Hire Things – things for hire!

Let Use It in New Zealand only went live (“public beta”) a few days before Christmas 2006.  We took no steps to market the site as we knew we had some more work to do to make it more usable and to speed the site up.  We are still working on those things, and only now am I starting to work on our “Googleness” and “Yahooness” 😉

So in the early days, the people using the site was us, and our friends and family. Now we are getting people we don’t even know registering and using the site.  I few days ago I received a booking request for the great Isaac Asimov book based movie i,Robot, from a guy I had never met. I asked him a few questions using the notes feature on all bookings, and accepeted the request.  We exchanged phone number in the notes, and he picked it up on Friday evening.  He returned the DVD tonight, and I have just completed the loan and placed positive feedback on him.

So Stirling, congratulations! You are the first person we didn’t know to use Let Use It to find and book and use something.  That was quite a milestone for us, and the team felt very proud when it occurred.

I hope you enjoyed the movie, and I look forward to dealing with you again.

Cheers

i, Robot is just one of many movies you can borrow on Let Use It.  Due to licencing and copyright restrictions, we do not let our members charge for copyrighted materials such as movies, books & magazines, and video games.

Peter

We have had Let Use It available as a private beta for a couple of months now, but today we made it publicly available on on the New Zealand domain.  The site needs lots of tuning and optimization in terms of its usability and its speed, but we really want feedback from a wider variety of interested users so we can make it all it can be.

Enjoy

The Let Use It Team

Peter, Nahum, Paul, Nik, Eddie, and a handful of part time contributors.

For those of you that have been “watching this space”, or just know us and have been “watching us”, you will have seen some slow evolving changes going on, both in us and in the Let Use It website. From humble words, to rough prototype, to rails-rewrite, to alpha 1 and alpha 2, and more recently to private beta, and a pre-launch “teaser” site. We are gearing up now to release a public beta of Let Use It, and are very excited (and nervous) about it.

Please bear with us as we take your feedback and bit-by-bit turn Let Use It into the most useful website for you. Checkout one of our many exotic locations: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe, South Africa, United States, and hopefully many more places around the world to come.

Thanks
Peter

From myself and on behalf of the Let Use It team, I would like to thank the many people that have helped us get this far, and thank in advance the many people that will help us make this a worldwide success. To name a few, but I apologise if I miss someone off the list (just give me a nudge and I’ll make amends for sure!):

• My parents Jeannette and Andrew, and my partner, Letizia, for giving me the support to give up the day job to focus on the business.
• Martin Kay for helping me work through some of the early “business model” concepts, and encouraging me to “just do it!”
• Colin Bevan for being a great mentor at eCentric, and for taking the time over a beer or a game of pool to talk hard cold realities of succeeding in the internet space.
• Tony Stewart and Intergen for giving us our first office space and just being there to bounce ideas off.
• All my friends at Intergen for being so encouraging as I took on a brave new world!
• Mauricio for being a good friend, helping out on the email front, and for leading the way in going solo in the world of the web.
• Tim Haines and Andy for helping us get things going in the Ruby on Rails re-write.
• JB for the helping hand and encouraging tips
• Alex Johnson and Engine for getting excited about what I was doing, encouraging me to go with “Let Use It”, and for pulling together the first Let Use It branding

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• Ulf Berggren for selling us letsuseit.com so we could proceed with the business and branding comfortably, and for his advice and support.  We look forward to meeting you one day Ulf.
• Nahum for seeing the same “big picture” and being the first to join me full-time on the quest (and Dierdre for her support of him).
• Mike Greenlees (out there in the UK somewhere now I believe) for spending his sunday doing some screen mockups when he should have been packing to leave the country the next day!
• Ed for for suggesting we give Creative HQ a go.
• John Clegg from Project X and Zoom In for meeting up with me to discuss being a start-up, the opportunities in web 2.0, and about Creative HQ.
• Creative HQ and Positively Wellington Business for seeing the business in our plan and inviting us in.
• Paul F for being the next brave one to join us on this quest full-time (and Sally for her part in all that).
• Paul Gold for being such a good mate, and for helping with the infrastructure and network, and everything else!
• Sally & John for world class web design and usability.
• Koz for his world of experience
• Tim Robertson with the Escalator Programme for taking a proactive interest and getting me in to spend time with David Caselli from I Grow when we needed it
• Our first round of “usability testers”
• Ben for his enthusiasm and viewpoints
• John Clegg again for being such a great colleague – it’s an honour to work along side him and Project X.
• Tim Phillips from RND Group for getting us going (and keeping us going) on linux
• Alick Wilson for his mentoring and guidance
• Murray & Shona for testing (and more testing, and, well, yep, there’s more to come!)
• Morrison Kent (thanks Andrew Stewart) for good legal guidance.
• Bruce Earle and Simple Accounting Services for professional accounting and financial advice.
• Mark Robotham and Creative HQ for hosting the Summer of Code programme which we are spearheading with ProjectX
• Joseph Stuart and FRST / Technology New Zealand for enabling us to take on our great students Nik and Eddie for the Summer of Code.
• And I thank my friends and colleagues at eCentric and AMR for the inspiration and experience I gained working on eCargo and alongside the Trade Me blossoming.  It is because of this that I have the courage to take on this challenge to build something useful and meaningful.

and I’m sure there’s more! Thanks for all your support so far… now it’s nearly time for the show to begin!

Peter