Prior to living here, if we ever needed basic tools, we bought them ourselves or borrowed from family (which have a large array of heavy duty tools) so we are not the target demographic for this.
Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools within your neighborood?
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools within your neighborood?
#12Also, maybe I'm not in love with the ladder I have. Selling it for $20 so I can justify buying a $2000 composite one that fits in your pocket is a pretty good use case.
If I lived in a dense metro area and couldn't afford to store a full complement of tools, I could afford to hire people to perform the labor associated with those tools, so urban isn't even a use case for a borrowing app.
Borrowing is like bartering: a coincidence of wants is much less likely than a want of coincidences.
Re: Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools within your neighborood?
#13Re: Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools within your neighborood?
#14This kind of app existed before (keyword "sharing economy") and it never really took off. I don’t know exactly why, but one obvious drawback is that I have to signup for a service (that none of my friends or neighbors use yet), post my list of 3-5 tools I’m willing to share and then never look in the app for 6 months, because I don’t need anything. An all like that is basically the same as sending an email to my frie…
We've done it as a community for a while. The downside is sometimes someone borrows a ladder but doesn't return it. Apps would help. I'm not sure if people would want to rent their tools though. It seems like the benefit of being neighborly exceeds the $3 you'd get from renting out a ladder.
> Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home
> hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting
> expedition, he found one of the successful
> hunters dropping off several hundred pounds
> of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man
> objected indignantly:
> "Up in our country we are human!" said the
> hunter. "And since we are human we help
> each other. We don't like to hear anybody
> say thanks for that. What I get today you
> may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by
> gifts one makes slaves and by whips one
> makes dogs.
> The refusal to calculate credits and debits
> can be found throughout the anthropological
> literature on egalitarian hunting societies.
> Rather than seeing himself as human because he
> could make economic calculations, the hunter
> insisted that being truly human meant refusing
> to make such calculations, refusing to measure
> or remember who had given what to whom
-- Graeber , Debt: The First 5,000 YearsRe: Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools within your neighborood?
#15The one that I hear about people using most often is https://fatllama.com
The liability side of this will be interesting. I know with Fat Llama the reason I generally hear about them is due to items being damaged or stolen.