Please Introduce yourself.
-My name is Anshul Johri and I am the founder of Rentomo.com before starting own I was working with Amazon.com. I was born and brought up in a small town of UP calles Unnao (60 KM away from Lucknow). I belong to a middle class family where everyone was service class minded and doing good job is the top most priority and that too government job. No one in my family had any idea about computer when I first decided to do my masters in computer science. But the best thing in my family/parents was they never imposed their decisions on me, they always asked me to do whatever I wanted to. My father has been always been a motivation for me, he was a sports person in his young age and always motivated me to do any work with full energy and passion whatever I want to choose. I did my schooling from my home town and did my graduation (Maths hons) from Kanpur. Post graduation I moved to Pune University to complete my Masters in Computer Science.
How did you think about Rentomo?
I am highly inspired with Airbnb model and when we (I and my wife) traveled Europe and stayed at Airbnb hosts at multiple places, I realized the potential of sharing economy and when this can be done for houses than why not for all the items/stuff/resources. Where people can borrow items from owners, use the stuff and return it back in same condition. Borrower saved money and at the same time owner made money from the item which they were sparingly used. But trust plays an important role here. So after coming back I started thinking to build some tech platform around trust. We want to provide a marketplace model where people have easy and on demand access for all the items in their neighborhood. There are a lot of under used items in each house which people do not wish to throw away or sell as they use it some time, same time there are lot of people who are looking for those items for short duration. We just connect them at the same time on the platform.
Introduce your Co-Founders and Team.
Founder : Anshul Johri, ex Amazon, Yahoo. He has 10+ years technical experience with startups and big companies and has been Initial core member of startups like ibibo.com, asklaila.com, bookadda.com. He has also worked with Amazon Prime team based out of Bangalore. He did his masters in computers from Computer science department, University of Pune.
Current team size: 8 (Founder, 1 web developer, 1 app developer, 4 designer/social media expert, 1 operation/customer care)
Explain more about Rentomo, what makes you special and how is it different from others?
Rentomo enables you to borrow the things you need from people nearby (yes! It will help you to find the person having what you need nearest to you!). It provides a platform that allows users to borrow/rent everyday items they may only occasionally need – like a drill, ladder, camera, bicycle, travel bag etc. and that to someone in their trusted network. Why does everyone feel the need to purchase their own private set of consumer items – a hammer, a tent, a badminton racket – that everyone else has, and that lie unused most of the time? We encourage people to share stuff with each other through our technology enabled platform.
We have unique features such as:
Trust network
On demand access of items
Location based search and availability of items
Discoverability of items available in local or in neighborhood
We also started onboarding business folks on our platform who are already in renting business. This helped us in launching premium products like bikes (Harley Davidson, Hayabusa, Yamaha R1, KTM etc.) and Bicycles (Giant, Scott, Fuji etc.)
What challenges did you face while setting up Rentomo?
Though its an early stage of journey but there have been good amount of challenges both professionally and personally. Professionally the toughest moment was to find right mind set of people and build a strong team. Biggest success is when your users write to you with thank you note.
If you want to do something in your life, preferable something on your own and waiting for the right time to come than this is the time, just do it now. There is no right and there is always a right time (My Mantra of work). Have patience; work hard and you will create history. Remember there is no shortcut to success other than hard work. Last but not the least, do not run behind funding instead focus on creating value, build a good product and make more customers happy, funding will happen by own.
What’s the present status and future plans?
Present status –
- 6000+ Registered users
- 350+ verified listings
- 250+ transaction per month
- 4000+ app downloads
- Popular Categories – bicycle, bikes, gaming consoles, travel, health & medical
Future Plans for 2016 –
- 20K+ Registered users
- Website traffic increase by 300%
- 1500+ verified listings
- 500+ transactions per month
- 2 new cities launch – Delhi & Mumbai
- Add a new category – self driven cars
If you would like, you can share your views about VID at the end.
I think VID is doing a fabulous job of bringing founder’s stories and the journey of their startups for upcoming entrepreneurs and young generation. Keep up the good work.
Website : www.rentomo.com
Android App : Download Rentomo
