Some thoughts on Peerby

The sharing or circular economy is close to my heart and what I work at every minute. Systems need structure, and that structure starts with the foundations. How are we seeding this paradigm shift?

Friends of mine are involved with a peer to peer sharing site called Peerby. It’s one of those new places where you can borrow a drill, or a step ladder, or nut crackers, from people in your neighbourhood. The drill and the ladder I get, it’s the nut crackers that bug me.

Peerby is going great guns in Amsterdam and as it migrates to new cities and markets, it appears to be facing the problem all such networks and communities have and that’s in seeding a solid foundation that the millions can build upon.

I think there’s a way to approach the problem and it’s something Airbnb did brilliantly, focus on the stock first.

Airbnb threw everything they had into getting as many flats, houses and rooms onto their platform as possible right from the outset. This allowed the browsers to pick from what was on offer. There was never a notion of a random traveller throwing out a request to a group of hosts and seeing what came back.

I joined Peerby because I want it to be a success. Although there are chinks in the UX they’re nothing a decent architect & designer couldn’t fix, it’s the underlying growth strategy that’s just not working. It needs to be flipped on it’s head. For any system or game to work, you’ve gotta lay down the rules of engagement first and then let the kids loose.

Right now, I join Peerby and I’m expected to shout out what I want to borrow OR sit and wait to receive notifications that someone nearby wants to borrow something that I might or might not have. That’s how I end up with a handful of random requests to borrow a bike for an hour*, some nut crackers for a dinner party and a large cooking pot. It’s un-structured and, I’m not waiting in for an hour to hand over nut crackers.

How about Peerby reaches out to find people who have stuff and asks them to join up and list the stuff they would be happy to lend. Give me a list of the most popular things others have borrowed as a guide too. I’m listing the ladders, the drill, collapsible chairs, tile cutter and most of the toolkit. Now don’t bother me until someone want’s to borrow what I have rather than hassling me with random requests — *we’re in London, the Boris bikes are on every street corner.

Maybe I missed a screen, but it doesn’t appear the growth strategy is working just yet, at least in London. It has worked in Amsterdam though, so it can work anywhere else. The inherently unstructured community and network models we’re noodling around with in the circular economy need us designers and engineers to assert and define a foundations that allow the structure to evolve, otherwise it’s chaos.