Rylan Blowers / Park Software
Rylan Blowers founded Park Software from the most fitting place possible—an RV. The idea sparked when he and his co-founder John, struggled to book a spot for the night, experiencing the pain points of campground reservations firsthand. The result: a campground management software made simple. Rylan’s story is not one to miss. In this episode, we cover building, fundraising, and scaling a software company while living in Vermont.
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Sam Roach-Gerber
Hello, Rylan.
Rylan Blowers
Hello, hello, thanks so much for having me!
Dave Bradbury
Welcome to VCET!
Sam Roach-Gerber
Take two. Got his last name correct. No big deal.
Dave Bradbury
Well, we’re just getting started with about 100 of these things.
Sam Roach-Gerber
Listen. Rylan is new around here, all right? So we’re just learning and getting to know each other. Not my first time. Blowers, like blowers—love it. Well, I’m gonna change the spelling if you don’t mind. No, hi. We’re so happy you’re here.
Rylan Blowers 1:14
Yeah. Thank you for having me. Thank you for welcoming me into the Vermont entrepreneurship community and working space—all of the above. You all have been wonderful.
Sam Roach-Gerber
We love fresh meat around here, you know.
Dave Bradbury
Yeah, the gene pool gets a little stagnant now and again. So this is great.
Sam Roach-Gerber
So, I mean, that’s a great place to start. Like you’ve traveled a lot. You’ve been all around the country. You landed in Burlington, Vermont—tell us a little bit about why.
Rylan Blowers 1:38
Yeah, super excited to be here. Moved here this summer; my fiancée, she got a teaching position at the University of Vermont, at their teaching institute. And of all places we could have ended up, I am so, so grateful that it was Vermont and Burlington. Of all places—as you kind of alluded—I’ve been very fortunate to have, in my RV, lived in 20-30 states, and then before that, in a suitcase, over 20 countries. And I genuinely believe the highest quality of life of any of them is where we ended up, which is Burlington. So, yeah, I’m very grateful to be here.
Sam Roach-Gerber
They say you’re definitely gonna get the agency of tourism reaching out. Be like, oh, we need this guy.
Dave Bradbury
Or we need to check the FBI wanted list, yeah? Just like, it’s like, he’s on the run a little bit.
Sam Roach-Gerber
But I do think that, yeah, the first time we met, Dave was like, wait, you do definitely live here, though, right?
Rylan Blowers
We’re setting down roots. Yeah, you’re skeptical. Now we’re here. Yeah, we’re really here to stay.
Dave Bradbury
So tell us what you were doing before you started Park, just to give us a little bit of grounding about who you are and sort of the context of why you’re now this awesome entrepreneur.
Rylan Blowers 2:45
Yeah, what wasn’t I doing before starting Park? It’s really—I mean, in terms of, you know, professional career beforehand—kind of coming out of school. I maybe this isn’t the case with all entrepreneurs, but it was very clear to me that this was the end destination I wanted to, you know, end up owning my own business eventually, whatever that timeline looked like. So coming out of school, you know, I studied computer science and business and realized that, you know, you can always learn to code, but if I don’t learn how to sell, we’ll never have a kind of successful business. So I decided after school to go into tech sales, and wanted to get a piece of the startup life. Got a job at a high-flying startup, and then two weeks before I was supposed to start, they got acquired by Salesforce, so ended up getting sucked into big tech. And I was not long for that world—it just very quickly became evident to me that I wasn’t, you know, made out to get on the L train every morning in Manhattan and do that. So ended up, after a year, working for a proper startup, being the first sales hire. That’s where I was able to travel the world for a while, and then it led me to the pandemic and the manic state of entrepreneurship, where I was starting a new business every other week. And, you know, obviously led to today working on one thing, which is Park. And I’m very grateful to kind of be at that dream state of getting to do this full time.
Sam Roach-Gerber
I love that you know, you had the self-awareness to get into sales and like, you know, kind of master that piece of it, knowing you wanted your own business. I think whenever I meet a young person that doesn’t exactly know what direction to go, I’m like, go learn sales, because it touches so much. And if you can sell, you can raise capital, you can do all kinds of other things, but I just love that.
Dave Bradbury
Well, it also forces you to listen, right? Right, which sometimes it’s tough for me, and the more creative types that build things—I’m like, I built it, wow, right? You’ll love it. Well, I didn’t ask you to love it, right? So, yeah, good for you.
Sam Roach-Gerber
So it sounds like you had some like, trial and error on the entrepreneurship side of things before you started Park. Can you tell us about how the idea actually came to you?
Rylan Blowers 4:46
And just one final note on like, the sales piece, yeah, I think that, yeah. I mean, there’s like, building blocks to any business or any career, whatever that is, and sales is one of the fundamental underlying pieces, whether it’s you or a co-founder or someone that can provide that. But yeah, I feel like, as you’re getting closer to whatever your dream kind of end state is, it’s just like, de-risking yourself as you go. And so for me, it’s like, oh, it’s a skill I need to learn. Let’s get one step closer. And, you know, eventually led to here. But taking off of your—yeah, your question, which is, I guess, how we came to the genesis of Park, yeah. So yeah, Park started where probably any good RV campground software company should start, which is out of an RV. It was, it was actually when I had—I had convinced John, my co-founder, to join me in my RV, kind of coerced him into it, into a trip across Texas to do some national parks. And like we had done many times before. I was complaining about some problem. In this case, it was very much scratching my own itch, or our own itch, which is for looking for an RV site for that night, we had to email or call and try to find a spot to stay, and for such a transactional thing that seemed insane to me, and it’s just a very frustrating experience. So John, being John, was like, Yeah, great, let’s build it. Let’s make a better version. And I was like, All right, slow your roll. Already burnt out on half a dozen failed businesses right now, let’s get some validation first. That’s, you know, another big learning. It’s obviously validate before you build. And so that night, we pulled into a campground and talked to the owner and pitched him on the idea, and he was incredibly frustrated, even more so than we were, of the current software, but it’s all incredibly complex and cost-prohibitive. So anyways, he liked it, and we stayed up the whole night, coding—or not even coding, actually building an MVP. It was basically in a program called Figma, so we didn’t actually have to build anything, but it was a working prototype, and so the next morning, he was on board and said, I’m in. We had our first kind of customer signed up in a 24-hour fervor. And yeah, that’s how it got started. But I mentioned this to you all when we first chatted, which is, it didn’t really hit us that we were doing something maybe different than what we’ve worked on in the past, until a month or two later, after we’d actually shipped code and had a product, when he called me and said that his 86-year-old mother-in-law had retired because of our software—she used to have to, like, sit there at the phone every single day. And that was when we’re like, whoa, this isn’t just another little hack project, yeah. And that was, I mean, the first of any signs to be like, Oh, this might be the one.
Sam Roach-Gerber
Yeah, you’re solving a real pain point for people.
Dave Bradbury
You know, one of the booking software isn’t a new concept, right, but you’re taking a different approach to it with the sort of business model and relationship with the campground or RV park owner. Could you talk a little bit about either competition or just how your approach and model is really unlocking all this, this, I don’t know, joy, or at least the reduction of friction and frustration, and it lets everybody’s 86-year-old mother retire.
Rylan Blowers 7:57
Yeah, definitely. I always joke that if we had done any market research at all, and didn’t just build everything in 24 hours—relates to the first version—we never would have started Park because there is a lot of competition. I mean, booking services in general, and even in our strange, unsexy niche, there’s, there’s a lot of competition. But I think that’s actually maybe, you know, contrary to proper belief, that’s not a reason to not build something. If anything, it’s, you know, an affirmation that it’s a market worth fighting for. If nobody’s doing something, unless—why am I so lucky? Right? Yeah, unless you’re building the next OpenAI, which, like, statistically, you’re not, there might be a reason for that. And so I actually think competition is a great thing, and in our case, you know, so long as you can face competition with a wildly better solution from some angle. So from whether that’s a product or service perspective. In our case, we’re trying to consolidate what is a very complex business into a super elegant, easy-to-use piece of software for these really not tech-savvy business owners. Oftentimes that’s kind of the product lens, and that’s great. But in our case, as you alluded to, also the service or the business model. So we give everything away for free, and we add that value or pass a fee to the end guest or booker if they’re choosing to use our system so they don’t have to. So it’s really setting everything up like a win-win for everyone involved, I think is another thing that’s gone a long way, because we kind of treat the consumer how they want to be treated and treat the business how they want to be treated. And with these small, medium, very morality-driven businesses, I think that goes a long way. And this kind of leads to the familial feel we’ve been able to maintain.
Sam Roach-Gerber
Also, that’s—it’s so indicative of a sales guy building a product, right? Because it’s a lot easier to sell something when, you know, it’s free, right? But I, I do love that, because I think, you know, it’s something that was overlooked, right? And, and I think you guys really understood the problem from the user’s perspective, and that’s such an important piece of it to figure out, you know, how can you solve their problem? But also, like, what is that barrier for them, and a lot of the times it’s cost, right? So I think, I just, I think that’s such a refreshing perspective.
Rylan Blowers
Yeah, definitely on the sales, quote-unquote, sales lens, it makes it a lot easier. It’s, you know, one call, close. Let’s see, take this for free, you’ll make more money and work less, and love it. Yeah, it’s definitely made that, that cycle. It’s just like a great feeling. They’re like, thanks—thanking you at the end of a sales call, like, what? What salesperson gets to be able to sit in a call and have them thanking you, but it’s very much seeing the other side of that coin, you know, selling Salesforce enterprise software. So, yeah, that’s, that’s something that I definitely don’t take for granted.
Dave Bradbury
You ever run into, you know, the skepticism or this is too good to be true. What’s the hook here? Yeah, like, how do you—what? What is that sort of reaction? And then how do you, how do you get people comfortable?
Rylan Blowers 10:48
I genuinely think if we charged like a nominal fee for setup, it would actually be easier, because people are, yeah, they’re like, what, what is, what is the hook? But, yeah, I don’t know. We, you know, when they do kind of approach with that healthy skepticism, it’s like, look, you know, we get it. We understand your perspective. We are campers, and we can kind of back into how we—you know, I’ve got this, and it’s set up in a way that’s fair for everyone involved. And the thing that, like, honestly, took us by surprise is like, yeah, you know that the end guests, the campers, in our case, they want to use a service, and they don’t mind paying a premium to do it. So it ends up being truly, yeah, a kind of win-win, which makes it a reason.
Sam Roach-Gerber
It’s so frustrating from the camper side as well. Like, I—who—at that point, you’re just like, I don’t care. I’ll pay anything, right? Like, I think people get to that level of frustration. And I think that’s also when you know you have something right, is like you don’t care about the fees, because you just want a place to park, right?
Dave Bradbury
Or we’ve been accustomed to it with how Airbnb has gotten—I choose to pay a fee or premium. Or some of that, some of that creep and acceptance is more broadly here than maybe seven, eight years ago.
Rylan Blowers 12:00
Yeah, which I think is also a matter of, like, meeting them where they are. So, you know, you have the younger generation that are used to Airbnb, and they want that convenience. And you know, when I’m driving down the highway, I want to just find a spot and pull in, and I don’t want to have to email someone or call someone at nine o’clock at night. But then you have the older generation, they like that in, you know, person-to-person interface, and that’s, that’s a super real thing that, like, we don’t take for granted. We’ll never, we’ll never assume that, you know, 100% is gonna go through an online format. So that’s another thing that I think really puts them at ease when there is a skepticism of, like, look, you know, Jerry has come to your park for 20 years and is used to handing you cash when he shows up and likes talking to, you know, the camp host on the phone. They can absolutely still do that, and they’re not penalized for that. Nobody pays fees in that case. So I think it’s just, yeah, it’s a really important thing of not trying to squeeze out every single cent from a business model and from, you know, how much can we do a renewal for? It’s, it’s meeting them where they are, and you kind of get that back in dividends anyways, you know, I think in the end, we end up unlocking, you know, probably a higher LTV, but doing it in a way that, you know, everyone benefits from it. So I think it’s good to take a step back and not over-optimize all the time.
Sam Roach-Gerber
That’s great, yeah, and that lowers the barrier for them, right? It’s like not a ton of change all at once, if, if they don’t need it.
Rylan Blowers
Totally. Yeah, which is, which is also a very real thing. I mean, the majority of businesses in the US are small, medium businesses that, you know, the status quo is going to be your biggest competitor because they’re, you know, you can do this on pen and paper, whatever the business type is, but ultimately, like, how do we crawl, walk, run them into the 21st century? Yeah. And that’s something that, you know, obviously, we built this around RV parks and campgrounds, but, you know, we’re getting pulled into all these other interesting use cases. And businesses are like, ah, you know, we do stables, or we have disc golf tee times that need to be booked. And thankfully, you know, our wonderful engineering team built it in a modular enough way that we can handle those. And they have the same kind of talk track, which here, you know, time and time again. And, yeah, I think easing from—from that, you know, kind of pen and paper in the 21st century is really important.
Sam Roach-Gerber
Can you talk a little bit about, like, your average customer and, like, what you guys are going for right now? Yeah.
Rylan Blowers 14:12
So definitely, I think when you’re entering a market, especially one that is already crowded, I think—yeah, man, this is not the first time anyone’s heard this, but it’s important to, you know, find your wedge. You know, kind of classic disruption story: find your wedge and then let the market pull you from there. So in our case, we were kind of thinking of those pen-and-paper Mom and Pop type operations, like, very small. Just—nothing could work for them. It’s all way too complex, way too expensive. And so that was the niche, or, like, that’s still the majority of this very fragmented industry. Let’s help bring them into the 21st century and let them see the benefits of that. And so that was kind of the landing point. And naturally, you know, you kind of get pulled either upmarket or into other use cases. So now I would say it’s still small and medium size. So in a scale of campgrounds, you know, it can be anywhere from, you know, one or two sites up to 1,000—so probably, like, a couple hundred sites and below is still the sweet spot in terms of the ones that’s just like a no-brainer.
Sam Roach-Gerber
Nice. Love that. And you had mentioned earlier that you’re doing this with a co-founder, John. Can you talk to us a little bit about your relationship with John, how you guys met, and why it seems to be working?
Rylan Blowers 15:25
Yeah. Love, love to talk about that. Yeah. I think John and I—the universe conspired for us to build a company together—so kind of a crazy, our own genesis story. So we grew up in the same very small farming town. I grew up on an alpaca farm in upstate New York, and didn’t know each other because we were a few years apart, but ended up going to the same college, and we ran the entrepreneurship club together there, and obviously, you know, united over that, but didn’t really keep in touch. So after school again, he graduated a few years ahead of me, went off and did his own thing, and the day I was set to fly to Croatia and start a new life—I was moving out of New York—I ran into John on the street, and obviously caught up—serendipitous occasion—and through that kind of realized he was also having a quarter-life crisis and going to travel the world, and we were going to overlap. And so we ended up meeting up in Peru and surfing together in Peru, just crazy coincidences, and that’s where we’re sitting out there, like talking about life and realizing, Oh, we have the exact same outlook on how we wanna approach life and take a very intentional approach to it. And so through that, just stayed in touch and then came back for the pandemic and crossed paths again. I invited him over. I was pitching—me—our first kind of app that we built together, and he walked into my room and saw my just every wall covered with pieces of paper that he’s like, Oh, wow, you really developed this idea. And then he looked closer and realized they were all different businesses, like, I need help. But anyways, and then to—to obviously, culminating in the RV where he wasn’t even supposed to join, I twisted his arm. Was like, you’re coming with me. And that’s how he ended up starting Park. So a lot of serendipitous.
Sam Roach-Gerber
Wow, I love that! It’s meant to be!
Dave Bradbury
…So I can’t remember how we met. How did you come across VCET?
Rylan Blowers
I did what you’re not supposed to do when you’re fundraising, which is, you cold-reach out with no intros, and I touched base with Sam initially.
Sam Roach-Gerber
I gave it a once-over, I was like, this guy seems legit!
Dave Bradbury
Pretty good at sniffing him out. Yeah.
Rylan Blowers
Somehow let us under the premises, which I genuinely was the first, like, in-person, out-of-boardroom type meeting.
Dave Bradbury
Hold on, it was a ping-pong table, with comics on the wall. So thank you. So first—I’ve been calling the boardroom. Sam, God, I love it, man.
Sam Roach-Gerber
I do kind of remember you had that kind of like shell shock, where you were like, sorry, this is so weird. Like, I haven’t been in an in-person meeting in like, years.
Rylan Blowers
Like half a decade!
Dave Bradbury
It was, it was all the—rattle ’em, Sam, you gotta, like, get them off their scripted game. So, okay, got it.
Rylan Blowers 18:26
I mean, as much as we love remote, you know, very distributed team, in person, it’s definitely where, you know, the magic happens when you’re in the ideation. And it’s, it’s really cool. I mean, getting to work with you all is something we’re obviously super grateful for. But, you know, and I have a hairy problem that come down and, you know, sit across the table and hash it out.
Dave Bradbury
So it was a fundraising inbound, right? For some reason we took the meeting, right?
Rylan Blowers
It’s a pity, a pit meeting.
Sam Roach-Gerber
I know this guy seems random.
Dave Bradbury
Was it an afternoon meeting? Because that’s when we do, like, the low-energy stuff. Okay. Anyway. And you know, as our colleague, we’re talking about fundraising. And you know, part of our sort of toggle here is, yes, we’re investors. We’ve got $15 million in funds. We invest in early-stage. But we also work with a couple hundred people that sort of show up in our community or have been here for a while. And you know, talk about the journey of fundraising or entrepreneurship. And I kind of remember doing both those. And I distinctly remember saying, Whoa. Like, we met on a Tuesday, I think, and you were going to start fundraising that Thursday, officially. And we’re like, well, well, buckle up. It might take a while, right? And I think we’d had a meeting scheduled for the next Tuesday or Wednesday, because John was coming in from Portugal, right, right? And you showed up. We had a great second meeting, Sam. And you know, at the end, it was sort of this humble brag. Well, yeah, it looks—fundraising has gone pretty quick. You know, we had multiple term sheets, and within 48 hours, and after this meeting, we’re gonna say yes to one. And so it was atypical, and really a reflection on how hard you—you all worked on the front end, the traction or the revenues or the customer sort of profile you’ve identified. I wish they all went that way.
Rylan Blowers 20:15
Yeah, well, I appreciate that. It was a surreal experience, definitely not how we anticipated it going. And super grateful with, you know, how we ended up making out. But yeah, I mean, and fundraising feels like a battlefront no matter what. I can’t really complain, because, yeah, we got through relatively unscathed and super grateful for that. But yeah, you built a great syndicate. You got a fantastic business, SaaS leader, and, you know, ended up getting more than you wanted, and, you know, could have gone higher, but you stuck to your guns. So this is what we need. I give you a lot of respect for making us a part of the round too. Yeah, no, 100% and yeah, it’s exciting and a scary new, new chapter, for sure. I have, you know, a love-hate relationship with—with fundraising. It’s obviously a superpower.
Rylan Blowers
We all do. We all just—good, yeah.
Sam Roach-Gerber
Can you, can you actually dig into that just a little bit of like, what your strategy was? Because I think obviously it was atypical from what we see, that you were able to close the round so quickly. But I think just thinking about how you and John thought about it ahead of time, what your sort of strategy was, and you know why you maybe decided to close the round when you did?
Rylan Blowers 21:22
Yeah, definitely. So Park was always built from the ground up to be bootstrapped, you know, thankfully, you know, profitable from—from day one, essentially, because we built it ourselves. And you know, costs for—is so cheap these days. So it was very much set up with that kind of initial, oh, let’s unlock our lives and build this great, you know, family-feeling business and, and that’s that. Obviously, you know, when something starts working and you start feeling product-market fit, and the ball starts rolling, the cat’s out of the bag, you know, the goalposts shift, yeah. And it was when we started working on Park full time, you know, a little over a year ago when, obviously, things change, you know, pace—it’s probably working on one business at one time is obviously the right thing to do. But, you know, we had to get there. So, so, yeah. So, I mean, basically, you know, you start to get a critical mass where things are going great, and obviously we could have continued down that bootstrapped route. But essentially, how we arrived to that crossroads of, do we fundraise and really do this the right way was kind of twofold. I mean, first off, quite frankly, is just to help meet the pain that we are currently experiencing. I think I’m sure the chip is painful no matter what. If it’s not going great, it’s kind of a dull pain. Obviously, that’s no fun. Or if it’s going great, it’s an acute pain, because everything hurts, everything’s pulling your direction, things are breaking, and so, you know, acutely, it was like we need more help if we want to stay ahead of this and keep this momentum going, but then I think on a bigger picture, and do we opt in for this venture scale route, which is a different it’s a totally different trajectory. And kind of the inkling for us, which I alluded to, is seeing traction in these other spaces and getting pulled into all these other interesting use cases that we just, quite frankly, didn’t have the bandwidth to be able to properly go after and finding great Capital Partners, you know, like yourselves and everyone else that we brought into to be able to do those in earnest. But I think in general, like approaching business from a bootstrap mindset is actually a very positive thing. And I think, you know, part of why we’re able to raise so fast was because, from the get go, we had a good business model. Is a very clear, linear path to, you know, what this looks like at a bigger scale. And if you build a business with those kind of fundamentals first, and making sure it’s it’s going to be able to operate without this influx of, you know, imaginary Silicon Valley dollars. Then, you know, great. Now you can add fuel that fire, and you figure out the machine to turn one plus one into three. That’s when you should, you know, ideally do that.
Dave Bradbury 24:55
Yeah, right. I mean, you weren’t, you weren’t asking for a lot of money for search mode, right? And—or I’m gonna go hire a dev team to build my vision, my, you know what I’ve sketched out on my wall, right? And I think that was, that’s right. And then, you know, and you and your, you and John and the others are, you’re the real deal, right? And I remember distinctly talking to my team afterwards saying, hey, when it walks in the room, you know it? And we just saw it, yeah, we got some work to do, right? And, you know, you know, and that’s why I took—I took him to—really, this really awesome piece of real estate, one of the greatest communities in our—in Burlington, down on Lakeside Ave. It’s called the St. John Club, right? Yeah, oh my god, I owe you a membership, right? Yeah, it’s November. Now we can—or December, I guess you can do it now. So, but anyway, really kind of fun, just—one—meet our community more and embed and get comfortable here.
Rylan Blowers 25:51
That’s the only time I’ve ever been let into a members-only club.
Sam Roach-Gerber 25:56
Well, it’s very brave of you to agree to do that with Dave, not knowing what you’re getting into, right?
Dave Bradbury 26:01
You never know.
Sam Roach-Gerber 26:04
So when I think you know the other reason, beyond you guys just being awesome, Dave and I, tend to fall in love with an industry that’s ripe for disruption, like something that’s like, Oh, it’s so problematic, and so like, antiquated, like, We want someone to solve this, and that’s totally what you guys have found. What I want to ask you about, because you’ve talked a little bit about kind of straying from the original case study of these other needs that have come up from some of your customers. Can you talk about how you balance that with, like staying focused on your product and your customer, but also like being open to this opportunity of what else could be? Because I think that is a huge challenge, especially for those early-stage companies.
Rylan Blowers 26:45
Definitely. I’ll answer your question as poorly. No, I mean…but I think, frankly, that is, ultimately, all of business is shifting priorities, and whoever manages to ship them the correct way will take the market. And, yeah, it’s certainly something we’re feeling. And once you kind of get that semblance of product-market fit, where things are pulling you in different directions, you know, right now we are. We feel like we’re in this very reactive mode where, just like every week, there’s 80 new feature requests and product asks going in, and they’re all cool things that we want to be able to build. And, yeah, it’s, I think you have to be realistic, even though we are expanding the, you know, engineering bandwidth and the ability to meet those—we also have to be, yeah, just, you know, honest with ourselves, we can’t. It’s not just John and I coding like madmen in an RV anymore. We can, yeah, sure, we’ll build that right now. It’s like, No, we got to do this, you know, in a way that doesn’t, you know, break the other hundreds of clients that are using this.
Dave Bradbury 27:57
Yeah, it’s not Figma anymore.
Rylan Blowers 28:01
Exactly, yeah, which is definitely a learning I think, honestly, it’s like being realistic with your timelines and getting better at actually roadmapping. So we, I just got back from spending a week with—with a team in Europe, and kind of roadmapping out what that looks like. And so like realistically coming out of it, our takeaways are, as much as we want to go to these other cool use cases and start servicing marinas, realistically, in 2025—like that’s probably not going to happen. And even more so, which is somewhat surprising within our own space, these large enterprise clients are people we love to work with, and we certainly will, because we are iterating at a very fast speed. But some of them just have such a level of complexity when there have, you know, dozens of different, you know, properties that, as much as I’d love to go back to, you know, default to our old mode of, yes, we’ll build everything. It’s, it’s also knowing when to stay in your lane and when to then look to the next swim lane over. And so I don’t have a good answer in that we’re still very much figuring that out. It’s a very good problem to have when you have just, like, too much coming in to figure out what shiny object to chase, but knowing to ignore 90% of those shiny objects, and find the one that’s worth your time is, yeah, that’s kinda the goal we think. It’s never clear.
Dave Bradbury 29:19
Well, it’s gonna be nice to, like, have the confirmation that they’re, they’re seeking new solutions, right? And you know, the buckets you have are, heck yes, not yet, or not ever, right? Right? For these things and that, that discipline of team, particularly new people coming—it’s not easy to navigate. So good on you for discussing it, recognizing it, and sort of picking a path. You know? Yeah, the problems in young companies are when they don’t pick a path, right? So either paralysis, or I’ve picked too many paths for everyone at everything all at once and that, again, we know how that story ends, right?
Sam Roach-Gerber 29:56
Or they drop everything for the enterprise customer, right? And then. And, you know, it’s your entire business is relying on one customer.
Rylan Blowers 30:04
I think, I think one of the most important pieces as, you know, as a CEO, is just to eliminate any existential risks. Sure we can take these bets, and now we have more bandwidth to take parallel bets, that’s great, but no bet should, should risk, you know, risk the farm, and whether that’s for the business or just personally, if you’re, like, getting into entrepreneurship, I feel really strongly just like, de-risk yourself as you go. And so, yeah, exactly that, like some massive enterprise customer, it’d be, you know, sure, if we went all in, it could be, you know, a huge uplift. But if it risks the other hundreds of customers, then it’s, it’s…
Dave Bradbury 30:41
Don’t bet the alpaca farm! So just another little—just question around competition. So what? What do you hear, I mean, from the consumer, right? The biggest like relief, that when they—when they reserve through your system and then from the property owner, like, what’s the one or two top reasons over and over again?
Rylan Blowers 31:07
Yeah, honestly, it’s kind of shocking me to this day, how little interaction we actually have with the end consumer, despite, you know, hundreds of thousands of them using it, that just kind of gets filtered and trickled up to us through—that’s awesome, which is great deal. And so we’re like, we don’t want to really build a consumer effort, but—but yeah, I mean, so obviously everything we do here that gets trickled up is, is great. They’re like, Oh, this is so much easier, and that’s all good. And, well, it’s mostly just the ease of use and the convenience. But for the—the clients themselves, I think the biggest takeaways are how simple it is to get up and running, right? So just drop it in and go, yeah, within a matter of minutes, you can figure out how to, you know, run your very complex business with a lot of levers. And that’s, that’s the challenge, to keep us subsidized. How do we, you know, build software that enables that? But I think, yeah, the time to value is really important, especially for SMBs that are, you know, one to 10 person operations, they need to see that value very quickly. So the faster we can get them there, the better. And we do that through product and enablement. So I think that’s, that’s the biggest thing. And then, and then, just like, because our incentives are perfectly aligned to get them more business, that’s the only way we have a business as well. They’re, they’re usually, you know, super excited when they’re like, Whoa, I was sleeping and we made $800 and we didn’t do anything. And there’s—this is kind of magic lever that you know, when you realize, as a small business owner, this isn’t just constrained to me and my output. Now there’s like, there’s a—there’s a scalable element to it. It’s really cool. And now we see, you know, after working with Park for, you know, a couple of years, they buy another property because all of a sudden, like, Wait, we can actually scale this thing. And that’s a cool unlock to be a small part of.
Dave Bradbury 33:00
One of our diligence calls was to a friend who has a glamping, you know, location in the Adirondacks. They’ve been—looked—wanting to make a booking software change. They’ve gone through a big diligence process. We’re going to literally sign a couple days later with a new company. And, you know, we brought your company to their attention, and it was hard stop, like, oh my gosh, we didn’t sign the contract. I hope they’ve onboarded by now. But you know, that kind of reaction says a lot. So that—that’s when we went from wide focus to laser focus on, on looking at the business.
Sam Roach-Gerber 33:44
One of the things I want to talk about a little bit more is your kind of growth strategy—you’re all funded for now, right? We don’t know what path you’re gonna take down the road, but you know, how do you look at the next, sort of 12 to 18 months. I know you’re, you’re sort of still figuring out, you know, how many different folks you want to serve, and how the product is going to scale. But like, when you kind of look at that big picture, what are you seeing?
Rylan Blowers 34:12
Yeah, good, good question. So, yeah, I mean, it’s a good continuation from realizing, okay, we can’t do everything right now. So let’s—yeah—siphon this down to 2025, and so we want to keep up the same growth rates, which gets obviously harder as you get past being a small operation. So for us, if we’re realizing, okay, we’re going to stay in our swim lane of small and medium-sized RV parks and campgrounds, mainly for at least the next—let’s call it six months, six to 12 months—then, okay, where do we find that gap to keep up that growth rate? And so for us, we decided, let’s go after other geos. This is something that our competitors aren’t really doing. Thankfully, we’ve set everything up in a way that we can service them. So we sat down and—spent an afternoon internationalizing our app, not language—still English-speaking—but any currency, metric, Imperial, stuff like that. And said, All right, that was a good, you know, bet. Now let’s launch some ad campaigns and see what it is. And, you know, within a few weeks of getting those running, we’ve expanded to six different countries. And that’s like really exciting, because I think there’s a lot more greenfield in those and we can stay in our swim lane. But in these other markets, obviously there’s multiple ways you can grow, and new geos is one of them. So that’s, I’d say, the thing I’m currently the most excited about, in terms of keeping up that pace and that momentum and then just naturally building as we go. And fast forward, 12 months from now, I think we’ll be in a much better position to be talking to these larger enterprise clients and just naturally grow upmarket. I mean, that’s kind of the classic disruption story.
Sam Roach-Gerber 35:45
That’s awesome. And I think obviously you guys have taken advantage of being a small startup in that you have, you have those afternoons of iterating on your product to get to that next level. And I hope you don’t lose that, because I think it’s, it’s such a—you know, you talked about how you love working for startups and smaller companies. And I think that’s kind of part of the magic of it, right? Is you don’t need permission to do that. You just do it and see what happens. And I think that’s what keeps Dave and I excited about startups too.
Dave Bradbury 36:11
Do you think the freemium sort of aspect of it allowed these new geographies to sort of try it, you know, very easily, and that gave you some like, Oh, why is Croatia downloading our app? Or, why are we popular in Germany?
Rylan Blowers 36:27
Yeah, well, yeah, definitely. I mean, it’s not even quite freemium. It’s like, truly free for the people that we’re interfacing with. We’ve never billed them a cent. And so that certainly makes that—that a lot easier, especially in these markets that aren’t, as you know, aware of these things going on. Now in the States, everyone—you know that owns campgrounds—know they can have booking software. You know, here’s some options. And thankfully, you know, a lot of them end up working with us. But it’s, yeah, if you’re going to take this leap of faith in a market where it’s not, maybe the norm, and it’s not like practice that people want to expect to be able to book online. I think removing any barrier of entry is super, super important, and obviously our model behooves that. Yeah, and also, just like in general, like, I think SaaS—this is maybe a little bit more metaphorical or hypothetical—but I think in general, with AI and how coding is going to become more and more accessible, building SaaS is just going to become much faster, and if you’re competing on pricing, it’s going to be a race to the bottom. So kind of getting creative with—with pricing models and doing things in a way that kind of flips the script upside down, I think, is something that’s more relevant than ever.
Dave Bradbury 37:46
Is that why ChatGPT thinks highly of your software?
Rylan Blowers 37:51
That was a crazy—like our first foray into, you know, we landed a couple parks in Australia. And I was like, how did you find out about us? Because this was, well, before we had, you know, anything. Even considered going after that. And he’s like, Yeah, I was asking ChatGPT. That blew my mind. I was like, we’ve been indexed by the dark web of AI LLMs, which was nuts. It’s enough. Every morning I’m talking to Chat—I’m like, use Park. He’s—Park. I’m trying to train it.
Dave Bradbury 38:22
I love it, okay, that’s your hacking tool right there.
Rylan Blowers 38:25
So whoever figures out AI SEO, they’re onto something big.
Dave Bradbury 38:29
So, um, I think Sam called you fresh meat earlier. Yeah. So and again, I don’t know if you’re vegetarian or not, so apologies if so, but tell us, really, this is helpful. Okay, your candid sort of impression of landing here as a young tech entrepreneur, really not having a big social or business circle around you, like, what’s—how’s it gone? Like, what’s it been like? And this isn’t like gratuitous for us, but really interested about what was helpful, what you looked for but didn’t find, and what the next person should think about.
Rylan Blowers 39:10
Yeah. I mean, it’s been, it’s been a great transition. I, like I said, I’m super grateful to be here, and I’ve met incredible folks. I think, honestly, it just takes a little bit of legwork to find a wedge into these communities. So in this case, you know, fundraising was our catalyst to, you know, have something compelling enough to talk to great, you know, viewers and, and then that’s led to, you introducing me to incredible other entrepreneurs and, and so that kind of scratches that itch. And then, you know, personally, entering a new place, just finding hobbies and using that as an entry point, kind of, yeah, it’s not an easy thing, obviously, as an adult, to enter a new place that you don’t know anyone, or build a company where you don’t know anyone. But thankfully, Vermont has been incredibly welcoming and made that relatively straightforward with just a little bit of legwork.
Dave Bradbury 40:00
You know, I hope we see this trend of folks like you that are popping up here with global teams, right, big ambitions and real authenticity, kind of cool, right?
Rylan Blowers 40:13
I mean, yeah, I don’t see why this wouldn’t continue to become a hotspot, just with the quality of life that you can have here, yeah, I’m, you know, surrounded by mountains and lakes and like, that affects your subconscious in a way that is tangible.
Sam Roach-Gerber 40:28
And I will say too, you know, wasn’t just any cold, cold outreach, like you were thoughtful and concise, and you said that you were here, which is, you know, a lot of people, when they do a cold outreach, they don’t have any personal touch to it. And, you know, you gave me a little bit of your story, and so that was very compelling as well. So I think, yeah, you have to put in that work, that initial work, to meet, you know, the first—you sold to, he made a sale. You have to meet the first, you know, five to 10 people, right? And then they introduce you to five more people, and it grows that way.
Rylan Blowers 41:01
Definitely, yeah, and fundraising is somewhat of a, I don’t know. It’s a nefarious art in that, like, if your foot’s already in the door, it can be pretty easy, and it’s probably not a fair system in that way, if you happen to know the right people or have the right pedigree, and then you can do that. And if you don’t have that, it can feel very scary and unfair and daunting. Yeah. I mean, like, one of our other investors, literally, their contact form said you probably shouldn’t fill this out, like there’s almost no chance we’ll respond to you. Thankfully, they ended up being the first check in. We just, I just met up with him in Germany. And what wonderful investor. So, like, obviously, if you are able to build and bootstrap something to the point where you become, you know, something where it’s just, it’s worth, is it worthwhile, at least a conversation—totally—or they’re coming to you, that’s when you know, right? Well, something’s happening. Our lead ended up coming to us initially, and that was, like, a crazy thing. We’re like, oh, maybe we should think about this. It wasn’t. We were like, going out, like, we need to fundraise to keep the lights on.
Sam Roach-Gerber 42:05
That says so much about you and John and how you’ve built your company. And I think, you know, it is a reminder of, like, yeah, give us a reason to respond. You know, especially I was like, we’re probably not going to respond to this, because they get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of inquiries from people that don’t have revenue, don’t have customers, don’t even have a product, right? So it’s like, a partner, right, right? So I think, like, you know, it is a really tough fundraising environment out there right now. And I think my advice to people is like, get customers, get traction, get proof that people want this thing and that they’re willing to pay for it. And you can do that in so many creative ways now, like, I think you know, building the Figma in the RV, right, and testing it the next day is the perfect example of, like, you don’t need a lot to just get something to prove out your concept. And I think a lot of folks overthink that, because they want it to be perfect when they launch, right? But it’s not going to be, and you’re not going to get the interest of investors if you wait that long.
Rylan Blowers 43:03
And leads to kind of backwards incentives if you do, kind of do that. And, and I went through that once before where we, you know, you know, fundraised and then built in, you know, in private for a year, and then had this big launch. And obviously it’s going to be disappointing. And, and versus building a business that’s, you know, functioning from the beginning, and then adding that kind of supercharged layer on top once it’s functioning, I think it’s probably the right way to approach it.
Dave Bradbury 43:28
No, really great. You got a great syndicate, your lead investor who, just by chance, happened to know he also was in the same quote, boardroom of ours seven years prior, looking at another company. So it’s the ping-pong table. Yeah, ping-pong table, that’s the secret. All right. Sam—
Sam Roach-Gerber 43:42
Rylan, magic wand time. If you could change one thing in Vermont today with a magic wand, what would you change?
Rylan Blowers 43:54
I would make all my friends and family move here tomorrow. I was, I have determined that this is where I want—still—to live out my life. Now I’m just annoyingly convincing everyone that I know to move here.
Sam Roach-Gerber 44:09
I think this podcast is gonna help with that.
Dave Bradbury 44:13
I love it. Great answer. Great answer.
Sam Roach-Gerber 44:16
Very sweet. Thank you, Rylan.
Rylan Blowers
Thank you. Thank you for everything.
Dave Bradbury 44:19
This has been Start Here, a podcast sharing the stories of active, aspiring, and accidental entrepreneurs. The series is supported by the Vermont Technology Council. Sam, let’s go book our camping trips.
Sam Roach-Gerber
All right!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
