This Service For Airbnbs Makes $1M/Year

Arthur Colker

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Published: July 23rd, 2022

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Arthur Colker

Founder, StayFi

$80K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

StayFi

stayfi.com

from New York, NY, USA

started January 2019

$80,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

My name is Arthur Colker and I am the Founder and CEO of StayFi. StayFi is a WiFi marketing and management company for professional short-term rental operators.

Our customers are vacation rental operators that can manage anywhere between 1 and 500+ listings. They typically list their properties on Airbnb, Vrbo, and other websites, as well as their direct booking site. Their primary motivation for using StayFi is to introduce their brand to all guests through a captive WiFi splash page and market to them to book directly again using our tools and services. This way they can pay fewer fees to Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) like Airbnb and become less dependent on these sites as their only source of demand. We currently operate in almost 10,000 rental properties from 600+ companies across 10 countries.

Here is an example of what one of our splash pages looks like that greets every guest in a vacation rental property:

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I had the opportunity to work in a variety of industries before starting StayFi. Out of college, I worked as a management consultant at Accenture, and then one of my clients, a mobile payments business, ended up hiring me full-time. This was my first experience working in a technology company - where I launched our targeted digital advertising through social media as those self-service ad tools were relatively new at the time.

I then decided to attend business school at Columbia where I received my MBA. After Columbia, I ran growth at a healthcare startup until I ended up starting my marketing consulting business, which is where the idea for StayFi was born.

I was introduced to the short-term rental industry through a marketing consulting job I did for an operator called Heirloom. Heirloom hired me to develop their brand, direct booking site, and strategy for attracting more guests to booking their properties directly. Like most businesses, remarketing to your existing customer base is core to building a marketing strategy - especially in the hospitality industry.

Determine the absolute minimum feature-set to launch and then iterate on that as you go to market.

However, one of the unique aspects of the short-term industry I was not aware of is that the booking platforms - mainly Airbnb and Vrbo - don’t share any guest data for remarketing with the hosts on their platforms. In addition, nobody, including the OTAs, has access to guest data from the non-booking guests in the homes. In larger vacation rental properties, there can be 10+ adults staying in the property that could all be potential rebookers of the home.

To solve this, I looked for a solution that could seamlessly collect marketing data from everyone in the home. I thought why not just do what Starbucks, hotels, and cafes have been doing for years with captive wifi splash pages. But when I researched WiFi marketing companies that service these types of companies, I found their services were not built for short-term rentals.

I, therefore, proposed to Heirloom that I would build an MVP (minimally viable product) version of WiFi Marketing Tech for short-term rentals if they agreed to buy it. They did.

Take us through the process of creating the original version of StayFi.

The first version of StayFi was essentially a white-labeled version of a product called OpenMesh (that no longer exists today). I needed to find a simple system that allowed us to set up just a captive portal with a new user UI or any other customer-facing tech. It also needed to be a system that hosted the access points at a minimal or free cost (as opposed to setting up our hosting service).

The OpenMesh service lacked much of what we needed and was expensive; however, it gave the minimum set of features we needed. To implement it, I ended up flying to a rental home in New Orleans with the equipment. What I thought would be a straightforward process turned out to be more complex. I ended up having to create a local job posting on Upwork and find a developer in New Orleans who could come by and help me configure it.

In about 20 hours of work paid for through Upwork, I had a minimum system of a branded captive page, integration with Mailchimp, and operational ability to manually add more access points for different homes. There was no user UI, data access, or other features that weren’t necessary to accomplish the core service of data capture on a splash page.

Describe the process of launching the business.

Building a tool for one customer does not necessarily mean your product is ready to meet the challenges of the larger market.

Don’t get distracted by hype-driven businesses and instead focus 100% on creating values for your customers.

I decided to organize a process to find and interview other short-term rental operators to see if there was a need to drive more direct bookings using guest data. To my surprise, I found that most short-term rental companies had their brands and websites - but that Airbnb & Vrbo dominated the space to such an extent that most guests did not know direct booking was an option.

Based on this information, I started the process of trying to sign up for my first few customers. In the process of launching StayFi, finding customers 2-10 was the hardest, as I was an unknown with no track record in the industry. It took many cold emails, cold calls, LinkedIn outreaches, and an appearance at my first conference - vacation rentals of Florida conference, to slowly acquire these next few customers. What I learned is that while people loved the concept, their attention was constantly shifting from fire to fire running their vacation rental business and executing against a consistent #bookdirect strategy was more of a pipedream than reality. As we grew, this learning has been a constant guidepost. How do we make our product make operating an STR business easier, not harder?

In addition, I had to do this while starting to develop the most basic tools for companies to manage their splash pages and integrations. I decided to take an incremental approach to bootstrap the business, so I could only invest the minimum needed to expand the feature set to sign up the next 2-10 customers.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

The short-term rental industry is massive, representing over $80 billion in booking revenue globally. Finding and reaching out to decision-makers at short-term rental operators, however, was not a straightforward process. We approached our go-to market by pursuing multiple channels to reach out to our target audience. These include:

Partnering with short-term rental influencers and educators

We leveraged a Stripe integrated referral tool called linkmink that helps us partner with influencers like Thanks For Visiting, so they can get paid if they send customers to us.

Sponsoring short-term rental conferences & events

We started attending conferences run by organizations like the Vacation Rental Management Association and VRM Intel to meet with both potential customers and partners.

Partnering with other vendors and software solutions

We launched a partner promotion section within our StayFi portal to make it easy to exchange promotions with other partners in the industry.

Targeting lists of short-term rental operators through digital marketing

Using custom audience targeting on Facebook and LinkedIn let us target lists of prospective customers with digital ads.

On the retention side, we have found our product averages near zero churns, except in cases of acquisition or shutting down.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

StayFi has been growing consistently in 2021 & 2022, now with over 6,500 properties across 600 short-term rental management companies. Our product focus now is on how we can measure and improve our customer's ability to retain and attract guests based on the data we collect. Recently, we have launched our town ext marketing and email marketing tools to make it even easier to monetize the data collected through StayFi.

In the future, we will continue to integrate with more 3rd party software to enrich and bring additional data into the StayFi marketing platform.

We are currently raising a small seed round through Republic to help finance these important product investments that will accelerate our growth.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I am a big believer in MVP-driven product development. Determine the absolute minimum feature-set to launch and then iterate on that as you go to market. This minimizes risk and allows real data to inform your product development pathway.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

For sales & marketing, StayFi uses Hubspot. To manage projects by the team we use Trello boards. For our store, we use Shopify, and for our subscription, we use Stripe to process transactions.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I listen to the Pivot podcast with tech journalist Kara Swisher and NYU Professor Scott Galloway but don’t consume much content on entrepreneurship outside of reading general business news.

I find that much of my approach has been informed by working for several VC-backed startups as well as entrepreneurship and investing classes I took while at Columbia Business School.