Gearmo

Co-founder, designer / developer

How we got started

The Gearmo project was a collaborative effort between myself and Daryl Thomas who took the role of CTO in our startup. The idea for Gearmo came from my love for the outdoors and, more specifically, mountaineering. I noticed how friends were often borrowing specialized gear such as crampons and ice axes from one another. This observation inspired the idea for Gearmo - an app which aims to help outdoor enthusiast find the gear they need in their community.

Mobile first

From the very beginning Gearmo was mobile-first. Our belief was that mobile is no longer a nice-to-have but the one and only way many people experience a service, especially in the sharing economy. The majority of growth in the consumer tech space happens in mobile and we wanted to start on the right foot.

Mobile also introduced many constraints on our design. Screen real estate is small, networks are not always reliable, and people can find themselves in all sorts of situations when they pull out their phone (Wroblewski, Luke, and Jeffrey Zeldman. Mobile First. A Book Apart, 2011). But we welcomed these limits because we believed this approach will give us razor sharp focus on what is the most essential for our users to complete their tasks.

Rapid prototyping and testing

We began by testing the concept with several outdoor enthusiasts. I led the effort by scheduling and conducting the interviews. We presented participants with a scenario to gauge their interest in the service. We also tested an interactive prototype of the experience which I created in Balsamiq and InVision.

Minimum Viable Product

This initial round of interviews gave our concept some validation and we learned the perceived challenges with our service - trust between users and the need for protection of the offered gear. We also captured several usability issues. With these learnings we continued to iterate on the design and moved into building the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Our goal with the MVP was to implement the minimum amount of features that would allow us to test the concept, learn more about the problem, the market, and our target audience.

We built the MVP in Swift with Xcode for the iOS app frontend and SailsJS/Node on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the Application Programming Interface (API) backend. My primary role was to develop the branding, design the app screens, and build the Swift frontend. The MVP which we released to the AppStore enabled basic search, user profiles, gear postings, and messaging between renters and gear owners.

As we started to acquire users we continued to address the challenges of trust and protection. We designed and developed comprehensive user profiles with ratings, taking advantage of community reputation as a mechanism to build trust between users. We also integrated with Stripe to enable payments through the app. This not only improved the user’s experience (people could avoid awkward in-person money exchanges), but also added an extra layer of protection for our gear owners - we could charge penalty fees in case of lost, stolen, or damaged gear.

Convenience through delivery

Throughout our next phase of design and development efforts we also conducted another round of interviews with usability testing. Our goal was to understand the two sides of our market - owners (the gear suppliers) and renters, as well as observe any usability obstacles. We reached out to existing users and local outdoor groups. We received a lot of enthusiasm from our gear owners. They often told the story of garages filled with camping and sports goods that only collect dust. They saw Gearmo as a great way to make extra money on their underutilized gear. Renters, on the other hand, raised the question of convenience through delivery - something we hadn’t considered before. We decided it’s worth testing the demand and viability of delivery services - we integrated a simple delivery process into the app.

After several weeks of beta testing with existing users and friends, we released a new major version to the AppStore. This new version got us much closer to the whole product and allowed us to gather more comprehensive feedback. At this point we also began more active marketing efforts.

Marketing efforts

We put together several small marketing campaigns, exploring multiple traction channels: offline marketing via printed flyers, email marketing, social media, and business development. I designed and produced all of the assets we used for these campaigns - flyers, online social ads, promotional videos, marketing emails. We ran weekly email and social promotions to attract new and existing users but our primary focus became business development - building partnerships with local outdoor stores to increase the available inventory on the app.

During our interviews, we learned that users often search but cannot find the right gear on our service. We lacked the supply to engage people in the full experience. A good analogy would be walking into an empty store. Your initial reaction is to leave and never come back because there is nothing there for you. We decided to partner with local outdoor shops to boost our gear supply. We introduced Gearmo to multiple businesses and were able to form partnerships which helped increase our inventory.

Gearmo today

Today Gearmo has reached close to two hundred users. To date, there have been more than three hundred downloads and about eight hundred sessions. There have been more than eleven hundred searches, two hundred conversations, and hundred and fifteen gear items posted. As of last month we no longer actively work on the project.

It was a fantastic journey.