Startup Stage: Strut wants to build booking systems for motels

Strut

Strut was founded by Matt Rose and launched this year, building booking engines for independent motels and hotels.

In addition to booking software, Strut offers a solution for fragmented guest information.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

There are thousands of independent motels in America where you still cannot book a room online. You call, or you go through Booking.com—and the owner pays 15% for a guest who was already looking for them, then has no way to reach that guest again except the platform. 

Strut builds those properties a booking engine on their own site, runs the front desk behind it and hands the owner a guest list they can use. Their own bookings cost nothing. We earn only when we deliver a guest they would not have had.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Flat pricing, no contract. Front Desk is $999 to set up and $349 a month where there is no booking engine and we build one. Network is $449 and $149 where one already exists. We take 7% only when Strut delivered the guest. The property's own bookings cost them nothing, and we never touch a reservation they already had. 

The technology is an identity resolution engine called Gallus. What an OTA passes along varies—a real phone from one, an alias email from another—and none of it links up, so the same guest returns three times and arrives a stranger every time. Gallus resolves those fragments into one record the property owns. Around it sits a booking rail with the hotel as merchant of record, a front-desk console, pre-arrival onboarding and Passport: the guest's stay history on their phone and a one-tap way back.

Give us your SWOT analysis of the company.

Strengths 

Built and taking real money, with the property as merchant of record. But what I would actually point to is that I may be the only person who has counted this market. Nobody in travel tech knows how many American motels cannot take a booking, because nobody thought it worth finding out. The identity engine is also hard to copy—it resolves a guest using no paid data providers, so a resolution costs us almost nothing. 

Weaknesses

One founder, one property in live trial, no revenue at scale. And a structural one: the feature owners like most—their own bookings cost them nothing—deliberately zero-rates the volume we create. Our upside rests entirely on repeat rate, which I have not yet measured.

Opportunities

I probed 684 Gulf Coast properties directly; 485 have no working booking engine or are OTA-only. The segment is unbuilt-for because the deal size is small, and the work is unglamorous. A moat made of other people's disinterest is not the strongest kind, but it is real and it is wide.

Threats

Not the OTAs. It is that most of these owners do not have a booking engine because they decided not to. Forty years on a phone and a notebook is a considered position held by people who are doing fine. That is not a gap waiting to be filled, and I would rather name it than pretend the market is larger than it is.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate?

For the property: The details arrive and go nowhere. Booking.com passes a real name and phone number; Expedia passes a name and an alias email that dies with the stay. Either way it lands in a confirmation email and stays there—no record, no history, no way to write to that guest next spring. The owner is not missing the data so much as anywhere to put it and pays 15% for the privilege. 

For the guest: staying somewhere three times and being new every time. Not because the owner does not care—small properties care more—but because the record does not exist. Recognition is the whole product at a place like this, and the plumbing removes it.

Now that the product is built, what's your strategy for customer acquisition?

Two motions, and I am clear which is which. In-person gets the first properties: drive out, sit with the owner, do not leave until they can use it. That is proof, not distribution—one person caps out around 30. 

Distribution is the self-serve trial: an owner signs up, builds the property in a sandbox, switches on when ready. Past that it runs on referral—a nine-property franchisee who likes it does not write a review, he calls three friends.

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

I stopped guessing and measured. I pulled the state licensing file and wrote a crawler that visits each property's site and follows the booking links to see whether a guest can complete a reservation. Of 684 Gulf Coast properties, 485 could not. 

Then I called owners, which made the market smaller and truer. The real market is not properties without an engine—it is properties without an engine whose owner feels the lack. I do not know how big that is yet and would rather say so than invent a number.

How and when will you make money?

Revenue starts the month a property activates: $999 up front, $349 recurring, 7% on delivered stays. 

A 12-room motel and a 60-room motel pay the same, which is why an owner can decide in one conversation. 

A hundred properties is roughly $420,000 a year before performance fees. What decides whether this is a small business or a real one is the share of stays Strut delivers—and that comes from live properties, not a spreadsheet.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

One founder. I spent years at Tiffany & Co. in client relations, including hosting Blue Book at the New York townhouse and presenting stones into the eight figures. What I learned had nothing to do with jewelry. It was that the whole business is whether someone feels known when they walk in. I am not a technologist who found hospitality—I taught myself to build this because what I understood needed infrastructure that did not exist.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion within your business?

[I am operating the company as] one person, so this is aspiration rather than record, and I will not dress it up. What I can point to is who the product is for: family-run motels, first-generation and immigrant owners who have run the same twenty rooms for decades and were never worth a vendor's time. That is a deliberate choice about who gets served.

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

Finding out I had built the right machine for the wrong buyer. I spent months on luxury properties, and the mechanism I built for them turned out to conflict with OTA contracts. I rebuilt around something that touches nothing and adds instead. Reversing yourself in public, alone and unfunded, is harder than any technical problem I have hit.

Why are you going to be one of the lucky ones?

I would not use the word lucky, and I am wary of founders who claim certainty. Most travel startups fail selling to buyers who already have four vendors. I am selling to properties with none, where the alternative to Strut is a paper notebook. I was also wrong once already and changed. That is the part I would bet on.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

Live properties producing a real delivery rate, so I can stop estimating the number that decides the business. Enough of them that referral carries the load instead of me driving. And an honest answer to how many owners actually want this.

What is your endgame?

Grow it. The obvious acquirers are the booking and PMS companies that skipped this segment, and that door stays open. But the asset is the guest network—properties whose returning guests come back through Strut rather than a platform. That compounds, and is worth more built than sold.