Tractionless
Occasionally, the invisible hand of the free market does, in fact, deliver.
In a sheepish statement, the non-fungible token (NFT) rental startup Rentable, which was supposed to let people rent out their monkey jpgs — like Rent the Runway for NFTs, basically — announced this week that it’s shuttering because it was unable to find a “product market fit.”
“I am sorry to announce that Rentable is shutting down, we did not find product market fit, and our runway ended,” co-founder Emiliano Bonassi wrote in a Medium post about the decision, admitting that the company had gotten “close to zero traction.”
Money Talks
As easy as it is to clown on Rentable, Bonassi’s followup remarks to Decrypt reveal that the venture also suffered from perhaps the biggest issue that startups of all types can face: a lack of fundraising.
“We had the possibility to raise but we waited. We opted to check [product market fit] first since we had capital for building and auditing,” the cofounder told Decrypt. “So, the main reason for closing is that after some pivots, we didn’t find a [product market fit].”
Rentable’s shutdown also comes amid what could well be the bursting of the speculative NFT bubble that critics have predicted since these crypto-backed digital assets-cum-artworks first hit the scene.
Timeshares
What Rentable was trying to do — let people who weren’t crypto hype beasts rent NFTs from those who were — was an attempted cash in on the model leveraged by Rent the Runway, Airbnb and Turo.
Unfortunately, that model might just not be compelling for intangible and highly-volatile digital assets, rather than a Dolce & Gabbana dress or someone’s Tesla.
And that might be a bad sign for the long term values of NFTs overall.
More on NFT cringe: David Bowie’s Estate Has a Very Believable Excuse for Nixing Its Hated NFT Project