gearo.de – the Airbnb for cameras
gearo GmbH Marketplace Responsive Web App
by Maximilian Heere
Summary
gearo.de was Germany’s largest P2P sharing economy marketplace for imaging equipment. A tight community of creative people and companies sharing their equipment to produce amazing content.
As co-founder and CEO I shaped all business activities of the startup. From the first idea to the maturing product. We sold gearo to our competitor gearbooker.com in the beginning of 2024.
Project
gearo is a multi-sided marketplace. Individuals, professionals and organizations rent and lend imaging equipment through gearo. gearo’s users produce amazing content at low rental prices and generate income with their own equipment.
The idea of gearo and its business model was created utilizing an applied design thinking (LEAN) process in mid 2015. After generating an initial investment in 2016 the first version of the product was launched publicly early 2017.
gearo was Germany's largest sharing economy marketplace for film and photo equipment. It served over 20.000 registered users. Generating over one million page views per year and millions of revenue for its vendors.
We are super proud and happy for the story to continue at gearbooker.com.
My role
As co-founder and CEO of the gearo GmbH I co -planned, -led and -executed all of the below mentioned jobs, collaborating with the founding partner and a small internal and external team. Being a trained designer as well as the founder of the company, I focussed heavily on creating a user centric product, while managing all other business aspects.
Since I was dealing with so many unknown unknowns, one of the most challenging aspects was to identify, quickly understand and solve the many problems from foreign areas.
Having to negotiate between a perfectionistic design perspective, limited financial resources and talent, product needs and business requirements I developed an understanding of what LEAN product development really means:
Be innovative! Launch a product, if needed with a minimum set of features and functionalities and let your users tell you what they need. Believing in true MVP’s and a “done is better than perfect” mentality helped to iterate and mature the product.
Jobs done
Product Development
- UX concept and UI design of features and functionalities
- Prototyping
- Refinements
- Implementation management
- Development team management
- Testing + Q&A
- User testing
- Analytics interpretation
- Iteration strategy
- 3rd party service implementations
Business Development
- Innovation processes
- Developing startup idea and business concept
- Workshop design & mastering
- Service design
- Fund raising
- Talent acquisition
- Growth hacking
- Customer service
Marketing
- Identity design
- Campaign creation & execution (on & offline; social)
- Marketing communication design
- Sales
And many more … ;)
Key features
All features were fully developed and productive.
Onboarding
Search, filtering & map
Basket & checkout
Multi vendor basket with edit and delete options. Checkout with credit card and Klarna payment integrations. Basket, checkout and booking confirmation page are integrated in a single modal flow.
