We’ve been incredibly hard at work at launching the iLetYou rental search engine and store platform for all products. It’s really been amazing what’ve already seen come up for rent, and what will continue to be unearthed for rent by iLetYou. Check it out for yourself. Please stay tuned in the coming months for rapid iteration and improvement of search results, and exciting announcements.
Your feedback is immensely important to us. Please send any feedback or questions you have to feedback@iletyou.com. Tell us what you want from iLetYou.
In the meantime, check out this video teaser about iLetYou. Enjoy!
May 13th, 2008
To a certain extent, there’s no shortage of interesting rental concepts being floated around today.
It’s a very different thing to realize that rental - hire, loan, lease, or whatever you call it - is rather a universal, worldwide idea. This article highlights the rapidly growing rental market in Korea.
The full realization of the rental economy might be highly specialized and localized, but every locality applies the concept of rental to suit their particular needs.
February 11th, 2008
If you’re stuck in a rut in any aspect of your life, this post is meant for you. It’s mostly just a teaser for deeper thoughts on the idea of changing behavior, and how adjusting to marginal cost can make it happen.
With the holidays and New Year upon us, everyone wants to make changes.
As gas prices rise, you are less likely to hop in your car for a questionably worthwhile trip. What if you didn’t have a car and used a car rental or sharing service? How would that change your behavior? You’d think a little more deeply if it cost you $10 to $20 to drop off your dry cleaning or grab a cup of coffee.
Are you sick of the go-go lifestyle, but feel constrained? Reduce your footprint, spend less on the front-end. Force yourself to think more about activity in strict marginal cost. Don’t overextend yourself with your home. Don’t buy that vacation home, timeshare. Don’t lock yourself down to any one choice.
You want to lose some extra pounds? It’s never been about depriving yourself. Reduce your consumption footprint: drink diet sodas, eat healthier on a regular basis. (And, of course, increase your exercise.) Being able to think about food on a marginal cost is actually more liberating than annoying. If you want that piece of cheesecake, you know there’s a cost but you can justify a one-time cost on a marginal basis to make yourself happy just that instant.
It boils down to this: if you have a big base of cost, you lose flexibility in your choices based on each choice’s marginal cost. I believe you also lose some of level of freedom and ultimately happiness.
This is a natural occurrence, most obvious in economics and sociology. It affects your life whether you like it or not.
It’s just another way of looking at an on-demand lifestyle, but focused towards making changes in your life and behavior. Circumstances in consumerism, environment, and consumption make it such that I think most people will be happier thinking about choices that are heavy on marginal cost.
Rental and Leasing enabled by iLetYou creates a marginal cost model. Your thinking is more greatly dictated by the true cost here and now. Many will and have come around to this way of thinking.
If you want to change your behavior, think about how to “Make It About Marginal Cost” in all aspects of your life.
December 12th, 2007
At its core, the potential of rental of all kinds (online and offline) gives the promise of two benefits central to temporary use:
One is Choice. It’s the freedom to get whatever you want, no matter where it originates. It was and continues to be the promise of e-commerce, and it’s the ongoing promise of online rental. Never before in history have consumers had so many choices, a great trend that will continue to expand across different rental products. But it’s also the promise that you can choose even more things because you no longer have the overhead of owning that item, keeping it around, and moving it from place to place.
Two is Life On-Demand. Imagine if the promise of on-demand movies was easily applicable across all sorts of different things. Need a car? You’ve got it now (ZipCar and CityCarShare are great examples). Want to be a professional photographer? You’ve got all the equipment at your fingertips. Need a new wardrobe, jewelry or accessories? You’re going to look great at that event. Want to build or create something? Here’s the tools to do it. Want to fly? No problem, we’ve got the airplanes.
These dreams exist in specific forms, but the best examples are those that make it easy. Someday, I may go with an on-demand car lifestyle with ZipCar, but I dread the possibility of getting to a car dealership only to wait in line for another half-hour.
Rental is clearly a greener option, but it’s also a much more open option. It gives you a choice above the consumer lifestyle, one that’s admirable but also enjoyable.
What temporary products would intrigue you if you had 10x or 100x more choices? What temporary products would you like if you could instantly get that product on your block or on your doorstep delivered? Please contact us and let us know. We’d really love to hear from you.
October 10th, 2007
Michael Silverstein wrote a great book “Trading Up: Why Consumers Want New Luxury Goods”, a description of the growing market of New Luxury items of $4 lattes, subzero appliances, premium liquors and varied other New Luxury items.
Quality plays a part in this exploding market, but aspiration is also a huge motivation.
There may always be a group of people that never wants to rent, usually the super-affluent. There will be some things too personal we will never want to rent.
The corollary to Trading Up is Trading Down, where you will trade down on goods that are of little importance to you, thereby you will trade down to generic goods, oft times of similar quality to more expensive brand name goods.
You can keep trading up in a great and growing number of high-end categories with rental: jewelry, handbags, high fashion, high-end cars, vacation homes, photography equipment, more.
There’s an occasional stigma attached to rental that equates it to trading down, using someone else’s dirty stuff.
But I also think that stigma’s really going to be starkly reduced, simply because there’s very little rationally that is too personal to be reused. Absent this stigma, rentals become very attractive to a great many people.
When it does, trading up may be well turn out to be the greater of the two motivators for choosing renting over buying.
- Rodger
August 15th, 2007
SeaWorld is a San Diego favorite. But when you’ve seen Shamu once, you’ve seen him a million times. A one day ticket is $57, a two day ticket is the EXACT same price and a 2007 pass is just $6 more at $63. That’s not just a steep decline - that’s a decline to ZERO! And nearly ZERO for rest of the days in 2007.
Most things (not all) decline steeply on the second cycle.
And my bet is that more and more, value placed on the second cycle will continue to drop. We’re in the ADD generation, where there is unlimited media, unlimited content, unlimited travel, unlimited goods, unlimited experiences, unlimited expectations. With saturation, comes discontent, impatience and, ultimately, wasted cycles when goods are purchased in an attention deficit society.
Here’s the value proposition I’ve begun to notice for such goods with steep declines. If you can offer nearly all (80 to 90% PLUS) of the value derived from a good for 20% or less of the cost, you’ve got a blockbuster offer and a blockbuster business. Even if you mess up and want to reuse a good, the cost is so low that you can always go and re-experience it.
But even if you require increasing your price to 50% or less of the cost, you’re still going to find a smaller market but still a market. In a world with steeply declining second cycle values, there are opportunities across the entire spectrum.
August 7th, 2007
Jeff McIntire-Strasburg writes about Green Business Concepts: The Product Service System and mentions sustainable business models built around product service systems.
I think the most striking point of Jeff’s article is to point out that PSS/rental models are truly sustainable - they encourage preservation instead of destruction. We’ve overburdened with too much stuff, too many CDs and DVDs, too much of everything where the only choice we have is to destroy to make way for new stuff.
I don’t like to oppoortunistically play up the green angle of rental and iLetYou. I also think there are many better examples of companies and powerful people making truly remarkable bets to help the environment.
So while we think rental is great on its own: sustainability sure is an amazing byproduct to help spread.
July 27th, 2007
iLetYou is mentioned on Datamation as a favorite site to make free money with Web 2.0 going beyond selling on eBay.
Let me take this one step further and suggest that rental is really one of the best ways to make free money. I’d further say that selling your stuff is just readjusting your assets into cash from hard goods.
The article features 9 sites. Here’s the basic breakdown:
Selling intangible goods: 3
Selling hard/tangible goods: 3
Renting hard/tangible goods: 3
So rental takes 1/3 of free money: our rental counterparts are Parkwhiz, which rents your parking space, and Ridester which rents your car seat. Or further, rental takes 1/2 of the real free money: the conversion of intangible assets into cold, hard cash; renting is the sale of an intangible service for temporary ownership of a tangible product.
All the sites carry a great purpose to make you money in a real, legitimate way, but we think rental will be one of the primary ways “free money” is created in new and varied markets.
July 26th, 2007
This morning, I noticed an article from my local newspaper on SignOnSanDiego about renting fake wedding cakes to save on expensive cake costs that can range from $300 to $3000+, particularly with the rising costs of everything wedding-related.
Cakerental.com rents fake wedding cakes through the mail, complete with a real cake compartment for the cake cutting ceremony. The same real sheet cake can then be purchased from a local bakery at a significantly lower cost. The Today Show recently featured a cake from Cakerental.com.
It’s not something I would’ve thought of immediately, but it goes to show what can be rented. I can imagine more elaborate designs becoming possible, even more increasing the elegance. A fake cake is a also impervious to damage, particularly weather elements. You can’t rent the taste of the cake, but you can now rent just about everything else.
- Rodger
July 23rd, 2007
I’ve just wrapped four days in sweltering Las Vegas for the Home Media Expo, a gathering of home media retailers, distributors, studios, and vendors.
It’s very easy to write off packaged media as a dead medium. However, I thought such simplistic views of the universe were dead until a conference-goer blurted out the question “Isn’t the DVD dead?” during a Manufacture On Demand session.
However, the conference stage spouted other sayings like “packaged media is here to stay”, yet another example of a spun view of the universe.
Rental itself didn’t necessarily get the lion’s share of attention, largely overshadowed by sell-through, new formats (push of HD DVD), and new mediums dominating the content. The conference is a shell of its former self, down from 14,000 plus attendees to the butt of a joke that “performing to 75 people in a 300 person auditorium as being the highlight of distinguished career” from the conference’s last night of entertainment featuring some actually very funny comedians.
I sat in both the digital media retailing and MOD (Manufacture or Media on Demand, depending) sessions, thinking hard about how the retail channel fits into the media landscape when moving to digital. One such MOD vendor I discovered was Allied Vaughn, a new manufacturer on demand that does something of a white label version of Amazon.com’s CustomFlix.
On the retail side, I believe that manufacture on demand vendors provided the most intriguing possibilities for independent retailers and retailers in general for practical solutions you can envision taking force in the next 5 to 10 years.
I had a few other thoughts stemming from the conference:
#1: DVD, HD DVD and Blu Ray are victims of their own success (OK, victims of DVD’s success). Some statistics presented would tend to suggest there is saturation in disc-based ownership. I see this as one of the most feasible reasons why packaged goods sales will hurt even short-term. Eventually, it’s actually a practical problem to have shelves and shelves of discs and a consolidated option overshadows the collectibility of discs, books, etc. I’m trying to reduce my footprint and buying more DVDs does not accomplish that goal.
Again, this is the argument for rental in general. I truly believe that the overextension of stuff will drive rental markets and iLetYou will continue to be a proponent of rental, wherever and whatever.
#2: Portability is a huge issue, sort of the bigger theme of DRM issues and limits to number of devices content can be stored on. The inability to transfer media around needs to be taken into consideration with digital media delivery business models. If I pay $15 to $20 for a DVD versus $3 to $4 to rent, sometimes it’s not rationally based. Some movies I may not watch the 6 to 7 times it may require to pay back my investment, but portability and collectibility are huge psychological benefits that drive the sell-through market. Portability also means I can resell that item, trade it, share it with neighbors, bring it to a Thanksgiving celebration, or even rent it.
If digital movies are $2.99 to rent or $9.99 to own (say in a digital locker), then the cost-benefit analysis starts to look more reasonable. Look for closer pricing, as it seems an absolute necessity if digital media delivery is to really take hold.
In all this, you have to remember that music and movies are different. The tendency is to listen to the same music over and over. Most movies, unless they are your all-time favorites, will not get more than 1 to 2 views for most people. Pricing models need to reflect this if digital portability is not possible, which is may well not be because true digital portability means media will run wild. Nor do I think that true digital portability is necessary. The digital locker is the far, far goal but also the closest I’ve heard to digital media bliss.
#3: All in all, online content delivery companies don’t really know how this all shakes out either. And these guys truly believe that digital delivery will put mom-and-pop retailers out of business, leaving online aggregators and big box. They may well be right, but micro-recommendations can be drivers of both retail and e-tail channels. Even giants like Amazon.com and eBay are largely driven by micro-markets.
During the MOD session, it was quoted that 75% of titles may not have yet been published to DVD for a variety of reasons and explosion of online content, good and bad, drives this further. As such, there’s even more opportunity for even more niche media markets.
I believe that shopping is so ingrained in American culture, which seeps its way into other countries’ cultures, that it would be difficult to alter that behavior. The retail outlet is here to stay. These factors work in the savvy retailer’s favor and I simply see MOD as a method for retailers to become the micro-recommenders, while matching the digital availability. They offer convenience, service and selection. The real open question is whether the economics of retail outlets can be supported by these micro-recommendations. Either way, I think the micro-recommendations concept still applies online or possibly even in an adapted retail state, such as with a small store footprint.
Finally, I do have to say that I got the feeling at times that home media is going through the motions waiting for a sea change to cast them into non-existence. Even in pushing HD DVD and Blu Ray, which will continue packaged media’s staying power, it feels like an effort to keep the party going. In a $20 billion plus industry, it was kind of surprise to see this kind of defeated attitude to be even somewhat prevalent.
It will take some true vision to create a new retail model that works in the new digital world. I do know that content owners win and experts win. Content and the discovery of content will breed lots of winners in the change.
Remember, there’s a tendency to overestimate the short term change and underestimate the long term change (thanks Bill Gates). It will truly be a while: 10 to 20 years is still my estimate to when digital delivery is equivalent to packaged goods, quite a while to sustain the business.
Unfortunately for digital media, it’s ultimately bits that are sold. As such, there will be a wind change over some period of time. It’s time for great small retailers, those with truly great depth of knowledge (in a niche or just plain deep), personality, and a want and willingness to help people, to figure out how to continue to monetize that as their greatest asset.
July 19th, 2007
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