Rentoid blog

A few weeks ago techcrunch broke the news that p2p accommodation startup Airbnb is in the final stages of closing a $100 million funding round which values the company at $1 billion. This comes after a phenomenal performance in 2010 with their service growing by 800% , booking more than 1.6 million rooms and securing $7.2 million in seed funding in December.

This is another piece of evidence that a new economy, driven by collaborative consumption, is on its way. And many people said that such a business model, could not, and would not work. Who would rent a bed out to complete strangers….? turns out lots of people would and do.

The future is not like the past. And we are glad about that here at rentoid.

Here is a presentation by one of the founders of Airbnb talking about how the company got started and the journey to where it is now - on the video inserted below:

Kudos to the guys at Airbnb.

PSFK CONFERENCE NYC 2011: Joe Gebbia from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

Our current paradigm, our current way of living is deeply flawed and unsustainable. The threats of peak oil, climate change, water & food shortages, deforestation, mass extinction etc are all clear examples of a need for change. Not to mention that we still live in a world where war and poverty are common. It is logically inescapable that you cannot have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.

Why are these things so obvious to some people and denied so vehemently by others? I’m not a psychologist but my guess is that, to people who tend to avoid these topics, discussing them calls into question everything they’ve know, everything they have grown up believing and by extension their identity - who they are. It’s just too difficult or maybe even scary, I don’t know.

In my opinion, this is where I see the environmental movement as having failed - in its communication, or maybe even their approach generally. To me the environmental movement seems very alienating in nature as it comes across as saying - ‘your current lifestyle is bad, you are hurting the planet, you need to pay for it by reducing your consumption, which in the minds of many people translates into - you must reduce your standard of living’. For many of those people, it is a price too great and they reject it.

Now, we could sit here all day playing the blame game and recycling arguments, getting really cranky with each other and going nowhere fast. Or, we could do something different. Something better. This is what Rentoid, and others working in the collaborative consumption space are all about - providing an alternative win/win solution:

By sharing what we already have, we can reduce our consumption without reducing our standard of living. In fact it can even enhance living standards by reducing the burdens of ownership (cost, maintenance, worry etc) and also by creating new value from underutilised resources.

What makes this solution so special is that because it benefits everyone who participates and the environment, not either/or, it is finally possible to get everybody working on the same team.

This is why I love rentoid.

Geordie, the rentoid team.

There isn’t much to say about some of the whacky things that people have put up on rentoid apart from that they are freakin’ awesome and hilarious, or just plain weird. My thanks go out to them for brightening my day!

Wife - ‘does not nag! Supportive & Respects Shows Love Happy to do House chores’

http://www.rentoid.com/item/1WIFEFORRENT-AustraliaWide-9076

Air band - ‘This is not a joke - we will play at your party - and we rock out and are always dressed up in killer 80\’s cock rock fashion’

http://www.rentoid.com/item/Airband-Werribee-9217

7 Seater bike - ‘The most enjoyment you will have with your pants on!

http://www.rentoid.com/item/7SeaterBike-SouthMelbourne-7221

StarWars Chewbacca Supreme Edition Costume - ‘Great for dress up parties and special events…

Body-suit and mask completely covered with hand layered multicolored long hair fur, for an authentic blended look’

http://www.rentoid.com/item/StarWarsChewbaccaSupremeEditionCostume-Whittington-4650

High striker - ‘Adults and teenagers alike can never resist testing their strength by swinging the big hammer and trying to ring the bell’

http://www.rentoid.com/item/Highstriker-Cheltenham-5075

Private Jet - Seats 8 in comfort, leather seats, in-flight refreshment centre & restrooms… Special event? Why not travel in absolute comfort and live the high life’

http://www.rentoid.com/item/Privatejet-Melbourne-5359

Segway - ‘The ultimate in personal transportation’

http://www.rentoid.com/item/Segwayi2-Sydney-7502

Cheers, Geordie

Get a free iPad! (No this is not a scam, really!)

Calling all rentrepreneurs!

iPads are the hottest, most requested item on rentoid

- They get at least 100 searches a day

- The 3 or so that we have available on the site are always rented out

If it is so obvious that there is such a high unmet demand, why don’t you go buy one yourself and list it on rentoid? Think about it, a new iPad 2 costs $580, if you rented it out for $20 a day you would have it paid off in 29 days! After that you’ve got yourself a free iPad! Or if you want, you could continue to rent it out and make some PROFIT for doing almost nothing! This sounds unethical but you are in fact providing a valuable service to people.

First go to the rentoid home page and do a search to make sure there are other people using the site in your area. If there aren’t, the first step is to tell your friends, family and neighbours about rentoid - share it with them via facebook. Once you are sure there are local people using rentoid it’s really as simple as going out, buying an iPad, listing it on rentoid and waiting for the flood of phone calls and emails.

Also, make sure you remember to get your renters to place a bond down in case the iPad or anything else you rent out gets damaged.

Happy renting!

Geordie

The traditional approach for most businesses has been to: create a product/service, sell it, end of story. This has worked well up until recently. But now many consumers are looking for a change. There’s a couple of good reasons for this:

Financial - The GFC has bred distrust of old companies and has also forced or at least encouraged many people to tighten the belts, downsize and re-examine what is actually important to them. Many are actually finding that they prefer simpler lives, with less stuff and want invest more in the things that actually make them happy such as their friends, family, health, traveling and new experiences.

Environmental - Growing awareness of environmental issues is causing people to question the consequences of our lifestyles - where do these products come from? What does it cost to produce them? What are the unintended side-effects of our production system? Where do they go once they’re no longer useful or wanted? It is an inescapable fact that we live on a planet with finite resources and need to find a better way of doing business.

The solution is a model based on sharing that Lisa Gansky calls ‘The Mesh’. The mesh is a new business model that is taking the world by storm. It is about giving consumers more tools, choices and information. It is about sharing products and services - giving people superior access without the burden and expense of ownership.

Mesh businesses work by leveraging the following growing trends:

Urbanisation - The increased population density caused by urbanisation makes sharing networks possible. Once people are living nearby one another in large numbers, sharing of certain items such as cars and tools can become practical.

Use of Data & Social Media - Whereas a buy/sell model encompasses one transaction, a sharing model inherently creates a conversation between providers and customers as they need to continually interact to do business. Every time a product or service is rented, leased, or borrowed the company can collect data about the transaction. This lets them get to know the customer better and then use that data they have compiled to personalise the offerings for the customer for next time. These conversations are happening in real life but also online with the explosion of social media, which provides an effective platform but also another point for data collection and further personalisation. Conversations over social media tend to be much more genuine and human, as opposed to the traditional scripted press release/sell approach.

@font-face { font-family: “宋体”; }@font-face { font-family: “Calibri”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }

Mobile - the Internet started by moving data around but now with widespread adoption of smartphones it is also moving around physical goods. Mesh companies are leveraging this trend to enable their customers to reserve cars, bikes, homes, meals and more - on the go.

Examples of mesh businesses are popping up everywhere. Here are a few to check out if you’re interested!

Carsharing - www.zipcar.com

Entertainment - www.netflix.com

Kids clothes swap - www.thredup.com

Collaborative funding - www.kickstarter.com

Group discounts - www.groupon.com

And there are plenty more here - http://meshing.it/

Geordie - rentoid team.

Yes, I own a ladder. But why? It’s something that most of us only need to use a few times a year, if that. I’m sure it’s a similar story at your house. Is it really necessary for us all to have one each? Why couldn’t we just buy one collectively with our neighbours and share it? Well I’d like you to tell me! In the meantime, here is my theory:

People have been willing to pay for access to a ladder anytime, with no hassles for say $100 for a new one, and the space it will take up in the already cluttered garage because until very recently there hasn’t really been an alternative, no other easy option.

Sure you could ask your neighbours if you could borrow theirs but maybe you’re afraid of annoying them. You could post an add up at the local shops asking to borrow one but this is quite a bit of hassle and maybe no one who owns one.

But things are different now. With the Internet and rentoid it is easy to rent access to a ladder only when you need it for say $10 each time. Is that all? Sounds too good to be true! Well yes, there is a small caveat, if someone rents the ladder at the same time you were planning to then you have a problem. But the thing is, it’s unlikely that will happen, and if it does, well it’s also pretty unlikely that it will be the end of the world if you can’t rent it today like you planned and have to get it tomorrow instead. For me, that small chance is definitely worth taking because I save money by renting, and because I can feel good about saving the environment by getting one less ladder manufactured.

The real truth behind this post is that the ladder is just an example for most things we buy. So remember this post nexct time you go out to buy something you intend to use infrequently.

Geordie - rentoid team.

In her book ‘What’s mine is yours’ Rachel Botsman talks about the rise of a new movement which is sweeping the globe called ‘Collaborative Consumption’.

‘Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being reinvented through the latest technologies and peer-to-peer marketplaces in ways and on a scale never possible before’.

To learn more about ‘Collaborative Consumption’ check out www.collaborativeconsumption.com

Rentoid is a part of the Collaborative Consumption movement and we are very proud of that, but today we are beginning a series of blog posts looking at some of the other ways this game-changing idea has materialised around the world - starting with peer to peer lending.

Ever wondered how all the biggest, most glitzy buildings in most cities are those of the banks? Or how a small group of men on Wall street managed get multi-billion dollar bailouts from the US government after gambling billions of dollars of other people’s money, losing, creating a financial meltdown? How is it possible for these people to be so obscenely rich when they are just moving money around and not actually creating anything of value?! It’s because banks pretty much run the world (see this documentary ‘money as debt’ for more info - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2550156453790090544#).

It’s a sad story, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but there is hope! With the arrival of the Internet and the Web, peer to peer lending is now possible so we cut those greedy parasites (bankers) out of the deal once and for all! What is peer to peer lending? Here is a good explanation from Zopa - a market leader in p2p lending:

Peer-to-peer lending is a smarter, fairer and more human way of doing money. It’s like borrowing and lending with your friends and family - except there are thousands of people you can lend and borrow with.

Both lenders and borrowers get better rates, because peer-to-peer lending is more efficient than the traditional banking model. Banks have massive overheads, with thousands of employees to pay and hundreds of branches to maintain. So they have to take large margins on the money that passes through them.

There’s no smoke and mirrors here. Banks use your money to make even more money for themselves. They lend some of it out, gamble some of it on the price of tin or the Yen depreciating, and invest the rest in any other money-making schemes they can think of.

Whereas at Zopa, people who have spare money lend it directly to people who want to borrow. There are no banks in the middle, no huge overheads and no unethical investments.

Also check out other p2p lending organisations such as ‘prosper’ - www.prosper.com and ‘lending club’ - www.lendingclub.com

Let us know what think about p2p lending!

Geordie - rentoid team.

Trying to make some extra dough? Want to do work that feels meaningful? Rent yourself out on rentoid! (No we don’t mean it like THAT)

Rentoid is all about creating value from things that aren’t being used as much as they could be. The stuff we own is a classic example of this, but something else that isn’t being used as much as it could be is us - or more specifically, our labour, time, skills etc

• Do you have any skills that someone in your community might need?
• Can you can make a good curry? Put yourself up on rentoid and I’ll hire you to cook for me one night!
• Can you speak a Chinese? I’ll hire you to be my tutor!
• Can you play jazz guitar? I’m having a dinner party and it would be SO cool to have some live music!

People often have many special talents they have acquired over the years, and they don’t have to be things you have learnt during your formal education or in your professional life either!

If you don’t have any skills that’s fine too! Want to earn some extra cash and do some good? Rent out your physical labour to the older lady next door who needs some furniture moved. Go and baby sit for the family down the road. Come over to my place and I’ll pay you a few bucks to do the washing up because I had a long day at work and just don’t feel like it!

So list yourself on rentoid to make some extra cash, help your community and hey, you might even have some fun doing it!

Geordie - rentoid team.

We’ve decided to make rentoid Free to list your items to rent. After a few years of trying to work out the best system, we think we’ve landed on what works best for everyone. It’s sometimes known as the ‘Freemium‘ model.

So what does this mean for you?

1. It is still free to join.
2. It is now free to list as many items as you like.
3. You still pay the rental fee to the owner of the item when you exchange the goods.

We will shortly be adding some very nice ‘paid only features which people renting out their goods - to make their items more attractive. But more on that in later posts.

Why have you done this?

It’s pretty simple from our perspective - we want to reduce the barriers that exist for peer to peer renting. What we are doing here is very important to us - personal in fact. While we have had steady growth, most people are slow to embrace the idea of renting instead of buying. (Not you - hey, your reading this!) Sure, we’ve got a loyal group of innovators, but a bigger community will benefit everyone using the site.

How will rentoid make money now?

Well thanks for caring, but that too is not important right now. It’s more important that we create as much value for our community as possible and that’s why we are reducing the barriers to come and play rentoid style.

So feel free to spread the word to your ‘less adventurous’ friends.

The rentoid team.

I’ve been thinking recently about the concept of ‘Ownership’. What do we really own in life? What do we aspire to own? More importantly, how do these “assets” and desired accumulation of assets impact how we live? But before I answer these questions, I’d rather make a list of things we think we own, but actually don’t.

Our House: If it’s mortgaged, we clearly don’t own it. If it is unencumbered it is still owned by the government. Real Estate, is Spanish for Royal Estate. All land is ultimately owned by the crown or the government of the day. Stop paying your ‘rates’ and they will repossess your house. The rates we pay are a form of rent from the true owners. What we have is a lease without an expiration date.

Our Body: In actual fact it owns us. It demands what we feed it, how we treat it and how we exercise it. Disobey and it will cut our lives short.

Our Car: We can’t drive it without insurance and licenses, or the fuel which is taxed. Our car is a liability we hold for which fees must be paid to make it ‘usable’

Most things we think we own, we have greater access to. If we ‘own’ it in law, it just means we have permanent access, not true ownership. The only things we ever own are our thoughts, our memories and our hopes. Why most people spend their lives accumulating liabilities instead of experiences is beyond me. The real cost of perceived ownership is the pillaging of the planet, and locking ourselves into the industrial complex. All we really need is the right level of access to assets and we’ll be able to do and achieve more than people who go around buying stuff.