Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Someone broke the drone (and we are pretty psyched about it)

We started an experiment a few months back, offering to lend out anything that costs less than $500 for up to two weeks, no matter what. Meaning that if a neighbor (or someone in our community) does not offer to lend it, we will buy it for you on Amazon and ship it to you - IF YOU GET 25 people to comment on a Facebook post. Sure the experiment says that the comments should be vouches that you will return it, but we all know the real reason we are doing it:)

Anyway- one of the items we lent out was a drone. The first person posted footage that he took on youtube. That was pretty awesome because it showed us he got it, showed us he was using it, etc. The second person got sick and couldn't use it but someone else in their office borrowed it (with 25 fresh likes). She couldn't make it fly. My friend in KC borrowed it next and he couldn't make it fly (and he's a nerd). He didn't have the right camera though, so I didn't think it was broken. But 3 times a charm, and now I am pretty sure, as My Cousin Vinny says, that "The fucken thing is broken".

Here's why that is kind of awesome.





  1. We learned a shitload. We learned that p2p shipping is super easy. We learned that people are more likely than we realized to share our site with colleagues than friends. And of course we realized that highly technical items require more than just good intentions. 
  2. We proved things we already knew like the risk of outright theft, for items low in relative value - especially when asked for on FB is close to zero and not nearly the PRIMARY risk. 
  3. The best thing about it though.. is that we are having "better problems"  a term taken from Zingermans 12 Natural Laws of Business. We are still not scaling as fast as I would like - but our old problems were proving demand in the first place. We could not GIVE SHIT AWAY FOR FREE if we tried, and we tried hard. We are slowly starting to see real demand, a real need for the service we are providing. We are also starting to fulfill that demand well. Maybe not with hand held flying robots controlled by iPhones... but hey, we aimed high:) maybe a little too high...
WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BORROW FREE FOR UP TO TWO WEEKS? REQUEST IT HERE (even the drone - but that now comes with a disclaimer... the last person could not get it to fly - some assembly required)

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