One of the big trends we’ve seen over the last few years is the push to bring local businesses online. No longer are online reservations and purchases solely available through major brands — it’s now quite easy for a local business to set up a storefront online, and plenty of them are doing it. Now a new site called RentCycle is looking to tap into a slightly different market: the rental industry, which encompasses everything from power tools at Home Depot to scuba gear at a local shop in Hawaii.
The company launched in a limited alpha last week, and has since signed on over 20 local rental businesses. The first 100 Techcrunch readers to sign up here with the promo code “techcrunch” will be able to sign up for free.
Founder Tim Hyer ackowledges that there are plenty of other sites looking to cater to local businesses, like this year’s TC50 winner RedBeacon. But he says that RentCycle is unique in that it is focused on rentals alone (RedBeacon has a much broader range of businesses). He also says that most of the services that are focused on rentals tend to cater to peer-to-peer rentals, not to established businesses.
Hyer says that the company’s goal is to serve as a sort of OpenTable for the rental industry, offering a full inventory and reservation management software solution that lets customers book their rentals and pay for them online. The service’s backend is straightforward, perhaps to the point of being a little too basic. There’s a calendar management area where you can see every upcoming rental by date, as well as an inventory screen where you can see the number of items you have available, as well as their current price. Finally there’s an area for analytics where you’ll be able to see analytics, with reports on pricing variability, seasonal changes and more, but these aren’t yet available.
Initially RentCycle will be focused on the hardware industry, which Hyer says is larger and less fragmented than other rental industries. In the longer term, he anticipates supporting rentals for parties and events, sporting goods, electronics, leisure and tourism (snow skis, surf boards, etc.), luxury goods (yachts, jets), and baby goods.
RentCycle is free for businesses renting out five or fewer items. Businesses renting out up to 25 items pay $40 a month, or $60 for up to 50 items. For $100 they can rent an unlimited number of items. RecentCycle is a graduate of TheFunded Founder Institute, a startup camp for new startups that has some similarties with incubator programs like Y Combinator, though the structure is different (TheFunded has ‘warrants’ to purchase equity from companies at market value rather than taking a stake outright).
Great idea that needs to be done right. Love the video. The UI is clean and easy to follow. This site should do well!
Great idea. Attacking a different market.
useful for mini-stores, who cannot afford to DEVELOP their own software…
Congrats Tim! I can’t wait to rent my snowboarding gear this winter through a Rental shop that uses Rentcycle! Founder Institute FTW!
Not gonna work… will fail in a year or so
This idea is awesome! I think that a green idea like this is exactly what we need right now. This will also be a great way to save money. MDPK is an idiot. Maybe once things really get going you can rent him a better personality, or a girlfriend, or some products for natural male enhancement. Hahahahaha!
一个新的创业启动阵营，非常有创意
Yet another Founder Institute company launch! Great! Can’t wait for 50+ more. Congrats Tim!
The future is renting. And technology that squeezes out all of the wasted fuel and human effort involved in paying per use will accelerate the trend.
i love the fact that rentcycle is working to prevent waste and promote sustainability. Looking forward to renting through rentcycle in the future. would it be helpful to autopost some of the listings to craigslist?
Awesome UI! I’m psyched to be able to have easier access to equipment and gear, especially for sports and activities. Who wants to go kite boarding??
Tim, Congrats on the launch! I agree RC will be super useful in many verticals. Looking forward to using it the next time I rent.
Congrats Tim and RentCycle. Don’t believe the knockers. Someone is going to crack the online rental market and when they do it will be huge, and you have a real shot if you can hit critical mass. Go get it!
Great opportunity! Love the video! GO RENTCYCLE!
Congrats tim…I can’t wait to rent my extra sporting goods:)
Love it! This will be so much easier than the old way of doing things – can’t wait to use this for my next rental!
THIS IS A GREAT COMPANY FOR OUR FUTURE. CONGRATS TIM ON YOUR INNOVATIVE IDEA. KNOW IT WILL BE A SUCCESS !!!
I am using their site at the moment and it sucks. .NET errors left and right. Images aren’t loading?
QA anyone?
Who designed this thing anyway? Their brother in law?
No, their brother in law appears to be too busy posting positive comments about it all on TechCrunch.
SSL pop-ups errors too. Hey RC, you gotta put your images in a secure directory or you get a browser error.
Thanks for all this feedback, Jason. Day 2 of public launch and lots to do. Cheers!
Great idea that needs to be done right. Love the video. The UI is clean and easy to follow. This site should do well!
that video is too boring to watch
I like the idea of but why not do it on a larger scale and allow people to rent items from others in their community as well? RentCycle could hold the deposit and return it to the customer afterward.
Oops, I thought that idea sounded familiar:
http://us.zilok.com
Great looking site.. And easy to use. Good work Tim… and congrats…
This fills a clear need. Will definitely try it out.
Really cool site. The UI is much cleaner and easier to use than another rental business site that I have used.
Love the clean crisp UI, nice looking site. Congrats on the launch, Tim.
I love the idea behind rentcycle, and I think the timing is perfect. With the state of the economy, Americans are becoming much more interested in renting, than owning these days. I am glad that innovative people, such as Tim Hyer, are starting new companies. Entrepreneurs create jobs!
Sounds like a great new tool for the rental business. Can’t wait to see the different companies that can get involved.
I think the guys need to really do some more testing before releasing anything to the public.
Or, better, get some decent developer rewrite the whole thing.
I signed up, got confirmation email, clicked on the link to activate the account and… bang! a nice page of source code comes up in the browser.
Even worse, it is in visual basic (or vb.net)… with SQL queries mixed all over with HTML tags.
Hello? This is 2009, if you want to offer a professional service to businesses, use professional tools. And I would never trust the security of your web site and give you my credit card details to sign up, if you can’t even properly protect the source code of your web application. I got to see it without even trying!
With that programming language and that style of programming, you’re not going to get very far when people ask you to add new features. A maintenance nightmare. No wonder other people have encountered plenty of errors.
The article says pretty clearly that it’s in early alpha and they’re doing early testing and seeking feedback with a small set of companies.
Release early and release often!
It’s pretty gutsy to expose an early stage alpha that’s only just come out to the rigours of the TechCrunch community. It’s crashed plenty of sites with a lot more resources.
Good on Tim for getting it out there. It’s a great idea and UI and there is an alpha and beta stage to go for testing, and it’s only going to get better with feedback and users trying it.
No matter what stage they’re in, it’s the foundations that are just bad. Any half decent developer that had a look at the VB spaghetti I saw, will tell you that. Anyway, any effort is better than no effort I guess. But surely I won’t be back.
Sorry for the bad experience, Harry. No excuse, but you happened to hit the site in the midst of a server snafu. Terrible timing, I know, but all fixed now. Thanks for the feedback.
What a great idea! I love the idea of renting instead of buying…can’t wait until the party goods are up! Thanks for helping to protect our world!
The website doesn’t work… there is an error on it…
All set, Brian. Thanks for pointing this out.
Well, looks like something’s going on with their site. It says it’s “Coming Soon”.
Not a good first impression RentCycle.
Sorry about that, Sammy. Of all times to have a server glitch! All is well again on http://www.rentcycle.com — thanks for the patience.
Tim & Co are tackling a very interesting market with some great methods… I hope they can help me rent a glider plane some day!
I love this business. Standalone functionality + obvious need for technological improvement. There’s no way people are still doing this with paper and pencil in 5-10 years.
It’s a great idea, and I can see lots of possibilities for the community to work with Rentcycle to make it an absolutely essential weekend warrior workshop!
Zilok has started the same kind of service in several countries for a long time http://us.zilok.com/
Great idea Tim, I would love to be able to rent some of the dumb things I buy. Best of luck.
That´s a great business. Same concept like http://www.erento.com/
can’t wait till I can use this in d.c. sure maybe there are a couple of other companies that have tried this, but it looks like those are just p2p.
everyone should keep an eye on this site.
Nice clean site. Also, pretty easy to navigate/set up for customers looking to post items – esp nubies….Good job!
Video is great. I like the simple explanation of what rentcycle is and what it can do for vendors.
Nice!
The best and pioneer website who are actually making a lot of noise is: http://www.erento.net.
Great work and awesome video
Congrats and keep up the momentum!
Congrats Tim! I think RentCycle is a great idea — good for small businesses, good for consumers, and good for the planet.
Looks great! I love the ad!
Tim,
I think you’ll be well served by focusing on a specific business segments instead of focusing on being everything for everyone right away. If you can tackle the challenge of getting technophobe small business owners to adopt the site you’ll grow quickly! The easy to use UI is a great start in achieving that goal. Keep up the good work.
You’re right, Dave. Definitely don’t want to be everything for everyone since that growth strategy rarely works. Rentcycle will start by serving the tool & equipment sector before moving onto other parts of the rental industry. It’s a surprisingly big space so starting small is key!
Great idea, webpage and promo video. I love the idea of being able to rent items, instead of buying them, using them a couple times and them never touching them again. My garage can’t handle that! Good luck, guys!
Great idea…and love the discipline around focusing on the hardware rental market. Best of luck!
This is an awesome idea… rentcycle is going rock our world!
the ui is clean and there is def a need for this. I think some people have pointed out some potential competitors but regardless its all about execution and delivery.
release early and often as someone pointed out is something someone pointed out which is an effective method and I’m looking forward to seeing lots of progress from rentcycle. they could position themselves pretty well in this current econ state.
best of luck to any entrepreneur who has the balls to do something in these times.
Interesting to see different approach to the local providers market. None of them really stands out to awe you. UI? a particular vertical? they are too insignificant. RedBeacon? they don’t know how to solve the chicken and egg problem.
Look at http://www.QuestBid.com . This is the one that will change the game. Their platform is so powerful that that once user submits a request, providers from yellowpage or on the web can get a phone call or email without human intervention, AUTOMATICALLY. Providers then will be invited to bid on the request on the forum.
I need a website like this. Last week I rented a projector for my presentation. It took me hours to find the best price and I had to call several rental companies. RentCycle will help a lot if I need to rent projector, lighting, etc. in the future.
Sounds like a great idea – I especially like the option to rent tools from Home Depot!! Good luck, Tim !