A conversation we had already forgotten
A couple of weeks before this happened, I had been talking with Tim about renting Macs.
Tim has been with me longer than anyone, and we're always throwing around ideas. We had the inventory, people occasionally needed Macs temporarily, and rentals seemed like something worth exploring.
We talked about it.
Then did nothing with it.
The phone call that sounded fake
A couple weeks later, someone called Techable and asked Tim if we rented Macs.
Tim said no.
Then he remembered our conversation.
“Actually, let me ask Jon. We've talked about it.”
The guy on the other end said:
“Maybe you'd be interested if you knew who it was for.”
Tim paused.
“Okay. Who?”
“MrBeast.”
Tim was basically like, “Yeah, okay.”
I don't blame him.
Someone randomly calling our office saying they need a bunch of expensive Macs for MrBeast sounds a lot like a scam.
But the timing was pretty crazy. We had just been talking about rentals, and now somebody was calling asking us to do exactly that.
So Tim brought it to me.
Then the emails started.
And somehow they made it look even more fake.
They were coming from people claiming to work for MrBeast, and they wanted us to send out a significant amount of expensive Apple hardware.
We deal with fraud all the time, so I was immediately suspicious.
The main person we were talking to was Bernardo Herrera. At some point I became convinced someone was pretending to be him.
I replied from another employee account and basically told him that if this was really for MrBeast, I wanted Jimmy to call me.
That almost killed the deal.
Bernardo told us he would take the business somewhere else.
But he also sent me his LinkedIn.
I opened it and immediately realized I had screwed up.
He was real.
A second chance, and 14 Mac Studios
I called him right away, explained why I had been so cautious, apologized, and managed to smooth things over.
Thankfully, he gave us another chance.
That phone call turned into 14 Mac Studios going out to the Beast Games Season 2 production team.
The original rental was supposed to last 30 days.
At the end of the month, they returned seven machines and asked to keep the other seven longer. What started as a one-month rental eventually stretched to about three months and generated roughly $14,000 in revenue.
More importantly, it forced us to learn how to structure rentals properly.
We had to figure out insurance, contracts, what happened if equipment was lost or damaged, and how to handle extensions and returns.
We already understood the hardware.
The rental side was new.
Turning one rental into a business
Then a few months later, Bernardo reached out again.
They were preparing for another possible season of Beast Games and wanted to know if we could help.
Except this time they weren't asking for 14 Mac Studios.
They were looking for at least 50, ideally M2 Ultra or M3 Ultra machines, potentially for seven or eight months.
That was when I stopped looking at rentals as something we could occasionally offer and started looking at it as an actual business.
So we decided to build one.
We're now getting ready to launch the rental side of Techable, and I'll be sharing what happens as we build it, including the hardware, pricing, systems, mistakes, and what we learn along the way.
If Tim hadn't remembered a random conversation we had a couple weeks earlier, that first phone call probably would have ended with:
“No, we don't rent Macs.”
Instead, it led to Beast Games and eventually pushed us to build a rental business of our own.
Follow along on Instagram, TikTok, and Techable on YouTube.
And Jimmy, if you ever read this, I'm still waiting on that video collab.