Spinlister

» see spinlister.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Will Dennis and Jeff Noh started Spinlister in Santa Monica in May 2011 on a premise that sounded obvious once somebody said it. Cities are full of bicycles that sit unridden for most of the week, and cities are full of visitors who want a bicycle for an afternoon. Put the two on a map and take a cut of the booking, with an insurance policy underneath so the owner would agree to hand over a bike at all. The press called it Airbnb for bikes immediately and never really stopped.

The first version launched in New York and San Francisco. In late 2012 the company decided it was really a marketplace for any idle asset and renamed itself Liquid, which lasted about a year before somebody sensibly reverted it. The 2013 relaunch under the old name came with iOS and Android apps and snow equipment alongside the bikes, and surfboards followed in 2014.

It got real. Listings reached 63 countries with renters coming from 120, and in March 2016 Spinlister bought Cycleswap, a Dutch platform with tens of thousands of listings and its own European user base. Total money raised across three rounds was about $2.3 million, the last $1.6 million of it in 2015. That is a modest amount of capital for a marketplace operating on three continents, and it is the number that eventually decided everything.

~ the record ~

~ the sharing economy shelf ~

Spinlister belongs to a specific cohort, the 2011 to 2015 wave of companies that took a verb Airbnb had proved and applied it to a narrower object. Most of that shelf is now in the ground. The pattern is consistent: a marketplace needs both sides dense in the same neighborhood on the same day, and for a bicycle rental that means you need enough owners and enough visitors in one city before any of it works at all.

Bikes were also the wrong object at the wrong moment. Between 2016 and 2018 the dockless bike-share companies flooded the same cities with millions of bicycles funded by enormous piles of Chinese venture money and priced at close to nothing. Renting a stranger's personal bike through an app, with a handover and a deposit, competes badly against a bike lying on the sidewalk that unlocks for a dollar.

~ the second run ~

The end came fast. Marcelo Loureiro, an early investor who had increased his stake and taken over as chief executive, told Bicycle Retailer on 26 March 2018 that the board had decided to close shop after failing to raise. The service ran until 22 April, and bookings dated after that were canceled with refunds.

Then it came back. In September 2018 Mark Gustafson, who had founded the bike company Story Bikes, bought Spinlister and restarted it. By April 2019 the trade press was covering a relaunched product aimed less at tourists and more at independent bike dealers, offering them rental management and bike-share capability under the Spinlister brand. That is a smaller business than the one the venture money had been chasing, and it took the collapse of the first company to get there.

~ the parking page ~

Nobody wrote the second ending down, so it has to be read out of the archive. The Internet Archive holds a working Spinlister homepage, titled "Find a ride to rent", as late as 11 September 2024. Then the crawls stop returning the site at all for eight months.

When captures resume on 1 June 2025 the domain is a parking page, and by the end of that year it is a German-language ad farm serving keyword filler under the heading spinlister.com. The domain does not resolve at all for an ordinary request today. Somewhere between those two captures a hosting arrangement lapsed. The second Spinlister ended the way small acquired brands usually do, without an announcement and without anyone outside the company noticing the week it happened.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »