Remember when music was a physical product?  From records to LPs to cassettes, music used to be a tangible good sold in stores like Tower Records and Sam Goody.  Think back to those (now vintage) CD cases and media storage racks filled with hundreds of albums -- a physical testament to a devotion to music.  Fast-forward to today and things are a bit different.  For one, music is largely a digital experience with audio files downloaded onto various devices.  Although music ownership still exists, there's another trend where music is a less a possession and more an experience.  From Pandora to Rhapsody, several emerging services provide listeners access to music on-demand.  Rather than own a finite number of songs on a device, on-demand services allow streaming from a large library of shared digital music.  People pay to use versus pay to own -- an emerging concept that extends far beyond music.

If you keep up with any of the major publications, you may have noticed several articles referencing the changing relationship between wealth and ownership in today's economy.  Due to the recent housing crisis, this Wall Street Journal article explains the misconception of home ownership (home ownership no longer yields the same returns compared to 30 years ago) and re-defines "the new American Dream" as renting instead of buying.  Another hot topic in the press during the past couple weeks has been around collaborative consumption, a movement I referenced in another blog post as "the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping redefined through technology and peer communities."  This phenomenon, which has been covered by TED, The New York Times and WIRED has been spearheaded by two visionaries, Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers.  This duo recently co-authored a book on the topic called, What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption which is set for release in just a couple weeks.  Coincidentally, another book called The Mesh: Why The Future of Business Is Sharing focuses on eliminating the burdens of ownership through shared access, and is set to hit bookshelves later this month as well.  Both describe a new way of doing business, citing several players disrupting the notion of ownership in favor of usership.  Previously, I've mentioned Swap.com as the leader in swapping.  Services like AirBnB and CouchSurfing are revolutionizing extra space by allowing people to rent out spare futons, bedrooms, apartments and homes.  ZipCar and fellow MassChallenge finalist, RelayRides, are changing the face of car ownership.  Lisa Gansky's Mesh Directory highlights hundreds of others (including Rentcycle) leading the way, and this video by Rachel Botsman features a few powerful case studies too:

As an evangelist for communal exchange, it's great to see collaborative consumption enjoying its time in the sun with some much-deserved buzz.  But the funny thing is, this is not a new concept.  The notion of paying for access versus ownership has been around for quite some time.  What would you say if I told you there are several age-old institutions built upon a dedication to usership?  These are things you and I use everyday.  Consider some of our public commons that have been enjoyed for centuries without a need to own.  For example, we use roads yet we don't own them.  All citizens are granted access to streets and highways through our payment of local taxes and tolls -- in essence, we pay a subscription fee to use the roads.  Similarly, we can borrow books from the library.  Library books grant accss to information on-demand, where content is shared among a community of users.  

The Internet takes this concept to a whole new level, opening doors to all sorts of shared content.  There's a high probability that in the not-too-distant-future, we will not "own" any music, books, movies, etc.  The truth is this is already possible (as I referenced with the music example earlier), but the principle is only just getting its bearings.  Soon, instant access to all these media through subscriptions and on-demand services will become mainstream... without having to own anything.  Chances are you're already doing this through Netflix's instant streaming capability.  You might be surprised that this is the same premise behind cloud computing where servers aren't owned, but shared through a pay-per-use model.  The same principle applies to software as a service (SaaS) where licenses are not owned, but accessed on a subscription basis.  Shared access is all around us.

This pay-per-use model is at the core of renting.  You pay to use things only when you need them.  You can stop paying at any time, at which point, you return the good until you need it again.  This is what renting is all about -- reducing the complexities of ownership through usership.  This is also at the heart of communal exchange.  Collaborative consumption and mesh businesses are not necessarily new, but rather, part of a larger trend of shared access where people pay for use instead of ownership.  Rentcycle is leading the way for collaborative consumption and is proud represent the rental opportunity by making the process easy for the mainstream.  We strongly believe that this ideal of shared access is here to stay.

The best part is: this is only the beginning.

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Over the weekend, Rentcycle celebrated two firsts: our first television debut and our first mention in one of our favorite publications, FastCompany Magazine!  It's great to see increased media coverage and interest in renting as a concept.  Look for more of this as Rentcycle brings renting even further into the mainstream!

The TV segment which aired on ABC News Philadelphia was all about how more people are turning to renting as a means to save money.  The report highlighted the economics of renting, stating, "the more expensive an item is, the more money you'll save by renting."  The segment touched on unique items people might not realize can be rented, referencing services like REI (camping gear), BookSwim (Netflix for books), Guitar Affair (guitar rentals) and ZipCar (on-demand cars).  Rentcycle was cited as, "a really great aggregator of the things you can rent," by rental expert Eric Ginsburg.  Watch the 2 minute segment for yourself here.

The September issue of FastCompany Magazine came out over the weekend with an interesting article in their Next Strategy section.  Titled "Welcome to the Copy Shop," the article highlights some of the web's most successful businesses with examples of startups who strive to apply similar business models to new industries.  Top business models included Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, Yelp and Zappos, among others.  Not too surprisingly, Rentcycle was compared to OpenTable which is reminiscent of the TechCrunch article that dubbed us OpenTable for local rental businesses.  Having utmost respect for OpenTable, we are flattered and have aspirations for similar success.  Another interesting piece of the article highlights companies with models similar to Netflix.  Included on this list are Bookrenter and Chegg for textbooks, RentTheRunway for high fashion, and SproutRobot for seeds.  Since Rentcycle serves this space, we are huge fans of these innovative rental services.  Read more by picking up a copy of FastCompany and turning to page 44.

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For the past 18 months, my team and I have been working hard to develop the concept, model and product behind Rentcycle -- a website for rental stores to gain greater visibility with consumers seeking alternatives to ownership.  During this time, we've recruited a handful of early adopters from around the rental industry to get direct input and feedback on the product as it came to life.  We had a surf shop in Santa Monica.  A tool rental company in Arizona.  Even a bike store down the street from us in San Francisco.  These initial Rentcycle customers provided invaluable feedback and shed light onto the inner workings of a rental business.  We learned the importance of taking deposits to avoid no-shows, requiring contracts to avoid liability down the line, and other processes specific to the rental industry.  Aside from these few contacts, Rentcycle had a very limited view into the rental world... until a few days ago.

This week, Rentcycle took the cross-country trek to Orlando, site of this year's Rental Show, an annual event hosted by The American Rental Association.  As I've mentioned before, the rental industry is a HUGE space, accounting for $85B and over 65,000 businesses in the U.S.  This show was our first major opportunity to introduce ourselves and we tried our very best to do it with style.

Although we were booth #5043 in the sea of exhibits within the monstrous Orange County Convention Center, Rentcycle's 10'x10' slice of the trade show floor was packed with flare.  Passers-by couldn't miss the vibrant Rentcycle green displays, complete with 2 Internet kiosks (for live demos), plasma screen (for videos) and the friendliest staff to hit the rental world since Avis ("we try harder" campaign).  Video games brought out the competitive side of attendees who played in our Wii Sports tournament.  And a daily raffle of iPod Touches and a Nintendo Wii kept visitors coming back.  All this traffic made for the perfect atmosphere as we debuted our brand new technology to an industry that's trying to keep up with its increasingly savvy customers. 

Rental stores from across the country and world stopped by our booth to learn about Rentcycle.  To be honest, I wasn't sure how a brand new website would be received by an industry that has done things mostly the same way for generations.  But our reception couldn't have been more positive.  I can't tell you the number of times I heard, "this is the way our industry is heading," and "we could really use some help getting more online business."  Business owners were signing their stores up and checking out how they stacked up against the local competitors.  We demoed our online reservation system, which would allow stores to conduct business 24/7.  And we got input on planned features that are in the pipeline to better suit their needs.  In three day's time, we achieved exponential progress.  It was fantastic.

During the event, we learned the nuance of difference between rental categories like party & event versus tool & equipment and will be planning our product accordingly to meet the unique needs of each.  We strengthened our network and developed relationships we hope to strengthen as we continue to grow our business.  More than anything, we got ourselves out there in the community of people we're trying to serve.  This alone made the trip worthwhile.  The fact that they liked what we're doing didn't hurt either :-)

Next year's event is a bit closer to home and I'm looking forward to bringing back the Rentcycle green.  See you in Vegas!

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