Anna De Matos

This is the first question almost everyone asks me, and it's the right one. A library of things is a beautiful idea, but ideas don't pay rent. If you want yours to still be open in three years, you have to understand what it costs and where the money comes from. I'm not going to give you a single magic number, because anyone who does is lying to you. What it costs to run a sharing library in rural Iceland is not what it costs in central London or suburban Ontario. But I can tell you exactly...

I started a Library of Things by cold-calling one in Toronto and asking if I could sleep on their sofa. The director told me later that people email him all the time saying they'll come visit and learn, and almost nobody actually shows up. I showed up. I crashed on his couch for a week and watched how they ran the place: how they handled volunteers, how repairs worked, how items came in and went out. That week taught me more than months of reading had. So that's my first piece of advice, and...

We've dropped our prices. Both Mini and Standard, whether you pay setup upfront or roll it into your subscription. Same hardware, same software, same app, same support. You just pay less for it now. This is something we've wanted to do for a long time, and we finally can. Here's how we got there, because we think it's worth telling. We got better at building A CLN station runs on our own smart lock IoT and controllers, the thing that lets it sit in a building and run itself around the clock,...