Show HN: Rentables, the Community Rental Marketplace
rentables.auWhat started as a learning project that solved a problem of mine, snowballed into a product that I'm working to grow.
It's called Rentables. It's a community marketplace that allows anyone to rent their things to their community.
I'm big on DIY, but with every project I do I'm always finding myself buying a new tool, using it once, and then it lives in the shed collecting dust.
This was a problem I thought I could solve, and so I set myself the challenge to build something that did. I believe the concept has the potential to change behaviour around buying, and make so many things accessible to everybody.
I've built this as a solo-dev, completely bootstrapped, and I'm wanting to grow this into something great.
Right now I'm starting small – I'm working with my local community, engaging with people on a small scale to iron out as many user wrinkles, iterating, rinse and repeat.
They key challenge I'm trying to overcome at the moment is the dichotomy of a two-sided network, and ensuring that I'm focusing on the right audience at the right time. For now I see the most important audience being the Owners who will be listing their items. Doing that should help develop more of a catalogue of items, in turn making the platform more appealing to renters.
It's not perfect, but I know there's a lot of bright minds here on HN so I wanted to share and hopefully get some feedback, perspectives and challenges on how I'm approaching things. All of these will help me, and Rentables grow.
Edit: It's currently locked down to Australian sign ups so that I can keep it manageable.
I was/am building something similar for the Canadian market in my free time! Any feedback to share, cost of operation, tech stack, etc., would be appreciated.
that looks pretty cool