Netcycler - swap your secondhand stuff with powerful matchmaking

A while back there I joined Netcycler as an advisor. It's been motivating and interesting to be a part of a startup with great green values. Focus on something that potentially makes a big impact; recycling and swapping secondhand stuff amongst us instead of just throwing it away to a landfill "someplace".

I bet many of you have seen "The Story of Stuff", right? if you haven't, go check it out at:

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

The Story of Stuff is a very nicely done fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our (arguably unsustainable) production and consumption patterns. Basically the ugly truth is that we consume too much and mindlessly throw away valuable resources and raw materials, waste energy and pollute our environment in the process of doing so.

A little more than a decade ago (or a few decades) there wasn't such an industry as "the self-storage industry". Now days that segment alone is worth more than 20 billion USD annually (already past 20Bn in 2007). That means that people (and some companies) pay up more than 20 billion USD a year to lock away their unused stuff & crap to decay in a storage facility someplace.

Besides the housing bubble we have pretty much had every other sort of economic bubble since the late 80's: people have been going crazy with their credit cards and amount of personal debt. Way above sustainable levels. People have bought so much stuff that the storage space they have isn't enough to pile it all up: hence the fast growth and the emergence of the self-storage industry. It sounds crazy, right?: to have a separate storage rented out somewhere just to throw your unused treadmills, exercise equipment, dirt bikes, canoes and other stuff in.. Well, it IS crazy, and there's a better way to do this, there has to be.

Netcycler is a service that allows you to swap stuff you don't need (or are willing to give away, if you get something good back) for other stuff that has more value to you. For example: you could swap the pair of shoes you only wore twice for an iPod.

Netcycler does very effective swapping with a little help from computational power and mathematical science (one of their founders has a PhD in physics). Netcycler finds long swap-chains of stuff; so that the chances of getting something excellent back, when you let your old skateboard go, are excellent. In fact they are exponentially excellent; the more people Netcycler has in their system, the more swap-chains they can form and the better value it will be for everyone.

Here's a simple pic to illustrate how it works:

I want a trombone and give away my old iPod. Somebody else wants an iPod and gives away a pair of shoes.. To somebody else who wants the pair of shoes and gives away the trombone. Netcycler already has swap-chains that extend to 5 people, and they are just getting started.

The interesting thing about very long swap chains is that the value of swapped goods can increase every step of the way. With a little luck you might end up trading away your old iPod and receive a sea-canoe, or even something crazy like a house in return. Swapping a red paperclip for a house is precisely what happened to Kyle MacDonald. Apparently the swap-chain took him a year to execute, and you can read his story from here. So, potentially, if you are extra lucky, you can end up with an amazing swap-chain getting you something much more valuable in the trade than what you are giving away. Remember that the value of stuff is highly subjective. This means that it is possible to get long swap-chains were every swap in the chain is perceived as a "tradeup" to something more valuable, making all participating folks happy. The more stuff you put on Netcycler and the more people are on it, the better the chances of this happening are. In Netcycler you'll see nice lists of the stuff that's available as a swap against your items; so you can pick and choose the things that have the most value for you.

More illustrations on how it works:

First you add your stuff. You can place offers (offer a stuff for something you want) and you can go and click items to your wishlist that would be valuable to you.

Next: the magic happens and Netcycler does the matching. You can end up with a really long swap-chain, or a shorter one. It takes into account anything that's on your offer & wish -lists and tries to optimize the swap-chain for every person involved.

Finally you go and do the swap for real. Or agree how to do it. There are several Netcycler meeting points and using one of them is a good option. If you don't wish to leave your apartment (or your storage room ;-)) you can just mail the item to the other swapper.

One of my things in there is a bodyboard, check it out.

I find the whole idea behind Netcycler exciting. This is certainly something that we, as a very material society, would need. I'm a hamster; which means that I'm the kind of guy that ends up rarely throwing anything away. I just pile up and save way too much stuff; and when I get rid of it, I try to come up with an intelligent way of disposing stuff. Throwing things into the garbage bin just isn't a good option - I much rather give stuff away to friends or somehow put them in recycling or charity. Netcycler hits this need and "consumer behavior" precisely and promises something better; you can actually trade up, not just get rid of stuff.

You can request beta-access to Netcycler from this signup page:
http://www.netcycler.fi/signup