I Built A Serverless AirBnB-Styled App For Garages — Here’s What Happened
Uriel Bitton
AWS Cloud Engineer | The DynamoDB guy | AWS Certified | I help you supercharge your DynamoDB database ????
?? Hello there! Welcome to The Serverless Spotlight!
The Story
A couple of years ago I had this potentially great idea.
I wanted to build the “AirBnB of Garages”.
As the name implies the application idea was to allow users to rent out their driveways and garages by the hour or the day and make a little side income with it.
Like AirBnb, the idea would offer users mostly pure profit since owners don’t usually have charges on their garages and driveways.
I also noticed that many driveways in my city were usually empty during the day when home owners left for work.
I felt like I had a great idea! — people could make an income without it costing them any money.
I called it Rentage.
“Rentage is an app that lets people find driveways/garages to be used as parking spaces for their cars.”
I instantly dived into building the idea. As a software developer, I had zero costs to build and test the idea.
Little that I knew, it was set up for failure before it even started.
Why? I hadn’t done proper research on the idea before starting to build it…
The App
The web app started off as a simple homepage where users could see available driveways/garages in their area.
(I would have loved to show more actual UI from the app, but when it went offline I deleted the repository on Github)
When users clicked on an available driveway, they could see the details, space, hourly rate and exact location on the map, amongst other useful metadata.
Then, when they booked a driveway, they could choose the number of spots and hours they needed.
Once the booking was made, the owner would get an email notification with the details of the booking and could either accept or reject the request.
Once accepted the “guest” received a notification that they could park their vehicle in the designated spot in the driveway or garage.
The Tech Stack
I built the entire tech stack as fast as I could using serverless AWS services.
Here’s a general overview:
I had plans to introduce Amazon SQS and EventBridge once the app scaled — more on that later.
The frontend was built with React JS and the main feature, the geolocation of users and driveways was built using Google Maps API.
Briefly put, when an owner added a new driveway to the app, the address would be converted to its latitude and longitude values and that was stored inside DynamoDB.
With some clever primary key design using these lat and lon values as a global secondary index values, users could query and discover all driveways in their vicinity.
The Issue
Everything on the development side was going well. I had completed the MVP version — a very lean app with very basic features.
Around this time I was speaking with other entrepreneurs on Y Combinator. I introduced myself saying I was building a cool new application to let driveway/garage owners rent out their spaces.
He answered: “that’s a great idea, in what city/country are you going to make this available”?
I responded, “in my hometown of course, in Montreal Canada. And then expand to other Canadian cities like Toronto and Ottawa”.
What he said next changed everything.
“Did you know that there’s a ban on this type of thing? You cannot rent out your driveway in Ontario and other provinces in Canada”.
I had of course no idea. I made some research and found out it was illegal or not possible to do as well in my hometown of Montreal (and province Quebec).
The more research I made the more I realized the app idea would not likely succeed.
I dropped it and sold the domain name and left the project files on my old laptop (which I sold).
The Result
I learned a lot about how to work with geolocation, different Maps APIs, geospatial data with DynamoDB (and other databases), and a little about some odd Canadian laws.
Could the idea have been successful if I had taken it outside of Canada? Like the U.S. or Europe?
Perhaps — but the fact there existed so much friction in two developed countries didn’t quite encourage me to explore the idea further.
Who know if I had persisted in Europe or Asia I could have been the next AirBnb?
I’ll likely never know.
What do you guys think?
Share your thoughts in the comments, I would love to hear them !
I’ve built many other cool serverless applications over the years — check out this invoicing app I built for a client some years ago:
?? My name is Uriel Bitton and I hope you learned something in this edition of The Serverless Spotlight
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Pragmatism better than Astigmatism!
3 天前This endeavour failed at the idea feasibility level, Uriel Bitton . But this scenario is clearly outside your core competence as a problem solver in the system design and Architecture domain, isn't it! ?? I have a question for you: let's say market research reasons a business idea is feasible. As a solution architect, how would you go about creating an MVP: identifying and solving for certain desirable use cases, architecting for certain non negotiable non-functional requirements, making design decisions on deployment options, etc? Hope the answer is not a book! ??