jayreno

8 ms·

1.
by jayreno 9y ago
Present you is happier to only pay $40/month rather than $500-600 up front. The hassle of selling used furniture should not be taken lightly, both in it's complexity and its sale price. Items on Craigslist, sold 12 months after pu
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by jayreno 9y ago
Awesome, glad to see this resonate. Where are you generally moving to/from? Inter- or intra-city moves?
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by jayreno 9y ago
Re differentiators: reasonable question, for sure. Check my reply to Charia above. Re established market: interestingly, Cort and most other rental cos don't have a very good hold on the direct to consumer rental market. They are prima
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by jayreno 9y ago
Good idea. Possible we are looking too mass market at the moment. Will keep this in mind.
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by jayreno 9y ago
Not much more. If the apartment is way up a walkup and we're carrying 4 dressers, 4 tables, 4 armoires, etc, we'll generally change the $99 delivery fee to $149. Re damage: if you break something, we charge the cost of fixing the
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by jayreno 9y ago
We see ourselves as competing more with "ownership" than anything else. To us, ownership of furniture (i.e. responsibility for big ticket items that tie you down) is the problem. Our competitive advantage to financing options is j
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by jayreno 9y ago
1. Data is about split. We're seeing people use us for both inter- and intra-city moves. 2. Agreed, might be a bit biased. LMK if you find a different/better source. 3. Census, unfortunately no. But like above, equally curious to
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by jayreno 9y ago
The ~$100/month price is our 3 month price. So total cost to you to have either of those sofas is $300 vs the cost to buy them retail at $600, which excludes assembly. Fire sales are easier said than done. Takes time to get real replie
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by jayreno 9y ago
See my reply to koolba below.
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by jayreno 9y ago
Yes, rent-to-buy is something we recently starting working on. Many people have asked about this, and we agree it makes a LOT of sense for our customers to have that option at any point during their rental. We'll have more info on our
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by jayreno 9y ago
Great point here. It's a bit counter intuitive, right, that Americans on the whole are moving less. To add some color: -The majority of Americans that live in rural or somewhat suburban areas are most certainly (though anecdotally) bri
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by jayreno 9y ago
Yeah, it's kind of gross really. These guys prey on the inability of certain income-classes to get credit, obtain loans, etc. Rent-a-Center is the same way :(
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by jayreno 9y ago
Yep, totally. We've been approached by a number of real estate agents asking if we'll do staging. We're working on seeing of and how this might fit into our business model.
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by jayreno 9y ago
Happy to jump in here to talk about pricing, as it seems to be a big topic of conversation (and rightfully so). - The $338 bed that you linked to is on a massive, one-time sale right now. I've refreshed the page several times and the p
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by jayreno 9y ago
We plan to differentiate ourselves by offering better quality items, a more modern storefront/interface, a superior customer experience with top notch support, and most importantly, better pricing (we know it's not perfect for eve
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by jayreno 9y ago
Agreed - scrapping furniture just because you're moving is not a great idea. This will, however, occur often when we buy IKEA furniture (or items of that quality level) that we often have to trash items, or are actually trashed acciden
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by jayreno 9y ago
Yep, it's difficult to find fully furnished apartments in a number of cities, especially at a reasonable price. Oftentimes landlords will put significant premiums on apartments they have fully furnished and keep that margin for themsel
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by jayreno 9y ago
That's exactly what we're working on now. we should have more information about rent-to-buy options on our site soon, but in the meantime we're discussing it directly with anyone who might be interested in this.
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by jayreno 9y ago
All great points re Feather vs Cort. To add to the conversation, we see ourselves as different from Cort in 2 key areas: 1) Price: compare our prices and, across the board, you'll find we beat them in every category, for every rental l
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by jayreno 9y ago
Well, you're right - it's not "new". Rent-a-Center has been around since the 70s, but are completely predatory, offering lease to own options that gauge customers (ie. a $700 sofa will cost the customer $2100 after 2 yea
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by jayreno 9y ago
Thanks for the thoughts! Curious to hear what type of furniture you would be purchasing that would break even to our furniture at 3 months? The breakeven price for our customers is always longer than the total price of the rental. Wonder if
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by jayreno 9y ago
You're exactly right. There are a number of other costs associated with getting the furniture, assembly, and selling or scrapping costs that are sometimes difficult to quantify. Wondering how y'all think we should be communicating
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Launch HN: Feather (YC S17), painless furniture rental for people who move a lot
79 points by jayreno 9y ago|123 comments