#2 - My first startup (0k/Year so far)

This is the story so far of faroo, my first start-up.
When I was 18 I worked as a car mechanic after doing my apprenticeship in switzerland. I wasn't happy with my work, I was young and full of potential (as most young people) but I think there was a lack of believe in myself. I have always been creative and full of ideas of how to improve stuff or make money. So trying to escape my work situation I brainstormed ideas of how to make money. One of those ideas was a rental marketplace. Instead of a marketplace to buy stuff you would rent it ( + passive income). But as I didn't know what I know now (and lack of execution discipline). So I just stored that idea on my ideas list and moved on with my life. Couple of years later in 2020, it's summer my last university semester is about to start. I am playing pingpong outside with my friend and future co-founder. He needed a high pressure cleaner, but he didn't want to buy on. So he said "a website to rent high pressure cleaners would be a good business idea" and I remembered my previous business idea and said "a website to rent all kinds of equipment would be great business idea". His eyes opened wide, he really liked it. A couple of days later he said he would start working in on it and asked me to join. After talking and pitching our idea to multiple people and doing some competition research we decided to focus on the b2b market and to start with the construction industry as our first niche.
So this is the story of the idea. Now we had a problem, fatmir is a mechanical engineer that works in sales, and I am a energy systems engineer that just finished university. None of us knows how to code a website. For us the people that do it are on the same level as wizards. So instead of trying to learn how to code we decided to try to find someone who can do it for us (with the best case scenario just by giving equity). We found a couple of companies that would be willing to do it for 100k to 200k, but we don't have that kind of money.
Finally, we found a company in Poland who what willing to code the MVP for 20k, we could then earn some money and finance the coding of the rest of the marketplace (50K, total 70k). Long story short we paid 20k for front end and very little backend (just send confirmation emails, register users and upload articles) and no admin panel. The customers weren't even able to pay in the website (so no revenue for us).

When we asked how much it would cost to upgrade, so we would have the basics to make some money they sent an offer of 300k. So needless to say we just wasted 20k.

We were destroyed and thought that would be the end of our startup, but I found sharetribe where you can create your own marketplace in minutes (like shopify for marketplaces). In one week sharetribe go was online. Not long after that we got our first 2 users which will mainly be providers (upload equipment for renting). faroo is online since August, and now we have 10 users and 3 of which uploaded machines for renting. Right now we have 42 listing that could be rented.

But we have the next problem, some of our users want to post a listing but the platform is not suited for them because they have another pricing model than sharetribe go provides. ST go is not very customizable but very fast to deploy. If I want to customize my marketplace I need to change to ST Flex or to the free to use community edition of sharetribe go. In ST Flex we can change the frontend our self (with coding it ourself i.e. a developer) in the community edition, we have all the code from ST go, and we can host it ourselves and change the code however we want, but we really need to know how to code. So that is the reason I am here and want to learn to code.

Of course not only that, I also want to have the power to create something out of nothing. If I have an idea, I can just sit down and start programming, that is what I really want.

Our plan in the next couple of months is for me to learn HTML, CSS, JS and Ruby and at the same time to get a lot of providers (users that post listings) in our marketplace. When faroo has enough providers/supply (I hope until end of the year), we can start focusing on getting customers.

So I hope it wasn't too much of a read, and if you made it until here feel free the ask some questions of drop a like.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day :)