The law of opposites and the start of Rentoid transcription

By Fiona Boyd |

Last week Fiona spoke with Steve Sammartino of Rentoid and Startupblog about the law of opposites and how he got Rentoid underway. This is the transcription of that video interview.

Fiona: Today I’d like to introduce you to someone who runs a really cool business, and has also started up a blog at the time he started up the business so that he could tell everybody about the real experience of that. His name’s Steve Sammartino, welcome Steve…

Steve: Thank you.

Fiona: The business name is Rentoid.com and the thing about Rentoid that’s so cool is that it’s the place that you can, the stuff that you don’t want to get rid of, you don’t want to buy, you’re not ready to let go of, you can actually rent it out, make some money, and someone else can use it, um, look, I just think it’s the most brilliant concept for a long time, Steve, well done!

Steve: Thanks!

Fiona: Good for you! You came up with it?

Steve: Yeah, I came up with it. It was funny because we came up with it, with this business maxim, which is called the law of the opposite, and it’s much akin to Newtonian physics, and what it says is, every business has an equal and opposite business, just like every action has an equal and opposite action. And my partner and I were talking about it in a café one morning, about the great internet businesses, and we thought, what is the opposite of selling and buying, or the opposite of some of the great businesses, and we were thinking about eBay and we thought, well, what if we wanted to hang onto that item and not sell it, how could you do that, and we thought, well, maybe if you could rent out idle assets that you’re not using, a lawnmower’s a really nice example because you use it once a month, imagine if you rented it out all those weekends you don’t need it, it just makes a lot of sense, and we had a look on the web and much to our surprise no one was doing it and we just went, OK, done, leave job and go ahead and do it, so that’s, you know, how it came about and we just thought, let’s give this a go.

Fiona: That’s the other side of what I love about your personal story as well as the business story is that you had been slogging away in corporate for a very long time and this is just two years in being your own boss. Number one, you know, having that long in corporate, it’s really hard to break the chains, A, so well done for doing it but B, what gave that intestinal fortitude to do it?

Steve: You know it’s almost like you get to a day where you say the rot sets in, you say, I have had enough of this, and no amount of consumption or money or the good things you can do after 5 pm or on the weekends with the money that you get can replace how little you’re enjoying what you’re doing between 9 and 5, it’s an incredible amount of time in your life to sacrifice for something you don’t enjoy…

Fiona: …you don’t love…

Steve: …you don’t enjoy, and I actually came up with Rentoid once I’d left but at one point I just walked in and I said to the boss, I said, look, you know, or my manager at the time, I said, look, I’m out, I’m doing something. I’d planned a trip to Europe with my now-wife, er, for four weeks, and I just could not comprehend actually coming back to the office and doing that job again, so I quit before I went on the holiday, so I just quit, and I came up with a couple of other business ideas when I was away, but it was funny, my mind actually didn’t start operating properly for like, you know, until I had left that grey cubicle space. And I think that, in a way, corporations, really, they whittle you down to a point where you actually, they reduce your thinking so that you think in their form, it’s like you become like a little, a widget or a screw that fits into that area, the people all become little widgets, and I, it was only when I left that world that my brain started to see things differently and I started to enjoy simple things in life again and see opportunities and ideas because we become so focused on doing what’s going to please the hierarchy within an organisation and when I left and when I went on holiday knowing I didn’t have to go back to a grey cubicle, you know, in an office somewhere sitting at a computer like this, not of choice, that my brain started working and thinking of some cool ideas, so it was kind of easy in the end to leave, but it was like I got to the point where I’d just had enough. That said, I did learn a lot there and also invest money so that I did have a small amount of passive income to give myself time, so if you are going to work in a job you don’t enjoy, my advice is, you know, really invest a portion of your income, especially if you are a high earner, put some into some investments so that you give yourself some choice, you know, put some money away, and I did that knowing that I wanted to leave.

Fiona: Talking about the law of opposites there, because that is what gave you the secret of pursuing Rentoid, what about the terror that, you know, someone in a startup faces, and you know that I’ve been through that, with David, but surely you have too, it’s not all plain sailing is it?

Steve: No, the other main, terrible…as I said to my partner, we can’t build a website, I don’t even know anything about…I can’t code, I don’t know how to do it, I don’t know how to build it. And it was really funny because my business partner is a really smart guy and he said to me, look, he said, we don’t need to worry about how to do it, our job is project management. If you can manage a project don’t worry about the fear, the skills or if you haven’t got the resources, it’s all about bringing people together to an end result, you know, we just drew it up on paper and went to a web guy and said, can you build this and this and this page goes to there and that page goes to there and this is…

Fiona: …did he get it?

Steve: He did too, you know it was funny, like, we hired a guy to build it for us and he said, yeah, this makes sense, this is a cool, easy brief to understand cos there’s no jargon, there’s no anything, he actually found it quite refreshing but you know the thing that I was most scared about is, can I actually do this stuff? But you know what? As humans we can pretty much do anything if we break it down into little chunks, so I just broke it down.

Fiona: Where do you start? Where do you start? We all start somewhere, don’t we?

Steve: That’s right!

Fiona: And you’ve got to start, I guess, with the idea…

Steve: Yeah…

Fiona: And you start where you start?

Steve: Yeah, and I started with the idea and I drew up some pages and went to someone and said, what do I do next, and they said, well you need this, and, like, I didn’t even know the difference between CSS and coding and getting the Photoshop pages designed or any of that stuff, or the wireframes. I just said, I want this, and they said, well you need this first, and I said, OK, so then I go back and do that and then I go to the next guy and they say, well before we can design the CSS we need to do some Photoshops of the visuals – oh, OK – and then I went and did that! I just went to each person and then they’d tell me, well you need this, you need that and you know what? When you build a value chain, people will help you work it out, and what I did was just thought, you know what? I’m just going to break it down into small chunks, and the smaller you break down the tasks, the more your fear goes away. Fear is scary when you think about it in big terms – like if you think about your life, you go, what am I going to do when I leave school? I’m going to have to have a family and pay for a mortgage and get a job and I don’t know anything!

Fiona: You feel like you’re about to die!

Steve: But what you’ve got to do is just worry about the first step, you know, just put that little step, OK, how do I get to there? OK, I’ve got to there, what’s the next step? And I reckon that’s a really cool way to bust down the fear – especially when you leave an organisation that’s been putting money in your bank account on the 15^th of every month and all that type of stuff, so, yeah, I was incredibly scared, but annoyed enough with the previous life, I thought, you know what, I’m just going to be like a kid and just go, well how do I do it, tell me how to do it, that’s kind of what I did. And I asked people, and I didn’t try and be cool like I know it all – in organisations and companies it’s all like, everyone tries to act like they know everything. I just said, look, I don’t really know what I’m doing, but if you can help me get to this next stage that would be really cool. And people love that.

Fiona: Well you and I have spoken about that, Steve, that so much of the world functions by faking knowledge and know-how about things that isn’t truly earnt, and the antidote to that is being a learner, and asking for help, and saying, well, if you’re the guru, tell me, how do I do this?

Steve: Yes!

Fiona: And there is always a transaction to be had – for you receiving help from someone, there’s always something you can do in exchange for that. Being a learner is actually a much more powerful situation than people, you know, let us in on the secret of…

Steve: I totally agree. And that’s I think one of the real fundamental differences with entrepreneurship is that, with entrepreneurship we, as a community we accept mistakes. In an organisation, in a company which has existential revenue and an infrastructure, people want perfection, but perfection’s a lie, it doesn’t exist anywhere.

Fiona: It’s unachievable…

Steve: It’s unachievable, it doesn’t exist, and, I think going in and kind of accepting mistakes and being in that entrepreneurial sphere, it’s OK to learn on the job – and that’s what makes it actually enjoyable, cos you’re like a kid again in some instances, you’re not expected to know everything. In a company they expect you to know the answer why your market share’s dropping, or why, you know, your readership – or whatever it is – isn’t working properly, and we don’t bloody know! No one knows! I mean, there’s so many things in any business, if we think we know with research we’re just kidding ourselves. But at least in entrepreneurship we’ve got a structure and a culture that says, actually we don’t know, we’re trying to work it out. And I guess cos there’s no stakeholders that makes it possible.

Steve Sammartino shares more of his inside secrets on the startup of Rentoid with Fiona, this coming Monday.

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