HYDERABAD: Necessity is the mother of invention. GrabOnRent, a product rental marketplace that lets you rent furniture, appliances, bikes, etc and gets them delivered to your doorstep, was born when three young IIT Guwahati graduates wanted a barbecue for party later in the evening and had a hard time finding where to rent it from.
“We even went as far as resorting to buying one but, thankfully, saner heads prevailed that day. It was after this experience that we became acutely aware of the hassles people have to face while renting stuff,” Shubham says.
Thus GrabOnRent, the brainchild of Shubham Jain, Aditya Sharma and Manish S Sugandh, three young IIT Guwahati graduates, took birth. It is aimed at young professionals who frequently relocate deal with skyrocketing real-estate prices and carry a truckload of baggage every single time while relocating.
“Renting objects makes more than just economic sense. It does away with most of the burdens associated with ownership, both financial and psychological.
Consider this, by choosing to rent instead of buying, one does not have to invest time, money and space to maintain and preserve the object, or, worry about having to spend a fortune to enjoy using it.
In addition to this, one does not have to fear the object becoming obsolete and the investment being wasted,” says Shubham Jain, Co-founder and CEO of GrabOnRent. The company recently launched their services in Hyderabad with about 400 vendors on board.
All you have to do is browse through the extensive range of products, select the item and make the payment for rent and security deposit online and the item gets delivered to your doorstep. Each item passes through a stringent quality check before dispatch.
After use, the item gets picked up, again from your doorstep. Security deposit is then returned online after verification and quality check of the item.
For enabling the transaction and taking care of logistics, a certain percentage of total transaction amount is charged as commission form the suppliers. This stands as their primary source of revenue. Currently, all the suppliers on the platform are registered business and in the near future they will be bringing on individuals as well.
Team GrabOnRent claims they are the only players that provide 500-plus products while providing a “seamless user experience to their web and app users”. “We also try to provide our consumers with relevant products with changing seasons - like air coolers and air conditioners during summer and party/event equipment during winter when they plan to party in chilling weather.
For the migrating crowd, we cater to most common needs and hassle consumers face providing furniture, appliances and bikes on rent,” Shubham shares.
Each of the founders’ expertise in different field helped their business idea be successful. Shubham is the big-vision person with exceptional product and marketing skills, Aditya is a techie by heart, and Manish is a methodological and innovative operations and business development person. “This made for an obvious choice for us to come together and start working on the idea,” he adds further.
“We want to be able to touch more than two million lives by 2020 thereby making rentals help people with their temporary requirements and avoid making heavy investments upfront,” he explains. Their recent achievement has been that they received 20 times more order in the month of March compared to the orders they got last year.