Two-sided sharing platform for everyday items

A sharing platform for everyday tools. The platform set out to revolutionise the way we share items. It did so by focusing on the owner side - the people who need to make items available to others. They were the ones necessary to bring balance to the two-sided markets.

It did so by standardising the process of creating ads for items and minimising entries to barrier. For example: if you wanted to rent out a tent, it would ask you predefined questions on what the important aspects of a tent are. Size, waterproofness, season. All that remained was to add pictures and upload the ad.

Safety and ease of use were the two prime considerations. After all, the app is handling other people's possessions. Challenges in particular:

Only one account per user. Ever. Achieved through the combination of Veriff as a 3rd party verification provider and clever background checks to allow an ID-document to only ever be able to open up one account.

Complex payment and deposit system Achieved with Stripe Connect to allow users each to have their own payment account. GuestGoods stood in the middle to safeguard the deposit until the end of the rent.

Standardised pickup and return scheduling The platform wanted to avoid long messages to find a time to hand over the item. It solved it through a nifty 1-hour slot system. The borrower would preselect all one-hour slots for when she was available. The owner upon answering the request selected one one-hour slot.

Standardised ad creation Making it super easy to upload an item for rental. This needed the implementation of a custom system to show just the right characterisitcs depending on the item.

In short: validation failed. This led to a couple of alteration - even easier ad-creation before registration - to no avail.

But this is exactly what fast development and validation is all about. Finding out what sticks with the customer and what doesn't. Without spending months and months and losing money due to a sunk cost fallacy.