TLabs Showcase on travel startups featuring US-based FutureStay, a marketing, booking and sales platform for rental property owners.
Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?
FutureStay puts vacation rental owners in control of their own website, sales and marketing with a suite of easy-to-use online tools.
FutureStay is run by two serial-entrepreneurs from New York City with a bit too much wanderlust for our own good. We were acquaintances for years before realizing that one was managing projects for the same clients the other was developing for. We collaborated on a project together and the rest, as they say, is history.
- S. Philip Kennard – CEO/CTO: After years of running a business developing software for companies, I caught the startup bug and built my own. I founded and sold www.foundlocals.com and co-founded www.BookABottle.com, an online marketplace for NYC nightlife.
- Jonathan Fabio – CMO/Sales: Jonathan's passion to create has lead to years of marketing consultation work as well as his first startup. He raised capital and partnered with the largest wine & spirits wholesaler in New Jersey to enhance brand programming measurability for companies such as Baccardi USA.
What financial support did you have to launch the business?One of the perks (probably the only one) of running a software development company is free software development.
My interior designer approached me looking for a complete website and system to promote, book and manage her five corporate/vacation rental apartments. I told her that a custom solution might be over budget, and searched for a comprehensive system on the market.
We couldn’t find one that met her needs of being powerful, beautiful and affordable, so we built the first version of FutureStay for her, at in-house cost.
What problem are you trying to solve?
Despite the growth of billion dollar listing sites and socially-integrated P2P rental networks, 2/3 of travellers’ searches are still performed on Google and individual property websites.
However, most of the 10 million vacation rental properties on the market don’t have individual websites, online booking, SEO or management tools because they are simply too expensive and complicated for a part-time business owner.
FutureStay solves this problem with an easy-to-use system that lets vacation rental owners affordably create, market and manage their own website at their own domain name; complete with online booking and automated SEO tools.
Describe the business, core products and services?
FutureStay is a web-based system that lets owners and managers take control of their online presence; create vacation rental websites, manage properties, promote and accept online bookings.
Our key principles are Simple, Beautiful, Powerful and Affordable. Anyone can point-and-click their way to a beautiful and powerful website for about 10% of the cost of an old-fashioned site.
Who are your key customers and users at launch?
We’ve just come out of beta with some great and very vocal customers. Because of its accessibility and flexibility, FutureStay customers are (literally) all over the map; from hotel owners in Bangalore to bi-costal apartment managers to local B&B owners.
We listen to each of them and have added a tremendous amount of user-centered functionality as a result.
Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?
Certainly. The concept for FutureStay stemmed from client needs. We brought our expertise to the table and built a company on a demonstrated gap in the marketplace. We’re validated each time a new client sets up their own website without a single call to the office.
We’ve self-funded to this point and are starting to talk to investors.
What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?
FutureStay charges a reasonable monthly fee based on the number of properties listed. We’ve created the fastest and easiest way for vacation rentals owners to take charge of their online presence. Now our strategy is to increase awareness.
SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Strengths:
- Our system has been powering various types of vacation rental owners’ websites for over a year, in which time we’ve grown with them and learned from them. We’re an agile, young company with patent-pending technology approaching the market from an owner-focused angle, which is pretty unique in this industry.
Weaknesses:
- We view ourselves as a ‘blue-ocean’ startup because of our price and solution. Thus our challenge is creating new demand, not directly competing with other companies. Given that we are self-funded we have to be innovative in order to build awareness.
Opportunities:
- Vacation rentals have recently become big business with HomeAway and AirBnB spending millions ensuring that owners know how important the internet is. Some would view them as competition. I view them as a ‘gateway’ step to owners wanting to have their own website with more control, individuality, validity and potential profit.
Threats:
- We’re a bottom-up business and right now it’s trendy to be top-down. Our message takes a little longer to explain than a listing site’s: "join r site free and people can book u!". We have to develop opportunities to demonstrate value to customers. Once they get it, they tend to get it.
Who advised you your idea isn't going to be successful and why didn't you listen to them?An older, non-technical colleague suggested that vacation rental owners aren’t tech-savvy enough to build their own websites. I pointed him to our free trial, and bet him lunch that he could set up his own vacation rental website in less than 5 minutes.
He was shocked by how easy it was. I had the steak.
What is your success metric 12 months from now?
FutureStay has great retention and free-to-paying customer conversion rates. We think that means our clients like being in charge of their businesses. We’d be happy to secure some strategic partnerships and distributions that help us put thousands more people in charge.
Oh, that and more steak.
Here is a clip:
NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.