Struck in 2021, an idea that led me to start a leap. I started Rentux as soon as the 2nd year of my college started offline after the first wave of covid. But this hypothesis is not about that. This is about conquering an open market. Almost a year back, I started a project to make rental transactions safer for everyone and it eventually ended up being a private limited company - Verispace. I had also started TRC (The Rental Community), formerly ‘Loop’. As it stands, it is the largest community of Rental Business owners across the country and I plan to aggressively scale it in 2026. Rentux wasn’t really on focus for me for a while as I am very much focused and committed to Verispace. Now that we have a brief background, let’s begin.
For quite some time, I wasn’t able to figure out a few things:
1. What shall I do about Rentux? It was a valuable platform and it was getting hundreds of customers per week. I wasn’t putting any effort or money into it, yet it was growing on its own. I can’t really keep it running in that condition where I had to deny all the customers. I even thought of selling off the entity, but again, I knew it's potential as well.
` 2. How do I multiply and scale The Rental Community, keep adding more members constantly? As TRC is a distribution channel for Verispace, I wanted it to scale as much as possible and as fast as possible. Tomorrow, the members of TRC will be the customers of Verispace.
3.How do I keep TRC members hooked and provide value?
A few days back, a random idea struck me and this hypothesis is about that:
Step 1: TRC Leads Program
I decided to launch an Initiative where I share the leads I get on Rentux with the members of TRC for free. I will also list their respective inventories on Rentux. There’s a prerequisite though. To become eligible for these free leads, the rental business owner has to refer and add one new rental business owner in TRC.
This will unlock a few things:
1. The leads from Rentux will get utilised for free, so I can keep running and scaling the platform passively
2. The rental businesses will be hooked to the community and there will be huge value addition for them in form of qualified leads
3. The member count will start growing because of the referral program
4. By listing the inventories of all member rental busineses, Rentux will become The Largest rental platform of the country
Step 2: Member Acquisition
Even though it sounds simple, this is an extreme effort and time consuming process. There are more that 1000+ rental businesses just in Pune across all categories. Imagine the numbers across India! Bringing them together is not easy. And doing it while you are running a company is even harder. So we came up with a decision to hire a team member dedicated to community outreach and growth. The target is to add 1000 rental businesses in 2026.
Step 3: Conversion and Control
Once we have a community growing and the growth engine ready, we’ll start offering them solutions. A Verification System through Verispace, an inventory management system and free leads through Rentux. We later plan to partner directly with the brands to create an exclusive supply portal for rental businesses to purchase inventory (similar to zomato hyperpure). We can also facilitate bulk purchases on community behalf. This will be economical for rental businesses as well as the product distributors - a win-win for everyone. These steps and more, will hold the potential to have an entire dominance over the rental market of India.
We'll be owning the entire infrastructure. Rental Booking Systems, Verification Systems, The Rental Community, Leads, Supply Chain and more.
And that's the hypothesis!
It might not work as planned or imagined, things might break, execution might fail, I could be wrong. Let's see.