hoo.gy, day #7 in production and user acquisition hustle
Today marks day #7ish in production of hoo.gy a community based platform for renting tools and equipments.
In numbers
- Facebook Page has 99 friends!
- Medium — blog has 93 reads, with a minimum of 70% reads
- Twitter has more than 83 followers
- Google Analytics shows an average of 20 sessions a day.
Numbers are encouraging, but not representing the success of the evaluation and business success, as conversion are not that sexy! 10 subscriptions with only one transaction done so far!
4 Core problems
- Data acquisition: Initial thought were to have users adding items, but most of the users are actually searching for items! I learned that users are concerned with degree of the trust to rent their items to strangers(makes sense), a payment system plus insurance of the tools/equipments, finally a template of a contract to sign.
- Trust: There is a way to overcome this issue: by gamifying the application based on usage history and feedback of both customers and tool/equipments providers (a +1 vote can do this).
- Payment: I though this would be the last thing to implement, but users I had a chance to talk to, were concerned with this upfront! I won’t implement this before the system solves the first issue, but when it comes it will come with insurance of tools/equipments(with some restrictions as well)
- Contract: users who were able to rent out items struggled to comprehensive contract. There is a plan to start an Open source catch-all contract template for those who don’t have a contract. Among other suggestions, Fred suggested lawdepot but he also runs a platform for finding best lawyers! Moses suggested docracy, and will try to find a good reference there too!
What now?
I am recruiting manually, if you ever have an idea of how to do this better, you may drop me a line or two! I visited a brewery, a musical rental business and have a handful contacts that I have to visit next Saturday(17th January).
It is not easy, check here, here , and here!
