Reyooz started as a passion for Freecycling and frustration with the actual product and service. Nothing new, that frustration is shared by millions and one of the reasons why the network has failed to scale beyond 10m.
While I was explaining how easy it would be to deliver a simple and supremely beautiful Instagram style product to make Freecycle worth doing, Brent Hoberman overheard and suggested I pitch my idea to the Nominet Trust and Founders Forum for Good Social Tech Social change. The deadline was 5 days away.
I pitched, I didn't sleep and I won. Nominet threw in £50k to get the idea off the ground and the FOunders Forum for Good intrduced me to my mentor Sir Tim Smit, founder of The Eden Project.
There was no plan for making money, no business model as such. Just a desire and a vision to put an end to waste. Humans are the only species what produce waste that does not instantly become a resource. I dived into PHP CodeIgniter, javascript and sass with the usual MySQL db on the backend. This beta didn't have to be a single page cutting edge hybrid app but it did need to be responsive. The lessons you'll learn taking an idea from virgin concept to a usable product in the hands of clients who want it are huge. Taking this on has been a curse and a blessing. I have always needed to be involved in every aspect of a project from strategy to execution. Be careful what you wish for ;)
How to reach out to an audience and find fans is the ultimate challenge. Nobody cares how sexy your new app is or how much better it is than rest of the players. I worked with charities to raise awareness and help them raise funds. We had a small impact but it felt like I wasn't addressing the real problem and drifting away from the original core proposition: A world without waste.
Working with a sustainability consultancy, discovering the epic amount of waste organisations create every day across the world. Goods with years of service still in them are broken down and recycled, if not landfilled or incinerated. 50% of all business goods trashed are re-usable, much of it pristine. We have to make it easier and cheaper to reuse and redistribute than it is to waste.
Bywaters Waste Management firm director of sustainability buys into my vision and the beta app. It's light years ahead of the competition, of which there is little. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could just take a photo and the app could tell us everything about the object.
So that's what we did...
Organisations can create inventories in record time using a smartphone and photo recognition. Big data builds out the stats for each and every item in real time: weight, dimensions, cost new, waste cost, material composition, geo-location, distance travelled...
Share that inventory internally within your organisation to keep what you've got in constant use. When you want rid of something share the inventory with Reyooz partners and service providers in just a click. Receive quotes for clearance or purchase of your goods. Reyooz enables the service provider to arrange collection and transportation on the agreed time and date.