You should be charging a % of revenue as people scale. That way you align with taking value as more value is driven. If you look at companies like Shopify over half of their revenue comes from processing fees. Maybe price is a good place to start to get people in but probably not best model long run.
There's a lot of justification for ethical percentage-based businesses. Particularly if the service provided is provided on each transaction.
It also means they don't make any money if their customers don't make any money. It's a good incentive for providing a quality product, over say, a single lump sum purchase price.
Variabilising all a company’s costs is every CFO’s dream: it makes all projections perfectly linear and totally eliminates any risk as zero revenue doesn’t create a loss because all costs also go to zero.
At least, in the start-up phase of operations.
Later, when economies of scale kick in and break-even has been far overcome, one seeks to negotiate smaller unit charges, primarily to capture more of the added value for oneself, and partially to reduce visibility of one’s revenue.
That's all definitely true. I think the cloud is a terrible value proposition for anything that's not a startup, for instance: You will safe a crud-ton of money paying your own IT staff instead of paying Amazon's IT staff, provided you have a stable business with relatively predictable needs.
Arguably, once you are a big player in a space, you should ideally have the clout to negotiate a better deal too.
Ethical companies don't exist. The only point of a company is to make money. If the company lets ethics get in the way of that it will be replaced by a more effective company.
Nice idea and design, best of luck! Seems like this is mainly for businesses, but presumably there's also a market for individuals renting equipment (e.g. tools/lawnmowers to neighbours)?
Small issue: was reading the FAQ and every time the screenshots carousel resets it automatically scrolls me up to the screenshots carousel.
My initial target market was small bike/ski hire shops but I’ve had a lot of enquiries from individuals wanting to hire out their gym kit, so this is something I’m also exploring
You joke but https://www.realpage.com/ ($6B market cap) advertises on its front page "precision revenue management through proven, cycle-tested, disciplined analytics that balance supply and demand to maximize revenue growth" and "The new RealPage® Waste Management Solution is a multifamily first, leveraging AI to optimize waste capacity and contamination levels, and cut costs by up to 40%."
My experience using a few similar competing platforms as a renter is that none of the management company employees using it ever seem to actually know how to operate it.
I've seen it a few times, but one case really stands out–A few years ago my apartment building went under a new management company. The system they used automatically applied a one month's rent "move in fee" when they created our account, despite the fact that I'd lived there for three years. I told them to remove it, but it took them so long to do it that the system had automatically applied a late fee. Then the late fee started automatically compounding on some kind of schedule, so the management company was always like $25 behind trying to fix it. This went on for months. A total farce.
The gross thing is that I'm sure they're now selling a profile on me, which I cannot access, that makes it look like I'm a super delinquent renter with months of unpaid late fees.
My take on Zawinski’s law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski) is that all software expands until it implements a nontrivial subset of QuickBooks Online. The corrolary, of course, is that no software is fully usable by non-accountants. It’s accounting all the way down.
So you're rich and want to get richer but the poor people you're exploiting are starting to hurt your margins? We're here to help you legally discriminate against MPoCs! /sarcasm
If I said this to a customer of such a company I would, almost certainly, come across as very offensive and sarcastic.
My rationale is that's it's the same type of logic I see with highly paid desk jockeys complaining about the gruff they from their grunts that make about 1/6 what they do. Or complain that they can't find people to work for 30-40k gross with mandatory ot out off cities where the cost of living for a family of three is at least triple that with amazing health insurance.
It's the they got theirs and those who didn't are obviously deadbeat junkies -- not deserving of: wages that would allow them to live reasonably close to their jobs, or have kids, or hobbies, or fun, or healthcare -- mentality.
I assumed this would be about real estate as well - the tagline feels somewhat misleading. Much as I hate "X for Y" descriptions of products, calling this "Shopify for rental businesses" would definitely communicate what it does more clearly.
I don't think it's a language thing so much as dedicated "hire shops" not being much of a thing in the US outside of certain touristy areas. Even then, they tend to be really low-budget operations that rely on foot traffic or hotel partnerships.
Maybe it doesn’t need ‘updating’, because British English isn’t a deprecated anachronism that needs to be patched and brought up to date, thank you very much.
I need to change the tag line to make it clearer internationally, and the product name because, as someone has pointed out, it’s actually already taken
I actually worked on one as part of a school project -- there are many, many, many pieces of landlord software. More than I would have thought possible.
