It’s like Uber but for your couch. That’s how UA senior Chris Gonzalez-Tablada described a new app created by one of his high school friends, Georgia Tech student, Yanni Barghouty. The app, Spots, allows college students to post their spare bedrooms or couches up for rent at a maximum price of $75.
Barghouty said the idea for the app actually came to him while using an Uber.
“That’s how the idea popped into my head,” he said. “I did some research into the market and found there was a massive hole there. There’s Airbnb but it turns out they’ve left a huge hole. The college aged market is almost completely untouched by them… so I saw I good opportunity there on the market side, an opportunity a little too big to ignore.”
The app works like Uber does in other ways too. Hosts and guests can rate each other based on their experience.
“If you stayed a someone’s house and you thought they were creepy or you didn’t like them, you won’t give them a high rating but if you really enjoyed it you’d say ‘5 stars’ and the next person that stays there will see that someone else has had a good experience,” said Gonzalez-Tablada, who is also the UA ambassador for the app. “And it works the other way too. If you’re a guest and if you’re sloppy and irresponsible they can rate you as a one and then If you’re a 5 star host than maybe you don’t necessarily want to be accepting people who have been getting low stars.”
Unlike Uber, Spots requires users to have an active .edu account in order to sign up. The goal, according to Barghouty and Gonzalez-Tablada is to provide more than just a home share utility. They want to try and provide a social experience similar to the hostel cultures in Europe.
“It’s just a more community oriented mindset and I feel that when people have that kind of culture that they’re immersed in it helps the quality of life,” Barghouty said. “It’s a nice feeling to feel unshackled and feel like you can do whatever you want, whenever you want without having to be rich enough to afford five star hotels or travel agents all the time. We just want to enable a new sort of free culture in the United States for college students. Get them to interact with each other, get them to experience new walks of life.”
Barghouty also said he feels college students are the perfect target audience for this goal.
“It’s a time when people have more free time to just explore the world and are more willing to do it before people get older and maybe get more closed-minded,” he said. “They’re still eager to explore and the still want to do new things and that’s what we’re trying to help them do.”
The app’s slogan is “travel on a whim” and Gonzalez-Tablada said he feels the app will allow college students to do just that.
“Our hope is for a college student to look at this app as a viable option for travel,” he said. “If you’re going somewhere for the day, maybe you want to go to New Orleans but you don’t have the money to stay in a hotel every night, maybe you can go down, stay there and have a good time. We’re trying to give a new mechanism for travel that’s cheaper and younger.”
Gonzalez-Tablada also said that so far, about 20 “spots” have been posted in Tuscaloosa. One UA student, accounting major Neal Darji, plans to use the app over A-Day weekend to rent out his home. Darji said he sees the app as a way for college students to make extra money.
“I thought this is a great idea, not just for myself but for others to make money as well so I told more folks that I knew,” he said. “From then on I felt like for myself a few other folks this A-Day weekend is going to be a great test weekend for us to see if this app will be worth using for other game day weekends as well. And I have a strong feeling that it’s going to be.”
