Show HN: P2P Marketplace for renting stuff

Some honest feedback, FWIW...<p>What's your plan to get users? A large part of the success from other asset-sharing services is due to the fact that they initially chose a vertical (Airbnb: apartments, Getaround/RelayRides: cars) and made a small number of people in that vertical incredibly happy. Generalizing to "all things" has the advantage of making your target audience/market bigger, but also seriously risks making the average experience worse for a couple of reasons: (1) you're constrained to keeping the interface generic enough for "all things", and (2) by not targeting a vertical, demand/supply becomes much less targeted, meaning you need a large user base for the marketplace to be useful.

You have a chicken-and-egg problem.<p>Also, each renter now must do fulfillment themselves. If I'm renting my bike for $5/day, it's a huge pain if the person that is renting from me is twenty minutes late to pick up and return it.<p>What I want to see is someone who focuses on have all the household essentials for rent, and does fulfillment themselves. I think electric drills are typically used for 5 minutes total by most owners. Could I please rent hardware and one-off supplies from one place? Pretty please?

Rentzar.com where you can find next to near free stuff! Seriously, what's to keep people from just paying for one day only to never return?

This would work well if it were also a storage service...charge for storage, rent to offset costs, send me the difference.

Not bad, but you've got a two sided marketplace you need both people with stuff to rent and people who need to rent stuff.<p>I'd start with a metro area and get ahold of existing rental places and get their inventories listed to break the chicken/egg issue you face.<p>Rgarcia makes a great point, you should think about focusing on a specific vertical as it will make it easier to get both sides of the market jumpstarted.

Dear Would-Be Entrepreneurs Wanting to Use Buzzwords:<p>It's not peer-to-peer ("P2P") if peers are not communicating _directly_. If they are using your server to communicate, e.g. post ads, then it's NOT peer-to-peer. It's a bulletin board. There is a difference between a) a switchboard, b) a bulletin board and c) a person-to-person telephone call.<p>Sincerely<p>End-User Looking for REAL P2P Services Not Fake Ones

Great idea, but without venture funding this is a tough operation to scale. With such low barriers to entry for this market, other local markets can easily replicate this model if it is indeed successful.

Great idea. I'd use it, if there were things to rent in my area.