HACKER Q&A
📣 kktcbananarep

Will It Work?


For the last couple of months I have been building app that would allow people to rent ('share' as I call it) their belongings to other people. An example of this is a guitar. I have a guitar that I don't play too often and would like to both make money by lending it to someone as well as allowing them to experience it instead of buying and potentially not using it later.

However, recently I have realized that what I'm building is effectively something people will use very rarely since it is a platform where you go to rent stuff that you don't use often. Is this adding real value to people? Would you rent things instead of buying them? What kind of things would you rent? (e.g. game console, lawn mower, surfboard, etc.) How is this different from what Airbnb is doing with homes? One big difference I see is rental of homes makes sense because they are very expensive to buy and you wouldn't want to buy a home everywhere you travel to. What is the threshold for buying something vs renting it?

Thank you all in advance for your contribution!

  👤 NalNezumi Accepted Answer ✓
I'd add a option to "rent & option to buy". It goes both ways: I have a pricey guitar lying around that I haven't used for 2year+, but haven't come around to quite sell it (because I might one day pick it up again, as I used to be very good at it). It could be quite a great thing to rent to young music students (like I used to be) that want a fairly good sounding guitar. Some years down the line having the option to just sell it might be nice for both.

The real added value is like the instruments above: you want something for a couple of years, and there's quite a lot of people out there that already own it (and is past year of using it). Although, second-hand shop already covers this usage, by people buying (console, instruments etc) it and using it for the years, and then re-sell it on second-hand. It only covers certain products so you might find a niche, maybe.

I'd say the most usefulness in the idea is what I see as a local problem around me:

I live in Tokyo right now, for work, so I wont stay here 1-2years+. There's a lot of people like this in Tokyo, it's often called "a transit city" by expats. Furnished apartments here is a thing, but its quite expensive and limited. For someone newly arrived, just renting the furniture might be a useful option. (but I don't quite see who would only rent furniture, since storage is a problem while not being rented)

👤 forgotmypw17
I think you should consider taking payment out of the equation. Instead of having people pay for the rental, have them earn points for first renting out their stuff and building trust in the system, and then being able to rent other people's stuff. You would have to make the system itself trustworthy (i.e. fully transparent and math-backed).

I'm working on a platform which would enable something like this very quickly, and I'll include it as a test case.

Thank you for sharing!

👤 throw03172019
There was a company that took your items to a storage warehouse. They then added the ability to rent your stored items to others.

https://beomni.com/ https://www.producthunt.com/posts/omni-rentals

👤 cable2600
Yahoo had Freecycle groups that gave away items for free to others who could not afford it. Your idea is like Freecycle but with extra steps for fees and rentals.

It almost sounds like a Pawn shop that rents items.

👤 fizzbuzzah2
might be useful if you want to test something out before buying it.
👤 slater
how would you prevent theft?