Use what you have
to get what you need.

by Iris Alonzo — September 2026

When I visited my XL storage unit in 2024, I was met with a wall of boxes stacked to the ceiling. I panicked and thought "What is all this?". There was a $500/month room full of things I couldn't name, couldn't price, and couldn't blindly throw away. I knew it was all worth something but I was unable to tackle it. So, I pressed snooze and kept paying rent. It didn't feel good. I must not be alone in this dilemma; storage is a ~$45B industry in the US.

My hot take is that most people should never buy a hammer again. How many hammers do you think are sitting in drawers in your neighborhood? Countless. Meanwhile, your friend or neighbor is about to order one online, then put it in their drawer for the rest of the year. It's a silly cycle.

And that's just stuff. What about the rest of what we're sitting on?

Spare rooms, secret skills, free time…

There are layers of idle resources in every person's life that nobody really tracks, and definitely not all in one place. What is it worth? What can I do with it right now that's easy and a net win for me?

The idea for iris started right there in that storage unit. I fantasized about pulling out my phone, scanning everything I saw, and having it all photographed, priced, measured, described and listed in seconds, then shared with my friends. ALSO: local pickup or convenient drop-offs only. I did not want to start an eBay business, tediously listing everything, then waiting who-knows-how-long for someone to find my needle in a haystack, only to have to schlep to the post office.

My next thought was, “I need someone to come help me move boxes around so I can scan all this stuff.” That was the epiphany: everything I had was balanced or affected by something I needed. i.e.: I need to get rid of my storage asap. I have so much good stuff. I need someone to help me move boxes. If I sell a few things, I will have cash to pay that person. Or maybe they need something of mine? Use what you have to get what you need.

Did the technology and tools exist for this fantasy to become a reality? I called my friend and technical advisor, Hicham. “Almost!” he said. I kept working through what a marketplace that was much more than a marketplace could be until the tools caught up, and in early 2026, he introduced me to Claude Code. For $124.99 a month and many, many late nights, I started to build this fantasy app myself with a few friends.

I wanted it to feel like magic. I wanted to meet people where they were already at. Only like to text? Shoot a message to +1 213 277-4747 (+1 213 APP-IRIS). More of a talker? Open the app and do a video walkthrough, send a photo, voice note or chat. I wanted it to blow the clunky status quo out of the water.

It gets deeper: iris identifies, organizes, visualizes everything you have and need in one place. It builds out a visual framework for your personal economy, and helps you see what I call “Net Worth Potential” in real time for the first time. Not what's in the bank, but everything else you have — stuff, skills, space, time — compared side-by-side to your needs. That's powerful. And then when I imagined visualizing the same thing on a community level, I got chills.

The oldest form of commerce goes: We are neighbors. I have/need this. You have/need that. Let's make a fair trade. Before cash. Before credit. Before one-click shopping and free two-day shipping, we moved our resources around amongst ourselves in order to survive. We automated so much and forgot the important part. People.

Under the right circumstances and with modern coordination, we can still meet many of our needs this way. We don't need cash or credit cards for everything; trading, lending or gifting can often make more sense. iris helps prioritize when it does.

Plus, what's less scary than stranger danger on Craigslist? More reliable than a faceless flake on FB? A friend of a friend.

Trust on iris is structural. You're vouched-in by someone who's vouched-for, and other users can see that. At the same time, we want the network to grow, so anyone can join. Every single user agrees to the Golden Rules (five ways of saying don't be a jerk or you can't trade here). New applicants earn their standing through positive transactions with vouched users, then they can vouch for their people too, and so on and so forth.

I've spent decades asking whether a win-win-win is actually possible in business, or whether creating value for one always means taking it from someone else.

American Apparel was designed for the worker to win. At Everybody.World, we added the planet to the equation. Neither was the easy path, but both were imperative to their success.

At iris, I'm digging into what the customer is missing. This time, everyone in the exchange can and should win.

One of my heroes, Buckminster Fuller, said that to change something, you build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

So what's the existing model? A dozen subscriptions you forgot you had. An outsized cut to the platform on every transaction. Your data collected and sold to other corporations so they can also sell you stuff. Systems too tangled to quit. Apps designed to keep you scrolling, and an industry that treats the environmental and human cost as someone else's problem.

I've taken every worthwhile function from every peer-to-peer platform with shitty practices and put them under one roof with the most generous business model and values I know how to build.

I'm trying to do the right thing and make it irresistible.

Fuller also believed the world already has enough. It's just distributed wrong.

In the 1960s, he called it the World Game: a thought experiment in which humanity uses its existing resources so efficiently that everyone wins. iris is a hyper-local to super-global, very practical version of that, using every tool in my reach to make it grow and work.

When the supply chain breaks — geopolitical, climate, pandemic, more tariffs, whatever comes next — the people who know what their neighbors have and need will be the ones who hold things together. We are building that map before we need it.

So, yes…iris is a marketplace, but it's much more than that, too. And it's only what we make it.

iris goes live on November 11, 2026. Ten years to the week from the last chapter.

Right now we're growing the beta word-of-mouth in LA, New York, Minneapolis and a smattering of places beyond. We are breaking and rethinking the interface in real time, designing a human algorithm: technology shaped by people living in the real world, here and now.

There's a lot left to build. See our listings on iris if you want to participate from the start.

This is our opportunity for unfettered spontaneous cooperation. I can't wait to see what we can do.

Iris Alonzo

Founder & CEO

Team

Advisors

Contact

Email hi@iris.market

Text iris at (213) APP-IRIS (277-4747)

Bugs and questions go to Support