Home is where You Park It.

Santa Cruz has always been a central hub for van and RV travelers around the world. Both the co-founders, Giulio and Wyatt, went to college at the University of California, Santa Cruz. During one of the UCSC hackathon, Cruzhacks, they met and decided to develop a solution for the growing parking problem in Santa Cruz. 48 hours and 12 Yerba Mates later, Vroom was born: a platform where students could share their driveway with van and RV travelers around the area.

While Vroom was a very basic app designed and built by two college students, it was enough to get a few people very interested in the project. Because of that, Wyatt and Giulio decided to give a real shot to the project and rebuilt the website from scratch. A few months later, Vanly was live for Beta testing.

Just a couple weeks after Vanly was launched, a new listing popped up in the heart of Silicon Valley. Wyatt and Giulio were beyond excited for what could possibly become of the app for sharing driveway space. They soon learned that it wasn't going to be an easy road, with suddenly, hundreds of listings appearing, and business booming. It would take them almost 6 months to see the next new listing, but the two began understanding the value in getting by with a little help from their friends.

From lockdown to jobs becoming remote, to sickness and fear rattling up the world, the novel Coronavirus has brought up countless of uncertainties to life as we knew it. Most of us could never have envisioned a reality where we feared visiting our family during holidays and not inviting friends over on a Friday night. Nevertheless, this turned out to be the perfect time to launch Vanly to the general public. More and more people were choosing camper van traveling over hotels, flights, and cruises and vanlife saw the highest increase in exposure in its history.

2020 has been a year that has rocked our world and taught us all about the fragility of life. For the Vanly family however, this year wasn’t all that discouraging. In June, three months after shelter in place began, friends were graduating college, leases to homes in welcoming neighborhoods were ending, and life was changing once again. On the first week of July, a group of friends like family moved to an empty piece of land in Truckee, California, and called it The Bug Farm! We named this starry granite land after the bounty of bugs we encountered at our fully-functional, digital nomad community. We had WiFi, a full outdoor kitchen, bathrooms, twinkly lights, loud speakers and dance parties. Living in nature demanded that we work and communicate at a more natural level than most of us ever had before. Rooted in adventure and teamwork, we had been gifted this opportunity, and we were not going to take it for granted. We took care of each other and supported each other while nature distracted us from the worldwide tension outside of our Van Community. #Vanlife proved to be fun and suitable especially with what the COVID-19 pandemic has left us with. And most importantly, we proved to ourselves that anyone can live on the road, particularly with the additional home amenities. The summer of 2020 changed how we all felt about Vanly. We were living it! It was real, and we felt the world needed to try it, too. How could we convince people to be a part of this? To figure this out, we all isolated ourselves from the rest of California to work on Vanly . That was when we got our first customer, and our first 100 listings! Vanly gained momentum with close to 800% of growth within a month. The Bug Farm would not have been the magical place it was without the RVs, vans, and buses that provided safety, transportation, and a home for us wanderers.