https://youtu.be/kpZMVdbBZ7U
Bo Abrams, Co-Founder of Kommu, is passionate about creating solutions that empower people to develop a startup and share their homes with trusted friends and communities.
We discuss his Marketplace Blueprint framework, which includes recognizing a personal problem, evaluating its impact on others, researching competitors, identifying gaps, and developing a viable business plan. Bo highlights how his own frustrations with the affordability of short-term rentals inspired Kommu’s development. By building a platform centered around trust and personal networks, Kommu offers an alternative to traditional short-term rental platforms like Airbnb, making travel more accessible for Millennials and Gen Z renters.
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Develop a Startup With Bo Abrams
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast and my guest today is Bo Abrams, the co-founder of kommu, a connected home sharing and travel platform that links users with their personal network and empowers them to host trusted friends, interest groups and communities in their home on their own terms. Bo, welcome to the show.
Steve, thanks so much for having me.
Well, that's a really interesting business you have there. So what is your personal “Why” and how do you manifest it in this business or through this business?
Yeah, I mean, I would say my personal “Why,” and it really starts with me as an individual, was to say that if I saw an opportunity where I thought there was something that needed to be built that I believed had the potential to go impact the world in that way, that I would go forward and build it and try my best at trying, so to speak. So for me, moving back to what happened, I basically took the GMAT seven times to try to get into business school. I paid for the business school consultants because I didn't get into the great undergrad schools even with great scores and everything else because I didn't run that process.
I didn't know how to play the game to get into great colleges. So for business school, I spent all the money I had trying to get in. And I finally got in, ended up going to UCLA. It's where me and my co-founder are from. We're both from LA. We both were supposed to go to other business schools, ironically. Covid hit, we didn't want to leave our families. And right in that moment, I decided to take a trip because I worked so hard to try to get into school and I go to Montana to clear my head, Whitefish, Montana. It was beautiful. And I could only afford four nights in a pretty crappy Airbnb in Montana. And that was half my rent for the month in Los Angeles. And as a renter in LA, I'm not able to list my home on a platform like Airbnb, a short-term rental platform for good reason. And beyond that, at that moment in time, and still today, travel had fundamentally changed.
People could now live and work anywhere and the demand for travel in the post-Covid era was surging. And so what did that do? It caused the pricings of these short-term rental platforms to skyrocket. And so, I remember trying to get a car, couldn't find one, we used Turo. I'm thinking, man, if people are able to list their cars in a peer-to-peer marketplace, why can't I do that with my home? And everybody would say, well, that's Airbnb. And I thought, well, that's unacceptable that there's this huge group of users, people like me, that cannot afford Airbnbs now, they're more expensive. They're not the economical version they used to be, and cannot list to recover any value while they're gone. And it's really as if, I say this all the time, it's as if UberX moved to just being Uber Black now, that professionalization problem. So in my case, I go and I meet my co-founder, Gus, in business school, and we were just talking as friends.
We were literally talking about how we were remote capable workers at our previous jobs before business school, but that we didn't travel a lot, because, secret's out,