Meet RENTMANIA-online rental platform

Take things for rent when you need them and keep your balcony spacious!

It will be about a new lifestyle that is gaining popularity, and a new look at our usual consumption model.

Part 1. Preface: just like everyone else
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I am a modern person and I try to live with the times. I have everything that I need and by my 34 years I literally have acquired a lot of things. I, like all of you, have things that I use extremely rarely or almost never use, but they lie and take up space on my balcony or in the garage. At the same time, I would like to buy something else (kayak for water trips, auto-trunk for skis / bicycles, bicycle-backpack), but I find myself thinking that:
1. I just have no more space to store it all;
2. I would not mind if already purchased things at least somehow paid for themselves, since I laid out that kind of money for them - but how? - I am not ready to sell them to Avito;
3. I would gladly take the next thing I need to rent from my friends or even a rental company, just so as not to spend big money and then not to deal with them again.

Part 2. Studying the problem
After looking at some sites of rental companies and bulletin boards, I thought that we lack a convenient specialized platform, where any person could find the thing he needed and take it from friends or a rental company. Also this person could rent his temporarily unnecessary thing in the lease and receive for it "passive income". Here it is extremely important that for all participants in the transaction the service is a safe medium and guarantees the return of things safe and sound.

Having interviewed about two hundred of my acquaintances and friends, I found out that people with great pleasure would take various things that they use from time to time to rent, for example: photographic equipment and electronics, tourist and sports goods, children's goods, special occasion clothes and carnival costumes , a tool for construction and repair, and more. But people do not know where to turn, and if they google, they end up on many small sites from a variety of dull bulletin boards and rental companies that do not inspire confidence.
After seeing the western experience, I certainly found examples of similar services that are already trying themselves in the markets of the USA and Europe and, in particular, I became acquainted with the increasingly popular phenomenon called “sharing economy”. The most prominent representative and, one can say, pioneer in this “story” was AirBnb.

Part 3. MVP Solution and Development
Thus, having weighed all the risks of uncertainty inherent in any entrepreneur and an amendment to the post-Soviet mentality, together with a wonderful development team from the Republic of Belarus, we set about developing a prototype service that just recently came out. We invite you to rate the rentmania.org link and leave your impressions in the comments or in the feedback form directly on the site.
It cannot be said that we have implemented a unique and ingenious idea, because in one form or another there were bulletin boards, klassifide-resources with rental announcements, but nevertheless, we wanted to breathe a second life into this idea, lying on the surface.

The features of the current version of the RENTMANIA service are:

1. registration on the site under social network accounts, which allows you to see social connections on the site (for example, mutual friends) in order to increase the confidence of service members to each other;
2. the ability to search for things by location close to your location - after all, none of us, for example, to drill a hole in the wall will go for a drill to the other end of the city;
3. it is possible to rent things only from friends or only from professional rental companies - to whom it is more convenient;
4. participants in the transaction will be able to see the contacts of both only when they confirmed their mutual interest in its conclusion. Also implemented functionality for messaging directly on the site;
5. when publishing your ad there is a choice: to share your property for free with friends or with all members of the community for money.

At the moment, our young service www.rentmania.org has just completed testing and we are quietly entering the market, collecting feedback from friends and the professional community. Therefore, we will be very grateful for your feedback and comments.

By the way, our project participated in Harvest working days off November 22-24 from the Greenfield Project and took the 1st place among 14 other projects according to the results of expert voting.

PS In order to avoid comments that are usual for our young company, that the service will not work, because the security of the transaction is not built up and there is no certainty that the thing rented will be returned in proper form, I would like to say that this is the main thing we are planning work. We will offer a comprehensive solution: social profile, ratings, deposits, and possibly insurance (we started with social profiles now).