Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.
When someone places an order on Beachgoer.com, Arlington natives and 2015 Yorktown High School graduates David Moeller and Finn Cardiff drive an hour to their warehouse in Manassas to package and ship it themselves.
“Yup — it’s just the two of us,” Moeller said. “We’re either at home on our computers, or driving out to the warehouse and back again.”
In 2017 while still in college — (Moeller at Ohio State and Cardiff at Virginia Tech — the two friends put together their passions for business and software development to tackle a niche market: beach supplies.
Working with over 250,000 thousand lines of code, the two created an algorithm that analyzes millions of data points across the beach supplies industry — think, what a surfboard is going for on Amazon — to sort what they can buy at wholesale at the most efficient price.
“Starting off, we just wanted sell our own brand of products with a beach niche, but we quickly realized there was a lot more opportunity to sell online across a variety of brands,” Cardiff said.
Since then, Beachgoer has grown a hundred times in size with over 200 products for sale, ranging from high-end body boards to beach balls.
So far, Moeller and Cardiff have not raised any outside capital. The two are currently searching for investors with the eventual goal of securing $2.5 million.
“Being based in Arlington, I mean clearly we’re from here, but the area gives us so many valuable networking opportunities,” Moeller said. “There’s a lot of talent and smart people that we connect with on a daily basis to learn about the industry.”