Why Buy When You Can Borrow? App Connects People And Stuff
In June, Peerby was selected best urban app in the AppMyCity! competition, held as part of the New Cities Summit in Dallas.
Peerby hooks up 100,000 borrowers and lenders each month in the Netherlands. Since its launch in 2012, the company has expanded to Belgium, Berlin and London.
The mobile app and transactions are free. Peerby plans to launch a warranty program — opt-in insurance that both the lender and borrower can request.
Cindy Bakum, an Amsterdam native, is a regular Peerby user.
Peerby founder Daan Weddepohl speaks at the AppMyCity! Presentations organized by the New Cities Foundation in Dallas in June.
"Last time I had a friend over, and we were watching a movie on his laptop, but he forgot his adapter, and my adapter didn't fit," she says. "So I put out a request, and it was actually my neighbor. He really lived on my block, and he had an adapter, so we could finish watching the movie. So that worked very well."
The sharing economy is booming. Some estimates put the peer-to-peer rental market in the billions.
"We see that more and more consumers start to realize that access to stuff is actually cheaper, more convenient and greener than ownership," says Herman Kienhuis, whose firm Sanoma Ventures is an investor in Peerby.
Access, over ownership, may be gaining fashion, says venture capitalist Guillaume Lautour, but to really change people's habits, a company has to have scale. Lautour says there are other borrowing sites, and size will make the difference between profitability and failure.
"It's a kind of service where you need enough liquidity to be really efficient," Lautour says. "You need hundreds of thousands of things to lend or borrow."
Lautour points to the success of eBay, which he says works because it is global, not local. This year, Peerby plans to launch in 50 U.S. cities, where it hopes to build scale and become a household name in borrowing.
sharing economy