A bit of a story, I recently wanted to buy a mini pc for my home server. That’s a 20+k investment, even if I buy it in second hand. While taking to a friend, I realized that one more common friend had a pc lying around which was unused. After asking him about it, he quickly offered to give it to me since it was lying unused.
A couple of interesting things happened here. I saved a significant amount of money and time, which would have gone into researching and purchasing the pc. My friend got rid of some old unused hardware which was lying around. We effectively contained the carbon footprint of the community too since I did not purchase yet one another pc. I potentially prevented a computer from entering the landfill. That’s a pretty damn good outcome!
On communities
We are social animals, we thrive in communities/tribes. Each and every one of us is potentially part of multiple communities. Family community, workplace community, your friends who you play football with etc..
There are resources scattered in these communities which are wildly under utilised..
Economics of scale is a very powerful fact of life. With volume, almost always price comes down. If communities are formed, a lot of things organically start working out.
Use cases
- Sharing subscriptions like iCloud, google one, YouTube, prime video etc..
- Car pooling across groups like apartment groups & office groups
- Collation of community media and resources like videos, music etc.. For example, uploading pics of an event, sharing videos after an event. Uploading performances for everyone in the community to check out etc..
- Communication like posting events & updates, requesting referrals etc.
- Listings for leasing for or for not money and managing exchanges. For example, I have a raspberry pi at home which I’m not using which I’ll happily lend to a junior at office if he wants to experiment on IoT.
Types
Communities in my opinion are of multiple types by the nature of entry
- By property: you’ll be a part of a community by property of being a part of a family. Or by property of being employed at a place.
- By trust: you and your friends will be a part of the community
Dynamics are quite different in these communities. For example, you might comfortably give away your bike to a friend for a week, but will think twice to give the same bike to a coworker in your office.
Some financially profitable use cases to experiment with
- Backups: backblaze seems to offer a terabyte worth of data storage on hot s3 compatible medium for around 7 dollars a month. For one person, this might be overkill, but for a family of four it makes sense.
- YouTube and iCloud has family plans which could be shared and are fairly cheap per member.
Closeknit: an experiment
Looks like discovery is one of the most important bottleneck. Closeknit aims to be a discovery and management platform for items and subscriptions.
With Closeknit, you can join communities and discover under utilized resources.
Let’s see how this goes.