Background
RentSmart Asia was founded in Feb 2018. It was founded when one of the founders was left with a bitter experience of having to pay a huge amount of money for something that he only needed to use once; only to find out much later that he has a friend who also purchased the same item idling at home.
The founders over a casual discussion realized that this problem doesn’t seem to have a solution today that connects people who have belongings idling to people in need of it. We quickly realized that there is an opportunity here to make a difference.
We envision RentSmart to be a trusted marketplace for people to list, discover and book items from near or far. This platform is accessible online, be it mobile or laptop. Overall, RentSmart provides a safe platform, insurance protection and convenient delivery services for both renters and owners.
Behind The Scenes
Once RentSmart was founded, we needed to find out what the market thought of this idea. The best solution to find out what the public thought about this idea is to conduct a market survey to determine if the idea was viable or is this a real problem people wanted a solution to. To our surprise, we had about 100 respondents to our survey and the survey results validated our idea. The results showed that 93% of the respondents would use this service; either as an owner, renter or both.
Since then, we have put in countless hours to develop the process of interaction with the system, we have also worked out our strategy on how to develop and system and the execution strategy, which includes marketing digitally.
We have got RentSmart to fruition today. RentSmart has great potential to expand within Asia Pacific. According to a survey from Nielsen, Asia Pacific has the highest adoption to the sharing economy. We can position ourselves as the leaders in the Asia Pacific market.