Contact Details
- rentaverse.com
- Instagram: @rentaverseofficial
Interview Details
Date: Saturday, May 31st, 2025
Location: Burlington – BIG HEAVY WORLD
Length: 1:38:53
Episode Number: 57
Show Notes Link: Mike Chase – CEO of Rentaverse – Vermont Talks
Short Link: vermonttalks.com/57
Transcript
Becca: Welcome to the Vermont Talks podcast. It is the 31st of May and this is episode 57. I am here today with Mike Chase. Mike is the founder and CEO of Renteverse, which is a community-driven gear-sharing marketplace where people can both lend and rent outdoor equipment. You’re also a front-end web developer and you graduated from the University of Albany and you made a note that you loved paint, thought-provoking art inspired by dreams and the muse, which I love so much. I love the reference to the muse. So welcome Mike.
Mike: Thank you for having me. This is great.
Becca: So let’s get into Renteverse. I love this concept. Feel free to tell me about where you came up with the idea and if you’ve got a promo you want to give, feel free to give it now.
Mike: Sure, yeah. So Renteverse is an online gear-sharing marketplace, like you said, similar to like an Airbnb model, where users or owners post their item for other people to rent them out locally. But I’m starting off with just kayaks, paddleboards and canoes and then going to expand categorically to things like tools and lawn gear.
Cool. Essentially like anything that’s like sitting in your garage collecting dust, I want to turn dust into dollars. I think everyone is familiar with that concept of the Airbnb. So I’m trying to just promote people making money, but also like meeting their neighbors, like if Jim has a kayak down the street, like you strike up a little conversation with him.
You know, maybe he asks you about like, oh, where are you going to paddle? Here’s some good spots. And it just kind of bridges, I think, a lot of community, which I think Burlington is like all about. So I’m like very happy to start it here. I’m going to start a very small, like low-scale, local, then if it goes well, expand and go from there. But you know, just see where it takes me.
Becca: It’s a really good idea, because I think everyone I know seems to accumulate a lot of stuff. And a lot of the stuff doesn’t get used all the time, but you don’t really want to get rid of it.
Mike: Exactly. Yeah. It’s like hard to let go of some things, because you know, like, oh, I’ll use this once or twice a year. But I just love that you can make money off of it. I think like, you know, you take a kayak, like for instance, I bought a kayak from Facebook Marketplace for like $300, $400.
I could rent it out for 50 bucks a day, make my money back and still use it. Right. So it’s kind of an incredible.
And I think a lot of other countries are starting to do it with like what’s called gear libraries. Right. Yeah. But that is more like they own all the equipment. This is more like a peer-to-peer model where other people own it and they’re just connected through the app.
Right. Like a Facebook Marketplace, but for renting. And yeah, I just, I think the world needs it. I think, you know, I would use it. It kind of solves like my problems.
But essentially, the origin story is in college about like 10 years ago, you know, go to, you know, ski trips on the weekend. And I’m like, oh, I want like a GoPro to just like film some stuff for Instagram. But I don’t want to pay like $300 for a camera. I’m a broke college kid.
Right. But I’m like, I would pay 10 bucks or 20 bucks. And then I kind of like tried starting a little business and never even like launched the website. I didn’t even know how to code at that point. It was just I would buy domains and then let them fade away.
Becca: I have done that many times.
Mike: It’s always fun. That’s actually another hobby of mine is just like buying fun domains and seeing after a year, I’m like, okay, am I going to use this? And if not, I kind of just let it go.
Becca: Right. The idea of the website or the business is always so fun to ponder.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah, I think the coolest one I’ve acquired, like a year or two ago is a stoned syrup. Nice. So I think in a few years, I want to make like they’re already having it like maple syrup infused cannabis oil.
Becca: This is an interesting idea. That’s a great name.
Mike: Right. I’ll probably never do anything with it.
Becca: But you know, you might now that’s the thing. Right.
Mike: For $10 a year, like whatever, it’s not the end of the world. But anyway, so I thought of the GoPro rental idea. And then I shelved it. I’m like, you know what, someone’s going to come up with this idea.
I’ll whatever, I’m just not going to think about it. But then like four years ago, I’m like, this idea still is not fully there in the world. And I think with the advent of like Airbnb and Turro, the car sharing marketplace, I kind of just realized like this problem is not solved. And like, I want to use this platform. Like I want to rent my neighbor’s weed wacker because I don’t need a weed wacker. I need it twice a year.
Becca: There’s so many things to like, that’s it. I just think of all the tools. Because there are companies like Home Depot that rent things out, but they’re not cheap to rent.
No. By the day, there’s all of these weird stipulations, which obviously, you’re organizing a structure where you’re going to kind of trust the person you’re renting to. That’s the whole point of having something guided, which I think is why Facebook marketplace hasn’t done this yet. Because when you go and meet your sketchy Facebook person, you never really know what you’re going to get. There’s a little bit more ownership through the apps, which is exactly why Airbnb, right? It’s a little less sketchy than some guy on Craigslist being like, come stay in my house for however much you feel protected when you go through the app to rent something out.
And the person lending it feels like they’re actually going to get it back. Like that structure makes a lot of sense. But I love the idea of like helping the community out because we live in such a consumeristic world where we all go in these, we buy these things. Everyone goes and buys the tools, but then we don’t do anything with them and they just kind of sit there and we don’t talk to our neighbors. So this is like a really beautiful solution to a problem we didn’t even know we had.
Mike: Right. And I think you touched on like many of the points. I think the trust factors everything like I’m that trust layer. But again, that’s hard from a website standpoint. You know, so I have like an MVP, I have some something that works, but I want to have things like ID verification and like things that allow people to be like, oh, he’s vetted of some sort right now. I just meet the owners and they pass like my sniff test, I call it like, are they a decent person? Like, you know, after talking to someone for two minutes, you know, if they’re decent, right?
Becca: 99% of the people are usually pretty decent. That’s the good thing. Right.
Mike: Like on Facebook marketplace, I think I’ve never like had a bad experience with it. I’m sure people, sure people do.
Becca: Mostly just people not showing up. I think that’s the thing. I’ve definitely had really weird messages. Never met them in person. Really weird messages for people on Facebook marketplace. So I mean, that happens. It’s the internet for you. Right.
Mike: No, but what’s interesting, like, I think, like Burlington, I’m a huge fan of Burlington, I think it’s culturally, it’s amazing. We were talking before we started about like the music scene and things how things are starting to slowly shut down.
And that’s a whole other story. But I just think like, for the arts and just the ideas in Burlington, I think people are focused on like living a quality life. Yes, not everyone here is wealthy. Like, of course, you have the lakefront summer homes and all that.
But I think it’s a special thing we have here. I’m actually aiming like, I have this concept of like a rising tide lifts all boats. If like, you can give more people more money, like, they’re renting out their bike or whatever it is, like, we all benefit. It just allows us to pay for maybe, you know, more obviously food and maybe a better house or whatever it is. But I think people are struggling today financially. I think no matter you know, $100,000 in today’s world is actually not that much money. Like, if you have a family of four and you’re raising, you know, if you’re the sole breadwinner making 100,000, you’re not doing like great.
Becca: No, no, especially not in this area. Our cost of living is absolutely skyrocketed. It’s really, it’s wild to think about how much $50,000 was when I graduated high school and how little it is now. Like just the comparison of the inflation and how much everything costs like rent was nowhere near what we’re expected to pay now.
That’s it. This happened so rapidly that we suddenly no one has any money and we’re having this huge housing crisis. There’s a lot of problems and we all have so much stuff. I wanted to bring up the crazy thing about America at our obsession with stuff and the secondary storage market. Like that was the fastest growing business market for like over a decade.
It may still be in the top runners. Just we have a lot of stuff. We don’t really want to sell the stuff. We’ve spent our lives accumulating at some people. That’s at your, if you’re 50 years old and you have a storage unit just full of paddleboards or a kayaks or a canoe or a million different tools, specialized tools, your pipe cutter and your tile cutter and all of these things you needed at some point in your life that you don’t really want to get rid of. What a awesome solution for all of that stuff. It can actually make you money and you don’t have to lose it.
Mike: Well, people are worried about, I’ve talked to potential customers and they’re like, yeah, we would do this and we probably will do it but we are concerned like what if they bring it back broken or steal it?
These are all things I’m trying to grapple with. I generally think most people like you’re saying are good. It’s like, yes, maybe someone will bring it back a little scratch but I think if you know them and you meet them face to face, you’re probably less likely to bring it back in a broken state.
I think you’re right. I think people are kind of hoarders. We’re kind of tricked into buying until we have a ton of credit card debt and just hyper-consumeristic society and I actually think we need to move away from that consumeristic society into more of a circular economy. We are with the secondhand stores and all that but renting is just another piece in that flywheel away from consumerism. But you still need to buy the goods. People are always going to keep buying stuff.
That’s a constant. I’m just worried about, is America even the right place to start this? Yes, Burlington may work but will Ohio work? Will places where maybe they don’t have that kind of mindset? I’ve even been looking into maybe starting expanding in Europe eventually. Obviously, I haven’t fully launched but I’m just trying to think of a larger picture here. We’re a place like New Zealand even where New Zealand is actually a test market because it’s like a small island. It’s contained but you have every demographic. For instance, you know the tap to pay? Yes. When do you think that started here like seven, eight years ago?
Becca: Yeah, we are way behind the time.
Mike: But they visa tested it out in New Zealand 20 years ago. That technology was there and we were still doing the chip. Actually, we were probably still swiping at that time. Then it went to chip insert which is so annoying because it takes like 30 seconds to do it.
Becca: Yes. Our countries have just leapfrogged us entirely. They never had the chip. They always had the tap.
Mike: Right. But they tested that out in New Zealand and they even call it something different. They call it pay wave. Right. You’re just waving your card.
Becca: Yes, I feel like that’s very common in all the different countries have a different term for that because Canada calls it something else too.
Mike: But wave makes more sense because tapping seems like a quick little tap and then it ends up not going. You need to wave and hold it.
Becca: Right. You need to just kind of hover for a minute.
Mike: Yes. You should be like hover to pay or something.
Becca: I can see New Zealand being a really good test market for this because they are very chill. I have a friend who lived there for a few years and they had just a very different attitude towards work and life and you kind of like the entire thing with money. Like we got this weird stressful cycle of like freaking out because we don’t have enough money and then you work so hard but you still keep freaking out because you don’t have enough money. You’ve got to enjoy life at some point.
Mike: Well, that’s where I think the alignment with Burlington is similar to New Zealand like that. I feel like it’s not, you don’t let your job define like your personality and your attitude. Like they’re actually very happy doing like trade jobs and just maybe what we would call here more simple jobs. Like they’re happy and yeah, they don’t make a ton of money but they live in such a beautiful place.
Becca: It doesn’t matter. Exactly. That’s kind of the crazy thing. We could talk about America a lot because you used to be able to live and support your kids, right? Single income grocer, supporting their kids, their kids could go to college, they had two cars, they had a television. People were happy, right? We used to be able to actually afford things on minimum wage. We were all pretty happy with that.
And it’s gone the other way, right? You just literally can’t survive if you aren’t, oh, I’m breaking the limits. I’m rising through the ranks. I’m making more and more money every year. You’re just kind of struggling.
Mike: Yeah, if you look at the like average wage to average home price in the 1950s, right? It was like much closer of a ratio and now that ratio like wages have not kept up with home prices at all.
Becca: Now, and that just means that the only people who can buy the houses or people are going to rent them out, which makes a very…
Mike: It’s a vicious cycle. It’s a toxic, not good cycle. That’s the markets way healthier. You get all this turnover. People buy houses they actually like versus houses they can just barely afford. And then the whole, yeah, we could go on and on about this. Because like the house poor that term where like, oh, I saved for two decades to be able to afford the house, but now I can’t afford to furnish the house. But I finally got the house. That’s become very common with the millennial generation. No one can afford to actually buy a couch to put in the house they managed to buy.
Anyway, yes, we could go on and on. But if you can rent your stuff out, because this is like passive income for the people, right? You don’t have to do anything too crazy. Yeah, it’s borderline passive income because like you still have to like, okay, if you have a kayak, you got to like get it to them somehow or like clean it.
Like there’s some touch to it. But for 80 bucks a day or whatever, like I’ll wash down my kayak or whatever. Yeah, it’s not that hard. And I’m even going to have it on the site so you can, the owner can choose if they want to add a delivery fee. It’s like an extra 10, 20 bucks. So people actually might make more money off like delivery. Or even I added like you can do a guiding service. Like you can add different services on there. Because some of the feedback I’ve gotten is like, yeah, I would love to rent my kayak, but be nice if I could go with them and like maybe show them my favorite spots. And it was like a very like uplifting feeling where people want to essentially introduce new people into the sport.
Becca: Oh, that’s, I love that because you can rent like a person. Yeah, rent a person, not only just rent, you know, their stuff, their time, rent their time. Yeah. Oh, I could see the tourist industry whooping that. I love that concept. That’s really cool. Your friend’s smart.
Mike: But it’s interesting though, because Airbnb now is pivoting into more of that experience as model. I don’t know if you’ve been seeing what’s kind of been going on with them.
Becca: Not recently. Not, I haven’t rented an Airbnb in a long time, honestly.
Mike: So that’s actually the thing. Their business is waning a little bit because now people are reverting back to hotels. So Airbnbs have gotten too expensive. Everyone knows those cleaning fees like it costs more than the actual price of the thing.
Becca: Yeah. And then you end up spending more money to clean when you could have just gone to a hotel. Like there’s a lot of reasons. I think the cleaning fee was a stretch too far for some people.
Mike: But then I end up cleaning. I got to do the dishes and like the sheets and everything. They make you like kind of clean up before you go versus a hotel.
Becca: It’s like, you’re just taking care of your own sheets. Exactly. I don’t want to pay to do my own sheets.
Mike: But then so their business there is actually declining in revenue. So they’re pivoting more towards experiential stuff. So like you can hire a chef kind of like renting that time. So I don’t want to tiptoe too much into that world. I want to stick more to items. But I do want to make that option available to the owners. Like if they want to do it, right?
Becca: If they want to. Because that’s it. A lot of people are probably just gonna say, oh no, I just want to rent my canoe or whatever it is. Right. I don’t want to talk to them anymore.
Mike: And that’s fine. That’s fine. Yeah. That’s an interesting option now, especially for things like water sports in particular, because who’s going to come rent kayak? Probably somebody who can’t afford either they’re testing it out or they are traveling or something. Right.
Becca: So that’s a perfect service to add onto it. Really cool.
Mike: Yeah. I honestly want people to kind of do whatever they want. Like even if they want to put it up for free, like I, you know, I’m a little nerd.
So I coded it. So if it’s like $0, it displays as free. It’s like, I want to like kind of piggyback off like the buy nothing movement too. Like I think people actually would rent a ladder for free like or a shovel or just because like people get it. It’s like, oh, I just need a shovel for like five minutes. Like I just need to dig something up out of the Yeah. If my neighbor has it, like I could just book it through him and like it’s just easy.
Becca: This is really interesting because there’s like the social media aspect. When you’re talking like that, like, oh yeah, my neighbors can come ask me for a shovel. We’ve gotten into such a weird social hole. Like I blame cell phones and social media. People are outright terrified to go ask their neighbor stuff. Like what a weird world we live in. I guess because I’m from Vermont and I drive by your neighbor and you’d wave at them and the city has gotten very, and I get it. It’s a city here and everyone’s not like, Hey, what’s up?
Mike: You have your guard up. Yeah. You kind of have, well, you kind of have to like it. There’s so many people and, but I think people might book through the app and if they see, oh, it’s down the street, like I’ll book it. And then I actually encourage like if you want to take it off the app and just text them next time because you need the shovel again, like do it. Like I’m not in it for like that consistent profit. Like, oh, if you take it off the app, I’ll charge you a fee or whatever. Like whatever. My my key performance indicators are like total amount of rentals. I just want more things rented than bought. Obviously, that’s a huge like challenge, but that’s really awesome though.
Becca: Because that’s it. How many people in North End and Burlington have shovels? And how many of the college kids or whoever coming to rent do not have a shovel?
Mike: Right, or drill. It’s like, oh, the college kids just came up, and they’re moving in. I need to hang some art. I need a drill.
Becca: Yeah. Yeah, drill is a good example, because that’s one of those things that I don’t know that I don’t even think Home Depot really rents that because it’s so low dollar.
Mike: They want to have to buy it. Under $100, they don’t typically. They do like specialized like saws and like pressure washer.
Becca: I saw some guy writing a pressure washer there not long ago. So that right, you’re filling this whole of there. There’s literally literally no option really. There might be it like maybe the free library, but that’s the other thing is the free library is just a singular item that the library has people. A lot of people could have access to a whole bunch of different tools.
Mike: Right. And it’s hyper local too. Whereas Airbnb is more travel based, like we’re saying that your neighbor has something you could just walk to your neighbor. You don’t even have to go to the library. I actually know the library here has a library of things, kind of like we’re talking about, but it’s like a spreadsheet and it’s hard to use.
Becca: Yes, and it’s confusing. That’s it. Yeah. I don’t think it’s been marketed enough where people really know what that means and how it works. I know it exists, but I have no idea how you actually go about renting whatever’s on that list. And you’re right. It’s a spreadsheet.
Mike: Right. People want to see pictures. They want the calendar function for booking. They want the message that you need to wrap it in some sort of package for someone to consume. Like a spreadsheet is not very scalable.
Becca: No, no, it’s not the best marketing for it that yet. Definitely what you said about having pictures. There’s so many interesting subneutias to this as we’re talking about it because I don’t know how real estate works, but renting a place for a night, there’s a lot of places that would be like, oh, I just, not Airbnb. I’m thinking more like DIY shows. Like, oh, my friends did a, their release party at Old Spokes Home.
They played a concert at Old Spokes Home. And we’ve all kind of been talking because everything’s closing. A lot of my friends and I’ve been talking about this where rent the library, like get them extra income for a building that’s sitting empty those hours of the day. This, you could, you could kind of tap into that as well where it’s not like a home rental service. It’s just a space and just for a certain period of time. And, you know, all of the other agreements about not damaging the space. But the amount of people, I think that wouldn’t be opposed to having things like DIY shows in their basement, but they want to get paid for it, right?
Like, sure, you guys can play here, right? But like, I don’t really want, you know, there’d be all the, the agreements and the whole middleman concept of protecting them. Thinking about that, if you’re worried about renting your stuff, I don’t know how you’ve like planned this all out in your, because it’s going to be a mobile app, I’m guessing.
Mike: I’m not going to have an app. I’m just going to have a website.
Becca: But it will be mobile friendly.
Mike: Mobile friendly, yes. I’m actually, is it side tangent? I’m like against apps. I think no one needs to download a new app, unless it becomes like a big thing. And I see people find value, but like, just use the website. I don’t know. It works in your browser. Yes.
Becca: And if it’s correctly coded, it can take pictures and it can do all of the things that an app could do.
Mike: Yeah, it’s called a web app. It’s not like, yeah, it’s the same thing just in browser. But yeah, so, so two, two things. It’s like, that idea for like renting your space is great.
And there’s many things like the tools and everything, but I have to start small and like, get my following in a niche area, like the paddleboards and water sports, like I was saying, I’m starting often and then expanding categorically. Because what ends up happening is, so this is not a novel concept. Many people have tried this. And I’ve like studied what’s called like, the marketplace graveyard, where like people have tried to do this and it’s failed. Some companies have gotten acquired. The most successful company I think sold for like a 41 million to some other company.
And then they kind of killed, killed the product. Yeah. But what ends up happening is they try being everything for everyone. Yes. And that’s where they fail. I need to get like really good at being one thing for one type of person.
Becca: Right. And come up with the formula for how to apply it to other things. Exactly. Once you do it once, it’s a lot easier to do it again. Right.
Mike: You got to like prove the concept and gain a market for that and then expand to that. So maybe one day I’ll have rented space or whatever. But yeah, I also don’t want to like, I can’t make promises. Like, you might morph into something else. I might go more like B2B and be more of like a grub hub for rental shops. Like, I don’t know where it’s going to go. It could go really anywhere.
Becca: Right. Right. But the middle man concept for renting things, I think that’s a really strong, definitely a really strong concept. And I think it’s a really good idea to start with water sports because I know a lot of people, just even local people who want to try paddle boarding, who want to try XYZ, who would say things like, oh, I wish we had a canoe. I’ve heard that a number of times from, you know, just we’re hanging out in the lake or whatever. It’d be cool if we could all get in a boat together. Right.
Mike: But no one wants the ownership of it.
Becca: No, not a canoe.
Mike: If you’re living, yeah, if you’re in a tiny apartment, like a canoe is huge.
Becca: Yeah, there’s a lot of, just thinking about the North end community in general, like that part of Burlington, I could see a lot of people because they all hang out on the lake. The amount of people who go down and hang out on the lake all summer is not small. A lot of people in Burlington love doing that. And if you could just rent something like that, or one or two of them with your friends, because you’re already done, they’ll like anyway. And it’s not a lot. If it’s a, you know, a handful of people renting a canoe out, I could see it working.
Mike: But it’s so expensive from these rental shops, you know, it’s $70, $80 for like half a day or something crazy where I’ve actually done some calculations like most people will probably rent their kayak or canoe for like 30, 40 bucks a day, which like the average person can afford 30 bucks, 40 bucks. But like 80 is where you’re like and
Becca: you don’t really want to throw down that much money just for a day of fun. Yeah, there’s a, there’s definitely a balancing point, right? Like how much are people willing to spend every day? This is interesting. I think the delivery, like having delivery built in is really, really smart because that’s hugely lending with paddleboards. Oh my god, I sold my stand up paddle board because I hated it because I hated loading it on top of the car was horrible. I could like shove it inside the car really awkwardly and it kind of worked. But there’s so much of a pain in the neck that if I could have rented one on the days it’s like choppy or something, like yes, I really want a solid paddle board today. If I could just rent one from somebody and then bring it to me, that sounds amazing.
Mike: It’s problem solved. That’s really what I’m trying to do is like I’ve been listening to like things like you’ve said and many other people have said this. I’m like, this problem has not been solved yet. I mean, like they have traditional rental shops, but like their locals even go there. They’re like sometimes, sometimes.
Becca: No, they’re so expensive. I think that a lot of people don’t do that. They’re also like sometimes at least in Vermont, they’re like cash only and you don’t have that much cash on you. My sister just said they wouldn’t rent her a paddle board because she didn’t have her ID on her. But that’s kind of if she had the app and she was already vetted or whatever, then it wouldn’t matter. She could rent it wherever. Right.
Mike: Yeah, it makes like a network of trusted people and yeah, there’s a lot of different scenarios and avenues where this can go. And I really just, I’m like excited to start in Burlington. Like I actually want Burlington to be like proud to have something like this. Like it kind of embodies like going back to like our culture here. Like this is our kind of our culture, right? Like we love to reduce waste and like create community and get outside.
Those like the three things like Burlington like stands for and obviously more things like arts and music and all that sort of thing. But yeah, it’s just fun here. I love it. I mean, this journey is, it’s beautiful to go on. The people I’ve met, the feedback I’ve gotten, it’s just a matter of doing it and scaling it and kind of leaving the world better than I’d left it. I think that’s my goal. So.
Becca: Yes, it’s very noble goal. And that I agree, Burlington would, I feel like Burlington will embrace this idea. Are you thinking, because obviously water sports are awesome. I love them. Outdoor stuff is awesome. Are you, so are you hoping to rent snowboards and winter sporting gear as well? I know, I don’t know where your lines are. Can you rent skis? Can you rent? What, what’s your hope for the first iteration, the first round for the next couple years?
Mike: So I’m going to, yeah, for summer start, obviously with the water sports, but then I’m going to have to have a winter category. So I’m thinking, yeah, like ski snowboards, snowshoes, like micro spikes, I think is a big one that I’ve heard. Cross country skis.
I think actually cross country skis are probably going to be more popular than downhill skis because I feel like with downhill skis, people are very particular. It’s like tune to your boo. It’s like, it’s very like specific.
Becca: But it kind of depends, right? If it’s a, if you just want to try it, like, oh, I really want to try skiing, but I don’t want to spend $600 to try skiing, which so I have fallen in that hole. I know my friends have complained about it as well. We want to get into a new hobby and we get all stoked about the new hobby and we spend a huge amount of money buying gear or whatever you need or tools, whatever it is for the new hobby.
And then you do it three or four times and you’re like, this kind of sucks. So maybe those people would be less particular. Yeah, they don’t know. They’re just trying it. Right.
Mike: Well, for my concern is actually more with the owners, the owners of the skis would want to rent them. Because you got to think I have two customers here. I have the owners and the renters. Right. That’s what makes it a hard business is balancing that. It’s called a liquidity ratio. So it’s like you have the owners, the actual liquidity of the items to the renters being rented the item. So yes, the demand could be high on the rent side. But if no one’s supposed to write them, then right, right.
Becca: You need the people like my sister who owns something like 35 snowboards. And she likes working on them. So she just keeps buying them and refinishing them and like sanding and rewaxing them and like completely redoing them. And then she just ends up with this like huge pile of snowboard.
Mike: So she would be like a power user. She would write.
Becca: Yeah. But I bet there’s people who like skiing like that.
Mike: Oh, I’m sure. I can’t even imagine the amount of like skis sitting in apartments in Burlington all over Vermont. And another hope of my business is actually like teaching entrepreneurship through that lens. So it’s like, okay, your sister’s like, okay, if I buy 10 more boards and I can rent them out for 40 a day, like I’ll make like 4,000 a month or whatever. Like people can make serious money.
Right. It’s not like you’re not going to make a lot if you’re renting one or two things out. But like 10, 20 things like I did some of the math, like you can make like 10,000 a month, 20,000 a month renting a kayak for whatever 75, five a day or whatever it is.
Becca: Yeah, that’s interesting. And if you live somewhere, like if you live near the mountain and you’ve got a bunch of boards or a bunch of skis or whatever, that’s it. Because people who live near the mountain, they probably have snow shoes, they have skis, they have a bunch of just different outdoor equipment. You know, you live right where they want to be to use that equipment. That’s pretty easy on you. Right.
Mike: And they could pick it up on the way to the mountain and just throw it in their car. And yeah, no, I’m really excited. But again, for each category, I have to get a new set of like liability waivers. That’s like a legal, a legal cost for me. So there is like some friction in adding categories. Because in the waiver, you have to make it very specific about like, with paddling, it’s like, okay, you can drown, you can
Becca: whatever, like whatever, like not legally responsible if you drown or falling off the paddle board. Yep, fair. That that seems like a reasonable expectation. Even when you go rent from the rental shops on the lake, right, they are probably like, send this and no one reads it. Right.
Mike: So I’ve had to do research on that and get the waivers and stuff. It’s like, you’re reading it, you’re like, okay, like, they, they’re just like saying all the stuff, like, oh, you can like drown, you can get seriously hurt, you can get struck by lightning, and you’re not liable.
It’s like, geez, I don’t even think about that when I’m going out. But yeah, that that’s kind of the friction of adding categories, which I actually think friction in some places is good. Because I’m not going to expand too quickly. And right, like friction even in the signup process, I always thought like, oh, I should make a super easy signup process. But if you add a little bit of friction, and people have to take more time and invest into it, they actually invest more of their time to the product in the end.
So there’s a lot of like user psychology behind that. And that’s the stuff I nerd out about. I’m like, I love that stuff. I love like the psychology of colors and like the user experience and the journey. It’s fascinating how we behave with like online.
Becca: Yes, yes. And the trust factor is interesting too. Because things like Uber, if they weren’t a little bit like, you know, I don’t want someone who doesn’t have a license being my Uber driver, right? Like you need some friction around some of this stuff, you have to prove that you actually like, you know, you’re saying you have a canoe.
Can we see some pictures of the canoe first? Like, because that’s where Craigslist is like the odd black box of the internet, right? Because you can find all sorts of weird stuff on Craigslist, including people saying they want to rent things. But there’s no fair, they’re not verified. There’s no pictures. There’s some really odd things where it just makes you question like, who the heck posted this? This doesn’t feel legitimate.
Mike: I mean, they only recently had to move the, I forget what they phrase it, but like the escorts, like you can, oh, right, for prostitution, like they like moved it to like a separate page recently. And I know that was a big deal for them, right? Because it’s saying like, okay, well, we’re not like, they add like more disclaimers or whatever it is. They don’t care. But again, I don’t think you could start that today. No, I think people expect to wait. They have a legacy brand that’s just impeccable.
Becca: But I don’t think that would work. And I don’t think they’ve updated their UI in like 15 years at this point. It’s, it is what it is.
Mike: That’s a huge testament to like the product works. It connects people through an encrypted email server essentially, right?
Becca: Yeah, that’s pretty much the entire like claim to fame. Because the landlords were kind of separated from the 500 applicants. And I think that’s really where it shined, right? They didn’t have to post their own phone number to the world. Because then you end up with a million scam bots and things. And same with email.
If you just post your email on Craigslist, you’re gonna get a million emails. But if the encrypted, the encrypted one, you don’t get that. That’s pretty much it. That’s kind of funny to think about. Like why did Craigslist get big? It’s very simple. It’s not a lot going on on that website.
Mike: But like, I mean, now I’m talking about like from an entrepreneurial lens, I think that’s a great case study of like, they made the product work. It was the simple most like in entrepreneurship, you call it like the MVP of the minimum viable product. They’ve had a minimum viable product through up until now. It is like, obviously they’ve iterated. I’m sure they do code this. I’m sure they do bugs.
Becca: And they must do something. Yeah, it doesn’t look or feel any different to the end user. But I’m sure they’ve had to at some point. Who knows?
Mike: But like, you know, if you are like a web developer or someone like, even with these like node code, no code tools now, I don’t know if you’ve experienced like, you get like prompt to make a whole website.
Becca: I’ve written some no code solutions.
Mike: But anyway, we can go into that. But like, I’m just saying in general, it’s like, you know, a lot of people can make something and just like release it, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to work and do the minimum possible functionality.
Becca: Yes. And the simpler the UI, the better. Like that’s that’s a huge thing when you brought up color, like color and the way we act online is really fascinating. Because it’s not, it doesn’t have to be over the top. A lot of times we actually react better to the more simplistic, very intuitive designs. If it’s intuitive, that’s a huge step, right? Because no one could launch my space today in the way my space used to work back then. It was not intuitive, like we figured it out.
But Instagram compared to my space, right, that jump in social media, it’s big when it looks pretty, and it’s easy to use, and it serves whatever function. We love it. Right.
Mike: And it’s easy for millions of people to use. But it’s funny, like if you look back at like web pages from like the 90s and early 2000s, like they were so busy and like, remember when even there was music that would play and like all these animations, the flash
Becca: animations, sidebars and the entire top screen and back then something interesting design thing back in the 90s, the average font size was like 12 points. Oh my god. And now it’s like 20. And we can just read the website so much easier without like getting really close to it.
Mike: Magnifying glass. Right. And that just took, you know, it’s funny, it’s not even something that we really think about. But like all the text has gotten so much bigger on our screens. But it feels so much better. Simple. Yeah. I mean, it’s come a long way. I mean, a big part of that is like, you’re familiar with like a B testing.
Yes. It’s like, you just keep a B testing and a B testing and saying, okay, users want a bigger font, users want this color button. And this is, you know, they scroll more when there’s some engaging content that’s like cut off and then they have to scroll. It’s like there’s all these different like techniques now.
It’s fascinating. But I think anyone can start a business today. I think it it takes, you know, obviously a little bit of capital, but you could probably take a thousand bucks and do something. I mean, I’ve done a few of these like business accelerators and it’s like, think of your core products. Like we were talking about the library of things being a spreadsheet. Like that could work if you just have a spreadsheet of items and people are like, email you to rent the item like that that could work. It’s not very scalable.
Or if you had a Google form and say rent my thing on this day and like you kind of have to start there. Since see if there’s a product market fit like does it serve a purpose? Does it scratch an itch? And if it does then put your time and effort into doing all this. And I’ve definitely done some of that. I haven’t launched yet, but I’ve gotten like a wait list of people. I’ve asked like about a hundred people like different questions about like ownership and like, are they willing to deliver?
Are they, you know, just a whole list of like questions for them? But I think the key thing is like understanding your customer’s problem deeply. Like Jeff Bezos like almost to like a manic level.
He understood his customers and what they wanted. And I don’t know if you know the whole origin story with them. Obviously they started with books, but then like they could have scaled categorically. And they didn’t for many years because they were still obsessed with getting low price books to people. And then they had the rails to expand categorically and do everything. And then they had AWS and all that. I mean that, right, that’s a whole other story with AWS.
Becca: But they’ve expanded so dramatically and basically every direction that’s you’re right. They were like very focused for a while. The thing I noticed with Amazon over time, because I never used to buy off Amazon, but I used to go read reviews. They got the review market, which kind of just started driving a huge amount of traffic to them. I used to, when I was younger, always compare prices from Amazon eBay. And they hit this threshold where Amazon started being cheaper than eBay. But originally I used to go find something that I wanted on Amazon and it would be $20 or $30 more expensive than what I could buy on eBay. So I always bought everything on eBay for, I don’t know, that was probably until like 2015, 16, 17.
And then everything flipped. They managed to get the pricing down on Amazon. And like, well, I just read all the reviews on Amazon. I might as well buy it from them too. And I don’t love Amazon for many reasons, but I 100% became an Amazon junkie because of the reviews. I got sucked into that whole world because other people, you don’t want to buy anything on the internet. Other people don’t like it, right? Right.
Mike: You need the social validation. Yeah. Yeah.
Becca: So it’s almost like the social media of buying product, which now is actually an entire like, they have video dedicated entirely to selling product on Amazon. That’s like a whole section of the website are influencers selling the stuff that they got for their own.
Mike: Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. Even just the reviews and now there’s whole businesses like managing reviews for them and like responding to customer reviews. Like, there’s like a local company here, I think, Widewale that does that some software that does that. But yeah, they listen to their customers. Like, they customers want to the cheapest product, they wanted it delivered in two days and they made it happen at any cost.
Becca: And Yes. Often losing money to make it happen. Right. Right. They leveraged their success to keep making the customer happy for a long time. I think they’ve kind of fallen in this weird hole because like the two day two day shipping has gone by the wayside the last few years. Like the things that I used to go to them for, they’ve fallen off where I am going direct to the manufacturer, whoever the brand is a lot more than I used to. But the things that made customers happy and that made them so great. You’re right. Like that was just what we wanted. We were like, I want it tomorrow.
Mike: And now even with the drones, like they’re delivering it in cities in 30 minutes, which is just scary.
Becca: The city deliveries are wild to me that the watching the drone come like flow over people’s lawns and drop the box.
Mike: Have you seen that in person?
Becca: I have not seen it in person. I’ve watched a few videos just because I was fascinated by this concept and how quickly there was a great video. Somebody bought their daughter like reads for her saxophone because she had like the show tonight or something. And they were like, we can’t go buy reads. It takes two hours and the drone came and dropped them in 30 minutes. This is cool. Like this is definitely cool. It’s really hard to scale that. I don’t know when Vermont’s going to get drones.
Mike: I mean, they’re still fighting the warehouse and Essex. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. Yes.
Becca: Yes. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. People really don’t want them here. My concern is that it’s going to hurt the shipping. Like we’re already having this weird power in balance where they’re attacking the postal service. And now they want to bring people to deliver Amazon direct. Like that’s just going to hurt the postal service more, which I can go
Mike: all right in about the postal service. Convenience though has a price. Like we all want these things now, but you’re almost like delaying the price of like environmental impacts, economic, like the price of convenience. If I could just order something, you almost like don’t think about it as much. You’re like, you know, how people like impulsively buy shop, shop, whatever. If you’re like, oh, it’s going to come in 30 minutes. I’m probably going to buy it versus like, oh, it’s going to come in seven days. Do I really need this? Do I want to wait seven days? Like you kind of question it in that friction is there when there’s no friction. It’s like, you could just impulsively buy whatever.
Becca: And that’s the problem with Amazon in general. Most of the crap that I have bought on Amazon, I didn’t need it in two weeks. I love the two days where it’s like, oh, yeah, I’ll buy it now. I don’t come eventually.
It’s okay. And like that’s kind of become their business model. Honestly, I’m buying stuff for my company. Because I have to buy a random business stuff for the company I work for sometimes through Amazon. Take some 14 days to ship a thing.
Wow. Like, now it’s become the only things we’re going to buy are things we don’t need for two weeks, right? We’re not going to rely on them to get our coffee delivered in a couple of days anymore because it’s it used to be and then it fell, which I don’t know what the heck’s going on. I can’t speculate. I don’t pay enough attention to what the Amazon dynamic is. But I also don’t miss it really. Like we just go to the store and buy coffee. If we need it, we’ll go to the local store.
Mike: Even like that local company Mighty, I think, is a fascinating business model where they’re like doing hyper local deliveries of goods nearby. I think I think, you know, stuff like that, definitely we need more of that. Like I’m not a future, like a lot of people in today’s world, right, they’re so negative about the future, like fatalistic, but like, I think we really have to like, especially young people, we have to think about the future that we want. We have to really like, kind of forecast like, okay, do we want drones flying overhead and having now like swarms of drones delivering stuff constantly, like it’s kind of dystopian to me. I don’t know.
Becca: Yes, I’d rather have someone have a job. That’s what gets me on. I love technology. That’s I went to school for electrical and I ended up writing software for a living and like, I love technology and I’m a dreamer where I’m like, the beautiful utopia we could make.
But then it becomes the dystopia so easily it can trigger like, oh wait, we were heading this one way and we thought it was going to be really good, but then they kind of like perverted the dream a little bit. Now it’s very dark and like, no, I’d rather my how so many people work in the delivery industry too. That one in particular I get a little emotional about because there’s like 40 million people in America that that’s like their entire livelihood is just providing like, I bring the groceries to Hannaford.
That’s that’s our whole life is I just drive truck for Hannaford and then the single mile last mile delivery guys. There’s millions. There’s so many people so many of my neighbors who I’m like, this is like the foundation of half our country and like yes, should it I’ll be green. Yeah, but I also like want my neighbors to have a job.
Right. Like, we can’t quite just have the robots do everything we got to do something. Yeah, I’m mixed on the drones because drones could be so beautiful. But I feel like Amazon will not make the most beautiful just knowing hyper capitalism.
Mike: It’s not going to be beautiful. It’s going to be overwhelming. I mean, I don’t know if anyone’s heard a drone like a loud big drone swarming overhead.
Becca: Big ones are kind of unnerving.
Mike: It kind of like ruins my central nervous system. Like I get startled. I’m like, what is like it’s like jolting.
Becca: It reminds me of I’m dating myself. The Hunger Games when the hovercraft came over and everything’s like the hovercraft and they go and like hide for cover. That’s what it feels like. Drones are really fascinating. And like they’re really interesting from like other energy efficient, the small the small craft that we were promised back in the 60s when they said flying car. That’s kind of what it could have been. But that’s not really what it’s being used for. And yeah, how many of these things are going to fly overhead in 50 years?
Mike: I don’t know if I want to be around for that. I want to be in the woods. Deep in the woods. I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve been hearing about like, you know, the company Andrew. They’re like a defense contracting.
Becca: Oh, wait. Yeah, this is this is where I start blocking out the news. Because that’s that’s it. The stuff out of Ukraine is wild, right? Like watching the fiber optic drones. Oh my God, I can’t watch those videos.
Mike: Well, they just came out with a fully AI autonomous fighter jet by Andrew.
Becca: And how big is this thing? Like as big as a normal fighter. It’s a full fighter. It’s an actual plane. Jesus.
Mike: And because think about it humans can’t take certain g forces, but like this thing can go. They could like turn out a
Becca: second right, right, which is part of why the drones are so crazy too, because they can just go no human costs.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. And they’re they can make them so small. You can make them small. They can make them very big because they put a huge amount of equipment on them, but they can also make them disturbingly small. I don’t love the whole fighter pilot or fighter, you know, jet idea. Because it’s going to be like AI autonomous fighter jets fighting other ones over our heads and like, who knows what it’s what it’s going to end up being. Right.
Becca: When it’s two both two robots fighting each other. What’s the point anymore? And that’s why we’re heading toward like quite quickly heading towards that. Yeah, it freaks me out runs me of that black mirror episode. Like much of life does these days. But did you ever see the one about the teeny tiny drones? I think so.
Mike: Yeah, it was like they’re kind of like bees or something.
Becca: They were incredibly small sized drones. And they were the whole show that entire episode was like, the guy was giving a PR speech to the military, essentially, about their AI driven, socially networked, tiny little B army of defense drones. And they just started like taking out the college kids like, I don’t love that this is where we’re talking about going, we should talk about the utopia.
Mike: Right. Well, getting back to like even like the Amazon drone things, it’s like, I think we need to stand for we need to have a line where we’re not going to let capitalism cross like I’m pro capitalism, but I’m pro like, controlled capitalism.
Becca: I think, like Germany, we need to have yeah, well, a lot of Europe in general has figured this out. This is not a wild concept.
Mike: No, no. And but, you know, the American capitalist will be like, well, Europe is just not going to progress as fast, which is true. But also the quality of life is much higher. So it’s like, and look at Japan.
Becca: They are so socially conscious, like talk about a society of socially conscious people where they don’t jaywalk in the middle of the night when there’s no cars around, they’ll wait for that crossing light, right? They are very, very socially conscious. The tech they have over there is mind right, like they are very creative and they are capitalistic.
Mike: Right. It can work. Yeah, I’m pro capitalism. But yeah, I’m pro like conscious, like, like humanistic human first capitalism. But I don’t know where it all goes. I really want people to start thinking about like the morals and ethics and all the stuff behind it. Because, you know, once the the levy breaks, and we’re just like flooded by drones and AI and craziness, like it is going to quickly become a dystopia because people who are power hungry, just given history, what people are power hungry, right? The, you know, generations before us.
But now if you have this leverage technology, people are going to be severely disadvantaged very quickly. And yeah, we do need to, I think, debate more and have more. I mean, podcasts are great.
I think podcasts, the advent of this, like, you know, not only for news, but just like learning about new ideas and discussions, like we need to talk more, both sides need to talk, we have a lot more in common on the political in the political sphere than than we we think.
Becca: Yes, yes, I think 90% of everything, that’s the craziest things people will have differing opinions. But they kind of think the same way about everything, like the when you talk to people, no one thinks health care works in this country. Not a single person is like, Oh, yes, this is going well.
Mike: Right. And it’s a matter of starting on the common ground. Exactly. Like everyone wants higher wages. Everyone wants better health care, whatever the hell we got. You know, maybe it’s a quasi mix of private and public who knows what it’s that’ll look like.
Becca: But Canada has that going on. It’s interesting talking to people in Canada who’ve never really had to live in America who are, you know, very separate because they thought Obamacare was what they have. They honestly thought we had a safety net and no matter what you always were covered, they thought Obamacare was universal health care because they have insurance up there that supplements, they get like cuts in line because they have better insurance than the universal, but they can always go get their broken leg set for free. And they actually thought that was what Obamacare was. I dated a Canadian guy and his parents were like, No, your dad would have gotten his leg set for free.
I’m like, my dad has a $40,000 bill to the hospital. Like, no, like that’s not how it works. But like that’s that’s kind of it, right?
Like it kind of works in Canada. It’s not perfect. They need more health care workers. But who doesn’t have that problem, right? Everything’s gonna have problems sometime. We can make work. I believe we can make it work. Right.
Mike: But I think the thing is, the powers that be don’t want us to even talk about this. Like I truly think I mean, that’s why we saw that uproar after the CEO got shot from the health care company.
Like it’s this deep pain people are feeling from this problem. And yeah, we can solve this. We are a smart advanced society. We can figure it out. You can’t be pessimistic to it.
But we need to start soon. Yes. What like what can you do in your daily life to whether it’s going to a town hall meeting and speaking up or signing petitions or talking to your local congressman, like we need to act.
Becca: Yes. Yeah, I think being informed and actually talking about it is just a huge hurdle. We and I we live in a really weird world where we came from. I was born in the early 90s. Just put it in perspective.
So I’m talking about way before my time. But back in the day, when JFK said, think not of what you can do for you think of what you can do for your country like that concept of camaraderie and teamwork and like love of your community got like trampled by rampant individualism to drive capitalism. Essentially, right? Everyone got like we got tricked into it.
Right. We got tricked into and it’s important. Like I’m not saying mental health isn’t important. But I know way too many people who have the attitude that it upsets me. I’m going to ignore it because my mental health is more important than anything in politics.
And when millions of people take that stance and let, you know, our country, it’s our it’s our public, it’s our social construct, right? Just start falling by the wayside because they’re so me, me, me, my life, my feelings, I’m going to ignore everything else. It really hurts all of us.
And they’re not in a bubble. Like if you ignore society to the point where all our hospitals and our schools closed, you’re going to feel that pain at some point in your life, even if you bury your head in the sand and don’t look at the news.
Mike: We found we got a taste of that during COVID, right? Like a little taste of really how fragile that that line is. And it is more about like creating better communities and support systems. And I am a big believer in like local politics, politics actually does slightly matter more than like voting for your president to a certain extent, of course, on like larger issues, like abortion and stuff like that. You do need to vote for a good president. Yes. Right. But it’s both. It’s both in tandem. Right.
Becca: And the voting.
Mike: Like please vote. Just vote. Just vote. And there’s great websites out there to even give you brief summaries of each candidate. Like, okay, I think even now, it’s like, oh, you put in your values and then it gives you candidates to vote for stuff like that.
But it’s funny, like being in Burlington and like, I feel like Bernie’s are unofficial mascot here. Like he really is like kind of a this ideological lies, you know, figure in our community. And he’s done something.
He stood up. And I think like for young people, I think we need leaders like that. Because it is so hard to to like you were saying, or it’s so easy to ignore things. And even you said before, like earlier, like I’m not even keeping up with what’s in the news, because I mean, how could anyone it’s hard to keep up with. But I think we do need to be somewhat informed on on the bigger stuff. I mean, don’t get me started on Trump. But I think it’s all he all just says this and that as a distraction.
Becca: Yeah, there’s a lot of books and studies confirming that overwhelm the public with just nonsense, right? Just total batshit nonsense going on regularly. And they it’s information overload, right? You can’t keep up when it’s like, Oh, five, six government agencies in the last week have been attacked.
And there’s, you know, there’s armed security guards from private security companies in the US aid departments, like, it’s overwhelming. I’m trying to keep up. But that’s it. No, no one can actually keep up with all this. But if you’re just a little, if you have the slightest idea of what’s going on, and you don’t don’t be polite, I’m so sick of the like, Oh, politics is in play.
Who started that myth? Because this is like your kids schools. This is the road you drive on. Like, this actually matters. This literally impacts you on a day to day basis.
Mike: I mean, we’re seeing that with the terrorists even and just like employment, like employers are just laying people off like the tech, the tech sector. So you’re in tech, like, you know, is getting gutted left and right.
Becca: Yeah, yeah, the advent of AI, we haven’t even seen, right? This is just scratching the surface. What is our society going to look like in 10 years if half the white color workers are just made obsolete? And all of the people in customer service have been replaced by robot voices with AI driven, you know, they don’t need customer support people, they don’t need coders, they don’t need content creators, they’re just going to steal data from the internet, which is a whole ethical question in and of itself, right? Because whose data did they steal yours? They stole yours and mine to make this AI to sell us crap.
Mike: Well, they train their models. Yeah, if the public benefit of the internet, we should get some public utility back. And it is about fighting for policy that is maybe going to look like universal basic income or just a heavy tax on these AI companies like a huge tax. Maybe I think universal basic income, it’s needed maybe as like like a baseline like a threshold. But I actually think we’re going to need more than that, I think, because if everyone has basic income, universal basic income, then the prices of goods just heavily inflate, you’re still going to need right a little bit more. And that tax on the AI companies can help reduce some of the taxes for everyday people, I think.
Becca: Yes, there’s so many ethical questions around AI, which we could go down a whole bunny trail about all of this stuff. But I wanted to ask you about your coding experience. And if you wanted to share anything specific, besides rent verse, which you’re obviously working on now, or if you wanted to share any tech details, I’m just curious about what you’ve done in the past and like what you enjoy doing. I think you had React when I internet snooped you on LinkedIn. I think it said something about React. I’m just curious where you came from and because obviously you have the skills to make rent verse, which is very impressive.
Mike: So yeah, yeah, I got started in college because I didn’t get into the business school. So I ended up minoring in business. But I actually was interested in it for the travel aspect.
Because I went to Bali when I was in college. And I saw these tech bros in a cafe, barefoot, walking around, working a little bit. I’m like, who do you work for? They go work for Amazon. We make like 300k a year. We just walk barefoot around here.
I’m like, I want that life. Let’s see. It sounds great. But then quickly discovered how hard coding was. And I’m like, I don’t know if I can make this work. I did it for two, three years in college. And I’m like, I can’t get a job doing this. This is like, it’s so hard to me. But it’s like the hockey stick curve. It’s like, it’s super hard. You get no progress. And then one day it clicks. And then you’re like, Oh, I could just go.
Becca: Right. But I guess that’s any skill profession. I’m sure like HVAC and plumbing and electrical work is like similar. They kind of have these hockey stick curves, right? It’s like, you don’t get it for the beginning. And then you like take off. It can be overwhelming. But once it clicks, it makes a lot more sense.
Mike: Right. Yeah. So just people on that path, like just stick with it. I think if you’re patient with it, because a lot of people get frustrated trying to code, you know, people want to do it. But it’s that barrier of just learning and being patient.
Right. But eventually I did cross that chasm. And yeah, I got deep into like the front end world, just like, you know, making these like beautiful interfaces for like B2B SaaS companies, learning like the whole inbound methodology through marketing and like lead capture and analytics. So it was kind of easy for me to make the Rinterverse site. But this first site is not going to be anything special. It’s just like a WordPress site that I skinned and didn’t do too much.
Because I want to validate the idea first before I, you know, actually started building out like a next JS like full stack web app. And I’m like, this is going to take me six months. And like, if no one wants it, it’s kind of a waste of my time. So I’m actually going to focus on like the marketing and the business and like the everything else, right, the legal, the insurance.
Becca: So which is very important to do. I kind of, you want to do this first before you stress about the tech too much. Because I feel like there’s been millions and millions of lines of code written in this world that just kind of, they can fall flat. Yeah.
Mike: Well, getting back to like just starting with the bare basics, like a spreadsheet or a Google form even works. I mean, for me, I wanted to do a website because like that is easy for me.
It is kind of as easy as making a form or spreadsheet. Like it didn’t take me that long, right? A few months, maybe, but working like a few hours a night. But yeah, I actually, I don’t think I’m like a developer, like I don’t like, I do it as a way to just get my ideas out there and obviously make, you know, learn a living. But I’m more interested in like kind of taking the idea and the business logic and conveying it to developers and learning how to kind of bridge that gap. I think eventually I might go down that route because I think with all these like coding AI tools, I think the syntax of the coding and stuff is almost going to be irrelevant. And you just need to know what to ask it and then it’ll develop the code. Right. So I actually don’t know if I want to invest like too much of my human capital into like learning more React or more JavaScript or whatever it is, right?
Becca: Yeah. Yeah. Certainly a lot of front-end stuff. It’s kind of crazy how good the AI is at, it’s horrible at complex data structures in the back end. Like that thing does crazy stuff that’s like hallucinating too much.
Mike: Yeah. It’s it’s getting there though. I’m not like saying it’s not getting there, but for UI stuff, it’s wild, right? Because there’s no, not a whole lot of data structures going on in the front end.
No. So if you just want it to be beautiful and have it work, it can usually do that. But the marketing, the marketing and the human aspect and is anyone actually going to use this thing is more important, right?
Becca: Like I think personally, like the business side of it is, is anyone going to come and do people understand what to do when they get to my website and do they do it? Yeah.
Mike: No, I mean, not to bash developers. I love the community. I actually think it’s a beautiful community of people who are having these intellectual debates and like, you know, obviously being opinionated and all that is great.
But I also feel like they’re siloed. And I feel like, like you were saying, it’s like, what’s the point of even making something if no one’s going to use it? Right. Like there is like, it’s just a waste of human potential, I think. Yes. I mean, yes, they might be making a salary doing it more power to you if you’re doing that.
Don’t stop. But like, some of these side projects I see, like, but again, it’s hard because like then you’re, there’s still learning and collaborating. Like it is good. But yeah, like, you know, you got to make it into something people are using because I think developers want people to use it.
It’s not that they don’t like, I feel like they do want people, they want a better of the world and whatever their ideas, but they just not conveying it in the right angle, I guess.
Becca: Yeah. And I, I’ve been in this world long enough to know there’s a, I don’t want to be mean to people I’ve worked with, but there is a huge group of the tech industry that has, I’m a weird one because I’m like an artist, musician, tech person. So I love good UI, UI, right? Like I want it to be beautiful and streamlined and like the art side of it, the way the customers make the, or the way the colors make the customers feel.
Right? Like I want them to come in and just know what to do. That is not the attitude of like a lot of people I’ve worked with.
I always, I have to tell the silly story. The first company I worked with, I was not on their software team. I was in the electrical department. They had an app that the clothes button didn’t work.
And I got multiple arguments for the software team. I’m like, just make the clothes button, close the app. And they’re like, you just need to go to file clothes application. And I’m like, why can’t you just make, you made the button, like just make it work for the customer.
Right? And they will argue with you and like make it painful on the customer. And like, I really love the user interface and customer perspective and just like doing it in a way that makes people happy.
But that, that’s it. So many people in the tech world just don’t, I don’t know. It’s this weird attitude that like, no, you’re too dumb to use my product versus, oh, I’m a bad designer because you can’t figure it out. Tech world’s weird. And it’s rapidly changing right now because of AI.
And it’s kind of like you either are going to get on this and change with the times quickly, or you’re going to go the way of the like Ruby on Rails devs. That it just kind of like died. It went like this and then died. And then you had to go learn a whole new language, right? Anyway, minor ramp, that software people.
Mike: No, I think you’re exactly right. And I think, so in college, I actually like studied just that like the human to computer interaction design. And I think the people who are worrying about like other things and not just like the simplicity and keeping it simple for the user may be left behind. I don’t know. Because I think a lot of this stuff is going to be more like chat like voice based and you speaking to an AI and because we are conversational creatures, we’re talking right here.
This is like, this is a format we feel comfortable in. It’s not a screen. And that’s not to say I think like for shopping purposes, okay, you might want to see a picture and compare like for rent averse, I want to see, okay, my kayak, I’m not going to be like, Hey, Siri, rent me a kayak.
I want to see the kayak, right? Like there is use cases for it. Like, okay, Siri, order me paper towels.
Like I don’t care what the paper towels look like week, whatever, just order it. I think it’s going to trend a lot more that way. And the people that aren’t focusing on like the simplicity of just doing that thing like will be left behind. And but the people will adapt humans. Yes, adapt. But it’s the case of like how quickly will we adapt because these things are moving at lightning speed.
Becca: Disturbing, disturbingly fast from the software perspective, just what I do, what you also have done or do
Mike: like two weeks, sprints aren’t going to be a thing. I bet you it’s going to be two day sprints. Like we’re like, who knows
Becca: how quickly, right, especially and depending on where you’re I work at a company that’s code stacks, 20 years old, right? So everything’s proprietary and built on itself. And like, my company is very different from people working for Shopify, right? They’re going to be able to just blow through stuff incredibly fast, because it’s all nicely encapsulated because it’s already had to be right. So the AI trends beautifully to these huge companies that already made everything its own like service, because the AI can just look at the service and gets it and it’s going to be able to just go. I yeah, I feel for the people working for those huge companies, because that’s it, their lead people are going to be able to just start flying through stuff when they put the chat GPT plug in from GitHub, like this is going to go wild really fast.
Mike: And those top 1% of developers are always going to have jobs and be augmented by the AI. But maybe we will see that shift of people then moving towards what we were talking about more of the design, like making it better for the user and like, more of that realm, I would hope because I just want to see better products out there. I still think so much of the web is unusable, not unusable, but like, it just too hard for the average folk.
Becca: And the funny thing to me, because you brought that up before of how noisy the web used to be, I just said this like three weeks ago in one of our software meetings, like anyone else noticing that CBS has gone back in time, and there’s 30 pop ups, and there’s ads in the sidebars full of it.
And it just feels like I’m on my phone and I’ve got this much of the actual article I can see and the rest is just crap. Like what is happening with the web right now?
Mike: It’s reverting back. Is that the AI? Like I just noticed this the last few months, like it’s got really loud. I think today, yeah, today I was like scrolling on an article and it did this thing where the ad would lag. So as you scroll, it would, you’d see a little text and the ad would pop open in between the text and the text would now go off the screen.
Becca: Right, like the dom’s been moved.
Mike: Yeah. And then it’s like, I didn’t know where I was in the article anymore. And then as you would scroll, there would be a new ad like every other paragraph or every two paragraphs. I’m like, this is on use while I’m leaving.
Becca: I just left immediately. And you know the statistic, right? It’s like 95% of people, if they leave within the first 10 seconds, they’ll never come back. Oh, no. Yeah, yeah, that’s 100% of things, the bounce rate. That’s what blows my mind that these huge, I guess they’re so big that they have so much traffic that they don’t care sometimes.
But like your bounce rate, it’s going to get worse and worse. Sometimes the content that’s that you’re trying to read some crazy news article that you’re like, what? You struggle through it. Like, why is this happening? But you just kind of struggle through it because it’s CBS or whatever I’m picking on CBS because I’m pretty sure that’s the one I saw that I got three sentences and I got a bunch of crap on my screen and fight with it. And oh, there’s the next three sentences.
Mike: But again, tech can solve that because I even use this thing for paywalls where it’s like you copy the link and it like depay walls. Is it 12 foot? I forget what it’s called.
Becca: I use 12 foot.io, the 12 foot ladder to get over. Yeah, the 12 foot ladder to get over the paywall.
Mike: Yeah, maybe there’s something like that for the strips the ads. I’m sure you could. Right.
Becca: It’s the mobile what you said about mobile apps, like, oh, the mobile apps are so disconnected with desktops. I love desktops. I’m on a desktop all the time because I write code for a living and I just like working on computers.
So many people, it’s like 70% of web traffic. They just live on a cell phone now. And it’s so hard to install something to get around that stuff on a cell phone that actually works well.
If you have a suggestion, let me know because I’ve never found anything that works well on a cell. Oh my God, we’re one hour and 23 minutes. Oh, wow. Wow. Okay, so, rent a verse.
Oh, there was one thing I wanted to ask. Okay, so you’re renting your canoe as a scenario. Your canoe, I’m guessing you have some structure like this, but I wanted to talk through it. Your canoe is worth $2,000. I don’t know. I have no idea how much a canoe is worth if that’s not obvious.
$2,000. Are you going to have this concept of because if you’re renting your gear, you’ve got to be like aware that it might get dinged up. You’re going to ding up your own canoe, right? People just know that that happens as you’re wearing your canoe. This is
Mike: natural wear and tear, yeah.
Becca: Natural wear and tear. But if the user comes in, like, I’ve got a $2,000 canoe, I want to rent it. Here are my pictures. Here’s the worth and like, here are the amounts I’ll take dependent on damage. And I’m assuming the person who agrees to rent this thing is going to be able to see, oh, if I destroy their canoe, I’m going to be liable for these rates. Like, is that something you’re building into this system? Like, if I was going to rent a canoe, what’s your vision for this person coming in?
Mike: So that is a wonderful question because that is kind of everything here. Like, I have it so right now, if you break it, you buy it. Full retail price. But I think the owner can, yeah, set that agreed upon price. I think if they break it, baseline, it’s like you have to pay for repair costs.
So that’s a thing. But then you come into question like, okay, it’s now being repaired, so they can’t rent it out again. So they’re missing some of that rental income. So like, do they supplement that?
These are all still questions like I’m trying to grapple through. But yeah, for now, if you break it, you buy it. Unless otherwise, it explicitly said, you know, the owner, maybe their lawn mower was $300, but now it’s only worth 100 because it’s kind of a piece of shit, you know, like, whatever, like maybe they’ll take 100. That’s where I’m actually going to kind of be hands off and let the owner decide.
The owner is kind of acting as their own small business in a sense, without being a small business. And they’re going to dictate that price. I think that is going to be a difficult part of this website though. Right. And right.
Becca: Well, that’s the whole agreement with you. I mean, these are the million terms of services, right? You’re going to be able to see that though. Like, okay, now I’m renting the canoe.
I can see the pictures. I can see the price that they have set is like, this is how much this canoe is worth, which also is kind of an interesting marketing thing, right? Because if I can rent a $2,000 canoe for whatever amount a day, I don’t have to buy that thing. Like, hey, I’m saving a lot of money by not buying this thing. And also, your incentivize not to break it as well. But you also know what you get it into. It’s not like some blind, I don’t know, you don’t know how much the thing is worth where you’re going to claim. You thought it was worth $100.
Mike: Unless it’s like handmade. Yeah, that’s a that does people do make their own canoes.
Becca: That would be a hard thing to rent out. I mean, people are wonderful. People will probably want to.
Mike: I have this, this beautiful owner, this guy named Cliff. I met on a train down to this business accelerator I was doing and he makes collapsible canoes from like a piece of plastic.
Becca: Oh, this plastic. Yeah, I’ve seen like the the Oru brand or whatever. I’ve seen other versions of that. But that’s really cool if you can do it himself.
Mike: He literally just goes like home depot and like gets a couple pieces of wood and like the flat plastic. I forget what it’s called, corrugated plastic or something.
Becca: Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s exactly the one.
Mike: Yeah. And he just like makes it for like, it’s like 10 bucks or like literally something it can’t it has to be like really still in the lake or else it’ll capsize. Like it’s very janky.
Becca: Right. Oh yeah. I’ve seen the kayaks they’ve done like that. But that said, a canoe is a whole other boat from quite literally. They’re a lot bigger and they tip easily. Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting. I bet they blow around really easy. They seem so cool though. I want to try one. Right.
Mike: But he’s renting them out. So it’s like, oh, you could try it out. I don’t want to, I don’t know how to make it. I don’t necessarily want it after the fact. Like, oh, let’s go rent it. Yeah. These are all like wonderful questions. I’ve been thinking about this now for like five plus years, like grappling with like all these different questions and, you know, concerns with the website. I don’t know like the answer to all these questions until I start doing it. That’s kind of the funny thing. Right. I need to get feedback, get, you know, survey data and analytics and keep making it better.
Becca: It’s really interesting from a tech standpoint, all the little pieces you have to get involved in this. Right. Because you need like how far away are they willing to rent this thing? So you’d like the Maps API where they can pick a distance, especially if they’re going to do delivery.
Right. This is really cool. I love this concept. I love thinking about these business models and working through the kinks in my head.
This seems like such a great idea on so many levels. Thank you. Thank you. Do you have an official, I don’t think you, you might have said that you don’t have an official launch date, but do you have a general timeframe that you’re hoping for? Yeah.
Mike: So it’s whenever my lawyer comes back with the official like terms of service and all the legal docs, but I have their website like ready to go. I would say within like a two to four week period, I could do a soft launch and then I’ll do a marketing launch, maybe like a month and a half, two months. So I just want to test it with some early beta users, you know this process and then get some feedback and then do like more of a marketing push.
But I’ve started to like do some social media. My girlfriend, Abby has been helping me like set all that up and she like, she has an interesting angle because she’s a PR expert. You’ve talked to her on the show, right? Yes. And we kind of talk about going back to the AI stuff. Like PR is so important.
You need to tell your story and with maybe AI taking a lot of this like problems with like technical problems like coding, we need to think more like the story part of it and like the human element. Right. So having her grapple with all that stuff with me has been a huge help to
Becca: that’s really interesting the marketing on this because I think the community aspect is like it’s so centered to this whole concept, right? Where you’re you’re meeting neighbors and shaking their hand, right? That’s part of this whole idea. Interesting, really interesting.
Marketing has gotten so weird over the years where it seems like you’ve got you know a lot about the marketing side. What’s your strategy going to be? Like do you have a main focus or you’re going to go straight to social media? Are you going to have radio ads? What is your plan?
Mike: Yeah, I think it’s a blend of a lot of things. Social media, I think but touching upon like I think the story is the community piece. I think it’s about highlighting the owners and even having an owner blog or like where they share their story. But I think avenues like from from porch forum because it’s more community based and like Facebook groups and stuff like that.
I don’t want to necessarily do radio yet. I think because it’s a double side of marketplace and that whole ratio we were talking about like I actually can’t get flooded with too much traffic because if there’s too much demand for not enough users, owners then people will leave and it becomes this like it’s like a balancing act. You need to like slowly grow it in tandem and keep that ratio.
Becca: You need to get sellers to come really before you can rent anything, right?
Mike: Right and you need to throttle that number. You don’t want too many, you don’t want too little. It’s like this is a hard business. I actually don’t know what I’m getting myself into. I don’t know how hard it’s going to be because I already like from the research I’ve done like I have a lot of headwinds but the tailwinds going like keep me going is that like people keep saying they want this thing. Yeah I hear, I listen to people. I’m like a very good listener.
My girlfriend always says like you’re excellent at listening and it’s about listening to that customer’s problem and solve it like scratch their itch. Right. That is what business does at the end of the day, scratch that itch. It’s interesting.
Becca: So interesting. I keep thinking about like how this is going to look. I love it. I love all the tech problems.
Mike: I’ll sign up on the wait list and yeah I need to find out.
Becca: I don’t have anything to rent though. That’s my problem.
Mike: Well you can rent other people’s things.
Becca: Right there you go. This is interesting because one of the things I feel like for something like this especially with the community focus is it it kind of needs up. I don’t want it to be a social media app. I’m not suggesting it but like I want to know if I see the canoe. I want to see the person who owns it being like hey I am this person maybe a little blurb about them. The thing that’s missing from Craigslist right. The thing that helps build community is like oh look at this person. Oh I know this person.
Mike: wow and that’s what I want. More user-generated content. I want the person who owns the kayak to be like, hey, I’m Josh. I love going to the sea caves or whatever, just saying a little blurb about them. And maybe I’m compensating them or giving them a discount or something for that. But yeah, I want people to kind of tell their story and give them a platform to do many things, like earn money and tell their story, build community.
Becca: Right. Well, what you said about them being a small business, like you’re kind of helping people create something that is they might have even thought about it, right? They might have thought about it, but that’s very limited. And people who want to do excursions. That’s such a cool thing that’s like, how do you get into that? That’s a limited field, right? But you could use this as a jumping off platform.
It’s kind of a full platform. It’s not just, oh, Uber Eats. It’s Jim from the North End. And Jim’s got 30 different things he’s renting. And he’s just open to the community. Like, what a great connection to make with this guy who’s willing to rent 30 things out to the community.
Right. Not only for Jim, but for the person who’s like new to this area, right? Like, oh, I haven’t met a lot of people yet. I’m going to rent something from Jim. I bet Jim knows a lot of people. Yeah.
Mike: I mean, also just being a transplant of Vermont myself, like I know it’s hard to find other people to do outdoor stuff. Like you always want like a friend to go hiking with or skiing or paddling. And maybe your significant other is busy or you don’t have one or whatever it is. It bridges a lot of gaps. I think at the end of the day, technology and businesses bridge people together in some form or way, whether it’s good or bad.
That’s up to the jury to decide. But Amazon, maybe not. But still at the end of the day, if you can get that read for your daughter to play the cello or whatever, like as much as I hate Amazon, that is a beautiful human experience at the end of the day.
Becca: Yeah. Well, two different niches, right? Very different things. I love what you said about renting more than you buy, like that idea. Yes. Yes, 100%. I feel like a lot of people would agree with that. Like, oh, yeah, that’s a no-brainer, right? Like that just feels like such a natural solution.
Mike: But they just don’t have a platform to do it. Exactly. I’m just giving them a platform.
Becca: Right. This is such a great idea. I’m excited for you, Mike. This is really cool. We’re about an hour and a half at this point, which is wild. Would you like to list anything specific? I can read off the website if you want me to, or you can read it off.
Mike: I don’t really care. Yeah, I mean, it’s rentaverse.com. We have a wait list up now, but it’s up to you to decide. OK.
Becca: Well, I’m going to spell it out. It’s renta, like the word renta, R-E-N-T-A, V-E-R-S-E. Pretty much sounds just like it’s spelled, which is unique in the tech world. A lot of times things are spelled a little funny. And the Instagram, that was it. The Instagram is rentaverseofficial. So check that out.
I have not checked it out myself. I just saw that today when I did this off, so I’ll have to go follow you. Anything else you want to say, though, before a week? Wrap it up.
Mike: I don’t know. I was just going to say about the name. I think it’s funny because it’s a little paradoxical. Because rent and averse separately is your averse to renting. You don’t want to rent. But together, it’s a new word that you are in this rental universe. Right, exactly. And you’re a part of this community and a part of this network of gear providers or item providers. I think it’s going to change the world, so.
Becca: I think it has the potential to. Excellent idea.
Mike: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Mike. It was a pleasure. Vermonttox.com forward slash 57. I will have links to rent averse and maybe some of your pictures thrown on there. Love it. Whatever’s on your Instagram, I might scrape off and put on there, as well as a transcript and just point in all your stuff so we can find you.
Becca: Thanks again. This has been really fun.
Mike: I’m excited for you. This is awesome. Thank you. Appreciate it.