The archive · Consumer Apps · Product decision · 2012–2013
CameraLends bets a camera-gear niche can make peer-to-peer rental work
In five hours Adam Derewecki built CameraLends, a Bay Area peer-to-peer camera-gear rental site, betting expensive idle lenses would make the niche work.
CameraLends
What the business is
CameraLends was a peer-to-peer marketplace where camera owners listed their lenses and bodies for local rental in the San Francisco Bay Area.
How it started
Over the 2012 New Year's weekend, Adam Derewecki's girlfriend tried to rent a sewing machine in San Francisco. The general 'rent anything' sites she found were inconvenient and charged $15/day for something cheaper to buy, and Derewecki had watched broad rental marketplaces fail on both lawnmowers and electronics. Brainstorming what was expensive yet easy to transport, they landed on camera gear, and he spent five hours the next day building an MVP on Rails, Bootstrap and Heroku — three pages, his own gear as the only inventory — then posted it to Facebook, Hacker News and the photography subreddit, where launch traffic ran to about a hundred hits.
What happened
When the launch buzz faded after a few days, Derewecki ran a channel-by-channel traffic experiment: Facebook Ads cost roughly 75 cents per click ($14 for 19 clicks, January 2–7); StumbleUpon Paid Discovery returned 176 Google Analytics visits for $29.90 (about 17 cents a click versus its advertised 8); a $299 99designs logo contest produced around 100 designs plus a fresh round of Facebook engagement; and automated Twitter following (50–200 new follows a day) left him with 57 followers while following 952. Google Analytics showed 741 total visits with solid pages-per-visit, and people signed up to list equipment — but by the date of the post nobody had rented anything, even with a promo link making rental free. He ended the post asking Hacker News what to do next.
No ending yet — it is still running.
Background
Over the 2012 New Year's weekend, Adam Derewecki's girlfriend tried to rent a sewing machine in San Francisco and gave up: the general 'rent anything' sites were inconvenient and $15/day was near the cost of just buying one. Derewecki had watched broad rental marketplaces fail at lawnmowers and electronics alike, while verticals like Airbnb and GetAround had succeeded, and brainstorming what was expensive yet easy to transport pointed to camera gear — lenses and bodies start at $200 and run into the thousands, and sit largely unused by non-professionals.
He spent five hours the next day building the MVP — a landing page, a gear index and a gear detail page, stocked with his own three lenses and one camera body — and posted the launch to Facebook, Hacker News and the photography subreddit, where it drew roughly a hundred hits. When the buzz faded within days, he ran traffic sources one by one: Facebook Ads ($14 for 19 clicks), StumbleUpon Paid Discovery ($29.90 for 176 visits), a $299 99designs logo contest that produced about a hundred designs, and automated Twitter following that left him at 57 followers while following 952.
Google Analytics in the post showed 741 total visits with direct traffic, Facebook and Hacker News each contributing strongly, and people signing up to list equipment — but nobody had rented anything by 2013-01-14, even with rental free through a promo link. The founder's post, which reached 128 points and 28 comments on Hacker News, ended by asking the community what to do next: add date-picker and card integration, list gear he did not own and buy it on demand, or go after photography blogs and camera shops.
What has to be true
- Broad rental sites kept failing on cheap, bulky items — a sewing machine costs less to buy than to rent — so the founder narrowed to gear that is expensive, portable and underused.
- Camera gear fit the vertical test best: lenses cost $200 to thousands and amateurs rarely use them, giving the marketplace both owners and renters.
- The five-hour MVP was the launch strategy: ship the thinnest marketplace with the founder's own gear as supply, and buy traffic only after the launch proved people would look.
What can be applied
Vertical focus earns early attention, but a marketplace's hard problem is the other side of the trade: cheap traffic brought people listing gear, not people renting it.
Aftermath
As of 2013-01-14 CameraLends was live with a three-page MVP, roughly 741 recorded visits, a handful of owners signed up to list equipment, and zero completed rentals — the founder was testing traffic channels rather than scaling, and closed his post by asking Hacker News which move came next. The record stops at this early stage; whether CameraLends ever converted its listing supply into a rental marketplace is not covered by this source.
Sources
- Getting traffic for your newly launched startup
- Getting traffic for your newly launched startup — Hacker News discussion
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