Manifesto
Things are not there to be owned. They are there to be used.
Sharepact exists so that a drill or an e-bike can change hands between strangers without either of them having to take the other on faith. Verified identity and Sharepact Protection on every rental.
Our grandparents expected the four-day week.They got the computer, and nothing else.
It had been promised to them along with holidays on the Moon and energy too cheap to meter. They were right to believe in it: they were wrong to assume it would arrive by itself. Since 1950 the only things that really changed are computers and the way we talk to each other, while buying and throwing away stayed the same machine it always was, and nobody bothered to argue with it.
Look at it up close, on a single object. A drill is built to run for two thousand hours and over its whole life it works for six to fifteen minutes; the rest of the time it hangs in a garage, four hundred metres from an identical drill hanging the same way. Multiply those two garages by every garage in Europe and you have the bill: we dug up, smelted, shipped and boxed the same object millions of times over because nobody could ask the neighbour.
The bill reads another way too: we pay a hundred to use two. Every extra drill is copper taken out of a mountain, a container ship, a cardboard box, a van, and when it breaks we all throw it away at once.
The answer is not owning less and going without. It is not buying it ten times.
This story starts with a pressure washer.Twenty listings, not one guarantee.
We wanted one for a couple of days, and a classifieds site turned up dozens: people renting out theirs, along with the drill, the trailer, the cement mixer. Not one of those listings said what happens if the thing comes back broken, or when the money turns up. People were already willing. Everything else was missing.
What was missing, precisely, was any reason to say yes. Ownership was never the problem: fear is. Nobody hands a €2,400 e-bike to a stranger out of faith in human nature, they hand it over if they know who they are dealing with, what happens if it breaks, and that payment arrives.
Those are the three things Sharepact puts into every rental: a verified ID, Sharepact Protection included, payment guaranteed. Together they are the plumbing of an economy that does not exist yet.
What Vinted did for second-hand clothes, renting is still waiting for. And second-hand was the easy half.
01
One drill, ten hands
Ten people sharing the same drill are nine drills nobody has to make.
02
Whoever hands it over has a surname
ID checked on every rental, on both sides. Without it, nothing moves.
03
Owners have to earn from it
Putting your own things up for rent is a risk and a service. It has to pay, and it has to be covered.
04
It starts on your own street
Renting works within a few kilometres. Revolutions always start within a few kilometres.
“The hard part is not imagining a world that works better. It is building it.”
It starts with the thingyou use least.
Rent what you need, or put up whatever has been sitting in the cellar. Every item that starts moving again is one that does not have to be made a second time. It all happens in the app, with verified identity and Sharepact Protection on every rental.
