The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [57]
make the everyday better.
The Mesh offers some special opportunities, as we’ve seen. Here’s how I’d start: Look around at your everyday life. First of all, most of us live in communities, transport ourselves on foot, bike, car, or public transportation, have families, go to work, socialize, make dinner, hang out, play, and exercise. All of these are rich fodder for Meshing, either from the customer side of the equation or from a material goods perspective.
For example, you might hear someone complaining about her commute, and how difficult it is to coordinate with family members when going to and from different meetings or venues. Perhaps you have the same issue. That’s an opportunity to think about how a Mesh model might work better. As you start seeing the world through a Mesh lens, you’ll notice opportunities to improve the customer experience, and to improve your own opportunities for business reach or leverage. You’ll perk up when you hear something from a friend like, “We have this opportunity. We own a building I inherited from my family, and would like to explore some new ways of using it.” Real estate, in fact, is one of the very fertile arenas for Mesh models to go to work. Consider thinkspace, Cubes&Crayons, and In Good Company. Each of them brings a different twist and fresh approach to office space and services.
Mesh business opportunities exist in pretty much every aspect of life, whether it’s home services or child-care services, health care, fitness, food, or real estate. With your Mesh lens on, you’ll also start to wonder: What is it I own, or my friends own that we value, where the relationship between the value and the relative cost is off-kilter? And can we form a community around offering that asset? Here are four things to ask yourself:
1. How could a physical asset be managed using technology that allows an entrepreneur to offer and track the asset?
2. What would you need or want to know about the customer that you wouldn’t need if you were selling something outright? What type of partners might offer data to enhance your peripheral vision?
3. What kind of promise of service or maintenance is required for the business to thrive, and what kind of risk are you asking the customer to incur? How could you uniquely reduce or eliminate that risk?
4. What are you seriously passionate about?
With these questions in mind, here is some general advice for creating a Mesh business.
identify shareable physical assets.
Identify activities that require high-cost materials—a car or a bike, or a really cool handbag (like the ones offered by Rent the Runway or Bag Borrow or Steal). For consumers, personal transportation, food and shelter, office space, and real estate are good places to look. I would include services like gardening and building renovation, where expensive tools are involved.
RelayRides, Spride Share, DriveMyCarRentals, and WhipCar are good examples. These companies have their own spin on car sharing. They take advantage of the fact that lots of people already own their cars by letting owners offer their vehicles through the network. Cars sit in a driveway or parking lot most of the time. RelayRides customers sign up for the service in a way that’s similar to a vacation exchange or a rental. The car owner logs into the network, says when and where the car will be available—preferably where the renter can find it!—and makes the keys available. RelayRides adds the car-sharing infrastructure, including insurance from State Farm. (This insurance company has shown a willingness to innovate in Meshy ways. A State Farm