I have been trying to solve the complete mystery of needs vs. wants in India. I have seen cases where people buy gadgets, books, and bicycle out of excitement and then don’t use them at all. During my stay in Bangalore for 5 years I ended up setting up my place with microwave, refrigerator, TV, study table, stove etc.
When I decided to shift back to Delhi, I couldn’t sell 80% of my stuff and I didn’t have enough time to try out selling websites like Quikr and Olx. I was ignoring them as I didn’t want to get involved in a lot of back and forth with the buyers. I shifted back to Delhi and realized that there has to be some kind of a fix to this.
So a friend of mine, now business partner, introduced me to the concept of Collaborative Consumption and sent me Rachel Botsman’s TED Video. After watching the video I realized that there has to be some way to put a structure to the whole thing and build a renting/sharing marketplace for the Indian consumers. We started digging deeper and realized that there aren’t many players in the segment apart from the listing websites like Bhaadepe.com, Rentongo.com, Rentalmasti.com, Rentkart.com (now shut) etc.
We wanted to be an end to end service provider from the beginning and decided to provide logistics, payment and security, and verification to the user, this feature is our USP. On June 14th 2013, we launched IRentShare.com, a community based marketplace for renting and sharing physical products.
It was difficult for us to convince users to add their idle goods online and we were trying to solve the security of goods issue through a security deposit, which in itself was not a foolproof method. So later that year, one of our close friends from IIT Roorkee suggested us to build focused groups/communities where people within a community can rent/share goods with each other.
IRentShare can put its effort and verify users for each and every single community by partnering with the community members. We decided to launch this in colleges, schools, corporates, and housing societies. Some of the colleges/corporates/schools that were happy to collaborate with us were IIT Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Expedia.com, and Ryan International School, Gurgaon.
Additionally, we increased our vendor tie-ups and started offering wide variety of goods and built a rental marketplace. Currently we offer cameras, camera lenses, air conditioners, refrigerators, deep freezers, mac books, dekstops, trekking equipment, furniture, projectors, tablets etc. Strong vendor tie-ups, logistics services, and verification of the users helped us in building a safe model for renting/ sharing of goods. In quarter 1 of 2014 we were the winners at IIT Kharagpur’s (Jury award) and Runners Up at IIT Delhi’s business competition.
We are currently improving our community UI and making it more secure/social so that it becomes easier for people within a community to rent and share goods with each other. Please provide your input on what would motivate you to put your idle goods for renting/sharing on our website?
Anyone in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai looking to rent out any equipment feel free to contact me at Vardhman@irentshare.com .
We would appreciate if you could look at our website and provide your valuable feedback. Feel free to quiz us on our model. We would be happy to discuss!
Our website: www.IRentShare.com
Check out our slideshare presentation on benefits of renting:
