“I went on Google Earth and searched eighty pools nearby,” Laskin recalled. His family had been paying a neighbor to use the pool she had built for her mostly absent, presumably ungrateful grandchildren, and he realized that he might have found a scalable business. Laskin, an Israeli-American whose family moved to Lakewood, New Jersey, when he was fourteen, had launched Swimply as a lark the previous summer, while he was home from college. Weinberger and Laskin met last year, at a networking event that Weinberger, an entrepreneur and “chill” Orthodox Jew, had set up for other religious Jews interested in startups. As for the ick factor? The company partners with local pool-maintenance firms to make sure that pools are up to snuff and proper pH levels before they’re listed. Hosts set their own prices Swimply takes a commission, plus a “service charge” from swimmers. Over all, the company has signed up pools in thirty-six states in a little more than a year. He now claims to host paying strangers in his pool four times a week, on average. “The first day, I made a thousand dollars in bookings,” Weinberger said. To that end, Weinberger’s own pool is available on Swimply, for fifty dollars an hour, under the rubric “Local Paradise.”

Both are passionate about developing the shared-swimming economy. Spindly, balding, and animated, Weinberger is Swimply’s chief marketing officer and something of a contrast to Laskin, who is shorter, hirsute, and less animated. Laskin was explaining this on a muggy morning while sitting poolside-that was another contender for the app’s name, he said-in a Long Island back yard belonging to his business partner, Asher Weinberger. It’s simple.” The name was originally even simpler: Swimple.“But people said it sounded like ‘pimple,’ so we added the ‘y.’ ”

The name might strike you as awkward-maybe appropriately so, given the potential ick factor of diving into waters that could be half toddler urine-but “it captures what we do,” Bunim Laskin, the company’s twenty-two-year-old C.E.O., said. How about going for a swim in a random stranger’s back-yard pool-but without getting arrested or shot at or developing a weird skin disease? Sound enticing? If so, there’s now an app for that, a sort of Airbnb for pools.

Airbnb with indoor pool brooklyn