Lensrentals Blog

Since you where collecting sign-ups, it would be really interesting to see registrations by marketing channel and calculate a CPA for each. In terms of building the "seller" or in this case, the "lens renter" side of the market, I'd probably do targeted facebook ads to photographers with messaging around "Make Money Renting Your Gear" or even more specific messaging "Make up to $20/day/lens renting your unused gear".

You could also try posting to various email lists/meetup groups/forums where photographers hang out asking for beta testers with whom you take 0% commission. Most likely, this is where you'll see the most success.

You could also go for the Chegg/Zipcar model, which obviously has much higher capital costs, where you own the inventory.

PPC could be a viable customer acquisition channel for you as well as "camera lens rental + city name" has decent volume, as does "lens name + rental" and "lens name + rental + city", so there's a long tail that you can exploit.

All that being said, there is quite a bit of competition in this market and it will be difficult to differentiate:

http://www.borrowlenses.com/

http://www.cameralensrentals.com/

http://www.lensrentals.com/

http://lensrentalscanada.com/

http://www.lenslenders.ca/

P.S. Glad to hear that 99designs ended up driving some good traffic to your site... I've also seen people list websites on Flippa.com (often with incredibly high prices) as a form of a growth hack when trying to reach internet…

Roger Cicala knows a lot about lenses and pushed lens manufacturers to have better testing and quality, he created https://www.lensrentals.com/ because he got sick with low quality checks of lenses:

When I started Lensrentals I had a lot of conversations with service centers that went like this. Me: "That lens you repaired still sucks". Person at service center: "No, it’s within specs". Me: "What are the specs?" Service center: "We can’t tell you". One day, after I raised hell with a factory service manager, he patted me on the head and said, “testing lenses is complicated; you don’t have the background to understand.”

Any of you who has ever seen a physician after someone says something like ‘you wouldn't understand; it’s complicated’ knows what happened next. I had no option but to spend a couple of years buying testing equipment, offering internships to really smart optical engineering students, and developing a lens testing center and methodology that was as good as anything in the industry.

He is also capable of writing about hard topics in a way that most people can understand them.

Anyone interested in camera lenses should read also his previous posts https://www.dpreview.com/members/1329131098

since it's manual focusing anyway, there is less penalty in doing so than one would think.

That's true, but the variability is much greater than is commonly appreciated: http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2014/07/sensor-stack-thickness-part-iii-the-summary :

While I don’t have a mathematical formula to predict how well a given lens will work on a given camera, it should be apparent that wide-angle rangefinder lenses designed for film are going to struggle, especially on m4/3 cameras, but to some degree on other cameras. Longer focal length rangefinder lenses tend to have longer exit pupil distances and should do better. Stopping down to f/4 or f/8 should reduce the problem significantly, although it isn’t guaranteed to eliminate it near the edges of the frame.

SLR lenses may also have some troubles on m4/3 cameras, since there’s nearly a 2mm difference in stack thickness. They shouldn’t have as much of a problem as rangefinder lenses, though, since they are designed for a 2mm sensor stack and they tend to have longer exit pupil distances. Older lenses designed for film cameras will tend to have more issues, of course, since they were designed for no sensor stack.

There's some history of "organic" or at least "natural" ingredients in photography. See, for example, the early "autochrome" color process. It uses dyed potato starch as color filters. Lampblack (granted a petro-byproduct) separated the potato bits. The plate is coated with shellac (secreted by the female lac bug).[1][2]

Other big photo ingredients, past and present, include egg whites (for albumen prints)[3], gum arabic (sap of acacia tree, for emulsions), and cow/pig hooves (gelatin, for the emulsion)[4]. And, of course, the alchemist's favorites: gold, silver, platinum, palladium...

What I'd take from this is that we're used to technologies involving highly refined/synthesized substances with fancy names. But so many 19th century processes were done with more day-to-day substances, and we're still partaking of those technologies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autochrome_Lumi%C3%A8re

[2] https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2019/05/how-potatoes-and-gelatin-created-color-photography/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albumen_print

[4] https://petapixel.com/2011/11/15/did-you-know-film-and-photo-paper-are-made-using-animals-parts/

Not a whole lot new in this article, though its "experimental" results confirm well-known phenomena regarding camera lens performance. In particular, small front-element blemishes do not in general significantly degrade optical performance.

That said, dirt or scratches become more important when there is greater depth of field, for example, shooting with ultra-wide angle lenses stopped down to small aperture. Naturally, how much image quality degradation is acceptable depends on the circumstances, there's no single rule that can be applied.

I wouldn't try to get into the laws of physics/optics governing these considerations, there are plenty of sites on the web for that. However I recommend taking a look at the LensRentals site for its wonderfully practical, entertaining lens information (including info re: user-level lens testing): http://www.lensrentals.com

Lensrentals | Full Stack Software Developer | REMOTE | https://www.lensrentals.com/

Lensrentals is the largest online rental provider for photography and videography equipment in the United States. We have a couple hundred employees at our Memphis warehouse, a few locations with associated staff in other states, and a full remote in-house software team of 7.

Our stack is mostly Rails on PostgreSQL + Go backend services, talking GraphQL to a React frontend, developed in Docker, built and tested in CI, and deployed to Kubernetes.
In our highly-collaborative environment, you will have the opportunity to grow as a software engineer, use new technologies, and help mentor others.

Email mirela@lensrentals.com