STARTUP STAGE: PopulStay uses blockchain for rental bookings, management and security

PopulStay

PopulStay is a booking and property management platform for vacation rentals that uses blockchain to create a direct connection between hosts and guests and to lower transaction costs.

Founder Wang Yue tells Phocuswire properties on the platform also use a blockchain-based smart door lock that is managed through a smart contract. Using a mobile interface, hosts determine who can access the lock and for how long, and the guests must confirm the rental transaction and receive authentication before the lock will open.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

We are rebuilding and challenging the Airbnb business model using blockchain technology. Airbnb charges a platform fee for every booking.

However, for every booking, we charge 3% of the commission and use it for community rewards (1.5%) and founder’s team (1.5%). This significantly reduces the cost of make a booking.

The early token holders will enjoy the re‐distribution of the tokens as well as the price appreciation of the token should they purchase our token.

On the other side of our startup, we are building the first smart door lock based on blockchain to be used in daily operation of the listings.

This makes the lock work as a node in the network instead of managed by a centralized server, which is easy to be hacked. The lock is expected to come out in Q4.

Therefore, PopulStay is not simply an Airbnb clone, but rather a new home sharing community redesigned based on blockchain technology.

What inspired you to create this company?

I was a part-time Airbnb host since 2013, and I have received a lot of visitors from different cities.

Some of them are repeat visitors, and they want direct booking instead of using Airbnb and some others trust my reviews and reputation would also like to book directly from me. This made me think if we can build a trusting community, the cost of booking can be reduced and there should be no middleman to take a cut.

Also, my previous startup was about using a smart lock to improve the operations of Airbnb, specifically around the check‐in process.

I’ve also spent my spare time since 2013 reading about bitcoin and blockchain, and I have become an early investor in bitcoin since then.

So I become quite excited to combine blockchain with sharing economy and IoT and thought it would be a great experiment to run in the next couple of years.

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

• Strength: Solid team with experience in engineering and blockchain development. More importantly, the team has IoT experience and domain knowledge about the business.
• Opportunities: The blockchain technology opens a new world of possibilities for startups to redesign such products, especially since the world is shifting from a business with middlemen to a business without middlemen using technology. We see this can be another unicorn in the next three to five years.
• Weakness: Millennials are starting to accept the idea of home-sharing as an alternative to the hotels, however they are still in the early stage of adopting cryptocurrencies, so it will take time for millennials to use them as a payment or investment tool. 
• Threats: The internet giants like Airbnb, Xiaozhu and Tujia may try to use their powerful resources to compete with us in terms of customer acquisition or listing acquisition. For example, they can force the host to not list their properties in our community should they want a listing on their website. This could block our development.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

Two major pain points coming out from my own hosting and traveling experience using Airbnb in the past five years.

We are solving the trust issue to reduce cost for the community, as well to provide a better check-in experience for guest using smart lock.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

On the supply side, we partner with property management companies in different cities because they are cost-sensitive. We provide an alternative avenue of revenue for them, therefore we could get their listings.

On the demand side, we have our own community to start with, and this will be our first seed users to start with. Specifically we will distribute our token to the users for them to be part of this community and use our product.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

As a host, I would like to help get better profit by taking way the middleman fee to the platform, while maintaining the trust level and quality of the guest.

Blockchain can help alleviate the cost by improving the trust level in the community.

As a guest, I would like to have a frictionless check-in experience while abroad. Waiting for a host to give me a key is not fun at all. Therefore we designed a smart lock for this pain point.

The travel marketplace is a trillion dollar market in the next 10 years. We have seen successful startups like Airbnb to grow magically 10,000 times since it was founded.

We hope to become the next successful one in blockchain world.

How and when will you make money?

We take 3% cut of every booking, distribute 1.5% to the community, and 1.5% to our founding team.

The token in our community will appreciate overtime when more and more users start to use it.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team, and why do you have what it takes to succeed with this business?

I was an early data scientist of Singtel’s spin-off DataSpark, which focuses on geolocation data analysis from Teleco. I was an early investor in Bitcoin and Ripple since 2014 and became interested in blockchain since then.

In 2015, I co-founded Igloohome, which focuses on a smart key box product that is shipped to over 80 different countries.

I left the company since in December 2017 to embrace the new challenges in blockchain industry.

PopulStay recently got a strategic investment from Bitmain, the largest bitcoin miner producer in the world, and Qtum, one of the popular public chains.

I think I will be successful because I have solid domain knowledge about Airbnb, both as a host and a guest.

Also I co-founded a smart lock company to help solve the guest’s check in experience, and I have solid blockchain expertise since I have engineering background.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Finding the right talent and complying with the legal aspects of every jurisdiction.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact ‐ so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

We are patient enough to develop the product and make the brand awareness, so we will see.