Trends
Communities In a response to growing globalization, people feel the need to have a community of neighbours in a world that is rapidly becoming more individualistic. Building communities on- or offline helps the users feel like they have a place they can go to.
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Digitalization Digitalization has also been steadily disrupting more and more classic business models. More markets are moving to digital formats to achieve a higher level of accessibility. However, there are some solutions that are valuable to stay analog. For example, part of the nice process of borrowing items from neighbours is actually interacting with those neighbours face to face. Additionally, by meeting the person you are borrowing from, you feel more responsible for the item you are borrowing and may be less likely to damage it.
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Access over ownership Ownership used to be a display of status. With new symbols emerging, ownership has become less important and ability to use the product becomes the leading benefit. This allows for new business models that provide access, rather than ownership.
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Decreased consumer patience Smartphones have made nearly everything available at the click of a button. This is nice for consumers but poses a threat to companies that don’t come up immediately in searches. The user has gotten used to getting information directly, without looking further.
Analysis
Company Values
Convenience It is much easier to borrow from neighbours than it is to rent from a company. Building connections in the community also leads to potentially recurring interactions. The convenience of borrowing from a neighbour who lives a 2 minute walk from you is incredibly valuable. The process of renting through companies is arduous. First you have to go during their open hours, travel there, sign release forms, provide ID, and return it again during open hours all while paying hourly for a tool or product you might only need for a few minutes. Peerby’s value lies in the fact that neighbours are almost always accessible. And Peerby does the hard work for you, constantly requesting the items consumers seek from a gradually growing radius of Peerby users local to the consumer.
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Save money Peerby is economical. Why buy a product you may only use once or twice when you can borrow it? You save money by not buying items that you only need once. Peerby aims to move from an ownership society to an access society. Peerby claims 80% of the things we buy we use no more than once. In the future, Peerby envisions that people will have instant access to anything they want at any time.
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Live green Peerby values environmental thinking. The sharing economy model allows for better use of resources. With shared ownership, multiple people can use the same, seldom-used item. This system helps reduce the amount of products that are being produced, which in turn, reduces the impact production has on society. Some would argue that consumerism will never truly go away, a sharing economy may at least reduce the amount of waste created.
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Connect people Peerby, as one of its values, believes in connecting people. In the digital age the concept of communities is changing. However, this doesn’t mean they are being weakened. The current generation of communities are being built online and span larger areas than ever before. Companies like Peerby are essential in this process as they can create lasting connections and functioning communities by digitally connecting people.
Peerby
Design Roadmap
For Peerby, we designed a new service proposition, Peerby People, to help them become self-sustaining without deviating from their vision: “Instant access to everything for everyone by 2020”. We present this advice as a roadmap with the necessary steps to bring this platform to life.
Client /
Peerby
Scope /
Strategic Design
Design Roadmap
Business Model
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Team /
-
Year /
2016
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Project Length /
3 months, 1 day per week
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Peerby is a start-up based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Peerby Classic allows the users to borrow goods from the people in the community. Thereby it battles both the low usage of some equipment, and it challenges the market economy by reducing consumption and thus the impact on nature. Peerby Go offers the same service, but it allows users to ask a small fee for their products. Peerby in return, offers an insurance in case the product gets damaged in the use.
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For Peerby, the challenge for the coming years is to grow their product or expand their services whilst still maintaining their original vision and ideology. An additional challenge for Peerby is to become self-sustaining in the future, as right now crowdfunding is their main source of income.
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To Peerby, we presented a new service proposition, Peerby People, to help them become self-sustaining without deviating from their vision: “Instant access to everything for everyone by 2020”. We present this advice as a roadmap with the necessary steps to bring this platform to life.
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First, we introduce Peerby’s playing field. This playing field is composed of the users, trends, competition, and the company itself. This analysis is followed by an introduction of the new service ideated, Peerby People, along with the key milestones that come with the introduction. It then continues by introducing the revenue model, along with other financial aspects of the service. Before the conclusions are drawn, future recommendations for the service are briefly touched upon, to give an overview of the challenges that come after the service has been introduced.
Introduction
Competitors
There are many companies, besides Peerby, based in the principles of the sharing economy. In the C2C category (across all sectors), we find Airbnb, Commuters-Club, and Local Roots. While in the B2C category, most important are Uber, Chegg, and Kuhteilen.
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There are some direct competitors for Peerby, although not all are present in the Netherlands: Neighborgoods and StreetBank. On the other hand, there are companies that offer community service platforms such as Neighbors Can Help and TaskRabbit. A step away into community marketplaces has other competitors such as Krrb, Rumgr, and Marktplaats.
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Many lessons can be learned from both these competitors’ successes as well as failures. Chegg has become a very popular market community of used goods. This began by targeting students trying to sell old university textbooks and expanded from there. Uber has struggled to break into some countries because of strict regulations on “taxi” services. However, both Airbnb and Uber (as well as a number of other P2P platforms) rely on the reputation of their users. Users are encouraged to do business with each other and then rate the experience. In the case of Airbnb, guests will rate their stay and renters will rate their guests motivating both parties to be their best. A similar rating system is interesting for us.
Users
The results of our analysis found a number of potential users for the new service, Peerby People. These users are divided in two categories: either are asking for help or giving help. In the following lines some potential users are further described.
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Always on the go The busy, young, urban worker. Has a very tight schedule and therefore welcomes a lot of help in his or her life. Needs help for the smaller things so he or she doesn’t have to do them, which saves time and stress. Doesn’t mind paying a bit for the service.
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The social seeker Likes to meet new people and get to know his neighbours. Considers the city too individualistic. Uses Peerby to get in contact with their surroundings, an added benefit.
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The unhandy man They need help for the tasks they can’t do on their own; they are incapable due to sickness or just not skilled enough. Uses Peerby to avoid the trouble of looking for professionals, and trusts the community.
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The occasion worker Has a part-time job but has time left in their schedule. Likes to do something extra, not even always to earn money. Very flexible in their time, so is available to do small jobs at a large range of times.
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Part time job searcher Needs a constant flow of income; uses Peerby services as a way to find small and constant jobs. Constantly seeking for new opportunities in the platform, to build his reputation and get the money they need.
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Voluntary work seeker Socially engaged, with a desire to make the world a better place. Uses Peerby voluntary job of the month to do good in his community and sometimes to build his CV.
Concept: Peerby People
We envision that the final goal that Peerby should strive for is a platform to fulfill everyone’s needs through, not only through instant access to products, but also through instant access to services. To reach this, Peerby should follow a number of major steps in the process, which are shown in The Milestone Map.
The platform that should be developed first in order to reach this total concept, is a platform through which users can seek help for (small) jobs in and around the house: Peerby People. Examples are cooking, ironing, small plumbing work, and babysitting. Through the platform users can ask, and pay for a compensation for these jobs.
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Volunteering work Special attention needs to be given to an aspect of the service that is very much in the ideology of Peerby. This is the “voluntary job of the month”, that can be introduced immediately from the start. The idea of this is that although people usually want or need to get paid to do a certain job, people can also have the option to help someone out for free.
How does it work?
Overview of services
Business Model
Peerby’s most important challenge on the short term is to create revenue in order to be self-sustaining. Currently, Peerby is using money from investors in order to maintain the platform. As the information that came with the crowdfunding action, this is not likely to be enough and new rounds of investment are likely to follow. However, another round of investing might be perceived as weak by investors. Therefore, Peerby has to start creating revenue in order to remain attractive.
Revenue model Initially, per transaction, Peerby receives a small commission. This basic model is already used in the Peerby Go application. The concept has been proven to work for Peerby, and easily transferred to another platform within the company. Next to that, it does not create barriers to users like a subscription or pre-paid fee per transaction (e.g. paying for a token that allows the user to make a transaction).
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After some time, and when the number of users for Peerby services has grown substantially, an urgency function to the platform will be added. Users that use this function pay a small fee and in return, all users that are known to have done a job needed (example, ironing) are sent a notification.
Declaration To declare costs, the user makes a picture of the receipt and the user is paid together with his wage. However, to increase safety in the process, the user has still to approve these.
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Payment The user is billed for each time he uses a service. He has to approve the hours worked by the service provider and receives an invoice for this. He can pay through iDeal, e-banking, and paypal. In later stages, if Peerby has greater financial stability, Peerby can offer a monthly bill to the users, which can also be deducted automatically. Later on, users will be able to prepay for jobs, for example laundry, or cleaning. A user can therefore prepay a number of hours so there is no need to have these hours billed individually. Peerby receives a smaller commission in this (to make this cheaper and thus more attractive); but in turn, Peerby receives the interest the prepaid money generates.
Implementation and Roadmap
The desired implementation for Peerby People is shown in the following roadmap. A roadmap, bringing us from A to B, showing alternative routes, provides a strong metaphor for Design Roadmaps. Strategy is a journey, purposes are destinations, means are routes, and achievements are landmarks. A design roadmap provides strong visualization and decision support.
The pacing and synchronizing of technology forecast, markets and product evolution plans is a major challenge. A roadmap structures and supports the dialogues of cross-communication.
The implementation roadmap distinguishes a number of aspects of the service: product development, promotion, markets, technology, and business. The separate components all fit together, but can be developed individually, allowing development teams to easily tackle one challenge at a time.
The Three Horizons of Growth
As aforementioned, Peerby’s vision for the future is a society that is much less dependent on a market economy to fulfil needs. Peerby itself aims at “providing instant access to everything, everywhere for everyone in 2020“. Sharing and helping each other inside a community is one of the major elements in this future horizon.
The following visual represents Peerby’s three horizons of growth. In the first horizon, we see the market economy decreasing and the sharing economy increasing. Platforms like Peerby are steering the change towards a more sustainable future. On the second horizon, we see the implementation of Peerby People as the trigger to the third horizon, an integrated neighbourhood, where everyone has instant access to everything.
Further development
A few aspects about this proposition require special attention when further developing the service. These are briefly discussed in the following lines.
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Guaranteed availability Instant access requires that always someone is available to do a certain job. This is incredibly challenging because traditional businesses can’t always offer this. Peerby should consider if this is an attainable challenge and if it is, how the company can address this. One solution could be hiring workers to do the jobs in periods of high need for certain jobs.
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Accessibility Peerby states in their mission that it should be available for “everyone”, which should also include those with a smaller wallet. There should always be jobs that are available for free, for example through the “volunteering job of the month”.
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Recurring use outside the platform People might find someone to do babysitting through the Peerby People platform, but might re-use these services outside of the platform. Tutoring services like StudentsPlus also experience this issue. Therefore, Peerby needs to offer a superior product in the platform. This may include ease of pay, ease of communication or support in another means.
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Pre-paying for supplies In some cases, the service provider is asked to pre-pay for supplies and later declare them (e.g. grocery shopping). For some of the users this may be very difficult because their financial situation does not allow them to, this is the case with some students, but also in the case of those on social support. Although not urgent and potentially derailing, this is something that deserves attention when the platform is developed further.
