Original Summary

We're two geeks with no business background and no mentor. For the last few months we've been building Rentouri. It's booking and management software for ski, snowboard and bike rental shops, plus a marketplace where customers find a shop on a map, pick gear in their size and pay before they arrive. The product is built. Getting shops on board is where we're stuck. We started with cold email. We sent about 300 emails and got very few replies. One shop did a demo and is now working with us as a partner shop and giving feedback. That's the only real result from email. Then we changed the offer: shops can get listed on the marketplace for free, without using our software. More shops say yes to that but there's a catch. Online booking only works for shops that run their inventory in our system, so free-listed shops show up on the map but customers can't book them. Until some shops use the software, we can't really launch the marketplace. Right now the free listing mostly gets us trust and maybe a list of future leads and we're not sure that's worth much. After that we started calling. We've made about 100 calls so far and around half of the shops agreed to the free listing. We also asked how they run things now, other software or pen and paper and about half said they'd be interested in a demo. Not one of them booked it. So, questions for anyone who's been here: - Half say they're interested, nobody books. Is that just a polite no or are we doing something wrong in how we ask? - Is cold outreach the right channel for small, seasonal, local businesses where many still run on paper? Would you go in person instead? Trade events, partnerships, ads, influencers? - Does a free listing that can't take bookings make sense or is it a distraction? - If you started with zero connections and sold to small local businesses, how did you get your first 10 customers? I know 300 emails and 100 calls isn't much. We're not giving up, we just want to stop guessing. Happy to answer anything in the comments. And if you have five minutes for the product itself, the site is https://rentouri.com for marketplace and https://rentouri.com/rental .   submitted by   /u/useful_byte [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SideProject
  • 发布时间：2026/10/3 07:09:14