As a photographer who has rented lenses online I'd say your biggest issue is lens options. Especially under featured lenses.
The vast majority of people who need to rent lenses due so for a professional shoot where they cannot afford to drop $2k.
The lenses you need are popular pro lenses. The lenses you have can be bought for 3 weeks worth of rental. Basically no one rents kit lenses because they are so easy to buy used and are not very good relative quality.
You need stuff like:
70-200 f2.8 constant app
Go after getting people with those lenses and offer them insurance or some other comfort and you can prob ramp much faster.
Consider a very strict system for checking out the lenses and a very clear policy on what is who's fault.
Add in fraud protection of some type etc.
Then you will be offering a real service.
Eliminate lenses which are not a minimum of $300usd from your site
I don't even think 70-200 f/2.8L IS II is where the sweet spot is. If you shoot a lot, you probably have one of those (I have the 70-200 f/4L, but I'd upgrade sooner if I didn't just do wide angle and macro).
The expensive primes and superzooms and tilt shift and stuff are probably the market, and those are $2000-10000. I've got access to a lens lending program from a manufacturer, and I'd plan a trip around borrowing an evaluation 500mm f/2.8L.
My thesis is: Wedding photography is the biggest market for rental lenses and the lenses REQUIRED for wedding photography are fast lenses that range from $900-$2200. Additionally, there are many people who may shoot a limited number of weddings per year which do not have the cash to spend $2,000 on a lens.
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Once a photographer has a 70-200 f/2.8, a fastish wide angle and a prime or two, they really don't need anything besides strobes to shoot weddings.
Wedding lenses are important for your business for 2 reasons:
1) Non-pros going to weddings are a great market for rental lenses (1 time use, going to get some great shots).
2) It takes a while to transition to wedding photography fulltime and it is the only place to make real money down the road in most cases. During the transition from 1 weddding a year to 20 weddings a year people will need to rent lenses or not eat if they want to use what is basically required equipment for getting quality low light shots.
They will want to own the body first so that they know how to use it.
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I don't have data to support that the sweet spot is $2000, fast lenses, but I'd be shocked if I were wrong.
The expensive primes and superzooms and tilt shift and stuff are probably the market, and those are $2000-10000. I've got access to a lens lending program from a manufacturer, and I'd plan a trip around borrowing an evaluation 500mm f/2.8L.
I'm sure this stuff gets rented too and is probably rented more than bought, but the overall market size (in terms of days used) for people shooting with 500mm 2.8 is far less than the 70-200 f2.8.
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Additionally, those that own the lenses are likely to have them unused 20 weeks a year which provides the other side of the market.
That makes sense. I've never even been to a wedding (except one as security), but wedding photographers seem to be a world apart. It makes sense. It's also a particularly undemanding physical environment for a lens.
It would be cute to do it just for the wedding vertical, to test this theory. Advertise specifically in the wedding market, and try to get weddings to promote "bring your own SLR! Bride's mom covers lens rental of 70-200s for canon or nikon!" Maybe add some other wedding-related stuff (like a free camera check before/after, classes on wedding photography, and resources to hire pros).
Since you where collecting sign-ups, it would be really interesting to see registrations by marketing channel and calculate a CPA for each. In terms of building the "seller" or in this case, the "lens renter" side of the market, I'd probably do targeted facebook ads to photographers with messaging around "Make Money Renting Your Gear" or even more specific messaging "Make up to $20/day/lens renting your unused gear".
You could also try posting to various email lists/meetup groups/forums where photographers hang out asking for beta testers with whom you take 0% commission. Most likely, this is where you'll see the most success.
You could also go for the Chegg/Zipcar model, which obviously has much higher capital costs, where you own the inventory.
PPC could be a viable customer acquisition channel for you as well as "camera lens rental + city name" has decent volume, as does "lens name + rental" and "lens name + rental + city", so there's a long tail that you can exploit.
All that being said, there is quite a bit of competition in this market and it will be difficult to differentiate:
P.S. Glad to hear that 99designs ended up driving some good traffic to your site... I've also seen people list websites on Flippa.com (often with incredibly high prices) as a form of a growth hack when trying to reach internet marketers/affiliates, though we strongly discourage it.
Yep, so there's pretty good access/liquidity in this market.
I don't necessarily think that camera lens rentals is "biggest player wins" either, unlike crowdsourcing graphic design (you go to the site with the most designers) or selling websites (you go to the marketplace with the most buyers) or even engineering recruitment (you go to the marketplace with the largest number of VC funded employers participating).
Unlike the three use cases above, the end consumer will only care:
1.) is the site trustworthy
2.) is the pricing competitive with what else is out there
Less than 1000 visits and we're already going to start chalking up the wisdom that's been learned? This is way too early and the traffic achieved is well down into the noise.
CPC is mildly interesting, but what was the real conversion rate to something that yields revenue? That's the only one that matters, at least unless your site is going to be an ongoing destination for repeat visitors that will allow you to sell them at other times ones they get hooked.
And that's your next step: figure out how to make this site a destination for your intended audience that they come back to again and again for the great content you're publishing there. Don't count visits unless they buy something or sign up for your email list and become repeat visitors.
Building the MVP is the easy part. Establishing a sustainable growing level of traffic that matters is the hard part. Before I'd even bother with an MVP, I'd focus on a blog and see how successfully I could grow traffic for some audience along the way. The area you're interested in, photography, is ripe with content marketing opportunities.
What sort of content will attract the kind of people who want to rent your products? What other products will they sign up for? What are the SEO parameters needed to get you that audience for free instead of via paid advertising?
Those are among the key initial questions to answer.
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, it's too early to chalk up wisdom learned -- but the main point of writing this was to get a discussion started and see what feedback people had. In my experience, blog posts do better if you offer something in them. In this case, I was sharing what the first two weeks of launching a site and trying to get traffic were like, for all the readers who haven't done it yet but want to do it some day.
Nice break down of what you did, I have a couple of similar stories of launching something (after fully building it) and then getting very low traffic but a fairly high conversion rate(as in, user arrives, uses the site to do thing I designed it for and maybe comes back in the future). I seem to struggle with growing traffic though.
I have heard StumbleUpon is great for traffic, especially paid discovery, but each time I apply to paid discovery they turn me down on a "Lack of content" issue so I guess they safeguard what they present on Paid Discovery.
I have found, for other projects that I no longer run, that "offline" buzz works well - so press releases getting picked up in local media and that kind of thing works well, you just need to know which reported to sweet talk I guess.
Are sign-ups intended exclusively for people listing their gear? Perhaps you can have sign-ups for people trying to rent, too, and request additional information that would help you hone the site, such as equipment sought. For example:
Email: xxx@yyy.com
Equipment Sought: <text field or drop down listing camera lenses>
This could be done under the guise that you will send them an e-mail notification when the requested equipment is posted to the site. This would help identify whether:
1. Users are camera-savvy at all or are indeed random people "stumbling" upon the site
Not related to the post, but I think it might be worth trying to target a slightly different demographic for the rentals: casual photographers who don't necessarily have nice cameras. As one my self (I've never owned a DSLR), I'd definitely be interested in being able to 'rent' a nice camera for a vacation at the right price.
Would a 'rental package' suit you better? Something like, an SLR and one or two lenses that you rent for the weekend. What price would you be willing to pay? Especially considering you could get a new SLR and kit lens for ~900. $50/weekend? $100?
Thanks for the feedback! This is a suggestion I've been hearing a lot and may pursue.
1. go offline. find photography specialty stores as well as 2nd hand camera equipment stores. Get them to list some inventory, as an additional revenue source, and perhaps you can post some handbills there. There's a little bit of conflict here, but the additional revenue might justify the risk and allow them to keep more/broader inventory while they're at it.
2. Find their sites. If you can find photo equipment sites who'll list with you and link to you, even better
3. Craigslist: respond to every buy request, autopost inventory etc
4. Autoretweet everytime someone on twitter mentions a model of equipment that you carry (This last one might be spammy).
Maybe it's just me, but your site design doesn't really inspire confidence, which is probably hurting conversions.
- The top navigation is left-justified, but "Peer to peer local camera gear" on the next line (also in the header) is centered.
- Right below your call to action "Find a lens", you have very distracting social sharing buttons that should probably be in the header or footer.
- The line spacing on the titles of your featured equipment is huge. The pictures down there being different sizes also bothers me, and they seem cramped in that frame (they look better on the rent page, so maybe just give them a little bit more padding).
Well. Although I don't live in the area. Are there any physical boards. Perhaps at airports or sight seeing spots you can post paper based flyers too? Also offer for a small fee. Some kind of instructions for you to teach people basics of photography and or using this particular camera. Because although not a photographer myself. I'd imagine the nicer cameras being a bit harder to use properly and that would scare me away from renting it.
I rented an 18-200mm Nikon lens for a week in England when we went away for Christmas. The process relatively pain free, it was posted in a very padded box, and I just posted it back when I was done. I think it was about 60 pounds all told.
I found it a great way to try a lens I'd always wanted but couldn't afford - good luck with your business.
Facebook ads are going to be expensive, as you mentioned, but it takes time to learn the optimization needs of each channel. For example, your click through rate of .031% can be improved (image and copy performance is going to vary dramatically).
Give users who list their gear a way to do some of the work for you (after all you both want more traffic to the site)... Maybe allow them to embed YouTube videos showcasing their gear on their product listing pages.
The vast majority of people who need to rent lenses due so for a professional shoot where they cannot afford to drop $2k.
The lenses you need are popular pro lenses. The lenses you have can be bought for 3 weeks worth of rental. Basically no one rents kit lenses because they are so easy to buy used and are not very good relative quality.
You need stuff like: 70-200 f2.8 constant app
Go after getting people with those lenses and offer them insurance or some other comfort and you can prob ramp much faster.
Consider a very strict system for checking out the lenses and a very clear policy on what is who's fault.
Add in fraud protection of some type etc.
Then you will be offering a real service.
Eliminate lenses which are not a minimum of $300usd from your site