Have you rented gear before? Are you sitting on a pile of old gear collecting dust? Chances are, you’ve probably used Sharegrid for camera sharing or rented out your own. Or maybe you’ve listed yourself as crew. We talk with Marius about the many things Sharegrid offers.
Panelists
Transcripts from Talk
Chris and Travis:
All right, everyone. All right. Welcome. Welcome to Crew Talk by shoots.video. We are your temporary guest hosts, my guest, Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff. We’re filmmakers and hosts of our own podcast. Unlikely Story, which you can check out at some point, if you so desire and hear more of our babble, but we want to introduce our awesome, oh, I was going to also say something fun about us as you can catch a bunch of our movies on a bunch of different platforms right now. Because we also produce films. We have a movie called Held that’s on Hulu right now. We have on Amazon prime, The Gallows act two and Prey and, and the gallery and then the gallows on HBOMax. If you guys want to watch any of those, that’s some of our background. We are independent filmmakers who have had some really great successes that we’re very excited about and proud of. But we also know that it takes a lot to make those things happen. So we’ve got some really incredible people with us to help talk about tools and things that they use to help them reach the X, the successes that they’re that they’re aiming at. So, yes. So why don’t we start with introducing each of our guests here is Marius? Did Marius get on board here?
Chris Lofing:
He’s here. Sorry. I just clicked off Marius. Why don’t we start with you? Marius is here. You’re going to have to help us out with your last name. I can’t, I can’t figure this one out. How do you say your full name?
Marius Ciocirlan:
Don’t worry about it. That’s Marius Ciocirlan. Yeah, it’s Romanian.
Chris and Travis:
Ah, Romanian. Nice. Okay. Marius, Marius is the CEO, the big man in charge of share grid which is as you guys know and amazing platform for sharing and renting each other’s camera gear, photo gear, a lot of equipment that is out there in the world that we can use and abuse, hopefully not abuse, but use certainly and get stuff done. Great to have you here, man. We’re gonna, we’re going to dive into a lot of fun questions. I want to introduce the rest of the panel. Next in line for us is shoot. You can’t see here. There we go. Evan, can Evan, why don’t you introduce yourself?
Evan Dvorkin:
Yeah. my name is Evan Dvorkin and I’m out of Baltimore, Maryland. My main, I guess, area of expertise is like commercial and my promotional materials. So photo and video, be it for companies, products, events, things along those lines. My wife and I kind of took it into a digital marketing realm. She had a history in social media management and Google ads. So it kinda like brought forces together and create our own digital marketing company. So we’ll take, you know be at a company or product put together the whole package, be it just photos, video for them, or we’ll just go all in and develop an entire marketing layout start to finish. That’s awesome. The general overview.
Chris and Travis:
Yeah. Cool. A lot of stuff. A lot of stuff in there. Okay. Businesses a lot like a marriage, especially if your business partner is your spouse. Yeah, quite literally. Next in line, Matt.
Matt Spaugh:
Hello. My name is Matt Spaugh. I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, and started out. We kind of talked about this a little bit. I’ll start on a graphic design path. Really ended up being a photographer just because there was huge demand for it. And most of what I do now is high volume headshot work. And I’m also a video producer. So I do some narrative and documentary type style work here and a little bit of commercial stuff. I’d really rather do more of that because it’s quick, clean, easy as my dad used to say.
Chris Lofing:
Yeah, that’s, that’s a very good point. Quick, clean and easy rather than spending years of your life on something that’s not as clean quick and easy. Yeah.
Matt Spaugh:
He was an automobile mechanic. And so he didn’t want to do like engine rebuilds. You want to do tune-ups, you know, get it done day, get paid wise man.
Chris Lofing:
Wise, man. I agree with that. Awesome, Bruce. We have next Bruce. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Bruce Himmelblau:
Hi, my name is Bruce Himmelblau. I’m a Chicago area. About 15 years ago. I got a bitten by the film bug shot behind the scenes of two local films. both of those are, have been released and are available on Amazon. And my background is mainly production and marketing, which has made me wish perfect level of producing the behind the scenes. DPKs I have a video production company, blue sky video productions for the past year and a half. We’ve been doing live streaming and hosting or producing live streams for people who don’t want to worry about the tech, who just basically have the information, want to do great interviews and don’t want to have to worry about running the show. So we’ve been running the show for them.
Chris Lofing:
Nice. That’s awesome. I can imagine too that during COVID and everything there’s been a lot of, I mean, we’re a perfect example. We started up our podcast just a few months ago. I feel like there’s a lot of people out there with a creative itch and looking to scratch it, you know, so that’s yes. Not having to worry about tech is awesome and I’m sure people get a great service from what you do. We may even be calling
Bruce Himmelblau:
Even if you are good in tech, you still don’t want to be distracted. If you’ve got a Steven Spielberg on the show, you don’t want to be having to ignore him while you’re trying to pull up something that he said he mentioned.
Chris and Travis:
Right. That is totally true. Well guys, thank you all for joining us on crew talk here. This is, this is going to be fun. We want to obviously talk about share grid. And and we also want to remind everyone that questions can come in, feel free, audience, anyone who’s listening, you can throw your questions in the little Q and a box down there, and we’ll try to get to those at some point during the discussion. But Marius, why don’t we, why don’t we start with you? Can you tell us a little bit from your perspective what sharegrid, you know, give us, give us the cliff notes version of what sharedgrid is in case you want to review the idea, what brought it about and and let’s go from there. I want to hear what, like what gave you the, what put the idea in your brain to, to come up with it,
Marius Ciocirlan:
For sure. For sure. I’ll, I’ll start with kind of the origin story. Let’s see. I originally went to film school and after film school, you know, move to New York, got into really video editing. But I’ve never owned a lot of equipment, but I had a lot of friends who’ve left film school and it seemed like everybody was trying to rush to buy the latest and greatest gear, hoping that they had all the equipment they would get hired. Right. and sometimes that, that happened, but sometimes it didn’t happen. The only thing that was consistent was the monthly payment for all that equipment. Right. so I saw a lot of my friends of buying a lot of this equipment. So that was one thing that kind of gave me the idea. But essentially from video, I moved into like more product design, like graphic design of it, I guess you could also call it, buy, you started working for Groupon.
Marius Ciocirlan:
I was one of the first designers building that app. And then somebody who was working with there was also a photographer, longtime photographer. He was kind of the opposite of me. I didn’t have a lot of quippy. He had a lot of equipment tography side and you know, just on a daily lock, we were kind of inspired obviously by all the sharing economy marketplaces that were popping up and boat rentals and house rentals. And we thought, why isn’t there a marketplace where you could put up your equipment and make money renting it out? Because my buddy who my co-founder rush back then was actually thinking about buying new stuff, but he felt really bad because he already had all this stuff, but you don’t want to sell his stuff. You don’t want to sell all his equipment. He wanted to purchase new equipment. And that’s kind of how the idea came was just essentially out of personal need and, and just kind of observing what was happening in in in the market at the time.
Chris Lofing:
Yeah, no, that’s awesome. I mean, from a personal experience, maybe guys, if you want to chime in too, like for us as filmmakers, we’re in the same boat where we know a lot of people who have a lot of gear, they’re constantly looking to upgrade or keep up with the latest, you know, release of, of the new model or whatever it is. And for us we’ve always just been like, well, let’s just get the bare minimum to just scrape by and get what we need. But then it comes to the time where we’re shooting a movie or whatever, some kind of commercial or something it’s like, shoot. Now we don’t have the stuff that we need now. We got to pull from all these resources, our friends, hopefully they have that, that new piece of gear. That’s pretty cool though. I think that’s really amazing.
Chris and Travis:
And it does allow for people who do have stuff to still get use out of it and make money with it. Yeah. I think for me, I hate the idea of something, just something that is a value, just sitting and doing nothing. There’s a story like this guy had this, this pocket knife and he added up on his shelf and it was like, it’s just up there as his, he loved this pocket knife since he was a kid. And then it’s like, when he was old, he just realized like, I never did anything with it. There’s no value with it where it was. And so the idea of having a place or platform for people to make use of that, I think that’s great. I think it’s brilliant. What what have you seen kind of throughout creating this and, and, and give us some, some stats like some use. So, you know, some stories about people that have used this stuff that didn’t have any connection to gear before, but now they’re like, Hey, I found something affordable. It helped me shoot this commercial. My, my business is doing better. And thanks so much, you know, like, I want to hear some of those kinds of stories first,
Marius Ciocirlan:
For sure. Yeah. I mean, like, like I mentioned, that this was back in 2013 when we had the idea, so we weren’t even sure if people would be interested in this and we knew that building a two-sided marketplace essentially would be a heavy lift. It would not be an easy thing. So before we even launched the website, we actually just made a one-page website with the idea and all it was, it was just a little bit of a paragraph with some images and then a FAQ at the bottom, explaining the idea. And as people want it to sign up, they could just leave their email. A lot of people thought it was actually a full blown marketplace. So they thought they were going to sign up and get to list their equipment. Within two weeks, we had 3000 people that signed up. Wow. And we were like, at least every day, getting emails from people saying, here’s my Excel sheet of all my equipment.
Marius Ciocirlan:
How can I put this up? Please let me in. And that’s when we knew that like, oh, there’s some interest here. Right? And it gave us the confidence to really start pursuing it. And seeing those emails every day kind of really lit a fire under us to get going. The hardest part honestly, was the insurance part, because everybody’s question was, Hey, this is a great idea. I’d love to make some extra money when I’m not using my equipment. But what happens if somebody steals my equipment? What happens if somebody breaks my equipment and, you know, being naive at the time were like, oh, we’ll just get an umbrella policy. Everybody will be covered. It’ll be great. Burns out insurance is a lot more difficult than we thought, right. We called a lot of insurance companies and they would literally laugh at us over the phone, like from like, they couldn’t even like, yeah, they couldn’t sustain their laughter because it was like, okay, so you want a stranger from their garage to give their $80,000 camera to another stranger they’ve been met.
Marius Ciocirlan:
And then that stranger could go off for weeks and hopefully come back with that. Person’s like a man, you want us to assure all of that? We’re like, yes, we want you to do it with just like a few buttons. We don’t want them to fill out an application. And they’re like, yeah, you can understand why they were loud. Thankfully there was one company that actually did take a chance on this. It’s at those assurance, which is still our partner to today. And they kind of, they, they understood the concept, but they said essentially you’d have to build all the tech and you know, that kind of just put it all online, everything we do ourselves with all of our people here where people call and buy insurance, which sometimes could take, you know, a day or two, if you’re, if you’re getting quotes from different insurance companies, you’re getting applications, you’ve got to fill out the replacement value of every single item.
Marius Ciocirlan:
You know, it could be a lot of work. We essentially had to build all of that on top of our marketplace. So for the first six months, we didn’t even build a marketplace. We built an insurance application. Wow. We were more in the insurance game even now than we were ever in like kind of the marketplace. So we built that all from scratch. So when we did launch and, you know, there was press about us and stuff. We were the first kind of marketplace where you could buy up to $750,000 worth of insurance instantly with just a few, a few clicks essentially. And you could do it any time and you never have to speak so broker. So that’s kind of how sugar got started. That was the kind of story in the beginning was like, you could rent out your equipment and it’s safe.
Marius Ciocirlan:
There’s actually insurance. You get a certificate of insurance every time you rent out your equipment. So that we launched in 2015, January, 2015. And since then we were, you know, over 120,000, hopefully not 130,000 people. People have listed over a billion dollars worth of equipment on the platform, as far as like success stories. I mean, I could point at so many success success stories, as far as people starting with a handful of the equipment that they just personally owned, you know, renting out of their garage, then now have huge facilities. I mean, there’s old fast class initially started with us. Boca rentals in LA initially started with us. There’s just so many of these examples F 22 studios where the, it was just dominant garage or out of a storage unit, but now they have, you know, six, seven employees and four or 5,000 square foot facilities, probing business on their own, our platform since, since then.
Marius Ciocirlan:
And then there’s some examples where, you know, people make 400, $300 extra a month and it helps cover their car bill. And they’re completely happy with that. You know, because it’s, it’s something that they weren’t getting before the gear was just sitting there. So there’s a huge range. It just depends on how much equipment you have, how much work you’re putting into it. Because at the end of the day, if you’re making, you know, we have people making over $200,000 a year on the platform, but those people aren’t putting in real working hours, running as a business where somebody that’s renting it just on the weekend, they’ll probably have their wife hand off the equipment or their, you know, friend or an intern, sometimes production companies do it all the time where the intern just handles all of their rentals stuff like that. So it’s, it’s a big, big spectrum. But yeah, we’ve seen incredible growth. Even past the pandemic. The pandemic hit us pretty hard. It hit the whole industry, but we were up to a hundred percent and like July, August, we’re backed up a hundred percent. So it’s, it’s been a growth in keep our making a good, you know, a good amount of money on the side.
Chris and Travis:
That’s amazing. Wow. Well done. Bravo for that. Yeah. Love, always love hearing success stories, man. That’s, that’s, that’s incredible. And it kind of reminds me, it’s funny. It kinda reminds me of that movie. The founder, Michael Keaton, you know, it’s about building these McDonald’s, but eventually it becomes about the land rather than like the, the restaurant itself kind of similar to you. Like, oh, it’s all about the insurance. Actually, you created an app that insurance company, you could sell the insurance company, but before we can get to the burgers, flipping the burgers, we got to figure out the land.
Marius Ciocirlan:
We turned out our, our core competency is insurance of fraud detection. Right? So like our goal, we wouldn’t be around if people’s stuff was getting stolen or if people’s stuff was getting dropped all the time, we have an incredible claim rate. Like, you know, it was zero point. I think it was like zero 30%. Is it like,
Chris Lofing:
I was just about to ask, I was just about to ask how, what, what the claim rate was that’s that’s incredible. Yeah. I was afraid to ask.
Marius Ciocirlan:
Yeah. Yeah, no, it it’s super it’s. You know, based on our carrier that we work with, they’ve said they’ve never seen claim rates this low. And it goes the reason why is that we have an advantage compared to most physical rental houses, you know, most physical rental houses. They typically think about how to get inquiries. They get an email, right. Or to get a phone call or somebody just shows up in the shop. We, on the other hand, we do extensive amount of verification. When somebody signs up for our website, we have various systems in the background, essentially verifying people’s information. And we’re also able to look at their behavior on the website. So, you know, if somebody’s putting in an Alexa mini in their car with a still lens that doesn’t even fit that camera, right? Like that’s a red flag that just doesn’t really happen. Right. If somebody’s signing up at 3:00 AM and once the rent, a lot of equipment and then wants to pick up that same day, kind of a red flag, right. And drop off the same day that’s not that’s odd. Or they change the dates all the time. It’s like,
Travis Cluff:
Yeah. The amount, the amount of the equipment that you’re trying to rent and use in one day takes at least a day and a half to set up.
Marius Ciocirlan:
Well, we got, literally your pickup thing is free and your drop-off days free. So it kind of makes no sense like,
Chris Lofing:
Well, yeah, the caliber of, of, of customer on both sides I think is, is, is really elevated because of the, because of the systems. It’s probably it probably a feeling to have, I mean, cause these are professionals, right. And they value their own gear. So it’s like when you’re using something of someone else’s, there’s gotta be that pride of ownership that you were also talking to answer a common respect to someone else’s like, this is their livelihood, you know, for a lot of these people. So I imagine that these, these great, you know, camera people, photo people out there that are just, they’re having respect for each other and it’s awesome. And their gear.
Marius Ciocirlan:
But when you pick up a set of lenses from a corporation where they’re like, Hey, your order’s over there on that table, you know, go ahead and grab it versus like you’re meeting the person and they’re telling you how much they love those lenses and what they like about those lenses. And now you have to meet that person face to face again when you were returning those lenses and they’re going to open them up and look at them, there is a kind of like, yeah, you feel, you need to take care of those lenses,
Chris Lofing:
Bruce, Matt Evan, I want to throw this to you guys. Have you guys got any cool experiences with share grid or not with share grid using something else that didn’t go so well or anything, anything you guys can throw into the conversation when it comes to renting gear with your experiences with what you do, or if you have any questions that you’ve been wanting to ask thus far. Yeah. Yeah.
Evan Dvorkin:
Oh, I’m sorry. Just more, more general. Like when it comes to renting gear, I mean, it’s just, it’s just an incredible option. Especially in the beginning, I will say like even when I first started out, I didn’t know these companies were around. I just didn’t know that it was an option. I guess. I didn’t tell it later. I was like, oh, there’s like lens rentals and borrow lenses and all these other ones. I was like, oh shoot. Like every time, like, okay, I got the shoe coming off. Can I afford the light equipment for this? If I had to do it. And then when you can rent gear, and again, this is just you in general, if you can rent gear, you can just line item it for your client too. So it’s part of the cost, but you can’t line item and entire lighting setup. So just renting gear in general is incredible just to be able to do it early on and you can get Alexis or whatever it may be to do these shoots without having to think, how am I going to spend $40,000 in order to accomplish, I need to accomplish, you know, it it’s awesome.
Matt Spaugh:
Well, I think that the shared platform is so unique and you’d like to say, you have the, you have the core of people who do respect the gear and you know, are going to take care of it and they appreciate what they have. But then you’ve got, there’s always a bunch of knuckleheads that are not going to take care of it. And then there’s a bunch of goofs that are trying to steal stuff. So having those things in place, I mean, obviously you’ve got what six years now of, of figuring out who’s a knucklehead and who’s a goof. I mean, if I could have figured that out earlier, I’d be a millionaire by now. And in Atlanta we have, you know, there’s really kind of two big facilities where somebody at my level is renting stuff. And the share grid is totally unique to either one of those one there’s lots and lots of hoops to jump through and very minimal well, a pretty good compliment of equipment across the board. The other, the, the getting into it is a lot easier, but the equipment that is available is a lot less. So you kinda, you kind of fixed a lot of different things there that are hurdles, at least in the market that I’m in.
Marius Ciocirlan:
Yeah. So the, the market we serve is essentially the up and coming filmmakers and photographers, if you’re an up and coming. So it’s only car photographer. What is your goal? Your goal is to essentially make the best product you can for the least amount of money. Like you’re going to try to get as much nice equipment, top professional equipment for the least amount. And, you know, if you run from our owners, you’re essentially going to save a good amount of money because our owners, our equipment owners don’t have the same overhead as a traditional brick and mortar facility, right? So that’s the benefit. The benefit is you’re going to get good equipment at essentially a really good price. The downside of renting unshare grade is that you’re probably going to have to run around town for a bit, right? You’re not gonna find everything in one place.
Marius Ciocirlan:
You, you know, sometimes you can. Now we have actually, after the pandemic, we had a good amount of rental houses jump on board. We’ve had over a hundred rental houses unshared right now that have facilities and all their inventories online on sugared as well. So you could filter by, I only want to run some share from rental houses or you could filter by well, we call it elite members which are people that have been renting a lot and they typically kind of a larger inventory. So you can rent from one place, but most likely, sometimes you’re not going to find everything you want in one place. You might have to run around and for up and coming some liquor that’s okay. Because, you know, time is on their side where money isn’t essentially. So that’s going to, that’s, that’s the crowd were kind of going off there. And, and we’re seeing the market actually kind of grow a bit more as larger production seem to be downsizing a bit, but the quantity of production seems to be increasing. So it’s more like how can you stretch that dollar to make five videos versus $1 to make that one video. Right. so we are seeing more production kind of heading our way as well, but that’s the market we’ve been dealing with.
Bruce Himmelblau:
And I’ve also noticed that on your platform, you allow the owner of the equipment to drop it off. And a friend of mine is actually on the, on the platform. And he specializes in that last minute need a camera for our production shoot and he’ll, he actually will drive around and then she calls her area and offer that service of actually dropping it off to them. So if you get maybe two or three people who have that equipment that you need, who are dropping things off all in one place, you’re not, you don’t have to do as much running around as you may think. Okay.
Marius Ciocirlan:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we do have the option for the equipment owner to say, I’m willing to drive to you and then they could, you know, figure out the fee for the drive depending on how far that person is. And we’ve tried lots of, you know, we’ve tried to make our way up to that, to the high end, that was kind of our goal starting off, right? We’re like, how can we also provide a service to the large TV shows and the large commercials and the large movies and while delivery is a great option, it still doesn’t quite like get you a hundred percent there because if you have a large production, what would you want is a place to prep with professional help next to you with the ability to say, oh, I need that extra cable. Can you run over there and just grab that off the shelf. And unfortunately, even if the items get delivered to you, if you miss that cable in your list, nobody’s going to drive just for a cable. You know? So rental houses still provide an amazing service if you’re above a certain budget and you could afford that kind of, you know kind of white glove service for anyone that’s looking to make the most out of their budget. We think share grid is a pretty, pretty good option there.
Travis Cluff:
I concur as an indie filmmaker. That all sounds good to me. What would you say are for people that, that are learning about share grid for the first time, if whoever they might be, or as Denzel says it in Philadelphia, why don’t you explain this to me? Like I’m a two year old, like I’m a seven year old. I’m like, what what’s the, just the basic, like how it would go down. Like if I’m just going to go on for the first time and I’m figuring things out, do I input my name here? Do you know just like how long does it take both from a renter’s perspective and someone who’s renting gear from both perspectives would be cool.
Marius Ciocirlan:
Sure. Yeah. So if you’re a renter, you come on our website and essentially we try to space out all the information we capture from you across many different kind of stages, but essentially you visit sharegrid.com. You can browse sharegrid.com and all of its equipment, as much as you want without even signing up. Right? You, you browse all the gear search for it. Look at the pricing. Look at people’s reviews. That was actually a revolutionary thing in 2015 pricing, favorable price. You know, all of you have rent at some point in time. If you’ve rented from a traditional brick and mortar rental house, if you were to go to their website, typically there’s a rental catalog with no pricing at all. You’d pick up the phone and call and what’s the first kind of question they would ask you, oh, who are you? Who are you working for? That question, let alone their, your pricing would change. And you would get a quote. And that, you know, that likes a mini that typically goes for 600, $500, $700 is not $1,200. Somehow it just jumped the phrase.
Travis Cluff:
Yeah, because you’re with the network or with Fox or Sony like, oh, Sony. Yeah. You guys can, we can charge you triple the price. Okay.
Marius Ciocirlan:
Yeah, exactly. So pricing was a big thing for us. So I think a lot of people just like to brow the share grid is, and just look at pricing and see what people are listing their items for. So that’s one thing you come to share her with you browse. Once you’re ready to kind of sign up, you simply sign up with your name, email, and zip code. That’s all we ask for now, you’re inside right now. You can add things to cart. You can start messaging people. Now, once you add things to the cart, we’ll ask you for in the cart section, we’ll ask you like, okay. How do you plan to ensure this item? How do you plan to ensure this rental and in the checkout we’ll have several options for you. So you could use our damaged river product that we sell similar to lens rentals and borrow lenses also sell kind of damaged river programs.
Marius Ciocirlan:
And or you could upload your own insurance or you could buy ASOS insurance. So we have that through our partnership and all of those typically are available for different, depending on the replacement value of the item. So let me really big. So why do you need insurance as a renter? Well, as in any rental situation, if you’re renting a car or if you’re renting anything, you, as the renter are a hundred percent liable for that item, once it’s in your possession. So the insurance waves your responsibility from being a hundred percent on the hook to, for the item, if it were to get damaged or stolen. So we help you. You don’t relieve that kind of liability off yourself. And we require this on every item. So we, unless there’s some like specialty items like helicopters, we don’t have insurance for that cop cars, stuff like that.
Marius Ciocirlan:
We just don’t deal with transportation and stuff like that. But for the most part, we will require some type of coverage to ensure that like, if something were to happen, you’re not going to be on the float sort of full amount. You choose your options there, and then you essentially send the request. So you’re not, there is the options that instant book, similar to like an Airbnb, or like, you don’t want to ask the person if it’s available or have a conversation, do you need it right now? And you just want to instant book, that is an option on some items. But for the most part, you’re going to send a request to the equipment owner saying, Hey, I would like to rent this item for these dates, by the way, I missed the important step. There’s a calendar before you get to the cart saying, what dates would you like to rent this item for?
Marius Ciocirlan:
And it will tell you the availability of that item. You know, if it’s rented out or not, if it’s available, you send that request off, right? And now the equipment owner gets a text message saying, Hey, somebody wants to rent your item again, email. And now before that equipment owner could accept your request. If you’re a brand new renter that has never done business with us ever before, that’s when we’re going to say whoa, before the equipment owner could actually accept their request, we need some information from you. The information we’re going to ask from you is he simple information like your phone number, and we’re going to verify that that’s actually your phone number. We’re going to send you a text message. You have to enter that code in, right. And verify it to your phone number. Then we’re going to ask you for your ID.
Marius Ciocirlan:
You’re gonna have to hold it up. And we’re going to do some fancy machine learning to make sure your face actually matches your ID. We’re going to verify that as well. We’re going to ask for like social media accounts to prove that you’re a real person and actually have work. Like we actually want to see your work. Like, do you have photography work? Do you have a website? Do you have an IMDV profile staff profile? We actually put at all of those things, right? And the more things you add up your profile is just going to be in a better state. And it won’t, there’s the possibility of you getting blocked. If like you don’t fully kind of fill out your profile and stuff or the equipment owner is not going to feel really safe. I accepting your request because that’s ultimately up to the equipment owner if they want to rent to you or not. So it’s just good practice to kind of fill out your profile
Travis Cluff:
A really good protective measures for, for everyone. And if someone’s a practical joker, they’re not going to go through the rigmarole of, of all that stuff. So they’re going to be a much more legitimate person. That’s great. So I would say if you’re looking to rent, brows, check it out see what kind of gear you would want and then, and then sign up and now for the renters, for people that have the gear I’m sure it’s a similar process, but then it’s, it’s a matter of like listing out and do they have like a page or, or yeah. Is it, and is there a minimum amount of gear that you guys look for?
Marius Ciocirlan:
Nope. You could set up you know, we’ve had people actually a popular rental item now with think it’s like the least expensive as iPhone lenses, really quite a bit like phone lenses. So there’s been people that list, just one iPhone lens you know we have anything like walkie-talkies or, or chairs or tables, anything you can essentially list anything for production. And yes, there’s a dedicated kind of essentially inventory management side for the equipment over there. That’s when we first built chair grid, it was very like simple interface for the equipment owner like list one item and great like, and then list another item. Last year we came out with the listing management dashboard and inventory management because we have some owners that have thousands of items and it’s really tough for them to actually manage all of these items and the availability of everything.
Marius Ciocirlan:
And what’s in what’s out stuff like that. So it’s, it’s a pretty cool system for listing your items really easy to use. Well, yeah, you, you list your item, photo description, availability price will help suggest the price for you based on other people and where they priced it. And yeah, it’s pretty easy to list. If you have a lot of items, let’s say you, you’re in a rental house and you have thousands of items. You literally, there’s a service there where you could just send us an Excel sheet and we will upload it all for you at no extra charge or anything. So if you don’t want to sit there and add the photos and descriptions and prices, we’ll do all of that for you. So that’s how you list the item. Yeah. It’s
Chris Lofing:
And, and is chair grid work anywhere or is there just certain areas that you guys cater to or service just
Marius Ciocirlan:
The US right now you. So you could list the equipment. We did, you know, prior to the pandemic, we acquired a small company in the UK called Barbara Fox. And we were planning to, to go out there, obviously the pandemic, we’re not, we can’t even travel out there whenever we do launch community. We like to locally embed ourselves into the community, gets to know the local creatives, and we just haven’t been able to do that. So we have not launched the UK, but we do have plans to launch the UK and hopefully Canada as well. But for now, it’s anywhere in the US the list of equipment we don’t do shipping. So we don’t support shipping for, for rentals, however, unshared, where you can also sell your items, sell used items. And for that service, if you list something for sale, we do support shipping, which essentially we have tools to print out shipping labels. We have tools to be able to track your, your shipment. All of that is kind of available for anyone selling their items, but not for rentals just yet, maybe in the future that we’ll, you know, we’ll have that as well.
Chris Lofing:
Got it, got it. Well, that’s pretty dang cool. Yeah. I was curious about if there was just like certain areas, but it’s supposed to the whole us pretty much anywhere in the us. Okay. guys, Bruce Evan, Matt guys, I’m curious in what you guys do specifically, what do you find are your common for each of you, your common gear needs? And and like the things that you seem like you keep running into that you need, or, or if that question makes sense, I feel like for us, we always have the same kind of type of gear that we’re like, oh, shoot, we need the, we need the red again. You know, we need our buddies red again, or whatever. Do you guys have like a common type of gear that you keep needing access to?
Bruce Himmelblau:
For me, it’s usually lighting kits. I’ve got a real basic lighting kit but on a larger shoot I can bring in, I’ve had actually people say, okay, we need a Kino flow and we need some HTMI or whatever. The other daylight, we actually did a one video shoot. We had the location booked for two days and ended up, we only needed it for one day, or actually Willie got available for one days. We had to squeeze two days of shooting to one. And so we had to fake it make it look like it was daytime when it was actually like two o’clock in the morning. And we had a big light shining through the window. And we were, the location was actually set up right next to a, a, a railroad line where they had like freight lines going all night long. And the thing is, we got to complain from the neighbor because it was too bright. Not because it was too noisy
Chris Lofing:
Going to we’ve had that happen before too. Brian,
Bruce Himmelblau:
I’m totally with you on the lighting gear. I’d say like before, that’s what
Evan Dvorkin:
I rent most often it has to be lighting or maybe like a C camera, if I’m doing like a full podcast video set up, I have, you know, an a and a B camera behind me, but I’d say it’s either like that third camera angle that you just don’t keep that extra piece of equipment around, or just you know, last time I think I rented like four or five lights, cause we were creating like essentially like a fake psych wall for a product shoot and they didn’t want to rent out like a psych wall. They wanted to do it like within a gym. So we were sort of like creating one with like white backdrop and building it within there. So we just had a ton of light to blast out the wall, light up the subject. So definitely lighting for sure.
Matt Spaugh:
Maybe it’s, it’s almost always lenses. So for, for documentary work or commercial work, I need a certain focal length. I need a certain look, something like that, but then I’m also producing YouTube content for myself. So I need things to rent to be able to do comparison videos or, you know, I’ve, I actually produced a video about the benefits of rental. And one of them was that you can, you can try something out without being invested in it. You haven’t bought it. So your ego doesn’t tell you that it has to be good. And so, and that’s where the share grid, you know, model is so awesome when you’re, when you’re actually not dealing with a rental house, but dealing individually with one-on-one with, with other owners, because you can get a whole lot more insight about the corks of a lens, the, you know, what it does with flares, you can get a lot more than even, you could get, you know, watching YouTube videos or, or, you know, the manufacturers content or things like that. So that’s where that, that kind of community aspect of being able to firsthand talk to somebody that uses this, that owns it. It’s really, it’s a huge benefit.
Evan Dvorkin:
Nice. I mean, it’s great to try before you buy it too, for gear like lenses and things like that definitely rented if I couldn’t decide between one or the other, I’ve rented both and tried them out and then ended up committing to a purchase, but it’s another good use too. Yeah, it’s awesome.
Marius Ciocirlan:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. We see that kind of behavior quite a bit, right. Where people before they make a big purchase, you know, you do as much research as you can and, and you, you watch YouTube videos, which is great because there is a lot of sample footage now where, before there really wasn’t, I guess before I used to go into a store and like actually try out equipment that doesn’t quite happen as much as it used to you know, show showrooms are kind of not as available as they were, especially with the pandemic bounds. Then your best thing is, is YouTube, like look at the footage, but sometimes you kind of just want to get your hands on it and try it out in different kind of capacities, different just environments,
Matt Spaugh:
Compression rates on YouTube. I mean, you’re, you, you can’t tell what something looks like or sounds like definitely not what it sounds like or for audio equipment. I mean, it’s, it’s so funny to me. I’m going to be quiet now, so you can hear how loud this microphone is right on, dude.
Marius Ciocirlan:
It’s tough to make those decisions because they’re multi thousand dollar decisions. They’re not like, you know, impulse purchases. So we we’ve tried our best to like help with that obviously by providing the ability to rent from some more local. But then we also did the lens test. I’m not sure if you guys have seen that. We, we ran a few guys go to share.com/learn. We did a huge side-by-side lens tests with the similar where you could essentially choose from, you know hundreds of different types of lenses and have like a quad four by four side by side, and then play all of them at the same time. And then see the differences between each one. So that’s another way to try to make a decision before you buy, but ultimately it’s really cool, but as the best way,
Bruce Himmelblau:
I’m sorry, this is really important is getting the equipment the day before you use it. Or there was one instance where I got a call from a company down in Texas saying we need this video shoot. And we thought on a convenience, like, okay, let’s say the shoots in Chicago. So if we were to rent it today, go down and pick it up, could bring it back to our location in the suburbs, then drive back to the city tomorrow that would waste a trip. So he decided, instead, we’re going to just going to get there early and pick it up and then go to this shoot and then re and then do the shoot and then come back. And it was a new camera that I’ve never touched before. And your learning curve is really steep. So that, and you got, so I got to learn fast and hopefully you’re not learning, learning it in front of the client.
Marius Ciocirlan:
That’s the worst. I’ve done that with audio equipment.
Chris Lofing:
Wait, wait, you’re not supposed to, you’re not supposed to do that. Oh, no. Well, and there you go. That’s why we don’t that’s why we were hosting Mario. You, you mentioned that you guys are looking to, you know, go into other, you know, areas, territories. Are there any future goals in terms of additional features or additional things that share grid’s going to be offering or, or, or doing anything that we should be aware of? Yeah.
Marius Ciocirlan:
Yeah. I mean, there’s some things we just can’t talk about just yet, but some things that we, we have been publicly kind of talking about and want to make sure that people know it’s on the way is, you know, we’ve been putting a lot of work into our catalog. I mean, are we, we’re trying to organize our town, which is over 40,000 different products. Because every time someone lists a piece of equipment, we’re trying to categorize them, they’re the right brand and model and obviously category. So we’d like to essentially become the encyclopedia of every single piece of equipment ever. That’s kind of the grand goal anywhere for me, traditional film cameras, all the way to the latest items, right. We do have somebody working on that, very putting it on a lot of hours. But the reason that we were doing that project is that we want to be able to give people the ability to package things just better together, right?
Marius Ciocirlan:
So like create these custom packages and build these relationships in between things which would essentially, once we understand the relationship, once people package items together, that’s going to inform our system of like, what goes with what and then we’ll be able to make really smart suggestions to people that maybe are a little bit newer and don’t know that, Hey, this matte box goes with this camera and this, you know you know, this rig doesn’t fit this lens now or whatever it is. So like essentially it starts with the catalogs have really clean data. They weren’t going to be working on these packages. We’re allowing people to package items individually, which will inform the relationships between items. And then we’ll have this really robust kind of suggestion auger them on, on the front end. So that’s been a big infrastructure project that’s been happening for a while and we’re continuing to work on that, but we think that’s going to be really, really important.
Bruce Himmelblau:
And the batteries, I think a lot of the cameras, people will rent the camera by itself and trigger. I’ll go AC and then they figure out they need to do some running gun. And there are no batteries.
Marius Ciocirlan:
Yeah. Andrew different mounts for batteries. And like, which camera takes the Mount versus golden out stuff like that. And, you know, even lighting, it’s like the, you know, the guilt could be different and stuff like that. So we want to try to make sense of all of that, because you know, when we talked to rental houses, the agents, the rental agents essentially spent a good amount of their time, helping clients kind of outfit. They’re choosing what they actually mean. The clients know that they want the, the main basic things, but then you actually have to make decisions on like a lot of smaller items. And it’d be ideal if like a system just suggested that for you, you don’t have to have a human constantly think like, okay, what kind of cable does this go?
Travis Cluff:
It’s a little bit like the Amazon does it for upselling, but it, I mean, it works. It’s like the, oh, most people also bought this thing. It’s like, Hey, most people also rent these batteries because you can’t operate this camera without them. Yeah. Oh, thanks for reminding me. Let me add those to cartoons. Yeah. That’s that’s great. Yeah.
Bruce Himmelblau:
Yeah. How many times have you been, ever been on a shoot where there’s one little minute piece
Marius Ciocirlan:
And that one piece makes or breaks the shoot?
Chris Lofing:
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. The worst.
Marius Ciocirlan:
And we don’t want that to happen. So hopefully we got the technology helped us out a bit.
Chris Lofing:
What would you say are like your pro tips for someone who maybe is just looking at like a lot of people listening to this? I would imagine have gear, even if it’s just some basic geared, a little DSLR, you know, and, and they’re looking to rent it out and make some extra money with their stuff. What would you say are some of your top tips on how to make a good rental listing and really get their stuff out there?
Marius Ciocirlan:
Yeah, definitely. That’s a great question. And I get that all the time. Essentially, when you’re listing your items, my suggestion would be break it down to its essential components. A lot of people come on and they’re like, here’s my camera. And then in the description, they’re like, it comes with a Mapbox and it comes with a tripod that it comes with or battery because it comes with, you know, these on these altars and that’s fine, you could do that. Right. But at the same time, I would list every single one of those items as individual items. Reason. Why is that? Let’s say now somebody searching for just the red battery. They might not need the whole red camera. Right. They just need the media. And now you’re going to pop up in those search results more often than you would, if you just had one listing and you only rented everything as like one big package.
Marius Ciocirlan:
So I would recommend that you spend the time and you individually itemize each item when you’re listing those items. And you know, don’t like a lot of people get this courage of like, well, I don’t have like the hottest new gear. I wouldn’t be discouraged because people have various different budgets. And a lot of people don’t go for like the most up to date kind of camera. I mean, sure. There’s lots of those, but you’re going to stand out if he’s going to have something that’s a little older or maybe more unique and also think outside the box, like, do you have foldable chairs or tables? Those actually rent out really well unshared grid because we will need chairs and tables for production. Right.
Chris and Travis:
Great point. Oh, we’ll throw some of those up. We’ve got those Costco ones. Look, we’re sold. We’re sold already. Cause we got a bunch of stuff that could be used. Yup.
Marius Ciocirlan:
One last thing I’ll say is we’re seeing a huge uptick in like traditional, actual film cameras. So if you have film cameras, I just talked to the president of Kodak and he’s like searching for them cause everybody wants them, but they just don’t have enough. So if you have old film cameras, please put them up on sheer grit. There’s there’s a big resurgence of demand, I guess for those kinds of cameras.
Chris Lofing:
Nice. Like your vinyl records are back in style. Yeah. Those
Bruce Himmelblau:
And also you mentioned, yeah, you mentioned that you’re also all over the country. Again, I’d rather rent someone from someone who’s within maybe 10, 15 miles of me and then having to drive into the city. So even if they may not have the exact high-end piece, I’m looking for, if it’s close enough it should work out
Marius Ciocirlan:
Exactly low price and then we’ll teach them, plays a huge part in people’s decision, you know, are they going to drive like an extra 40, 50 minutes just to get something that they, the brand they wanted or can the replacement brand for the item be just fine.
Travis Cluff:
No problem with gas prices, the way they are. Go ahead.
Matt Spaugh:
Is there, is there anybody who’s listing locations?
Marius Ciocirlan:
Yeah. So location, we do have a category for locations. We don’t have like a lot of that. We need to do a lot more work, but that is something that’s on the roadmap to kind of focus on location specific features like hours people can rent the location for the day, but like I rent that for just a few hours. So that’s one specific feature that we need for one station, but there’s plenty of locations on shared grid, at least in some of the major cities that people have listed anywhere from editing studios to sound boots, to houses. That’s
Matt Spaugh:
That’s more what I was talking about.
Marius Ciocirlan:
Yeah, yeah,
Matt Spaugh:
Yeah. We were, we were actually flirted with the idea of building out hospital room, prison, cell, things like that because we had space here being able to have something like that listed or have a resource for those. Awesome.
Marius Ciocirlan:
And I mean, look, there’s other marketplaces that focus just on spaces. So I think worthwhile you, you know, you doing that, I think it’s a great way to make some extra money. Yeah,
Matt Spaugh:
That’s it.
Chris Lofing:
We’re, we’re, we’re sold, like Travis said, we’re sold on sharegrid, man. I mean, we’ve already been on it before. I remember using it for previous shoot, but all the features I’m hearing about hearing all that from you, Marius, it’s pretty awesome platform. It sounds like there’s a lot of room and plans to take it even further. So that’s pretty incredible. And when, what a great way to help creators like ourselves find a place to help out each other and level up and pay the bills and level on level up without, you know, maxing out.
Marius Ciocirlan:
Th th th the idea is like, everybody here, essentially, you guys rent out your time, right? You’re, you’re renting out your time. So if there’s another way you could, like at the same time, while you’re renting out of your time, also rent out some of your assets that you own, that you have invested money. You’re kind of increasing your earning capability, right? And the whole goal is like to give creators more freedom, more freedom to, to have the item that you want to shoot with and improve your image, quality and freedom to make some extra cash. So you don’t have to work at Uber or run for door dash or whatever, maybe by renting out your items, it gives you a little bit more flexibility to focus on what you actually want to focus on, which is creating a great concept.
Chris Lofing:
Yeah, absolutely. Amen to that.
Matt Spaugh:
Well, on some level, on some level, too, if you’re doing the individual thing, you are making connections on some level with people who are in the industry, that’s truly needs. You keep renting that Fs seven, and that guy needs a Fs. Seven operator. Chances are, you know,
Marius Ciocirlan:
Yeah. It’s a great network way to network and meet local, like literally browse from you. Another DP that you would have maybe not met unless you want. So some, you know,
Matt Spaugh:
We can start bad, mouthing him and taking his jobs sauce.
Chris Lofing:
That’s a great point.
Marius Ciocirlan:
That’s a good way to find your competition too.
Matt Spaugh:
I have a goal to not get asked back. So I’m just, I’m kidding. Corbin. I’m kidding.
Chris Lofing:
Yeah. Next episode. How does, how to make goals and set them and not burn bridges? Yeah, no, that’s awesome. Well, guys, I think we’re getting close to about time to start wrapping up. I wanted to turn it over to each of you our panel one last time to tell us where we can follow you guys. And and keep up with what you’re doing and Melinda with [inaudible] and give him a special thanks. But yeah, let’s, let’s start with Bruce, Bruce,
Bruce Himmelblau:
And I want to say, gosh, shout out to Richard and Sue who actually tuned in and watching this. So, hi, haven’t seen Richard in quite awhile and so follow me. I have a live stream of my own, which is called, be SVP on site. You can follow me on the social medias @BSVPTV.
Chris Lofing:
Okay. Awesome.
Matt Spaugh:
Mattspaugh.com. There’s a YouTube channel there, there’s Instagram and Facebook. And then of course the website mattspaugh.com and spaugh.net for the high volume headshots, but all that’s getting gradually combined together. So nice
Chris Lofing:
Premium. Thank you, Matt. Evan.
Evan Dvorkin:
Yeah, I mean, it’s simple enough. It’s just you go to Instagram @EvanDvorkin like everybody else. There’s a link and bio and that’ll bring you to everything you need from my work to contact YouTube and all that. And yeah. Thank you guys for having me on. Yup.
Chris Lofing:
Thanks for being here. Yeah. Good stuff. Thank you. Cool. All right. As far as us, we’re just Chris and Travis at Tremendum Pictures is where we make our films. So if you follow us on the social media is @tremendumpics. Yeah. Tremendous picks. You can see that stuff. And then we have our Unlikely Story podcast where we have people come in and tell their story of how they made it or how they became successful in the industry and the hoops, and kind of serves to inspire a new generation of content, creators of artistic, visually artistic crafts, men and women in, in helping them, you know, defeat some of the beasts that arise in our paths in life and on set. Yeah, it’s all in one, but check those things out. We’re certainly going to be checking out all the awesome tools and things that we’re going to be able to use and listing a bunch of our own stuff. And while we get turned the time, the final time over to Marius here, guys go ahead and also type in your contact info into the chat here. So we can all have access to it. Like go ahead and throw your your social media, your website, whatever you want to throw in the chat there. That’d be great. Marius
Marius Ciocirlan:
Thank you for hosting this. This is awesome. It’s been a great conversation and yeah, I hope everybody gets to try out sharegrid.com. If anything, just, just browse your city. And if you have gear definitely list it, it’s free to list, then it doesn’t cost you all the clothes shoes, a little bit of time to list the equipment and then you sit back and relax and, you know, hopefully somebody will be knocking on your door to, to rent that equipment. So try it out. If you guys have any questions, feel free to email me directly [email protected] and just check out sharegrid.com. But thank you all for hosting this. This has been sweet.
Chris Lofing:
Thank you. Yeah, I’m excited. I’m gonna list some stuff and then I’ll tell you how it goes. We got a bunch of things that I’m like,
Matt Spaugh:
If you guys are standing up next time, we’ll know you rented your chairs out.
Travis Cluff:
That’s right. That’s right. I don’t think we should stand though. Cause remember I’m not wearing pants.
Chris and Travis:
Guys, thanks for joining us. Anyone who’s listening and watching. Thanks for joining us on crew talk. This has been a fun conversation. Go ahead and check out. All of these guys in their various places, especially share grid where you can utilize all those great resources. Awesome. All right guys. Keep creating state, keep rocking. All right. And we’ll sign it off. See ya. Take care, everyone.
