#SURFS UP BIRD SOFTWARE#

In the intervening years, they’ve upgraded from cardboard signs to wooden frames to the metallic surf rack system they have deployed now. The SurfUp team first tested their concept at UC San Diego’s annual Meet the Beach event for incoming students, where they proved that the concept worked. The students workshopped various business ideas in the beginning surfer space, and eventually settled on an app-based, surfboards as a service (SaaS) platform. Hissom, a life-long surfer, had noticed that while the market had plenty of options that catered to him and other intermediate and advanced surfers, it’s a highly fragmented market for beginners like his wife. Here, Hissom and Abugharbieh teamed up to identify an opportunity and create a business model. The SurfUp concept first surfaced in the Rady School of Management Lab to Market capstone course in 2018, taught by lecturer Del Foite. The team did early user testing during the annual Meet the Beach event held near Scripps Pier. After exploring their options, they partnered with several hotel chains including Diamond Head Inn, which agreed that having such a rental system near their beach-adjacent hotels would be a boon for their guests.

Since the rental stations aren’t allowed to be physically on city beaches, the team got creative. “One of our biggest technical hurdles was getting that initial link between the rental station and the app - that took months of R&D, trying different platforms and solutions,” he said. Malcolm McSwain, a current computer science student at UC San Diego and full-stack developer for SurfUp, said getting the app to function seamlessly was also a challenge.

#SURFS UP BIRD SOFTWARE#

“So, we wanted to leverage some of the learned behaviors that people have learned from Uber and Citi Bike and a lot of these software services where they also interact with hardware.”Īfter many prototypes for the secure surf rack - including design help from teams of mechanical and electrical engineering students in the Jacobs School of Engineering capstone senior design course - they settled on a design where the surfboard is locked into the rack while the board remains visible a gate latch securing the surfboard opens when a user rents that particular board on the app and closes once the board has been returned. “We wanted the user experience, from downloading the app to actually renting a surfboard, to be seamless,' Abugharbieh said.

But it also needed to not be fully enclosed like a locker, supporting the open look of an actual surfboard rack. The team wanted to design a surfboard rack that would adequately secure the boards. Mazen Abugharbieh, chief product officer at SurfUp, who earned a bachelor’s degree in structural engineering from the Jacobs School of Engineering and his MBA from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego, led much of the early hardware and software work.

Surfs up bird