Our Story: From One Water Slide to Thousands of Memories

I’m Anthony, the owner of U Bounce Party Rentals. Here’s the story of how a conversation, a couple phone calls, and a single water slide turned into a business that has served thousands of events across Arizona.

U Bounce Party Rentals started the way the best ideas often do – with friends, family, and a casual conversation. In May of 2022 during a get together with some family & friends, someone mentioned they had just rented a bounce house for their kids, and the question came up: “What about renting water slides? I wonder if that would be a good business to get into?”

That little spark turned into action almost immediately. I remembered a friend, Josh, who ran Wild Child Inflatables in South Dakota. The next day, I gave him a call. Josh walked me through the ins and outs of the rental business and pointed me toward my first manufacturer. While Alyssa at SJS Accounting was setting up the LLC, I was at my “cushy” software engineering job in Chandler, locked in a conference room on the phone with a manufacturer Josh had recommended. Before I walked out of that room, I had ordered my very first inflatable water slide.

When it arrived, the reality of the business hit me. These things are heavy! I dragged it into the backyard, got it blown up, and thought, “This can’t be too bad.” Then came the hard part: learning how to roll it back up. For a couple of days, I was out there in the Arizona heat, rolling and unrolling, inflating and deflating, watching YouTube videos, and starting over when it didn’t work. The funniest part? After all that effort, I’d finally get a decent roll only to realize it wouldn’t even fit through the backyard gate. So back I went, unrolling it again, moving it, blowing it up, and starting over.

Even when I finally got a tight enough roll to get it out of the backyard, the next challenge showed up: loading a 400-pound inflatable into the back of my pickup truck. After a few failed attempts with ATV ramps and a dolly, I realized this wasn’t going to work. That’s when I went out and bought my first trailer — one of many “figure it out as you go” lessons in those early weeks.

Finally, on June 16, 2022, I loaded that first water slide rental onto the new trailer, hauled it across town, and delivered it to our very first customer.

From there, things snowballed. I added a second slide before July 4th, and soon I was running 3 to 4 deliveries every weekend all summer long. That August, I bought two more slides. Then I discovered that tables, chairs, and tents were in high demand too, and just like that, U Bounce began growing beyond inflatables. By the end of 2022, I had hired our first two employees.

2023 was a year of expansion and milestones. The business grew, I hired more help, and most importantly, a new member joined out team when my daughter Maeve was born in March. Becoming a dad while building a company was a challenge, but it gave me a bigger reason to keep pushing.