I am building a book rental platform. Need your input.
I want to build a book rental platform for paper books in my state in Nigeria.
Users can rent books for a fee rather than buying a copy. Rent will be charged weekly.
I will appreciate any advice or input regarding execution, especially from founders with experience about a business of this sort.
What about peer to peer?
I thought of this.
However, it will be a more complicated approach. I will have to address the chicken and egg problem, alot of disputes could arise with respect to book handling and safety. Also, I couldn't conceive a clear monetization model for a peer to peer lending model.
How would this beat a public library, where they "rent" books for free?
Thanks for your response.
Where I come from, the libraries are not functional.
In fact making books more accessible and available is my goal for this project.
If that's the case, then personally I would consider why the existing libraries aren't functional, figure out if there's a software solution that would fix it or not and if there is, build and sell it to the libraries. Could even be done as a hosted saas, for nice recurring revenue.
Would be worth chatting to the libraries first, before writing any code.
I like and will explore the idea of providing software solutions to existing libraries.
However, the reason why they have failed is because they are state owned.
Here in Nigeria, due to bad leadership, whatever is state owned is bound to fail.
Ouch, yeah ok can see where you're coming from now.
You might want to looking into how Blockbuster processes used to work. In my country there used to be a number of different video/dvd chains out there, blockbuster eventually drove most of them out of business, so they knew what they were doing.
The same processes for renting out physical dvd's could be applied to books.
Although eventually Blockbuster went bankrupt because online movies smashed their business model of renting out physical dvd's.
Yes. You get the idea.
Thanks for your input. They were very meaningful.