STARTUP STAGE: Trustr is a private marketplace for vacation rental discovery

Trustr

Launching publicly Wednesday, Trustr is a vacation rental marketplace that enables its members to make properties they own available to people they know and capitalize on recommendations for places to stay from people they trust.

Trustr is co-founded by entrepreneurs and executives Bill Cummings, CEO, and Brent Hieggelke, CMO.

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

Trustr is a new, first-of-its-kind vacation rental marketplace. It enables its members to make properties they own available to people they know, and capitalize on recommendations for great places to stay, written by people whose taste they trust. 

Trustr brings greater control, satisfaction and peace of mind to the short-term rental process. For vacation homeowners, it allows them to curate guest lists for sharing or renting their home on a private basis. For vacation home seekers, it is easier to ask questions and get honest feedback from people you know about rental properties.

The idea for Trustr came from the co-founders’ personal experiences booking disappointing places, and then later discovering that their friends had great recommendations for better places to stay. They were also hearing from many second homeowners who were underutilizing their properties because they didn’t want to rent to strangers. As longtime entrepreneurs, they decided to tackle both issues by focusing on the trust inherent in existing social networks.

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

• How Trustr works for property owners:
  • Private sharing: By making their homes available to private guest lists or broader circles of people they know and trust, property owners can maintain complete control over who knows about their property, who can access their detailed listing and who can stay there. Trustr makes it much easier to share or rent their homes, with significantly greater peace of mind.
• How Trustr works for renters:
  
  • Peer-to-peer recommendations: Find better vacation rentals faster by discovering and capitalizing on recommendations for vetted places to stay from people you know and whose taste you trust. With Trustr, you can easily book great properties that your friends, family and colleagues have seen firsthand and recommend, rather than having to rely on anonymous, inflated or - worse - fake reviews. 

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

• Strengths:
  •  Trustr is the first travel platform that combines the dependability of word of mouth with the scale of established social circles, making it easier to find or share great places to stay. It is booking platform-agnostic, and the only two-sided marketplace where both renters and property owners can benefit from trusted connections.
• Weaknesses: 
  • Trustr is building this community from the ground up. To fulfill our potential of providing significantly greater satisfaction and peace of mind when booking properties, we need more people to become members, post recommendations and list their properties.
• Opportunities:
  • The vacation rental market still has tremendous growth potential, with 65% of vacation homes in the United States currently unavailable for rent - likely because many second homeowners do not want to rent their vacation homes to strangers. Trustr’s private listings allow them to participate in the market on their terms.
  • For vacation home seekers, the search for a place to stay can take hours and be risky because you are relying on reviews and descriptions from strangers - some of which could be fake or artificial intelligence-generated. Either way, the prospective renter knows nothing about the reviewer and their taste or how they like to travel. Unlike other options, Trustr allows members to see the places their friends and trusted connections have stayed in and are recommending.
• Threats:
  • As a new player in the short-term rental market, the large online travel agenices might initially view Trustr as competing for awareness, traffic and bookings. However, Trustr is agnostic to where the booking occurs, we are set up to link to all OTA platforms for the booking consummation. What Trustr is offering is first of its kind - adding a new social discovery layer that drives all OTA businesses in a new direction.  

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

Searching for a place to stay can take hours and be risky and/or disappointing. And unfortunately, OTAs are increasingly plagued with scams, and vacation renters must rely on anonymous and often misleading or inflated reviews from strangers. Word of mouth has always been the most effective marketing tool, but it is inherently unorganized, inefficient and hard to scale.

Trustr is the first travel/rental marketplace platform that gives you the opportunity to hear about and share great places to stay from/with people that you know and trust.

For homeowners who previously have not been comfortable publicly renting to strangers, we offer a more comfortable option to start sharing or renting to people they know and trust. 

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

Trustr has two distinct audiences to reach:

• Home rental enthusiasts who will create and share recommendations for great places to stay and will invite others to join their Trustr circles.
•  Second homeowners who will create listings and invite people to be on their guest lists.

Our go-to-market strategy includes a mix of outreach programs that will work with the industry at large as we offer complementary and new ways to drive bookings. 

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

Throughout the Trustr development process, we talked to many OTA users and second homeowners, ran surveys and focus groups and studied the vacation home market and existing research to get a better understanding of the opportunities.

 How and when will you make money?

Trustr’s main revenue streams will be earning referral fees from existing OTA platforms and our “freemium” listing model. 

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

Trustr is co-founded by serial entrepreneurs and seasoned executives Bill Cummings, CEO and Brent Hieggelke, chief marketing officer. Prior to starting Trustr, Hieggelke co-founded and was CEO of a vacation rental startup, Second Porch, which built the first sharing economy vacation rental site and was acquired by HomeAway, now Expedia. Cummings has built a career focused on developing innovative solutions to problems in many industries, including luxury goods, building materials, supercomputing and health care supply chain.

How have you addressed diversity and inclusion in your business?

The more diverse our network becomes, the more diverse our offerings will be. Renting to someone you trust reflects the unique makeup of your social network.

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

We are confident that we’ve built a comprehensive product, so it has taken time and money to get to the launch phase. 

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

We are patient and have a new idea that makes sense for everyone who likes to stay in beautiful homes and unique hotels, but wants to be certain that they are going to have a great experience. Historically, word of mouth is the most trusted way to source great places to stay and now with Trustr, we can scale word of mouth by leveraging our members’ collective social networks. 

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

We hope to be steadily adding new members, new listings and new recommendations; driving revenue to our partners and hosts; and fine-tuning our platform with customer feedback. 

What is your end-game (going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)?

We believe that we are building something unique, valuable and additive to the travel economy and existing platforms, so we are hyper-focused on driving Trustr adoption and scaling our business. It is too early to speculate about what our end-game options may be. But we are in this for the long-haul.