In this talk, Aarthi Ramamurthy, founder and CEO of Lumoid, walks through the evolution of her try‑before‑you‑buy gadget rental startup. She begins with her engineering background and the genesis of Lumoid, a service that lets consumers rent high‑end photo/video gear (and later other gadgets) with the option to purchase. Facing zero marketing budget and no sales experience, she and her team relied on "non‑scalable" grassroots tactics—hand‑out cards at the Bay Bridge lights, partnerships with community‑college issue rooms, branded packaging, and offline referral cards—to acquire their first users. She then stresses the importance of getting the basics right: tracking core e‑commerce metrics (LTV, churn, acquisition cost, AOV), building simple internal dashboards, and iterating on referral programs. Next, she describes how happy customers became a free marketing engine through handwritten thank‑you notes, a Tumblr showcase, Yelp, Facebook, and influencer collaborations, turning organic praise into sustained growth. Finally, she reveals an unexpected core market in the U.S. Midwest—particularly Ohio—where customers lack nearby brick‑and‑mortar rental options, prompting Lumoid to redesign its fulfillment logistics for central‑US delivery. Throughout, she offers five lessons: (1) do things that don’t scale, (2) master the fundamentals, (3) harness happy customers, (4) stand on the shoulders of giants (leveraging existing platforms), and (5) stay data‑driven about your true target audience. She closes with an invitation to connect for deeper discussion.
Chapters
I'm Aarthi Ramamoorthy. I am now the founder and CEO of Lumoid. I'll tell you what Lumoid is. I am an engineer by education. I have a master's in software engineering. So I built products at Microsoft before this. I worked on Xbox Live, Visual Studio, and the CLR, the Common Language Runtime, building a bunch of products there. And then joined the Netflix movie streaming team, which built the software which lets you watch Netflix shows and movies and stuff. And then I started— co-founded this company called True&Co, which is actually an intimate apparel startup where we apply a machine learning algorithm to go fit women online. And from there, it applied to Y Combinator, got through the program, launched Lumoid. We launched late last year, and since then, just been building and scaling the business. So what is Lumoid? Lumoid is a try-before-you-buy service for gadgets. So we started in photo/video gear, entirely focused on consumers who want to try and buy really high-end gadgets, medium to high-end gadgets, but didn't want to splurge right away. So we provided a rental model, and then if you are interested, you could buy, but there's no commitment to buy. And we worked with secondhand stores, used electronics stores, to get inventory from them and amortize the whole thing. So that's kind of how we started the business. And like most other startups, we had no money to start with. We basically said, OK, we have to go figure this out and scale out the business. And I have no background in sales or marketing. And so we just had to go figure this out. So these are 5 lessons that have been relevant, what I've learned building Lumoid. Most of these might not be applicable to you. If they are, great. If they are not, and if there's anything else that I can help with, let me know offline and we can chat. What are the 5 things that we're going to talk about? Building things, things that— do things that don't scale. You've heard this before. Everyone talks about this. What are the things that didn't scale that we tried in the beginning? What worked? What didn't? We made a ton of mistakes and That's the only way we could learn. Some of them worked, and we applied more resources towards it. Some of them didn't work, spectacular failures, and we learned from that and moved on. Getting the basics right. What are the basics in our business? What worked for us, and what did we apply? What are happy customers? How do they help you with marketing? Standing on shoulders of giants for us. What does that even mean? And finally, Ohio. We'll come to that. So doing things that don't scale. When we started out, we were renting and selling cameras, lenses, things like that. I used to be a photographer. I had expertise starting out the business. So how did we go reach out? We would do the absolute craziest things. I am a runner. I would run. And right then, about last year, they started building the Bay Bridge lights. And lots of photographers used to show up. And we would go— when I was running around Embarcadero, I would hand out cards to all of these guys. And I would say, you should come check out Lumoid and try this out as a service. And for the first month, I think people were just like— I would see them just toss out the cards and just keep moving. And then they would come in. They would actually try out the service. They're like, oh yeah, I heard about you guys. And they would just pay attention to us. And that kind of worked out in the beginning. We would go talk to community colleges. We found out that most community colleges had issue rooms where students can get gear for free. But these issue rooms had incredibly dated equipment. So we were able to get these students to go talk to their teachers and convince them to talk about us and work with their issue rooms to provide gear to them. So that worked out really well for us. This is something that I would pick up the phone and just start calling and get people to come on board. We would— when we send out cameras, we would send out Lumoid straps along with the cameras. When customers saw their other customers trying out gear, they would say, "What is Lumoid?" And they would come check out the service. We've had a number of customers just come in because of, "I saw somebody wear Lumoid strap." I mean, these are very simple things, but it just ended up working out pretty well for us and just scaling out the whole side of things. Every time we sent out a box, we made sure we had a really good packaging experience. People love opening the box. It's really pretty. and we put in a card there that says, "Send this card to somebody else you really like, and they'll get a discount." Like an offline referral program kind of thing. And that worked out really well because the card was beautiful, and they wanted to share it with everyone else, and we got traffic through that. Just figuring out ways in which you can get the initial set of customers without having to spend too much on marketing or spend anything at all. Meetups.com, stuff like that. Those were the ones that really worked for us to start building a foundation for the business. And of course, once you get enough traction or you get a little bit of PR, you can kind of scale, build, and keep building on it. But these were the initial things that worked for us. Getting the basics right. Everyone talks about like hacking your way into getting million users. For us, one of the things was just focusing on the fundamentals. We are an e-commerce company, so we want to go measure the absolute important metrics, measure everything, And you will not believe the number of startups who I talk to would be like, yeah, we, yes, we have customer acquisition numbers, LTV, AOV, but our startup is a little bit different. Everybody comes and tells me that their startup is a little different and they can't measure the numbers exactly like how they're supposed to. Yes, you might have exceptions, but more often than not, you're probably the norm. Somebody else is doing something something similar to UR. So go and measure every aspect of your business. I mean, it's not impossible. Yes, it takes a little bit of work, but put in the effort to the point where if you are non-technical, or if you have employees, other people in your company who are non-technical, you want to be able for them to just be able to look at the numbers. It doesn't have to be pretty, but generate a few scripts and push them into some UI, something that they can all look up. So build, measure everything that you can. In my case, we look at how much are they spending, where are they coming from, how much does it take to acquire the customer, how long are they retaining, what is the churn like? Basics of the business, get those right first, and then you can figure out other growth tactics and hacks in there. The basics have always worked out pretty well for us and just optimizing that part. Referral programs print money for us. It's worked out really, really well. We only started this a month ago, and we were kind of— everybody told us, "Yeah, referrals, everyone's doing referrals. It's not a big deal. It's kind of saturated." Turns out it's not. I mean, this is still one of the good ways to go acquire customers. Just the fundamentals and focusing on that worked out really well for us. Customers, when I purchase from Amazon or when I get a box shipped to me, I would never ever send them a thank you note. But it turns out that a lot of our customers actually write handwritten notes like this whenever they're traveling. Travel is a big segment for Lumoid, where we ship gear to their hotel destinations. If you're, say, vacationing in Hawaii, we ship a box to you, and once you're done, you can ship it back to us right from there without having to carry gear with you. And so people, when they travel, they get a postcard, they write stuff, and they put it back in the box. It's just amazing to see why customers would do this. We use, we collected a lot of these cards and handwritten notes. They get their kids to go write in the boxes and stuff like that. So at one point, we just had a whiteboard full of just these cards, and then we said, okay, we're gonna just create a Tumblr that just puts up all of these. And customers now love contributing to that Tumblr. They would send us a card and then they'd be like, can you put it up on that blog? You have a blog for it. And that kind of became this competition where people would just want to write thank you notes and write stuff, or they would talk about us on Instagram, and then we would put it up on Tumblr and they'd be incredibly excited about it. It was just one of these really easy channels for us to pay back to the customer without having to really do much about it. So in general, for us, if you have happy customers, they are basically free marketing for you. They would talk about you. I remember, I think our fourth ever paying customer, they came on board and that guy single-handedly referred 11 other paying customers to date. And pretty high AOVs for each of these guys. And we didn't do anything. We just had really good service and he would just come back and tell his friends. He posted on Facebook and people just came through because of that. So if you have— one is you need to have happy customers, basics of any business. But when you do have them, make use of them. They'll be happy to spread the word because They have friends who might be similar, and they want to tell them about you. Yelp, it's again something that we started looking at about 2 months ago. Same thing, everyone said, "Okay, it's really saturated. Everyone's on Yelp. What's the big deal?" We put it up on Yelp. Now we are at 5 stars. Really good service there. People write about us. They are— they, you know, every time they have a good experience, they go talk about it. A lot of customers find us on Yelp. It's amazing the number of people locally find us from there. They would call us, and Yelp has a great metric system. They tell you how many people have looked for directions, how many people called from the page itself, and stuff like that. Yelp has worked out really well for us, and it does really well when you search and when you find a service like ours. Same for Facebook. Customers tell their friends through Facebook itself. We boost, we promote those posts. Those work really well for us. Reviews, food photographers, mom photographers, mom bloggers. We basically work with these guys either as an affiliate basis or we work with them as an influencer, give them free gear rentals for a weekend, and they would just do a review for us. It just works out. And instead of us having to build platforms, build long-form content, build all of this, we're basically working with these guys to just make it happen. And that just works out really well. And finally, Ohio. What happened was when we first started out the business, a lot of our investors came in and said, I know who your target audience is. It's all gadget geeks. These are people, maybe San Francisco, maybe New York, who are really interested in high-end gadgets. And they have disposable income. They want to try stuff. You're basically looking at a tech folks in the coastal areas. But it turns out that a predominant number of customers are bang in the middle of the country. Ohio is one of our biggest areas of acquisition for us. And we were wondering, every time an investor would come in and say that, we dig up the numbers and be like, actually, that's not true. This is like, we have customers from Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, middle of the US. So we started looking at what was really going on and called up a few customers. And it turns out that, you know, we rent and sell gadgets. The nearest Best Buy for a lot of these guys is about 40, 50 miles away. They don't want to go up there and buy something, and they have no experience. They want to be able to test it out for a few days. And the local rental stores have all shut down, and they're no longer there, the brick-and-mortar stores. And so they place an order from the website. 2 business days, it shows up with a return label in the box. They love the service. So it turns out that the middle of the US is actually a pretty big audience for us, even though just on the first appearance, it doesn't seem like it. So always try and understand who your target audience is. It might not be the people you think they are. And if they aren't, go figure out what you can do. For us, we are figuring out fulfillment from the middle of the US. What do we do in that case? For East Coast and for West Coast, we figured it out. How do you get to the middle of the country in about a day's time frame? The logistics operations, that side of things. So figure out who your target customer is. It might not be the people who you absolutely are sure about, and if it isn't, course correct and make it happen depending on who your customers really are. So that's really what Ohio is about. And that's basically it. I would love to reach out and talk to you if you are interested in how we work or just want to know about Lumoid. I am at rtr.com. Or arthi@lumai.com is my email address. Thank you.
