Austin-based Sparefoot moved into new Headquarters last week, celebrating with an office party last week. Having been to their previous offices, which was substantially smaller and required storing massive amounts of snacks in the hallway, their new digs are downright luxurious. The space features 99% re-purposed materials, graffiti art by Austin artist Sloke, an 18 foot shuffleboard table, dart board, foosball, a Super Mario mural (one of the co-founders is named Mario), sushi-inspired conference room, [...]

SpareFoot, the free online self-storage marketplace (like Hotels.com for finding storage), announced it is expanding to offer a suite of marketing tools for storage facilities. From humble beginnings as a person-to-person storage website slinging extra space in private residences, the Austin start-up has raised $4.5 million and is now a disruptive force in the notoriously low-tech $22 billion self-storage industry. SpareFoot’s new marketing products help facility operators nationwide reach a crucial audience of increasingly web-dependent [...]

SpareFoot, the online self-storage marketplace, launched a unique project and blog series called Adventures In Storage, designed to familiarize employees with their product in the most entertaining way possible. The new mixed-media “reality series” documents the start-up’s 18 employees as they experience the process of renting and moving into and out of self-storage units. CEO Chuck Gordon coordinated the nine-week project, in which duos of employees moved a growing pile of possessions from one storage [...]

Part of the very first Capital Factory class of 2009, SpareFoot has been growing, selectively hiring, and iterating their way to success. Along the way they’ve also attracted capital from legendary angel investor Mike Maples, Jr. and local investors Silverton Partners. Today, they announced that they’ve joined the INSOMNIAC Self Storage Network (ISSN), an open reservations network that allows any third-party marketing company to communicate securely in real time with several self-storage management software systems. [...]

Disclaimer: I am an investor in Sparefoot, and they were in the 2009 Capital Factory program where I am a Managing Director. In early 2009, the founders of Sparefoot (then called Homstie.com) had a vision of allowing people with extra storage space in their homes to make a match with people who wanted to store things. It was a way to bypass the traditional self-storage providers, and create a mutually beneficial relationship between people who [...]

The economic downturn has prompted credit scarcity, layoffs, and cutbacks. Despite the tumult, however, earlier this year twenty Austin business luminaries pumped $100,000 of their own money into the creation of Capital Factory, an Austin-based technology startup incubator that gives funds and mentorship to the most innovative startups.