Toy and Tool 

The Community Sharing Model

Designed around the incredible power of people, we believe that our communities can greatly improve their social and economic wellbeing through the facilitation and support of peer-to-peer sharing.

Imagine for a moment there are people that want to buy things they can’t afford. For most of us this is easy to imagine, regardless of that, what do folks do? Most will forgo buying the things they want and miss out on the experience the item could provide. Others will delay purchasing something until they can afford it, so missing out on the experience by delaying it, while others may purchase a lesser quality item that may not fulfill their expectations. 

Toy and Tool helps to solve the affordability part of the equation by allowing people to purchase exactly what they want by sharing the cost of the item with other like-minded folks in the community, for a fee. In this way the owner of the item uses the desirability and value of the item to pay for itself.

Sharing an item with like-minded people is the other end of the equation that makes the model work. Kayaking is a great example, and as someone who enjoys kayaking I can tell you it’s very difficult to go kayak without one. That would be called swimming. So how do you get a Kayak if you can’t afford to buy one?

In your community there is likely someone, if not many someone’s with the same affordability dilemma as the first person we discussed; they want a Kayak but can’t afford one. Or perhaps they want a kayak but wanted to try it first to see if they would enjoy it; or perhaps it’s not an activity they would participate in enough to make worthwhile; or perhaps they have no place to store a kayak; or no way to transport it; OR perhaps they want to go Kayaking but other activities in mind they would enjoy more, so they invest in that activity instead. We’ll talk about this last person later. Either way there are many excuses we can use to talk ourselves out of purchasing the things we want, regardless of what decision we make, we're still interested in trying Kayaking for ourselves.

So although people may not be willing to buy an item for themselves, they’re likely willing to pay a small fee to own the experience of enjoying the item instead, provided the item is affordable and the process is easy. From this perspective, the platform not only helps individuals experience an item, but it also helps to satisfy all the questions they may have had surrounding the responsibility of owning item, the main one being, will I enjoy the experience enough to make ownership worthwhile. 

Let's go a step further

Remember the person who didn’t want to buy a kayak because they thought they might enjoy another activity more? This is where the real magic of community sharing happens and the part of the model I love the most. Because the person who rented the Kayak didn’t buy a Kayak, and instead used their money to buy, for example the best mountain bike ever, they can now rent that bike out on Toy and Tool to offset the cost of ownership. And who would they rent it to? They rent the mountain bike to the same person who owns the Kayak that they rented previously.

The reason why this is magical is that you now have different people in the community participating in activities that otherwise may not have been available or affordable, while the cost of ownership is distributed amongst members of the community as a whole. Overall the act of sharing in this way helps us to engage more actively in our community while creating positive and respectful relationships with our neighbours.

Economic and community benefits

Furthermore if the economic benefits are not obvious let me spell it out further. With individuals renting out the items they own for a fee, after awhile the items pay for themselves, and soon after these same items start putting added disposable income into people's pockets. And from there help to improve our community economies.

One final point I'll make is the potential effect community sharing has for the public purse. Generally speaking, improving community health and wellbeing is the domain of our local governments. Creating and maintaining programs, sponsoring events, and facilitating product purchases takes money, a lot of money. However if a portion of the costs required to improve community health and wellbeing could be payed for naturally as a byproduct of our platform, that means more money from the public purse could be used to go towards other services, or perhaps even a reduction in taxes as less support would be required from the government. You choose.

Our Minimum Lovable Product

More than a minimum viable product or MVP, we’re designing love and delight into our platform.

A minimal viable product or MVP is generally the minimum a service needs to be to prove an idea works and presents promise of something more scalable. Or otherwise, a product worth investing more time and money in.

Product and platform designers rarely launch with their final concept, as you learn to rely and thrive on feedback generated by real users in the community to help shape the desirability of the platform. Real users will test and reshape assumptions based on what they really do with your product, which is completely different than what they say they will do. The customer is always right of course, but you can never completely rely on their opinions. But relying on what they ‘do’ however can generally be taken to the bank, and we mean that literally.

One of the core components we’re testing for Toy and Tool is enjoyment and delight. We’re betting on the things that allow us to experience happiness and fulfillment, which could be an activity as common as bicycling, surfing, or horseback riding. The crux of the situation of course is that all of these activities require particular items to help fulfill those experiences. Regrettably to satisfy any of those activities on a whim is far from easy without the right equipment, and disappointingly, the services are not always available or affordable in our community to satisfy those experiences.

 How the Toy and Tool model works is by encouraging people with access to the items necessary for an experience to share them with others in a community. Why would they share these items? Precisely for the same reasons why we all don’t have these items ourselves… cost, or more pointedly, the cost of ownership. Cost of ownership is the greatest problem our Toy and Tool model resolves and one of the biggest reasons we’re betting on its’ success. 

To better understand cost of ownership from the Toy and Tool perspective let’s play devils advocate for a moment. In larger communities you can very likely rent things like bicycles, surfboards and even a horse to go horseback riding. People will say that if these businesses exist why would I rent these things from someone in my community? Great question and the answer is cost of ownership. 

A private individual is simply looking to offset the cost of ownership of the item they possess as opposed to running a business with overhead and profit margins to maintain. As long as renting the item is worth their time to do so and they’re not using the item themselves then they’re likely ahead. The greater the cost of ownership and burden the item has on the individual, the more likely they are to rent the item out, and subsequently the more likely they are to find a like minded individual who would much rather rent the same item as opposed to buying it for themselves. And as the item owner is simply looking to recover costs, they can generally charge much less making the item more affordable to rent than from an established business.

 Now back to delight and encouraging folks to dream big. To truly test our platform and to encourage others to get involved, we need to prove the idea works by demonstrating ourselves how the idea will work. But why is delight important. Delight for us means providing individuals with the opportunity to enjoy an experience that they otherwise could not afford, or would have to wait a long time before they could afford. It’s true that the experience they’re looking for cannot be physically experienced on the platform but it can be experienced emotionally by providing the promise that such an experience is possible in their community and perhaps even available to them on whim. 

Realizing that such an experience is available to them both affordably and in their vicinity, is when we want the user to take in a quick gasp of air, smile uncontrollably, and immediately change their plans for the weekend. This is delight, and the emotion we need and want to induce for our Minimal Lovable Platform to work.

So what are our next steps? 

We’re going to launch carefully and minimally in order to measure the effect while maximizing the outcome of every step we take. We know there will be risks and problems, and we want those problems to surface as soon as possible while we’re still small so we can solve those problems before we scale.

While we’re looking to solve the obvious problems, we’d love our community to contribute ideas to the experiences that would delight them. Personally speaking I have a family of five and there’s a lot of stuff we’d love to experience that we realistically understand we could never afford ourselves. For my family, I’m using the opportunity, some would say the excuse, to purchase some of the quality items we always wanted to enjoy and then will leverage the Toy and Tool platform to help offset the cost of those items. Delight of course is a big factor and although I always wanted a helicopter we still need to think a little smaller first. 

With that, if you have ideas please share them with us.

Just two Categories: Toys and Tools

For the launch of platform we just have two main categories divided into Toys and Tools. We’re starting off this way, as we didn’t want to create an inventory of categories that in the short term would primarily be empty. It would only be frustrating to the user and not very enjoyable. 

We are continuing to work on the categories of course however they’ll likely be modeled after those from our friends at Kijiji. So yes the categories will be growing, but it will take us a couple of years before we’re able to launch with a full inventory of categories like what Kijiji or Craig’s list has now.

One thing we would love to add is of course services. We know of some folks who have chainsaws and wood splitters, however as you can imagine tools like these can be dangerous if handled improperly, however that doesn’t mean that the owners of these tools are not unwilling to rent themselves out as operators of these tools. In fact many folks are often looking for any excuse at all to use their tools, and if they can make a little money in the process to buy more tools, then why not?

Anyway if you don’t see a category for the toy or tool you want to list please let us know and we’ll add it to our list to be integrated into the site as time goes on.

Setting a Fair Rental Price 

A great question with a bit of a cryptic answer – it depends. The vision for Toy and Tool has always been about the sharing of private property for a fee used to offset the cost of ownership. It was never intended for folks to start a rental business, however we’re not going to dissuade anyone that wants to. Business sometimes just happens.

When first trying the idea, I started renting out our family’s popup camper for $50/night. Folks would take it away for a week or weekend, and the camper gradually ended up paying for itself, and soon it was also helping to pay for the greatest portions of our family vacations. We could afford nicer campgrounds, and some of the better activities like horseback riding, go carting, and deep-sea fishing, all courtesy of our little camper. We even bought a canoe and bicycles for the kids. We did increase the price a few times as we were getting a lot of calls without any impact on demand, and then we soon bought a second camper, as I hated seeing all that lost revenue. Our two little campers soon helped us to finance a much larger one, which we still rent today. We didn’t intend on getting into business for ourselves, the market just sort of made it happen. 

So what to charge? It only makes sense that folks will want to maximise the revenue they earn, but that doesn’t always mean charging more. You’ll often earn more sometimes by charging less as you’ll earn more by renting more often. Remember folks are often renting because they don’t want to buy the item themselves, however if the cost is too high, the first thing they’re likely to say is that they might as well buy one instead of renting it. Its really up to you to figure out, but we’ll do our best to provide some guidance along the way. 

As an experiment for the launch of this site, we purchased a medium sized Honda rototiller. The cost was around $1500 plus tax. We chose the same model we rented from a rental company the year before for about $100 for a half day. If you know the Honda brand, you know you’re paying for quality and reliability, which is why it’s a popular brand at rental stores. They’re built to last and designed to take some abuse so encouraging the tiller to pay for itself will not be a problem.

As a price point I decided on $50 a day as it was half the price of what they charged at the rental store and if I rented it out 30 times, the tiller would end up paying for itself, maybe even by the end of the year. A value added benefit also is that folks in the community wouldn’t have to travel outside the community like I did to pick up the rented tiller or have to drive just as far to drop it off.

Again what you charge is really up to you and what you feel is fair. For our rototiller we’re hoping to rent it out countless times over the lifespan of the tiller, while encouraging a lot of people in our community affordably take up backyard gardening.