A Note from the Co-Founders: Why Building Booster Means So Much to Us

I’m proud to announce our Series B today. As we begin to grow our team, my co-founders and I wanted to offer a look into why building Booster means so much to us.

Our “Why” at Booster

Stories of selfless devotion and hard work are why we wake up each day at Booster. Everywhere we go, we see in others snippets of a common struggle to provide for family and make a place in the world. These stories are moving and they resonate with our own family lives. Co-founder Diego immigrated to America from Brazil as a young kid, his mother tirelessly juggling multiple jobs while trying to save money and make time for her son. Co-founder Tyler’s father commuted 4 hours via car to go back to school while Tyler was in elementary school, missing irreplaceable family memories, with the hope to get ahead in life. My own mother spoke no English when she came to the United States at the age of 16, without a penny to her name and worked tirelessly for her family for a full career.

The selfless don’t make time for themselves. They are rarely willing to splurge on non-essentials, even though they deserve it most. It’s just not in their DNA. We all know, and love, people like this.

Many businesses do not serve these selfless individuals well. Those businesses typically fall into one of two buckets:

a) Bucket #1: The product is a luxury. To select into this customer base, customers have to feel they’ve earned something special. Selfless people don’t often feel this way, even if they should.

b) Bucket #2: The customer is the product. Eyeballs on screens for entertainment or consumption is a core goal. Selfless people often find these products frivolous or a poor use of their time.

We wanted to build a third kind of business at Booster. One that serves all people — especially those that never ask to be served. One which acknowledges that everyone is busy, and everyone deserves more free time for the people they love. It’s this passion that fuels our maniacal drive to be both more convenient AND more affordable than the status quo.

How We Think

We uncovered the opportunity to build such a service around an underutilized societal resource: full parking lots. The parking lot full of automobiles is a truly wonderful thing. It is the transient aggregation of hundreds of unattended unique personal addresses into an organized formation of high density. The result is a chance to deliver goods and services to consumers with unparalleled efficiency, speed, affordability, security, and sustainability. This insight is the #1 “How” that makes Booster work.

Given this insight, we can reinvent new supply chains that eliminate real estate, infrastructure, and middle men costs from the delivery of goods and services. Picking the first such supply chain one was easy.

We asked ourselves, what is the one thing nearly everyone needs? The one chore that steals precious spare time and causes missed family dinners, business meetings, and dates? The gas station errand.

What Is Booster?

Everyday we deliver gas to thousands of people’s cars while they’re away, for the same price as the local gas station. Same-day delivery is free.

Doing this is hard. We need the best operations and logistics experts, because if Booster is late the delivery point relocates itself. We need the best product thinkers and engineers, because habits are hard to break, and Booster is less similar to gas stations than Airbnb is to hotels, or Lyft/Uber are to taxis. We need the best marketers, because parking lots cannot self-select, so they contain as many late adopters as early adopters. Reinventing the gas station experience for a technology-enabled world requires working with the most tenacious, brilliant, and mission-driven people. The outcome is an effortless alternative to the gas station that saves everyone time and money.

I’m truly humbled by the trust that our investors have placed in our team by contributing to our Series B fundraise today. Still more special are our customers who have put aside decades of habit to try our gas delivery service, and the team at Booster that has come together to build it.

We’re hiring. If you’d like to join, let me know, or find a role here.

Frank