So I’ve been working on an idea to allow “peer-2-peer” rentals.  Imagine being able to find people in your area renting the things they don’t use.  Not just tools in the garage, but their camper trailer, their kayaks, their bread maker, even their cars.  American people are voracious consumers, well they were.  The times are changing, we’re realizing we can’t keep spending and consuming.  It affects the environment and it leaves us with no money.  So if we aggregate the “stuff” we all have and offer it up to the community for a daily rate we’d be able to find what we need without needing to buy more.  Reduce packaging, reduce transportation costs, and save some money for things that matter.
Now I came up with the idea on my own, I have hundreds of them bouncing around in my head to tell you the truth.  While it was my own original idea, I wasn’t the first person.  There are two other major sites out there that allow you to do the same thing basically.  Zilok and iRent2U both offer the same thing, both are substantially more advanced at the moment, and both are seemingly infinitely more complicated.  What I was trying to accomplish in Crowd Rent was a simple process.  Reduce the forms, the questions, and process to what it is, renting your things to people in your area.  I also wanted to make it safe to pay.  So I used a system that charges the customer up front when the rental is confirmed and allows them to give the owner a payment code to redeem.  This could be a pain if people don’t know how it works but it protects people and allows them to use their credit card.  So in a way, we’re ahead of the competition.

Yesterday I finally opened it up to the public and the response was good.  I got three new users but only one new item listed.  This was from one ad on Craigslist that generated quite a bit of traffic.  So I was excited but also dissappointed.  I know full well this is a long process to build a viable business but that’s what I like about it.  Sure I want to work for myself, set my own hours, and be filthy rich but more importantly I wasn’t to build something.  I developed the U-Haul reservations site so I know the technical aspect of these things but the thing we took for granted was the traffic.  We’d work up something new, flip a switch and overwhelm ourselves with our success.  With good reason, the reservations site was generating over a million dollars a day in rental revenue and that was three years ago or so.  It something I’ve seen with gAuto.com, another venture with a few former coworkers.  It’s a great idea and we have great talent but we need customers.  They’re coming but it’s always slow.