool. The first is skimming where you use a net to skim the surface of the pool to get any debris off the top of the pool. After you skim the pool you will need to brush the sides, then you will need to vacuum, and finally skim again.

The main tools that you will need for this are: a net with a long pool pole, a brush metal brush head, and a vacuum. Using all these tools will help you keep your pool spotless as long as you follow the above steps.

Next up is pool circulation. Your pool has at least one jet that should be pushing your water either clockwise or counterclockwise. The main thing you need to know is whether or not the water in your pool is being circulated well. If this is not happening then you will likely have buildup occur. If you can adjust your jets I recommend tilting them downward to help get some circulation on your pool floor.

The final and most complicated part of pool care is pool chemistry. This part of pool care is also the most finicky as you need to understand how all the chemicals and elements react. There are 7 main things that you need to track in terms of chemistry. They are as follows: Total Hardness, Total Chlorine, Free Chlorine, Bromine, Total Alkalinity, Cyanuric Acid, and pH. These are all measured in PPM or Parts Per Million. (except pH it has its own scale and has to do with the acidity or lack there of in a substance like water).

The best way that I have found to track all of these with high reliability is with multi test pool test strips. These strips have little squares that all react to different chemicals that can tell you the amounts of certain elements in your pool. I test the pool daily and record these results in a spreadsheet.

For the final segment of this blog I’ll include the healthy values for all of these chemicals in your pool. To start the ideal total hardness is between 120-425 ppm, the ideal total chlorine is between 1-5 ppm, the ideal free chlorine level is between 1-3 ppm, the ideal amount of bromine is between 2-6 ppm, the ideal pool alkalinity is between 120-180, the ideal amount of cyanuric acid in your pool is 30-100, and finally the ideal pH levels are between 7.2-7.6.

That’s it for today’s post I hope you enjoyed and I’ll see you next time.