STARTUP STAGE: VacationRenter aims to solve the industry's inventory fragmentation

VacationRenter

Two ex-Googlers created the vacation rental search engine that consolidates listings from sites such as Booking.com, VRBO, HomeAway and more. 

The platform is using automation and artificial intelligence to power user acquisition. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup. 

VacationRenter is a vacation rental search engine. We bring all the rental options from the leading travel sites together in one place and showcase only the best results.

We love vacation rentals, but not how time-consuming and complex it can be to find the right one. So we reimagined a better way. We eliminated the need to search across several different sites and scroll through pages of irrelevant results just to find the perfect home away from home.

VacationRenter was born inside Wilbur Labs, a San Francisco‐based startup studio. Founded by ex-Googlers, VacationRenter uses automation to help travelers find the perfect vacation rental.

What inspired you to create this company?

Early on, the Wilbur Labs team had several company offsites where we would rent vacation rentals so wecould get out of the office and work from another city. Each time, finding the right rental took so much time and planning out of our day. As a result, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to make it easier.

Around this time we were scoping out industries that would work well with our automation tech, and the aha moment was when we realized how much our technology could impact the space by making it easier to find the perfect rental. 

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

Strengths

• Proven automation technology to scale businesses 

Weaknesses

• Need more great people to join the team and run the business outside the lab ‐ we’re hiring! 

Opportunities

• Continued investment in automation and AI 

Threats

• Public policy affecting the vacation rental market

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

The vacation rental space is extremely fragmented. While there has been a ton of growth and innovation in the space over the last five to 10 years, it is still really hard to find the perfect vacation rental. Inventory is fragmented across several sites and suppliers. Finding a rental you like on a site with a lot of inventory can be very time-consuming. That makes it hard on travelers and property owners alike.

The biggest customer pain points in the space are focused around fragmented results across platforms, too many irrelevant results and uncertainty on whether the best deal was secured. These are the same issues we face when booking a rental for ourselves. We decided the best solution would be building a metasearch engine that could solve those pain points for ourselves and others. 

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

Our growth is largely driven by proprietary acquisition technology. At Google, we saw company after company using slow, manual approaches to user acquisition. Automation is eating everything, but user acquisition seems to have been left behind. Most companies have isolated teams of marketers siloed from engineering teams.

We want to solve big problems ‐ not create lifestyle businesses.

VacationRenter

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At the same time, acquisition has become more data intensive, more technically complex, and it’s becoming more and more critical for growth. We saw an opportunity to run acquisition with a product mindset, applying automation and AI to everything we do.

While we cannot share specifics on everything our technology does, what we can tell you is our technology layer serves as a central brain that is connected to every part of the business. It applies advanced logic to efficiently maximize growth across product and marketing.

This is a new type of automation that goes beyond simple executional tasks and also enables us to scale far more quickly than a traditional business. Because product, marketing and real‐time data are all in sync, we’re able to take personalization to the next level. That means marketing campaigns and user experiences can be more relevant than ever before.

Our growth rate shows how disruptive this technology is. In the two months since we have launched, VacationRenter has exceeded an annual run rate of $100 million in gross booking value. We’re setting a new norm for how fast companies scale and look forward to rolling this out to other parts of travel as well as other industries.

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

No two companies we launch have the same founding story, but they all follow a similar process. It starts by us finding an interesting problem we want to solve, or an industry we can disrupt. We want to solve big problems ‐ not create lifestyle businesses.

The idea could either be a totally new concept, or an opportunity to 10x a mature market. By 10x, we mean that we aren’t interested in incremental or small improvements ‐ we look to create something 10 times better. In the case of VacationRenter, the market existed, and we knew our automation technology would add significant value to the consumer, and allow us to grow much faster than others in the industry.

A recent PhocusWire article mentioned, “the vacation rental industry is estimated to achieve a global market value of $194 billion by 2021,” which made us optimistic about entering this space. Additionally, we have been following the industry from a consumer standpoint for some time, and we’re extremely bullish.

Our team came together, looked at the automation we had built and growing addressable market, and that was when VacationRenter was born.

How and when will you make money? 

We bring all the rental options from the leading travel sites together in one place. When users click on a property on VacationRenter and book through our partners, we may share revenue with them for that booking. We like this model because it perfectly aligns our interests with the traveler. We operate around a central goal of finding travelers the perfect vacation rental. 

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

Phil Santoro founded his first tech company when he was 14 and sold his second company, freeforums.org, to a public company in Los Angeles while he was in college. He became the first person at his university to rent a separate dorm room for servers. Prior to starting Wilbur Labs, Phil was on the ads team at Google.

Before co‐founding Wilbur Labs, David Kolodny was on the Customer Solutions & Innovations team at Google, a team that shapes advertising product roadmaps and designs go‐to‐market strategy.

We started at Google on the same day in 2013 and have worked together since then. We left Google to launch Wilbur Labs so we could take big bets across multiple industries. Wilbur Labs has launched two ventures thus far: Nomad and VacationRenter, with two others scheduled to launch in 2018. 

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

Our biggest focus for the next year is building the VacationRenter team so it operates outside the lab. The majority of startups focus on recruiting a team, building a prototype and then hoping there is a market for their product or service.

With VacationRenter, we took a different approach. We researched growing markets that are ripe for disruption using a high degree of automation, and then looked for a management team once we had significant traction. In essence, we build the plane as we fly it.

Now that we have significant traction, we are looking for industry veterans to come on board and help take VacationRenter to the moon.

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

Given how complex it is to find a vacation rental, we know that the long term solution for users will be born out of automation and personalization. When you look at most existing vacation rental metasearch engines, their main focus is being the biggest. We have used their sites as consumers, and have found that simply being the "largest" metasearch engine rental doesn’t help consumers by addressing their biggest problem: finding the perfect rental.