The Software Startup Journey of Gas Money Services
DADEN Software Client Showcase. DADEN welcomes Gas Money Services to our Client Showcase event where we learn about their entrepreneurial journey, challenges, successes and future roadmap for their custom software project.
Gas Money is a platform that enables clients to find and hire young adults in their area for the completion of home and yard-based services. These services include jobs such as lawn mowing, landscaping, and car washing, to name a few, but our goal is to eventually accommodate any service that can be completed by a high school or college student.
Unlike other gig-based platforms, Gas Money is fully student-led, and all contractors that offer services on the Gas Money App are 16-24 years old. Gas Money contractors can create their own schedules and communicate directly with clients through the app, and they also have the ability to collaborate with other contractors in their area. The Gas Money App is completely free to use, and it generates revenue on a commission-based model from completed jobs. The GMS mission is to provide young adults with the opportunity to become their own boss and develop real-world skills in communication, leadership, and accountability. Gas Money is more than just a service platform: we are the workforce of the future.
Panelist: Chris Daden
CEO and Chief Architect, DADEN LLC
Panelist: Austin Pariseau
Co-Founder, Gas Money Service
Panelist: Robert Walker
Co-Founder, Gas Money Services
Moderator: Karley Velasquez
Runtime: 29:06
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GMS Showcase Transcript
Karley Velasquez
Hi, everyone, welcome to DADEN Software, Purpose Built Software Solutions for the Best Version of your Business. I'm Karley Velazquez with DADEN Software and we welcome you to today's client showcase, where we will be featuring Gas Money Services, a platform that enables clients to find and hire young adults in their area for the completion of home and yard based services. With me today, we have Austin Pariseau and Robert Walker, the founders of Gas Money Services, taking us through their startup journey, and what it was like building custom software from the ground up. Also joining us on the panel today is DADEN Software CEO and Chief Architect, Chris Daden. As you have questions throughout, feel free to type them in in the stream chat during the discussion and at the end, we'll go through those questions. Let's jump in. How are you today, Austin and Robert?
Gas Money Services
We're great.
Karley
Good to hear. We're happy to have you on with us.
Robert Walker
Thank you. We really appreciate the opportunity for us to be on here and we're looking forward to speaking.
Karley
Great. So to start us off here, can you give us a brief overview on the Gas Money Services’ platform and the Gas Money Services’ mission?
Robert
Yeah, so essentially, the Gas Money Services app and platform allows you to find and hire young adults in your area for the completion of various services, such as lawn care and landscaping. We are also looking to branch out in photography. Essentially any job that a high school or college student could do. Our mission is to provide young adults with the opportunity to become their own boss and develop real world skills and communication, leadership and accountability. So essentially, the Gas Money app has two accounts, a client account and the contractor account. When you sign up as a client, you can look for either a service that you would like, or if you know there's a certain contractor in your area, you can search for that contractor. Essentially, when you search for a service, it'll bring up a list of all the contractors in your area. It’s as simple as sending them a job request. You can look over their profile before you decide to hire them and want to send them that job request. You'll open a message tab between you and the contractor ,and it's all through the app. So once the contractor sets up the date and time to come to your house, they do the service for you, and you just click a payment button right in the app. That is the goal of Gas Money-- it's all about simplicity. Austin, did you want to add anything to that?
Austin Pariseau
I think the biggest thing is that our overall mission is to give this opportunity to people of youth, aged between 16 and 24 years old. You know, most of those will be students in high school or college, which is a huge opportunity, especially for people that are looking for something that they need, not necessarily full time. You can have a very flexible schedule without a boss or something like that, that gives you a schedule every week, that you may have to cancel things for and everything like that to work around work, where actually with us, work works around your schedule. That's our biggest thing. Like Robert was saying, we also want to educate with many different things that is basically not taught in your everyday education, such as different tax benefits by working as an independent contractor, and being a business owner. Also the many other things that go along with that, while also, providing that self motivation and confidence in real world situations that you're not really taught in your everyday education.
Chris Daden
That's awesome. You know what's unique about Gas Money is your guys’ focus on the youth. I know when we were building your app, we were focused on allowing people 16 or older to register, building the parental consents and those kinds of things. How did you guys ended up saying, ‘I want to start a services platform geared towards youth,’? What was the founding purpose of that?
Robert
Yeah, so it really just comes down to how me and Austin started. We were actually doubles partners in tennis. When we first met in high school, we both were super busy. We wanted a way that we could make money without having a boss looking over us and without having a certain schedule. Essentially, we just went out and got some lawn mowers and started kind of mowing lawns on the side. And from there, we really found that a lot of clients really liked hiring us specifically, because they don't really see young people working as much anymore. So that kind of sparked the idea, like, hey, let's try hiring some of our friends to work with us and hire them as independent contractors instead of employees. So that way, they have the same freedom we experienced doing the services. It kind of just grew from there throughout the summer of 2020, early 2020 is when we actually started Gas Money. We actually had a manual process for all of this, all the way up until today. Actually, in a couple days, we will be launching the Gas Money app. So with that manual process, we acted as the medium between contractors and clients. We had a phone that we worked on, we did all the paperwork, we did all the scheduling and essentially, when a contractor wanted to work with us, we'd give them the paperwork and everything. Whenever we got a job request, we would send those job requests out to our contractors, and whenever they wanted to work with us, then they would just simply accept that job request, kind of how the app is geared. We really wanted to simplify this process. But to kind of get back to what we were saying about really focusing on the youth, when we decided to make an app, we kind of thought about this idea. There's so many apps out there that offer services and act as a connector. I mean, you've got Uber and Lyft, those are basically very similar apps, and you see a lot of that in this kind of industry. So what we've thought about is, hey, let's provide this opportunity to young adults, like we had with these experiences. By focusing on that, we really think our company develops more as with the mission of really empowering younger generations, and helping people, instead of just being another company out there that you can use to find services.
Chris
Yeah, and that is what's awesome, is that you guys as the founders are able to exemplify what you guys went through. You guys were youth, taking ambition yourself to go out and find these service opportunities, working hard. That makes you guys great founders for a platform like this. That’s a great starting story. It's a good motivator for you guys to grow the company.
Austin
Yeah, exactly. To kind of bounce off of that a little bit, too. That was one of our biggest things as well. That's what has driven us to do this and get this far today is because we did all of those things in the beginning process. We door knocked, we handed out pamphlets, we did all of those things that a lot of people our age really don't think is possible. I guess you could say, they look at all these big names, these big companies, and they just think, oh, man, that's just such a big mountain to climb. But it all really starts with just that, and that's what really showed us, is that it just starts with something small, and it can become something so much bigger. We kind of built an opportunity for ourselves and built that experience from that opportunity. Now, we want to provide that through our company, to as many youth people as we can.
Chris
That's awesome.
Karley
That is so great. I wish this was around when I was in high school. So you guys kind of already touched on this a little bit, you talked about all the things that you had to do manually-- scheduling, the contractor onboarding. Maybe you can touch a little bit as to how you manually did finances? And then how you got to a point where you decided okay, this is taking off. How did you know that it was time to create a custom mobile app to help your business grow?
Austin
Okay yeah, if you want me to start on that one, Rob. So, we call it our paper model. This is basically using the app and everything like that and anything online, that's the online model. But we started out with the paper model, basically, we got invoice books, printed out Gas Money, invoices, and we would hand those out to each contractor, and each job that they would do, they would fill out an invoice, collect the payment, and actually, at the end of every week, we would have to meet up with all of the contractors and collect those invoices. At that point in the process, it was a very time consuming process, especially, you know, having to do that at the end of every week. In order for anybody to get paid, they have to turn in invoices. So you know, let's say they, forgot to turn in an invoice or something like that, but they still did the job, we wouldn't be able to know that because they didn't turn in the invoice. So that's another reason why putting this model into something online can make that much easier and automated. Then after that, we go through all of our spreadsheets and Robert actually put it in Excel spreadsheets with different formulas to help with the math. And then we would update those at the end of every week. Our weekends were pretty taken up by this model, and then we kind of went from there, got everything set for the next week, and we would do it all over again, so that was, that was our paper model.
Robert
Yeah, to kind of add on to that. At the same time we were doing this paper model, we also would work five to six days a week doing lawn care and other jobs. We really found it to be pretty stressful, especially in the summer when a lot of kids relax. In the summer months, me and Austin were working 40-45 hours a week, just mowing lawns and doing stuff outside. The crazy thing is it never really felt like work to us. That's another thing that we have in mind with the Gas Money app, it allows you to actually collaborate as a contractor with other contractors in your area. This feature really reflects what me and Austin have as best friends. Working with friends is really something that's beneficial. It allows you to grow together and it's also just a way of making work not seem necessarily like a job. Lawn care and landscaping is what we really push on because that's essentially what we've done. But we're really looking to expand, even to tutoring, dog walking, house sitting, or anything like that. Anything that a high school or college student, or anybody that's a young adult, would be interested in doing, just for the opportunities you can get with being your own boss, working with friends. These are really valuable and they've definitely helped us out a lot.
Chris
Awesome guys, just to add some value to some of the viewers that are thinking about starting their own custom software project or just starting a company in general-- How valuable would you say, doing your paper model was to beginning the wireframing stage that you did with us in the design stage of building out your app? Would you say that it was, you know, extremely beneficial to have that paper model down, because then you could refer to those manual processes, in order to build a more effective software application? Tell us a bit about how that may have helped you.
Austin
I would say it was extremely beneficial. If we did not have that paper process, then we wouldn't know what to automate with a software solution. So I think that that's the biggest thing that comes to my head. So I'm very, very happy and that's what I would recommend. You know, get a manual process down, like you were saying, Chris, at the beginning of the business and figure that out. Then that will also help you figure out what you need to put into your software or your mobile app to then automate that process for you, and grow from there. So I think that definitely helped a lot.
Robert
For sure, and it really helps you learn about your own business because if Austin and I wouldn't have had all these experiences and one day, we just got this idea for the Gas Money app, we would have not had any idea where to start. At that point, we would have had to look and we actually did research on other companies that are similar, and we kind of borrowed ideas from them. But especially when it comes to the student working population, as well as the collaboration feature, that's something that we hadn't really seen in other apps. If we wouldn't have had that manual process before creating the app, I don't think we would have thought of adding those features.
Chris
That's true. I think a lot of startups, and this is just general comments to everybody watching-- a lot of startups come to us and say, I need to build software. In our wireframing stage, the first thing we do is ask, how are you doing this today? If you're a law firm, or you're a construction company, or whether you're a startup doing what Gas Money was doing, we ask you what is your manual process today, because we always look to those manual processes first before we start spending a bunch of money building custom software, and planning that out. That's really one of our core values that I think really exemplified itself in our Gas Money project. When you guys came to us and said, this is how we work with the contractors, from what I remember in our early meetings, we didn't really talk about different things software specific. A lot of our first meetings was introducing each other and about your business. How do you do it today? How do your contractors communicate? How do you hire people? How do they work? How do they communicate with customers, and all of that stuff culminated into what we could use for wireframing to build software to support your manual process. So a lot of people come to us without a manual process and ask to build software automation, but it just doesn't always work out that way. So that's a really great highlight in your guys' journey that I think lends itself to your software success.
Karley
It’s so cool to learn more about how you guys came to be and how you started out. So going off of that, now that you know that you wanted to build an app, and you're currently going through that process, which is almost complete. What type of fundraising strategies did you have to find to help Gas Money Services be successful? Did you guys self fund? Did you get investors? How did that work out for you?
Robert
Yeah, so I'm actually up until today, we have been fully self funded. So when we started, that was definitely a big challenge we had. But it's been really rewarding, because everything we've put into the business has been returned to us and it just shows how powerful that is. Essentially, when we started the business, we each put in an investment of our own equal investments. From there, we basically just used our commission model to really fundraise the business. So essentially, what we were doing is from any job that was completed by Gas Money contractors, Gas Money takes 24% of that towards insurance, I mean, we have to insure all the contractors and to cover all the behind the scenes work, so to speak. Then most of it ended up turning into fundraising for the application, because I'm sure a lot of the listeners out there know creating a mobile apps is not necessarily inexpensive, it's a lot of money you got to put forward. That was actually one of the biggest obstacles that we had when we were deciding if we wanted to make an app or not, because you're talking about a huge investment and there's no real certainty of any rewards or returns in that. That's one of the biggest things in business, it's all about risks and rewards. By having the success that we had from just investing back into the business, we didn't take any company draws. Still, as of today, we haven't taken any company draws from Gas Money. We put it all back in the company and it's just really rewarding that we have been self funded so far.
Chris
Wow, that's awesome.
Austin
Yeah, another piece to add to that rewarding piece is that with being self funded, we've also not had to take on any debt or anything like that, from banks or anything. We're completely debt free and that is another accomplishment I wanted to highlight.
Chris
Yeah, that's amazing. A lot of companies are not fortunate to say that. I mean, I come from the startup and entrepreneurial background. I know a lot of companies that debt fundraise in order to fund development. As an entrepreneur myself, if you can get by as you guys did with self funding through cash flow, it doesn't suspend the reality that you have to make some revenue, right? Like a lot of people want to sit, make an app, polish it, polish it, never release it. And you don't want to keep fundraising debt because it's easy to not go to market, you guys have really flipped that kind of procrastinating model on its’ head by leading with a manual paper model. You've then fundraised enough to say, okay, we can scale this with custom software, we take our own fundraising dollars, build that custom software, and now you'll see some growth in your business because you've automated the process. Self fundraising is not easy. But you guys said earlier in the interview here that you didn't want to have a boss, the worst kind of boss you can have is some type of investor or Board of Directors telling you what you can and can't do in some scenarios, right? Some startup companies, and some companies require funding to adequately scale and grow. But in your guys’ case, it's awesome to see you flourish in a self funded way. So super, kudos to you guys on that. That's great work and keep that going for as long as you can.
With that, some of our audience listening today may be angel investors, or they may be interested in working with you guys in some capacity. Are you guys interested in fundraising? What is your plan now that you have a kind of a custom software model to develop? Do you guys want to continue on the self funded track? Are you looking for a partnership with investors? Tell us a bit about that.
Austin
Yeah just to start off, I think our biggest thing, and we've had multiple conversations recently, because we've realized it's a very difficult way to go unless we have some kind of money in the family, or that we've worked since we were 14, or something like that, and just put everything away, which unfortunately, we haven't. So, we were able to put up quite a few funds from the beginning. The 24%, like Rob was saying, has helped us out a lot to this point. But now that we have created this software, we're definitely going to be interested in doing some partnerships with some kind of VCs or like you're saying, angel investors, and things like that. That's our next step. We've had many conversations about different strategies on how to connect yourself with people like that, or companies like that to do partnerships. We've gotten mixed advice-- a lot of people have said, start with the family for the first round, kind of just ask and guarantee a return back to some family members, or close people, close friends and family. But then, also, if we can make that next step quicker than expected with partnerships with larger forms of capital, then that's definitely what we would like to do.
Chris
You guys are definitely ahead of the standard fundraising startup because you have your paper model proven, you have revenues, you now have a software model, you let that software model be live for three to six months, get some statistics from it, and get some proven data, I believe you may have the capability to skip that friends and family seed round and go more to a traditional fundraising round. Since you guys have already self invested, you have not taken draws. Congratulations to you about launching here in the next week or so. Great job. So far, you guys sound like you're doing a good job running the company. We wish you the best of luck finding some investment partners. Keep an eye on who those partners are, and we always say watch for the color of money. It's important to know who your investors are and make sure they're not just Capital Partners, right? It's not just about the money. It's about how they can advise you, how they can add value to your business, and make sure that you truly have a partner, even more so than just the capital that they're giving you.
Robert
Yeah, for sure. Thank you for that advice. That's one of the biggest things. We try and get advice from everybody. We're definitely both new in this and just kind of learning as we go. It definitely feels good to hear advice like that, from somebody who's went through it already. Thank you.
Karley
Okay, so I think this is a good point to jump into our live Q&A. We actually have a question about advice from one of our viewers here. Austin and Robert, this viewer wants to know, if I'm interested in coming up with my own app, what is the most important advice you can give to a startup that does not have technical founders?
Robert
Yeah, I can start out. Austin and I were just basically doing lawn care landscaping, we did not have much technical knowledge, so we could definitely offer some advice for that area. Basically, when we launched Gas Money, the paper model, so to speak, it was right at the start when COVID had hit the United States. We weren't actually able to work until late April. During that time is when we started looking into making an app. The biggest thing we found was researching companies that have already been established. For example, we looked in the Uber model, whether they hire independent contractors and the client/contractor account. That really showed us a lot. Then, we also branched out in the service base models, more towards lawn care landscaping. So definitely, the advice that I would give is to research companies in the market you're looking towards, and research what it means to be a tech company and what it means to create a mobile application.
Austin
Yeah, exactly. To bounce off of that, I think research is extremely important. Then also try and gain that experience from people that have either went through it, or are also kind of going through that and bounce ideas. If you're afraid to reach out to someone, then you're never going to gain that experience or that knowledge that person has. A huge example from what we did is reach out to my cousin, Randy Watkins, who works down south. I knew that he was in the tech industry, and like Robert was saying, we had very, very minimal knowledge about tech, other than, you know, we were wizards with an iPhone and computers. But, we had no idea how to create a mobile app or anything like that. I hadn’t really talked to him a whole lot, he is family, but there wasn't much of a relationship there. One night, it was kind of late at night, and we were just like, let's reach out, and he actually responded within the next five minutes. Since then, he's actually helped us extremely along this path. Another thing that we've done is have had countless meetings with people that are in business and have owned businesses. Getting that advice, you know, you just take everything with a grain of salt, because you don't know exactly what they've done or because you haven't seen that, but still that's more experience and more knowledge that you have now after doing those things, than you would by just doing everything on your own. So that's my piece of advice.
Karley
That's awesome. Yeah, it's always nice to walk along somebody who's maybe been through the same thing that you're going through. So that's great you had some family to help, and thanks for giving that advice to our viewers. Looks like the next question here is, what are some marketing strategies you're going to use to drive traffic to your app?
Robert
Yeah, I could go off of this first. The first biggest thing, especially in today's age is social media. The first thing we did, when we got this idea for the app is created mock ups for advertisements, started pushing our socials a little bit more, everything like that, because everyone has some form of social media that they'll look at. It is the easiest and the most affordable way to get your message out there. So that was a big thing. And then also, we're actually in the process of speaking with the local news station because we really want to push a hard, local launch right now. So we are really trying to hit local at home and the local area as our first goal, and then from there go spread out a little more.
Karley
Great. Yeah, social media can be your biggest asset. That's great to hear. I actually think we do have time for one more question. So for Austin and Robert, what has been the greatest challenge for you two as you've gone through the process of building an application?
Austin
I can start with this one. So I think the biggest thing is monetization, figuring out how we were going to monetize from going with the paper model, then going to this software online model, so to speak. Our biggest thing is that we were inspired by the Uber model for the paper model that we've been using, because Uber, and actually all of those big economy, so to speak, companies, such as TaskRabbit, Thumbtack, Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, all of those companies, normally they'll take, and we know for a fact, Uber takes a certain percentage per drive for providing that job for that service availability or that opportunity for that contractor. So that was where we started and that's definitely the way that we're going still today. We're still figuring out which way we want to go exactly with the monetization, but we are going to start with that model. Taking a commission approach to it from each job that's completed. I don't know if you want to go off of that, too, Rob.
Robert
Yeah, so a big, big thing with that commission model we're using too is every job that happens is guaranteed income for obviously, the contractor, but then for Gas Money. We think to start out, taking that percentage is really going to help guarantee that we can keep funding Gas Money, especially in the early stages. But as we grow, we're looking into maybe either decreasing that personal commission that we take, or even looking into a different model, such as subscription based or buying leads, anything like that. So we're kind of keeping an open mind for monetization. But, that was definitely and probably will be the hardest challenge to keep Gas Money running.
Karley
Great. Well, thank you so much for speaking on that. It looks like that's all the time that we have for today. So thank you to all of our viewers for joining us today. Austin and Robert, we value our client relationship. We thank you for our partnership, everyone listening, we hope that you enjoyed learning about Gas Money Services' journey today with building their custom software. If you have any questions or you yourself need advice regarding an app, we're happy to help and we can set up a one on one meeting with you.
Keep an eye out for our next client showcase, and if you get the chance, please follow DADEN LLC and Gas Money Services. Our DADEN LLC QR code should be up on the screen. If you go ahead and scan that, you'll be set to follow DADEN LLC’s notifications, any upcoming events that we're going to have and receive more software development strategies, similar to what was talked about today.
So once again, thank you Austin and Robert. It's been really fun. It was so nice to learn more about what you guys are doing and we're just so excited for you. So thank you to Gas Money Services and thanks to all our viewers.