Boostrapping live

When rentoid.com was launched. I believed in the concept, the dream and the process. (still do).

 

So in order to make the site work I had to put some stuff to put up for rent. Stuff I didn’t even own – yet. Once the site went live, it needed stuff on it. But at that stage we had no members, so we had to populate the site. Content was and is King. Included in my listed stuff was a home gym. A rental came in for it. So I went and bought it.  It cost me $400 to buy. I rented it out for $140. Then Sold it on Ebay afterwards for $280. (We now have other suppliers of gyms for rental on rentoid)

 

 

 

Net result:

A good user experience for a new member

A $20 profit

 

And I felt the excitement that goes along with bootstrapping; finding creative solutions,  and most importantly, inventing transactions.

Rentoid on techcrunch

We finally got ‘crunched’ – with a little spiel for rentoid on Tech Crunch.

In the first instance it’s given us a large membership boost and a very positive response. But it’s also given us our share of negative armchair experts, naysayers in the comments.

We say:

“That’s Ok – revolutionaries like us don’t care what naysayers think.”

But it’s a few thousand more people that know about rentoid.com too.

Actually we do care about what they think as it pertains to ideas to improve the service. We turn their negatives into a positive. But we always ignore an attitude which says something won’t work. It won’t for them – their attitude has already predetermined that!

In fact, some context here: We had many more positive comments and only a few negative. Also, both our membership and listings have been boosted as has our unique visiters today. But I thought I’d make this ‘blatant piece of self promotion’ worthy of a startup blog story by providing some insight!

You can check out the story here.

And add some comments here on the Crunch Base or on the story. We want to hear negative and postive sentiments. We want to improve our offer.

Reliability

4.17pm – Get email from friend advising of a small bug on rentoid.com

 

4.17pm – I email my main guy from my tech team to ask him to check it out  

4.21pm –  I receive email from my tech guy saying – bug fixed please check it!   

4.23pm – I email my friend advising that it’s all fixed saying – ‘my guy is quick.’ 

4.25pm – Friend emails me back saying “..Wow… that’s amazing.” Blog worthy!! 

As above.

Never underestimate the power strong relationships within supply chains. Strong relationships build efficient supply chains – not the other way around.

When things go wrong

Update – all fixed. phew… 

When things go wrong – admit it and fix it….

At this very second something is wrong with rentoid.com – people can’t join…a big issue for us.

While the tech team are on it, we posted this blog entry which might advise those who see the blog…

Any other ideas / solutions?

Uncovering the gold nuggets

One more quick rentoid spruik. We’ve just added a couple of cool things to rentoid.com: 

The rockstar list

The quirky list

and the ‘surprise’ function

 rentoid-home.png

They’re all decided by members through a tagging system. We’re hoping they’ll add a bit of a social element and in turn unlock some of the gold nuggets we have hidden in our database of listings…. Click ‘em and be pleasantly surprised.     

    

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