With bowl season kicking off next week, millions of sports fans across the country are dreading the looming end of another exciting season of college football.  Even though you team not have made it to the historic Beef O’ Brady’s Bowl or the illustrious San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl, you can always look forward to packing up the tailgating gear and heading back to campus next season. 

Such weekend football trips have become an annual tradition for many college sports fans; however, hotels rooms can be hard to find in college towns during gameday weekends and the good old laws of supply and demand cause the prices of those few available rooms to skyrocket during those six or seven weekends each fall.  By connecting passionate college football fans with homeowners looking to make some extra income, University Football Rentals has steadily become a company focused on ensuring college football fans can have both an enjoyable and affordable trip to see their team play.

Started a few years ago to serve Notre Dame fans descending onto tiny South Bend, Indiana, University Football Rentals has worked with hundreds of willing homeowners living near stadiums to list their properties and rent them out to fans coming in for the weekend. UFR makes the listing process extremely easy for homeowners to post a few pictures of their property, set their rental price, and immediately start making money.  Meanwhile, families and friends looking for a place to stay can search the listings by price, size, or proximity to the stadium.  Staying at a house with amenities like big screen TVs, pool tables, and hot tubs makes for a much more enjoyable gameday experience than splitting the group up between two or three hotel rooms.

Recognizing that this same shortage of housing is plaguing dozens of college towns across the country, University Football Rentals has steadily expanded over the past few years.  Fans flocking to Lincoln, Athens, and other great college towns are heading to the company’s website to ensure they can have a more cost-effective and enjoyable gameday experience.  Just this past year, the company added both Oxford and Ann Arbor to a continually growing list of towns with available housing.  I sat down with Mike Doyle, the company’s VP of Business Development to talk expansion, entrepreneurship, and the business behind connecting homeowners and football junkies.  Check out the interview and University Football Rental's video below

Q: What is the biggest challenge of running a very involved business with a lot of moving parts all over the country with such a small team?
There are a lot of different challenges. One thing that I've had to get a lot better at is prioritizing and creating processes. At bigger firms, there are all sorts of processes in place for every imaginable scenario. That's not the case with us - as things come up, we deal with them. That's not scalable, however, and the more you grow, the more of a problem that becomes. I've tried to spend a good deal of time formalizing the things that I do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Creating a master schedule, guidelines on how to deal with different issues, etc. I think this will become increasingly important when we start expanding the team.

Q: What drew you to work at a company like University Football Rentals?
During senior year, while in the process of looking for jobs, I remember speaking with someone about working for smaller firms/startups. I may be butchering this, but the guy had a quote that was something along the lines of "At most big companies, you can't even reach the gas pedals. At startups, they throw you the keys and make you drive the car."

I think what was the most attractive to me was that I would have the freedom to try lots of different things, and would be able to directly see the impact of my work. If I tried a new strategy that worked out well, I could point to the financials and say that I caused that growth. On the other side of the coin, however, if things started going south, there's no way to pass the buck. On top of that, I really like the challenge of growing something new - granted, when I joined the company we were already well established at Notre Dame, but expanding to new towns is a challenge that I really enjoy.

Q: How has the dynamic between University football rentals and Ann Arbor/State College/etc football rentals evolved over time?
We decided early on to have local pages for each college that we would expand to. The thought process was that for our business, national brand awareness was not a major priority, as 99.9% of our customers are only going to rent homes in one town (PSU fans rent in State College, UGA alums in Athens, etc). That has also been hugely helpful on the SEO front, as our naming strategy has helped generate lots of organic traffic for our network of sites. For our homeowners, it seems to be meaningful that we are a national company with multiple locations - it shows that we are an established and legitimate business, even if we don't have many homes in that particular town.

Q: What are the benefits of renters and homeowners from using RLAC instead of something like Airbnb?
In the majority of the markets that we're entering, Airbnb does not have a huge presence. They're a great company, but it seems that their focus is on large vacation destinations and cities - not smaller college towns. Aside from that, however, we are extremely specific in who we are marketing towards. All of our marketing dollars that go towards renters are targeted at football fan sites, alumni clubs, etc. We know who our customer is and focus in on them with all of our outreach.

Additionally, we only rent out entire homes, while a lot of Airbnb is renting out bedrooms in a home. For these types of events, people are often coming back with large groups (meeting college friends, families coming back, etc) and thus renting an entire home seems to work really well.

Q: What makes for a great new market besides a big football town.  Why an Ann Arbor or State College over a West Lafayette or Madison?  
The things that we look for are a large alumni base, a passionate football following, and a small(er) urban area, one that does not have enough hotel rooms to support the influx of people that show up for major events (namely football games and graduation weekends). Ann Arbor and State College have been ideal for us, in that both Michigan and Penn State have storied programs with really devoted fans, and are in smaller towns. Somewhere like Columbus is tough in that it's more of an urban area, and thus lack of hotel rooms is less of an issue. The same is true of a place like Madison, Wisconsin - the demand for this service simply isn't as high in a place like that, as there more of the traditional options available.

Excited to announce that the newest episode of Startup Roadshow will be featuring Philadelphia!  Looking forward to heading to my hometown and learning about all the exciting and interesting companies calling Philly home.  Reposting a story from last year on Colabination, an awesome philly startup taking a new spin on how consumers find their favorite designers.  Be on the lookout for the new podcast epsiode this week, and enjoy the story about Colabination in the meantime:

On the rainy and cold morning before Thanksgiving, members of the Philadelphia based startup CoLabination gathered in their small co-working space to share what they accomplished the previous day and what they wanted to achieve that day.  But before the team could break and start their tasks, everyone had to share a life goal and a value.  For some it’s a breeze and they can’t wait to share, for others, it’s a pain to get something out, and for a casual observer it’s a sign of a company doing things differently and doing them in a meaningful way.

 I recently spent a few hours hanging out at CoLabination’s co-working space near Drexel’s campus meeting the various team members to hear not only about their unique backgrounds, but also understand the passion shared by each employee working at CoLabination.  All of the feedback I received was unique and honest, especially what I heard from the guy who dreamed up a particularly innovative concept only a couple of years ago.

A professed entrepreneur at heart, Scott Latham tried his hand at building and running a Philadelphia based streetwear brand called Flight Crew Clothing a few years back.  While things were progressing with the company, one retailer here, a couple sponsorships there, Scott quickly ran into the expensive problem of geographic expansion, a challenge that plagues nearly all small and independent clothing brands.  Most apparel or streetwear brands either sell directly through their website or through a handful of smaller boutiques offering local and underground products, but this can be both a costly and inefficient route for brands like Scott’s looking to gain visibility well beyond the zip code they were started in. 


“I knew there had to be a better way,” Latham said.  So he has set out to overcome the extreme fragmentation that permeates the streetwear and underground apparel industry.  “Its an exciting opportunity because at first what I thought I was doing was just solving a problem for brands similar to mine, but what we’ve realized is that it has grown into two really big problems, one for brands and one for shoppers,” Latham explains. 

 Scott split his time between refining this concept with the help of other entrepreneurs at Seed Philly, an early stage incubator for Philadelphia startups, and gathering an all-star team that could contribute to the mission right away. Within a year, what was a frustration became a solution in the form of CoLabination, an e-commerce startup in Philadelphia focused on providing a marketplace for brand discovery and collection.  

Aiming to be a new online option for smaller and independent designers, CoLabination tackles the e-commerce and business side of the apparel industry and allows designers to devote more time and energy to their passion for making great clothes.  “There’s so many of theses small businesses out there that have tried to set up an online presence but its not working for them because its not being aggregated and no one can find them,” Latham explains with the zeal of someone confident that the market is in dire need of a better solution. “So in essence, what were doing is aggregating the future of shopping online.”

CoLabination boils down to three main features benefiting both brands and consumers.  For discovery, shoppers use the Rolodex to scroll through and check out the newest or most popular products featured on the site.  If you click on a shirt or hoodie that catches your eye, you are taken to that brand’s Showroom. Once inside the Showroom, users can browse and purchase what the brand offers, but they also get a better understanding of the story and people behind that particular brand.   “We let designers tell their stories,” insists CoLabination’s Brand Specialist Tyler Blaisdell. “Ideally, we want CoLabination to serve as a platform for connecting shoppers with brands from all around the country.”  If a certain brand keeps displaying apparel you like, you can add them to your X Collection, a personally created profile allowing users to define themselves by the brands they collect. 

 Sitting down with Tyler and Paul Dziemianowicz, CoLabination’s product expert, I quickly appreciated the tricky yet crucial balance CoLabination is striving for when it comes to building a site that is easy and intuitive to use but also allows brands to express themselves.   Currently, a limited number of e-commerce startups feature up-and-coming brands, but they often leave shoppers feeling overwhelmed and confused.   After just a couple minutes on the site, I could already see why every member of CoLabination has taken such pride in offering a simple shopping experience for consumers who are passionate about discovering new and interesting brands.

Despite being such an early stage venture, CoLabination is already making noise in Philly’s growing startup ecosystem.  An endless pool of young talent from schools like University of Pennsylvania and Drexel combined with a renewed push for small business investment from City Hall has helped to strengthen Philly’s startup scene.  Every single CoLabination employee expressed his or her desire to help create a more collaborative community for the entrepreneurs within the city and make it a final destination instead of just a launching pad for young and growing startups.  

            Whether the topic is the Philly startup scene or the fragmented market for streetwear and underground apparel, talking with any of the CoLabination employees gives off a strong sense of excitement not only in what CoLabinaton stands for, but what it might become.  More than anything, this team seems driven by the excitement and energy that comes from creating a service addressing a massive challenge facing both brands and the people that want to wear their products.  

Thanks for inviting me and Tech in Motion to your blog, Will! For those of you that don’t know us, Tech in Motion is a (free of charge) tech and networking meetup group. Currently, we have over 16,000 members nationwide, or continent-wide, I suppose, as we started a branch up in Toronto this last spring. 1,700 of those members are located in Chicago. And to think, this is where it all started. Because Chicago is awesome.

My co-organizer Jen Diaferio and I run the Chicago division, and have both gotten to witness (and fuel) the amazing transformation Tech in Motion: Chicago has taken in becoming the success it is today. The initial idea was born out of Chicago Tech Week back in 2011. Both Jen and I work in marketing for local tech recruiting agencies, Workbridge Associates and Jobspring Partners. Being genuinely interested in the Chicago tech scene, we decided to join forces so that we could get more involved. From there, it just sort of took off, and now Tech in Motion is a prominent meetup group in 10 cities.

It’s been sort of a wild ride. I don’t think any of us realized what it would turn into when we started, and maybe we still don’t. Every month, our membership continues to grow and we’re constantly brainstorming ways on how to keep our audience engaged. For example, we’ve started an email newsletter to keep people up to date with relevant events across the country. And we’ve recently started accepting external sponsorships (previously, Workbridge and Jobspring were the exclusive sponsors for our events) so that we can host bigger and better events.

I think some of our favorite events have been with the tech guys from Obama for America, and the talk with Divvy and the representative from the Chicago Department of Transportation. The Obama event was HUGE. We actually had to cap our RSVPs at 400 because the venue wasn’t big enough to accommodate all the interest.

Divvy was a lot of fun, too. At this point, the blue bikes were sort of a new addition to the city, so everyone brought bunches of questions to the event. Scott and Elliot were really good sports about it. It was definitely more casual, and you could really tell those two had a great working relationship.

For our December event on Thursday, we’re trying out a new format. We’re calling it a Demos & Drinks (accurately named, because we’re having a lot of both!). Four food-based app companies are going to be setting up tables to demo their apps and products, and maybe even share some tasty samples! Ale Syndicate will be there sampling their beer. We’re hoping it’ll be pretty informal, a lot of networking, and very informational for people interested in seeing how these companies managed to create an app and launch a company. We hope to see you all there! Also, we’re always open to featuring new and interesting startups at our events! Feel free to reach out if you have one, or even if there’s a topic you’d like to see us cover in one of our future events.