Hot 25 Travel Startups for 2023: Buoy

Buoy

Headquarters: Chicago

Website: Buoy

Co-founders: Tim and Candice Speicher

Founding date: founded 2019; product launched in 2021

Investment: $370,000; about half has been from non-dilutive funding

• Startup Stage: Buoy helps vacation rentals maximize revenue through data
  

  Founders Tim and Candice Speicher

Strategic goals for 2023

Today, Buoy is most heavily used by diverse, complex portfolios needing lots of automation. The platform can do the work of an entire revenue management team. However, it’s only accessible to users who can afford to spend thousands of dollars a month to price their listings. 

This year, we are creating a free version of Buoy built for new entrepreneurs and travelers. We believe people should know how much home they can afford, how much they can expect to earn and how to price their listing for success. This product, called the Barometer, is being piloted with groups of early entrepreneurs from the Southeast United States. 

Lessons learned since founding

We are first-time founders, and we are married, so it has been super-important that we found founder communities. We owe Buoy’s success to our incredible mentors from Google for Startups and Techstars; they gave us the frameworks and language to communicate our ideas clearly. We’ve also been incredibly lucky to win non-dilutive funding from both pitch competitions and Google’s Black Founders Fund; this has allowed us to build a sustainable company without losing ownership.

Buoy is the product of Tim’s industry expertise and Candice’s design knowledge, but we attribute our growth to our incredible mentors and customer feedback. We’ve been so honored to be in these communities, and our goal is to create technology that gives back.

NEXT: Chooose

PREVIOUS: AltoVita