Fifteen-year olds Austin Schwab and Tyler Plack co-founded Reserverr, a website that automatically books reservations for free.
“We like to think of Reserverr as a calendar on steroids,” Schwab tells me.
At first, the simple site looks like iCal (which you can import, if you want) in a web browser, with standard appointment creating capabilities. But you can enter the time and place you want to make a dinner reservation or book a hotel room and Reserverr will book it (or tell you that it isn’t available) for you.
Plack, who had the idea for Reserverr, went looking for people to help him online. He met Schwab, his co-founder, and Phil Fishbein, the young startup’s senior developer.
Sam Altman, Loopt CEO and a Partner at Y Combinator, put us in touch with Reserverr, in which he has no financial interest.
“He randomly started pestering me via email about a year ago, and I was impressed with his persistence–it reminded of me of what I would have done when I was his age,” Altman tells me of Schwab. “As a general rule, I expect good things of people that start companies before they can get drivers licenses.”
Schwab says their closest competitors are virtual assistant sites, but they differentiate themselves by offering the service for free.
While the service is free, the three already have a monetization plan, which Schwab says includes consumer-targeted advertising based on places users have been; however, he says they haven’t implemented it yet as they are focused on “building the brand and making Reserverr the best that it can be at making reservations.”
They are currently in a public beta; Schwab says they currently have around 500 users and are focusing on scaling the site.
“The majority of the feedback we received was positive,” Schwab says. “Naturally, we found and fixed bugs, but we also learned a lot about the ways that people can use Reserverr.”
Schwab tells me the three are working on an iOS app where users will be able to manage reservations on the go, as well as new features like user-to-user events and package tracking.
The team recently tweeted a screenshot of their iOS progress.
For the trio individually, they are focused on improving Reserverr, working hard in school and applying to a range of colleges, from New York City to Palo Alto.
While the site is pretty simple right now, it’s exciting to see the young group’s persistence in carrying out their vision. If they put the serious work in to take the project from a novelty to a lasting product, some pretty cool stuff could come out of this.