The Land Was Just Sitting There

We started Campfire Concierge on a road trip.

Not a work trip. A regular one, where the good part turns out to be the four hours between the towns. Land out both windows for miles and nothing happening on any of it. Some of it has probably been in the same family for generations, and it is sitting in a spot people would pay real money to wake up in.

So, plainly. You can earn money on land you already own by letting people camp on it, and you don’t have to build anything or be home when they get there. That is the whole idea. We handle the camping part.

What the landowner actually does

Owning land has mostly meant working it or building on it, and when neither of those works out, selling it. We wanted a fourth thing, and the point of the fourth thing is that it keeps the land intact.

On our end that means we bring the equipment, set the site up before anybody arrives, take care of the guest while they are there, and haul all of it back out when they leave. Then it goes back to being land again.

There is a whole page for landowners that lays out the steps and what a property can bring in, without my road trip story attached to it.

The part we did not plan on

The gig economy is real, and not just in cities. That turned out to be a bigger piece of this than we expected going in.

The person who sets up the site and looks after the guest is a Regional Manager. Basically a local who brought the property onto the platform and then runs the bookings, the equipment, the guests, and the cleanup. They are investing in something of their own while they do it. That is the part I get genuinely excited about, more than the land, honestly!

What makes a spot work

We score properties across five categories. Access, utilities, scenic, privacy, recreation. In normal words: can a vehicle get close to it, is there water or power or a cell signal anywhere near, is there something worth looking at, will the neighbors be sitting in the middle of it, and is there anything to do nearby.

If you own land like this, my guess is you could rattle off what it doesn’t have faster than what it does. No power. Forty minutes from a real grocery store. Nothing out there but a hill and a creek.

That’s honest, not modest. You have looked at that hill every day since you were nine years old, so of course it registers as normal. Somebody who has been sitting in traffic since Tuesday doesn’t see a normal hill. The last thing I wrote here was about the best nap you ever had, and that one is entirely the guest’s side of this.

What signing up looks like

The partner application runs in two steps. You make an account first, then you fill in the property details, and you can stop halfway through and come back to it later. It opens by asking whether you are a private landowner or a campground, because those two work differently and that is a much better thing to find out at the start than at the end.

I don’t think most people who own land like this are trying to turn it into a business. They would just rather it did something.

So what does yours look like? If the answer starts with “well, it’s nothing really, just a hill and a creek,” we are going to get along fine.