Back — 05 Product & Entrepreneurship
Lendr — smart lockers with AI condition checks
A co-founded B2B startup. Repositioning the product from education to field service, and building the financial model behind it.
The product
A connected locker that uses AI to check the condition of equipment as it is returned: the loan is tracked and damage is recorded at the source, not three weeks later when nobody remembers who had the key.
The repositioning
The first positioning targeted schools. That market proved too narrow and, more importantly, unable to pay: the cost of lost equipment there is not painful enough to trigger a purchase.
We repositioned towards field service and industrial maintenance, where tooling is expensive, circulates between technicians and genuinely goes missing. Incumbents exist there — CribMaster, SupplyPoint — which is a good sign: the need is proven and budgeted.
What I produced
- Business model canvas after repositioning.
- Hardware BOM — bill of materials and unit cost of the locker.
- Financial model in Excel: P&L, 5-year projections, fundraising and leverage analysis.
- Investor pitch deck.
Outcome
[TODO: metric] BOM unit cost, or modelled raise amount and resulting runway.
What I took from it
A market with no competitor is almost never an opportunity: usually it is a market that does not pay. And building the P&L before the prototype changes what you decide to build — the BOM cost constrains the feature set, not the other way round.