Have Need Bartering App Represents An Intriguing Alternative To Currency

Austin, Texas -

Austin, TX based Pitchit.ai recently spoke to Josh Kline of HaveNeed to learn how the company took its first steps and discovered its place in the market. As founder and CEO at HaveNeed, Kline’s experience with the company began far before the team even settled on its official branding. As such, his insight can prove valuable to anyone who wishes to learn more about the company’s journey or follow in its entrepreneurial footsteps.

As Kline explains in the interview, “The basics of HaveNeed are that it is the first consumer multi-party barter platform for goods and services. It's mouthful, right? What HaveNeed enables is for people to trade for goods and services using their own goods and skills as currency. We do that at a sort of hyper-efficient level through paths of technology.” One of the platform’s major strengths, he emphasizes, is the fact that it is unique despite the fact that it is operating within a well-established arena. While numerous entities offer users a way to trade cash for goods or services, HaveNeed allows their community to trade more directly — goods for goods or services for services. Kline says the concept behind this is known as the mutual coincidence of wants, and this is what fuels this type of trade on the platform.

HaveNeed is essentially a bartering app that allows users to do exactly this at scale. One of the main problems the team had to resolve, Kline explains, was the fact that it is relatively difficult to have two complementary goods or services that can be exchanged between two parties. To get around this limiting factor, the platform now connects multiple users during a transaction. While the two initiating parties may begin the process, they need not necessarily get what they want at the same time. Since multiple users are involved, the exchange can happen with a third party, then a fourth and so on until the exchange comes back to include the second user in the original pair. According to Kline, this means that everyone involved gets what they want eventually. He comments, “we are taking a vastly different approach to the exchange of goods and services than all of the other players in the secondhand economy or home services space.”

Crucially, he also believes that HaveNeed will not displace currency, given it plays a similar role. Where HaveNeed makes sense from a user’s perspective (in a currency-driven world) is situations where they either have no currency to exchange for a good or service — or simply prefer not to exchange currency. In many cases, a good or service can be substituted instead, and HaveNeed simply brings an organizational structure to this problem. Kline points out that many people around the world have access to a smartphone but are still quite cash-poor. Should they gain the ability to use an alternative to cash, this could prove a life-changing development.

Kline adds that HaveNeed could also help people live more sustainably, giving unwanted goods a second life (and more) in the hands of people who can still utilize them. “For instance,” he explains, “just for goods, not talking about services right now, but you have this good. You don't need it anymore. You don't really need the cash for it, but you're not going to give it away. So what could you get in exchange for it? That's where we fit in. You either know some things that you want, and we'll make those connection points, or you could list something that you have without knowing what you want, and we'll tell you all the things in the marketplace that you could potentially get in exchange for the thing you already have.”

In practice, users can post what they are willing to let go of or trade on HaveNeed, following which they will receive alerts about compatible posts from other users that may indicate a viable exchange. The platform is designed to bring users in contact with each other when they may have mutually beneficial goods or services.

This comprises a small part of the insight Kline had to share with Pitchit.ai, and the full transcript of the interview can be found on the company’s website. See more here: Pitch Anything Cross-channel.