Love this discussion! I’m currently running Last Minute Gear: www.lastmingear.com which rents outdoors gear for camping/ snowsports in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before that though, the concept was called www.projectborrow.com, very much borrowing!
I want to address why there aren’t “successful” startups here in my experience and my outlook on the future. The 2 dominant forces governing buy vs not-buy behavior for anyone are price & convenience. For example, if a tent costs $200 to buy and $100 to rent, you’re obviously going to buy it, since as long as you get 2 uses out of that tent, it’s financially more worthwhile to buy. If a tent costs $200 to buy and $1 to rent, you’re obviously never going to buy it since you’ll probably never camp 200 times in your life.
In the real world, though, the rental price is fixed and retail prices move. Let’s say the rental price is $20. A nice tent is $200 and a crappy tent is $40. If you’re like most people, you’re going to decide to buy the $40 tent, reasoning that as long as you get 2 uses out of it, you win.
But this is actually very irrational, because it doesn’t account for the fact that:
- that crappy tent may break your 1st trip
- even if not, you’d have to make sure you maintain it well enough such that it’s still usable the 2nd trip (i.e., did you know storing a wet tent can lead to mildew growth?)
- and the psychological/ spatial burden cited elsewhere in this discussion
$40 may be too much of a low ball, but the reasoning above is why people persistently choose to buy instead of rent even though rationally, renting is almost always better. It’s irrational, but such is the amazing magnetic power of the low price. (Should prices be so low in the first place, aka should a bag of chips be cheaper than a bag of carrots, is a-whole-nother debate!)
Borrowing is just like renting, except that the cost is the value of your time in finding a lender and sorting out all the logistics. This has its own set of complications, because what I found is that different people place different premiums on non-monetary values (aka convenience). In other words, some people would rather pay a taxi back and forth $40 to get a tent for free, while others would rather rent a tent at a store for $40. Same cash outflow, but vastly different user beliefs about which is more “worth it.” Here’s an extreme example: if I told you that the building you lived in would stock a mini “toolbox” on every floor so residents could share things like drills, and the building would cover all costs, you can bet that plenty of people are still going to buy their own things. Your closet is 10 feet closer, and therefore, to some people, a million bucks more worth it. (Consider the startup service provider Alfred.)
Because people are so different in how they perceive the value of not buying, I think it’s improbable to have a product that works for even 50% of the market. In fact, I’d venture that stuff-sharing startups will continue, but you’ll see a lot of smaller players rather than large. But that of course limits investment, which further limits the appeal of this space.