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Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools within your neighborood?

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Re: Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools within your neighborood?

#11
Personally I wouldn’t but that’s not indicative of whether the idea has merit or not. We live in a small neighborhood that roughly spans 3 streets where majority of the homeowners know each other. We’ve borrowed tools from various neighbors within our neighborhood over the past couple of years without issue and there were never really any rush to returning them.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools within your neighborood?

#12
It's simpler to buy-and-sell the appliances on craigslist. That way you don't have to worry about the borrower depreciating the value of the appliance or not returning it in a timely fashion.

Also, 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?

#14
post #8
post #6

This 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 Years

Re: Ask HN: Would you use an app to share and rent tools within your neighborood?

#15
Putting "tool borrowing" into Google comes back with multiple apps already.

The 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.

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