” The goal is to create scroll-stopping listings: How I Doubled My Revenue in 3 Months ” with Mike Sebastian

Summary and Highlights

Building a Direct Booking Strategy That Works

1. Control Your Business, Not Just Your Listings

• “If you’re going to build a business, you need to either control the whole thing, or you need to diversify your income sources.” – Mike Sebastian

Many hosts rely entirely on platforms like Airbnb. But what happens if your listing is suddenly delisted? Mike emphasizes that while OTAs are a great tool, they shouldn’t be the foundation of your business. Instead, building a direct booking strategy gives you long-term control over your revenue streams.

2. Finding the Right Market Matters

Mike scaled quickly by testing different markets, from Spokane to Blue Ridge to Red River Gorge, before discovering where he could generate the highest returns.

• Red River Gorge became his focus after a $298,000 property generated $77,000 in its first year.
• Less competition, higher demand, and unique builds were key factors in his market selection process.

For hosts looking to expand, Mike suggests analyzing:

• Visitor numbers vs. STR competition in a market
• Unique stay potential (i.e., treehouses, silo houses, adventure stays)
• Local regulations and growth potential

3. The Power of Unique Stays

• “The goal is to create scroll-stopping listings. When people see your property, they should feel like they need to stay there.”* – Mike Sebastian

Mike’s success comes from designing properties that stand out, whether through amenities, location, or design elements that create an emotional response. He advises:

• Maximizing natural surroundings – hot tubs with stunning views, cliffside decks, or hammocks over scenic landscapes.
• Gamification & experiences – secret rooms, adventure-based designs, or themed stays that spark curiosity.
• Aligning with guest avatars – designing spaces for relaxation (cozy reading nooks) vs. adventure (on-site equipment rentals).

4. Building a Direct Booking Engine

Mike uses a combination of marketing tools to drive direct bookings, including:

• Email marketing: Collecting guest emails (from OTAs, StayFi, and rental agreements) and consistently engaging them.
• UGC & Influencers: Hiring content creators to generate viral-worthy imagery and videos for social media.
• Automation: Setting up anniversary emails, seasonal promotions, and personalized follow-ups using tools like Zapier and HighLevel.

He emphasizes starting simple: “Even if you only have one property, start collecting emails now. Use Google Sheets if you have to, but build your list and nurture it.”

5. Leveraging Social Media for Direct Bookings

Mike’s properties gain traction because of strategic content marketing:

• He invests in high-quality UGC (user-generated content) to showcase experiences, not just amenities.
• His properties are regularly featured in influencer posts, reaching travel-focused audiences beyond traditional STR platforms.
• He ensures all content is optimized for Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook to attract direct traffic.

“We don’t use our own photos for marketing. We hire professionals or trade stays with influencers who know how to capture the magic of our places.”

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Final Thoughts: Take Control of Your STR Business

If you’re looking to reduce your dependency on Airbnb and scale a sustainable short-term rental business, focus on: ✅ Market research & selecting high-potential locations ✅ Making your properties truly unique ✅ Consistently collecting & leveraging guest data ✅ Using professional content & influencer marketing to boost visibility

🚀 Interested in an optimized direct booking site? CraftedStays helps hosts build high-converting websites that drive direct bookings.  Book a demo today!

Transcription

Mike: If you’re going to build a business, you need to either control the whole thing, or you need to diversify the income sources that you have. So for the people that are only on Airbnb or only on booking. com or whatever they’re on, right, that’s a very dangerous place to be because you have a mortgage, you have utility bills, you have loans, you have all this stuff.

Mike: And if Airbnb turns around tomorrow and says, Hey, nevermind, I’m not going to let you stay here. You broke our policies or whatever. And I’ve heard that happen to so many people where all of a sudden it’s like, it was just D listed. It’s like, what are you going to do? So I’m hyper focused on building my business, right?

Mike: And Airbnb is a part of that booking. com Verbo. They are a part of that. The core of what I have is my marketing and my direct booking. Right. And that’s what I want because I can control that. So what I’ve done since day one is tried to build all of the database that I can apply customers.

Gil: Hey folks, welcome back to a direct booking simplified where we break down the strategies and tactics to win in direct bookings on today’s show. I have Mike Sebastian, Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Gil: Yeah. Mike is, uh, the co founder of the hideaways. Um, you might hear from it as hideaways as the, the state that you can do, but also he has build your hideaways, which is actually more on the host consulting side of things.

Gil: Um, Mike, do you mind giving folks a kind of an introduction to yourself and. Maybe it’s just first starting off with like how you got, and it got started with the hideaways to begin with.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So I think my journey was kind of similar to a lot of people’s just stumbling into real estate side and then Airbnbs and then figuring out the boring houses weren’t really doing it for me. So getting more unique, more fun and then finding the results in that. But my, my background is marketing.

Mike: Um, I ran a digital marketing agency for about 10 years and as I was in that, I realized that I was getting a little burnt out and there wasn’t a whole lot of tangible asset to the marketing agency. It was just the software systems and employees. And I wanted something that had a little more, you know, girth to it, I guess.

Mike: And I started looking around at my, the friends that I thought were successful, the people that I would consider mentors and all of them were in real estate. So I dove into real estate. I started loving it immediately. I got a long term rental. Then I got a short term rental. And then I started researching how to grow, how to scale, how to get investment, all that kind of stuff.

Mike: And really digging into the numbers and I, you know, went from, what was it? 2022 to 2025. So three years, I went from zero to 19 properties that we managed today. Um, pretty spread out across the United States for the initial ones, but now we’re honing in on a market in Red River Gorge, Kentucky, and we are getting more and more unique with every build that we do.

Gil: Yeah. Was Red River Gorge the one that you first start off with, or is that a new discovery in terms of a market?

Mike: new discovery. So I started in Spokane, Washington. I then got some places in Blue Ridge, uh, Blue Ridge, Georgia, so a place in Blue Ridge and a place in LHA, which are right next to each other. And then I joined a mastermind and started to figure out how to research markets in the short term rental space.

Mike: Um, it took me a while to really understand all the complexities of it and things like that. Um, I will say the Spokane houses and then one of the house in Blue Ridge, they were break even properties. They’re fun. Get your feet wet. They will appreciate over time. But there was really nothing to write home about with those.

Mike: Um, as we got into Hawking Hills and Ohio, that started to get a little bit better. We did a couple of custom builds there. And then Red River Gorge with the knowledge that I had and the knowledge that I learned in researching Red River Gorge seemed to be, uh, I don’t know, needle in a haystack, I guess, like it’s the impossible market to find.

Mike: And I bought 1 house down here is 298, 000. It made 77, 000. It’s first year. Like, it just killed it. Yeah. So started to get to know the market actually moved from Seattle to Louisville, Kentucky so that I could go out there and do some custom builds out there. But it is. In my opinion, just way, I mean, it’s the perfect time to get in.

Mike: There’s so much growth. There’s so much that’s going to happen down there. I’m excited about it. The houses are still cheap. There’s a lot of people that come, there’s not a whole lot of competition. And the competition that is there is like grandma’s house. You know, they just turned grandma’s house into an Airbnb, so,

Gil: Yeah. Um, so the, the one property that you start off with at River, River Gorge, what was that type of property? Interesting.

Mike: I’ve become really good friends with them since that build. We didn’t know it at the time, but when we first started, uh, that was their office in a town that was an hour away. And they used to transport sheds across the country. So they had all of the equipment to take that office and move it into a lot that they had and then build the house around it.

Mike: So it actually was like, not a prefab, but his actual structure that they craned onto an 18 wheeler and they brought it in and then built the house around. And then the inside is all cabin design. They put a catwalk on the top and some window cutouts on the roof and whatnot. So it’s a, it’s a cool looking cabin, but it is.

Mike: One of our most standard cabin builds, I’d say. Yeah.

Gil: and that does that end up becoming like. You basically your market research, you got that one cabin, you saw how well it perform the entry price versus the income that’s bringing in, you know, that there’s a man going into, you’re like, okay, this is actually a market that has all the right components for us to double, triple down into it and start taking more risk, if anything, is that

Mike: That’s, that’s exactly what it was. So we, when we first found it, I had a partner in that deal and we were both looking at the entire United States for a market that kind of fit this criteria. Um, actually a little bit worse criteria. This is dream criteria. We didn’t have that goal. We were just looking for something that was better than what we had existing.

Mike: And as we found it, it was like a million and a half visitors per year. It is not a national park. It’s a national geological area. So it still has the potential to transform into a national park and boost the visitors that come in there. The home prices were in the high twos, low threes. Um, for a nice home.

Mike: Some of those were brand new, which was very affordable for us to us to get into. And at the time there were 400 Airbnbs right in Blue Ridge. Just for comparison and blue in the Blue Ridge County, not just the city, but the county area. There were 25, 000

Gil: Hmm.

Mike: Right? So, just for comparison, like, a lot less competition that’s there.

Mike: And then the competition that was there was not great. Right. There’s, there’s some houses that are there, but they weren’t well designed. They really just didn’t, it seemed like it would be easy to outdo them with the stuff that we were already doing. And so what we did is we got that one to test the model.

Mike: Uh, that model worked and we immediately started buying a bunch more.

Gil: I’m guessing you’re, you’re doing all these tests almost in parallel as well, too, from 2022 to now, it sounds like you’ve gone into several different markets. Some panned out well, but not as great as this. And once you found this, this is where like, okay, this is where I need to amplify it quite more.

Gil: It’s not that necessarily all the other markets were failures in any way, but it just didn’t have the outsized performance like this one did.

Mike: Correct. That’s exactly what we’re doing right now. We, I had to date, um, we have a couple that we’re starting to change this on, but to date I have never sold a house. Um, only purchased. Um, that’s because all of them are making some money, right? I don’t don’t have any that are losing. They’re making somebody.

Mike: Some of them are pain in the neck where it’s almost break even. And it’s, you know, a lot of short term, short term rental or midterm rentals for those. Uh, but I have 1 in Seattle, 2 in Spokane, 2 in Blue Ridge, 5 in Hawking Hills, and all of those were purchased with the exception of the Washington ones.

Mike: All of those were purchased on the same day. So the 5 and Hawking Hills was 1 acquisition. To a Blue Ridge was one acquisition and then the Spokane ones was because I lived out there. So it was a convenient thing at the time. Um, those were all testing the market. They’re all doing, you know, some of them are doing great.

Mike: Some of them are doing okay. All of them are profitable. But then the Red River Gorge market was where the, you know, the time value of money and really putting in the same energy and getting out triple. It’s like, why would we go anywhere else at this point? So we’re growing a lot here. And then we’re going to find another market to diversify a couple of years.

Gil: Yeah. What is maybe a slight tangent there? I’m curious what your finance strategy is to do so many acquisitions in such a short timeframe.

Mike: Uh, partnerships and local banks. Um, we did, yeah, we’re, we’re in process right now. We have six silo house builds that are happening simultaneously. And that was a 2. 1 million loan that we had to get. That loan took, uh, it’s like 10 and a half months, just shy of 11 months. And I called 47 lenders, most of them local.

Mike: Um, some hard money lenders and whatnot, but just giving them, you know, pro formos and appraisals and kind of just like beating down the door until we found somebody that was willing to do it. Um, the bank that we found is, is fantastic. She’s a local bank in London, Kentucky. And, uh, the, the woman that I work with is just one of the most amazing people.

Mike: And she has a lot of, I don’t know what it’s called, like the allocation for this space. Um, so she’s been able to help us out a lot with, uh, new loans that we’re getting and new, new partnerships and whatnot. But most of them are commercial mortgages that are based on the performa and the expected revenue, because we have.

Mike: Proof cases of things that are actually happening there right now, um, that are personally guaranteed on the back end.

Gil: So are they more similar to like a DSCR type of loan?

Mike: Exactly that.

Gil: Uh, okay. Okay.

Mike: Yeah, for the acquisitions, they’re just straightforward with that. But for the builds, it’s a construction loan first that rolls into

Gil: Uh, okay. So I’m guessing you’re doing like a refi after, after construction, moving into a

Mike: some of them, some of them automatically roll into it. So we don’t actually have to refine anything. There are no other closing costs for it with the local banks. So,

Gil: That’s

Mike: and then the bigger ones, we do have to reply.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. It’s smart that you guys are going down like the DSCR, especially since you guys have such a strong track record. It’s easy to look at your performer and look at also your track record prior to it. So for a bank is a lot easier for them to take that type of risk there, um, without having to pay like heavy points and so

Mike: I’ll, I’ll say for the local ones. Yes. Um, for some of the bigger ones, you know, when we go to the big guys and talk to them, there’s different LLCs for each of these. So if we open an LLC in January, apply for a loan in February, there’s obviously not enough credit in there for them to go off of it. So if we want it off of our, like, if I want it off of me personally.

Mike: Then to go to the bank, they say, well, you’ve only been open for 30 days. Like the bank of America is and chases. They don’t really care about my story, if that makes sense. So the local ones have been a lot easier to work with where, where they can look at the history that we have with them as individuals, and then they can look at the LLC and say, Hey, it’s the same manager there.

Gil: Yeah, I, I guess in this industry, I don’t come across a lot of like B of A’s and chase funding these types of deals anyways, at least in the short term rental market, it’s a lot of like a local, even some credit unions, even at times that will, that will end up floating these.

Mike: I will say for the, for the big one, we talked to all of them. The hardest ones was the big ones. They, they didn’t care for the big loan that we got. Um, they, the big banks just, they just didn’t care. The stories didn’t matter, but it was like, I got to get through a list of as many people as I can talk to.

Mike: So we were definitely on the phone with them.

Gil: Yeah. Um, now that you’ve gone through several different markets and you now found a, a strong one, what is like the biggest learning? Like if you were to like have hindsight looking back. Into it, were there indications that Riverville Gorge was already set up for success, or did you feel like you needed to actually go through the motions of establishing that first property in there, learning about it before us to understand that there’s like a lot of potential there.

Mike: There’s, I, I would say like the first time that I looked at it, I saw the potential, but it looked so good. I didn’t believe it. Right. So I was a little hesitant of what I didn’t know. Right. I didn’t want to go in and get, you know, 20 houses immediately and say, this is going to be great because I didn’t know what I didn’t know, um, getting in and easing my way into it.

Mike: I will say, like, I got more comfortable with each one that we purchased because we were able to give the handyman more work, give the cleaners more work, like, really build the infrastructure behind what we were doing. Um, I also got to know a lot of the locals and the management companies that are there and whatnot, and just heard all the problems that are in the market right now.

Mike: And they were really easy to address. So what I felt like is there were a couple of players that were big fish in a small pond that had been there for a very long time and they got complacent. So now there’s a lot of other people that are starting to enter the market and kind of seeing the same thing like, oh, there’s, there is some real opportunity here.

Gil: Yeah. And maybe this is a nice transition into, uh, do you call it like built building the hideaway?

Mike: Build your hideaway,

Gil: Build away, build your hideaway, kind of transitioning to that and your, your, your coaching program. Now that you’ve known what, you know, like, how do you actually coach people through that process and without, without like giving away too much, um, but yeah,

Mike: No, we, we follow the Alex Ramosi model of give away all the good stuff and then charge for the stuff that’s like huge and in person. The, um, so build your hideaway is founded around the concept of like uniqueness drives. The uniqueness drives higher revenues essentially. So what we’re doing is not only finding a good market, but also making it stand out as much as possible.

Mike: The term unique is relatively ambiguous. Like anything can be unique if it’s not in the, in the other markets. So we do two approaches. One is complete custom builds. Right. So we have six and we’re signing on to hopefully later this week, um, two more that are happening right now that are just from the ground up, you know, it was chicken coops and dirt and creeks.

Mike: And now we’re making it these big silo houses and a little village. Um, that’s fun. It’s not for a lot of people. They don’t want to go through that process. There are a lot of people that own houses and they’ve kind of ridden the roller coaster of Airbnb and they’re like, it was busy. Now it’s slowing down.

Mike: I don’t understand what’s happening. Um, so we do a lot of consulting with those people going through what their property looks like, how we can make it stand out right from a, from a scroll stopping perspective, like Instagram, tick tock, uh, even Airbnb and Verbo as you’re just scrolling through kind of comparing around, what is it that we can do to differentiate you from your market or from your competition, make you stand out, get more views, get your higher conversion rate and then make ultimately make more money.

Gil: Kind of going back at one step there about like the river of a gorge part of it. Uh, if you have a host that’s coming to you and they’re looking to shop for new markets, like what is like that process of getting them to figure out like, okay, if you’re going to do a unique build, these are the criteria that you’re looking for.

Gil: Um, and, and I’m thinking maybe in like the back of my head, um, like way back when I was getting started, I, I had listened to like Kai Andrews and him talking about land, land hacking, and he had the golden circle. And I was wondering like, Or they’re going triangle. I think it’s called. Um, do you have a similar kind of framework that you kind of walk through through with your coaching clients?

Mike: so we actually did a 8 week hands on training with a bunch of people specifically about this. Um, what we started with was like research and revenue drivers, right? So what does your market currently have? What does it need? And we would establish like a baseline, right? So Gatlinburg is a good example that a lot of people know of, right?

Mike: You’re not going to have a house that performs well. Without a hot tub and right or a nice kitchen or that kind of thing. So there’s like this baseline of like, everybody else has this, right? Then you have the revenue drivers of what’s, what can you put in addition to that? That would, you know, really boost that for our property right now.

Mike: There’s, uh, two of our properties are on, uh, this place called Hollywood, uh, Hollywood adventure park or off road park. And it is, uh, essentially 2, 700 miles of side by sides and off roads. Right? So we have parking for trailers, parking for side by sides, a wash, so you can wash off your side by side before you leave, and then we’re looking at doing side by side rentals, right?

Mike: So all of those things are really unique to the market. There’s not a single other person or Airbnb that we found that has that kind of thing. So little revenue drivers that you can add on to properties like that, um, design amenities and details, really talking about the flow, how to put everything together and make it look visually stunning because people want an experience that’s better than their house.

Mike: Right. And I will say this market in particular, there are a lot of people that just converted their house into an Airbnb because they heard it makes money and it’s, it looks like someone’s house, right? It’s not great. It’s, it’s safe. It’s there, but it’s not great. Um, then we go through like performance for unique properties and we go through a lot of the like financial pitfalls.

Mike: Right. There’s one property that’s being built down the road from us that we’re in conversation with this guy, and it is 44 feet up a cliff face tucked into a hole in the rock. It is the most visually stunning property I’ve ever seen in my life. If he went to get a loan for that property, they would have laughed him out of the bank.

Mike: Right? So what are you going to have in terms of appraisals and comps and struggles? Like, is the, if you’ve got an A frame, is that top loft area that you’re using really a bedroom or is it not? It’s going to change the overall loan that you can get. Um, social media. We do a whole class on social media and how to get more bookings.

Mike: A couple of our channels are getting 1415 million views per post right now, which has been fantastic in terms of direct bookings, um, operations and systems. That was something that we did a big dive on. How can you, you know, obviously doing all of these things takes a lot of time. So how can you go through all of this and make sure that it’s systematized, whether it’s, you know, a Zapier integration or high level, or if you’ve got days.

Mike: Um, and then revenue management to make sure that you’re charging, you know, enough to actually repay for all this.

Gil: Got it. So it sounds like the program is not just about the unique stays, but really around all the different parts of one operationalizing actually, what, Hey, first off is acquisition, where to pick the right markets, how to read the numbers, um, how to scale and op operationalize just hosting in general.

Gil: Um, and also really, how do you make those stays unique? And it sounds like you’re actually doing a lot of these in parallel because they go really in tandem with each other.

Mike: they do. Yeah. And the, the unique part, like, like research and revenue drivers, right? Everybody needs to do research. Everybody needs to know what their revenue drivers are. The unique part comes into play where it’s like, instead of stopping at the minimum, like, what can you do that nobody else is doing there?

Mike: And it just, it really unlocks just a different mindset, right? Where you’re looking at it and it’s like, you got a house, you got Airbnb, you got your performer, and it kind of. Become standardized and then you take a step back and you’re like, if I were to blow this up, right? And say, I want to do something that really pops.

Mike: That’s really going to like that. There’s just think about we call it the thumb stop ratio, right? So as you’re scrolling, how many times are you going to stop on my listing? How many people are going to stop on my listing? So that’s the ultimate goal for the unique brainstorming, right? How’s it going to look in a photo?

Mike: How’s it going to be there in the reviews and really be able to execute that? Yeah. Um, and then some, some benefits versus drawbacks, right? Like we did like a space net on one that was over a creek. So you can like lay in this hammock like looking thing in the dock versus a zip line, right? You can do a zip line.

Mike: You can install a zip line just as easy as you could do a space net. But a zip line comes with a lot more risks, a lot more, you know, uh, liability, insurance costs, things like that. So really weighing both of those at the same time to make sure that you’re maximizing the profit without sacrificing like all of your time on the next bill.

Gil: Yeah, you, you mentioned, um, an interesting kind of market there, like Gatlinburg. Gatlinburg is, is, um, everybody says it. Everybody just says it’s saturated. Definitely is saturated. There’s so many folks in there. I’m in there myself there. Um, I’m interested in hearing from you. Like if you have any stories there of you taking on a client where they might have kind of your standard, um, cabin cabin, the woods and what they did and kind of like the outcomes of it.

Mike: Yeah, so we haven’t taken on anybody in Gatlinburg. I have a friend that was through our course that had one cabin in Spearville, but she actually was more interested in a new build that she’s doing in California. So we didn’t do too much there. The issue that we run into with those a lot of times with the super saturated markets like Gatlinburg or Spearville, for example.

Mike: Um, the issue that we run into with those is typically when people are starting to look for the alternate routes, like how to make it unique, how to, how to do add ons, they’ve lost a lot of money at that point. So what they don’t want to do is go spend another 20, 30, 000 on that. Um, we started a list of essentially just like a download of all these different, uh, standard amenities that you can make unique, right?

Mike: And like a good example that we’ve done is we needed a hot tub. We’ve got these 3 cabins that are 4 wheel drive road, little 2 bed, 1 bath, 420 square foot, almost built awesome cabins, right? And they’re next to these cliffs, cliffs are, I’d say, 75 foot tall. So you’ve got the cabin and then 10 feet over to the side, you’ve got a 75 foot tall cliff, like, looks absolutely awesome.

Mike: And around it are all these big rocks, right? So we needed a hot tub and we went out and met with a builder and we’re like, where can we put this? Like, we’re going to build a deck somewhere. What we were trying to do is put it beside this. Big cliff, right? This big rock that we had. It’s not a, not the cliff, but like a big boulder.

Mike: And as we’re standing there, he’s like, what if we just put it on top? Right. And my mind is just like, Oh my gosh, like we’re starting from scratch. Here we go. So we wound up doing that. We built this patio on the bottom that’s cut into the cliff side. And then the steps that wrap up around the back. And what you do is you walk up to the top, you get in the hot tub and you can oversee this entire like Valley that’s right next to our house.

Mike: And so the hot tub is actually above the roof of the house. You’re overlooking the roof of the house while you’re out there. And we, it was a hundred percent increase in revenue within three months. Right. It was insane. Yeah. So it’s not just ADR, not just occupancy, but those two combined increased us a hundred percent year over year.

Mike: Um, it costs about 20 grand to build and we made over 20 grand in the first year that was there. So it was, it was just immediately we’re like, Oh my gosh, we have to do this for all of them. So we had a meeting last week about doing another one. We’ve got a cliff that fell off and we’re going to do something in there with a big overlook deck and whatnot.

Mike: Um, but that being said, it wasn’t a hundred percent increase in revenue because what we did is just. Put a hot tub up there and then put it back on Airbnb. It was a hundred percent because what we did is we put that up there and then we had Shelby Wilray come out and do a bunch of videos and Instagram reels.

Mike: And then we started marketing that. And then we started to get a lot more views and so on and so forth. So that combined gave us something that people really wanted to look at. It gave a lot of conversation pieces, right? We put it up there and people are like, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe this is Kentucky or I want to go there.

Mike: Whatever, so they’d start having a conversation that would drive up all of our social media growth, which then would lead over to direct booking.

Gil: Interesting. Interesting. So it’s, it’s, you’re actually taking a step several steps forward or, or, or up where you’re not just thinking about the amenities. You’re actually spending a lot of time to really think about, like, how do we actually make this a really unique stay there? Um, and wow, that’s, that’s an amazing story there.

Gil: Um,

Mike: pretty cool. That was that was an awesome success story, but we do that with a lot of people that have places in places in Gatlinburg that are underperforming. And it’s like, let’s look at your lot. What can we do? And we’ve got a list of how to take a hot tub and make it unique in 25 different ways, right?

Mike: Or how to take a bicycle and really implement it into your property. If you’ve got that, or can you do like outdoor bowling? And if you can do outdoor bowling, like, what could you do to make it more fun? More unique? You know, I’m really installed there and then the how far they go with it is up to them, right?

Mike: If they want a full on landscaping project, it’s going to cost 100, 000 and it’s got cornhole, cornhole pickleball, like all that kind of stuff. We could do that and we’ll try and drive like what that specific revenue would be. But there’s typically speaking in those saturated markets, there’s this like inflection point of are they going to look at you first?

Mike: Right. And if they look at you first, if you can stay on top of Airbnb, if they can see you in, and they can see you on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and social medias, whatever, um, and know that they’re going to go there, they’ll, they’ll think of you first. What happens is you still have millions of people going to Gothenburg.

Mike: Right. There are a lot of people that go to Gallagher. So, unfortunately, there are a lot of Airbnbs, there’s a lot of competition, a lot of choices, but if you can get to the point where you’re up top, where they’re looking at your listing first, there’s typically like this floodgate that opens up, where all of a sudden it’s like you’re full all the time because You know, that right there is the one thing that just pushed you higher than you needed to be.

Mike: So it’s just really making sure that what you’re doing is going to achieve that goal for your target market. And we niche down to a specific avatar with everybody that we’re working for. So is it, are we advertising to the child, the six year old child that wants to come out there and play? Who’s going to tell their mom about it?

Mike: Are we advertising to the couple that wants to go out for their honeymoon anniversary birthday? That kind of thing.

Gil: Got it. Got it. So is it, is it almost kind of where you start in terms of amenities? Like when you’re thinking about it, one, you have your standard amenities where you make sure like you’re checking all the boxes to make sure that you’re staying competitive. And then two, you’re driving, you’re diving down deep and understanding who is, is that you actually want to attract in there and possibly who you want to detract from your place.

Gil: Um, and really trying to make sure that the amenities align with that persona there.

Mike: Yes. So we’re, we’re doing that even 1 level further where we designed, um, we’re going to put together a container house to me to 40 foot containers of the 20 foot underneath it. And as we’re thinking through what we want to put in there. It’s specifically towards couples. It’s going to have a secret room so we can gamify it a little bit.

Mike: But then as we’re putting together amenities for couples, a lot of the things that came up were like, do we want fitness equipment? Do we want yoga mats? Do we want a, you know, pillow filled room where they can relax and read with a circular note that’ll pop on Instagram and that kind of thing. And what we realized is we’re kind of mixing active and restful at the same time.

Mike: So instead of just saying couples, what we said is this one, this Particular house is going to be the couple’s rest house, right? So now all of a sudden, we’ve got our, our color scheme is, you know, lights and neutrals and we’ve got big pillows and we’ve got music that’s there and we’ve got, you know, a simplified layout, whereas the active, the hiker that venture or the workout person that’s going to have the workout or the excuse me, the hidden room could be like a big like Peloton workout room with the gym, whatever.

Mike: You know, that kind of thing. So it could be the exact same layout of a house, but a completely different design in terms of what’s offered there, what the colors are, what the feel is right. And the reason that I can be confident in that is because I’m bringing people from Colorado, New York, Washington.

Mike: California to Kentucky for the experience of staying here. So my market is not just the people that are in the course. My market is the United States couples in the United States. And if you look at it, you have 365 days to fill, right? If you can’t get 365. I’ll say transactions, right nights filled doing a good job setting up and marketing, right?

Mike: Then to me, it’s just that natural. That natural limiter on Occupancy is such a confidence booster to say I only need to fill 365 nights There’s a lot of companies out there that if they only sold 365 products, right? They wouldn’t be doing too well Right. So it’s, it’s, when you think about it that way, it’s like, I think I could do that.

Mike: Right. I think I could design this for the restful individual in the United States and get 365 of them to come or, you know, 180 or whatever it is, half of that for two nights.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. And is that kind of, I’m thinking about your experience there as a digital marketer, um, is that kind of where you start putting on your prior experiences on all and that hat there and then bringing it into. Short term rental and investing is really with digital marketing. You’re trying to figure out what people’s problems are, who’s your ideal customer profile is ICP, we call them ICPs.

Gil: Um, and you’re trying to really make sure that any advertising, any, any landing pages is really resonating with one specific avatar type. And it sounds like you’re applying a lot of those digital marketing, I would say like tactics and strategies specifically around guest stays.

Mike: Exactly. That’s exactly what we’re doing and looking through same kind of funnel and conversion rate. Where are we getting enough views? Are we getting enough people on our page? Like, All of that, but it starts, it starts with that, you know, the visuals, right? That’s the first thing that they’re going to see is that visual.

Mike: Now we have every short term mental hosting. I’d say it sells in my opinion, the best product that’s ever existed, right? We sell a relaxation. We sell disconnection with your devices. We sell connection with your family. We sell core memories. We sell family time. All of those things. So, so it’s an easy product once you actually like get them interested in it.

Mike: It’s an easy product to sell, right? Everybody wants to go on vacation somewhere else and have a better experience than they do at home, but they’re that being said, like, getting that designed in a way that will stop their scroll is our primary objective with everything.

Gil: Interesting.

Mike: sometimes it’s not even that hard.

Mike: Like, sometimes you take a square window and you frame it in and you make it round, right? A circular reading pops 100 times better on Instagram than a window. Right. You put that in there. All of a sudden, you’ve got, you know, every female under 30, maybe even some that are over. It’s just like, Hey, what is this?

Mike: Right. This whole, this whole thing. You asked a little bit about like where I started this whole concept of short term rentals started because of a tree house in Redmond, Washington, that three, I’m married now, have a kid, love my wife, but three different girls that I dated, including my wife asked me to book that so that we could go there.

Mike: It was 700 a night. 700 to sit there. I never went, but I wanted to buy a tree. I was like, if this, if this is consistent enough, I want to, I want to own the tree house, right? I don’t want to rent the tree house. I want to own the tree house because that’s a fantastic business model. Right? So we went a long route trying to build a tree house in Washington.

Mike: It wound up the regulations were too strict. And I found a market where there were a lot less regulations in the gorge, which is fantastic. Um, eventually we’ll do a tree house, but I’m, I’m interested in the, the bigger, more unique stuff now.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. On the kind of like the more digital side of things or the marketing side of things, you talked a little bit about working with influencers and some of the things you do there as you’re thinking about, I would say kind of like your direct booking engine, everything that has to go into your marketing.

Gil: What are the pillars that you think about as you’re building out your marketing engine? Yep.

Mike: visuals on that first part, what’s going to attract in a first spark to make him stop the scroll is two fold and the most important part to anything that we’re doing, right? The design is one. So we’ve talked about that. What are we selecting? What does it look like? What’s the theme? Making sure that that fits together is good.

Mike: However, I have some beautiful houses that we’ve designed that I went and took photos of and I wouldn’t even show them to my friends. Right. I am not a photographer. I’m not an influencer. I’m not a videographer and I’m not good at any of it. Like I look at him like, this is great. I snap a photo and I’m like, this is the worst photo I’ve ever seen of any house.

Mike: So hiring the right people to come out there or trading. The right people to come out there. Um, we have been all over the map on influencers and photographers. Um, we’ve done standard real estate. We’ve done short term rental specific. We’ve done, you know, the Shelby will raise. There’s a couple other guys.

Mike: Jordan does that on our team. Um, there’s a couple other guys that we’ve used in the past that have, you know, just the eye, the drones, the skill sets with their camera. You know, it’s not the camera. It’s the eye that they have and the ability to know how to use it while they’re in there. And when we get there.

Mike: Content back, it’s night and day, the performance is night and day. So we don’t, we don’t use any of our own photos. We almost don’t use any of our own real estate shopped imagery. We’ll use it for our listings, but not on our Instagram or Tik TOK anymore.

Gil: So is it all, is it all a UGC, all user generated content?

Mike: a hundred percent

Gil: Wow. So all of your Instagram posts, all the content you have are via influencers that have stayed at your

Mike: correct influencers, or we’ve hired a couple of the professionals they’re, they’re basically their own influencers, but they charge to do this now. Um, and then we’ve hired a couple of them to come out seasonally and shoot different seasons. But it is, you know, again, we paid, I think, for 3 different cabins to get shot.

Mike: It’s 1, 300 to have them out there and we gave them 2 nights for free. Um, drove out there, they brought a couple people with them, so we got actual You know, people, they’re like using the hot tub cooking all the experiential shots, um, had a car out front, a cute little like teal jeep kind of thing that he had, um, just really pops, really looks good.

Mike: And it was that right there made us over 10, 000 dollars, like, having that shoot out there, just in direct both things

Gil: That’s wow. That’s actually not that much more than like we pay close to that, even for our SDR photographer

Mike: yep. So, out of the gorge, they’re about 450, so it’s, it’s about double a little bit over double. Uh, what it does out there just for photos, but this gets you, it gives you reels. It gets you like edited videos that you can use for the whole thing, or you can buy the raw content for a little bit. 

Gil: How do you, how do you find these

Gil: folks? 

Mike: Instagram.

Gil: Yeah. Are you just endlessly scrolling and

Mike: my, my algorithm and I don’t see anything else anymore. It’s just unique short term rentals. That’s all I get. But what we’ll do is we’ll reach out to a lot of the other guys that are out there and just say, Hey, who’d you use for this? Or what’s your process for this? And you’d be amazed how accessible most of them are.

Gil: I know a lot of SDR specific ones. And I do know like a lot of folks that will have influencers out there, but the, the influencers that I’ve come across are really around influencers around travel specifically, but it sounds like they’re influencers that stay there. But. They’re more so more focused on creating content for you, for your audience, rather than their audience.

Mike: So we put together a really good, I’m gonna call it like a barter agreement, right? Where we get people that reach out all the time and say, would you be willing to trade? Right. And the first thing I want to see is like, what’s your photo quality? Cause I’ve, we’ve, I mean, we’ve let hundreds of people stay at our properties over the last few years that were, some were good.

Mike: Some were not, some had. Uh, okay photos, but a fantastic audience and we’re engaged Right. Those we have, we’ve actually done a couple of giveaways with them where the photos were, you know, they’re meh, like, I didn’t like them personally. And I’ll be the first one to say, my opinion doesn’t matter. Like, let’s figure out what the masses want to say.

Mike: But I really didn’t like them, but their audience was fantastic. And we had them out 2 or 3 times just to do more giveaways because they just kept engaging and everybody was like, thrilled about it, which was awesome. Um, so looking at a couple of different things that the engagement is definitely 1, the photo quality is the other I’ve had.

Mike: Yeah. It’s probably 50 percent at this point of the influencers that come out there, like, I just won’t even use their stuff. It was just a free stay for them. But what we did is we put together, you know, this whole sheet of, I need 10 edited photos. I want three edited reels. I want all of your raw content along, you know, photos of X, Y, Z, like either go to the town and kind of, uh, videotape around like how to get back from the town or, you know, you eating.

Mike: In the, in the, like, if we need something, that’s a, uh, how to use the dining room table or work remote or something like that, whatever the theme is that we’re kind of trying to do, what we’ll do is guide them to get those kind of shots. And that’s been really helpful. Um, but I will say, like, you do waste quite a few nights on influencers that are just don’t hit the mark.

Mike: They’re great. Influencers are probably really good at some other topics like travel or whatnot, and just can’t capture the Airbnb side. Um, and I can confidently say that knowing that I’m the worst out of all of them capturing the Airbnb side. So. It’s challenging.

Gil: Yeah. I bet that like, say for instance, you create that script in there, that scripts, it may be a hit or it may, it may be a flop with that one influencer. But the next time you have someone that you’re interested in bringing another influence in there, you already have that script created. You already have the content that you know that you want to gear towards and you can always reuse it.

Mike: Exactly.

Gil: Got it. And then maybe just rewind back a little bit. It sounded like there’s two criterias that you’re looking for when working with influencers. There’s one, engagement and audience. Are they the right fit with your ideal audience? Do you get the engagement there? That’s, and are they getting the click throughs to your, your, your page?

Gil: Are they actually converting it to bookings?

Mike: hmm.

Gil: And then there’s two, which is, Outside of that, uh, or alongside of that, you have just the quality of the photography that you can use as UGC content on your own pages. And they’re almost like two separate things that you look at and judge completely separately.

Mike: A hundred percent. And I would say if you get one, it’s a win. Right. If you have average photos, but they have a big audience that’s super engaged. Right. I don’t really care what their photos are because I’m probably not going to use them. I’ll get them, but I’m probably not going to use them, but I will, you know, comment the heck out of their audience.

Mike: So as they’re saying stuff like, thanks, you know, I’d love to see you can book here and we’ll see direct bookings from that. The others. I had a girl that stayed with us that I think she had 450 followers on Instagram. That was her biggest platform. And, you know, bless her heart. I think she has 17. She’s an awesome, awesome human being, but was like trying to be an influencer.

Mike: It was brand new. But I looked at her photo quality, like she sent me just some photos that she’s taken. I was like, these are fantastic. They’re better than the photos that we have of the house. Right? So I asked her, I was like, would you be willing to go and shoot a lot of the stuff in that? So I want to, you know, the couch, the kitchen, the layout, all that.

Mike: And she came back and sent us some reels that just killed. I think we grew her audience more than she grew our audience. But it was because of the photos and the photo quality that she took just really aligned well with the place that we had.

Gil: That’s, that’s so interesting because I’ve not heard someone talk about like working with influencers on that side where you’re using them as the, like the paid UGC. yep. Oh, Yeah, Well, especially if they come with their friends, I’ll request that they bring some people with them. Because a lot of times you’ll get like two or three people on the couch and there’s a really good usable photo. And my thing is I want to take every photo that I can from here down. Right. I want someone to see that there’s long hair and that there’s a nose and mouth and whatnot, but not like be able to identify the individual.

Mike: And what that does from a psychological perspective is you say, you know, Hey, I’m a 30 year old girl and that girl looks like she’s around that age. I don’t have to envision myself sitting there, right? I can see how I fit on the couch. I can see that it’s relaxing. I can see that there’s a place to put your food, that kind of stuff.

Mike: So, I’ve answered all of the subconscious questions that people have when you’re trying to build, say, build trust and air quotes, but that is what you’re doing, right? You’re trying to build trust so that they can stay there. Trust that, especially on direct booking. Trust that you’re going to take their credit card and give them a place to stay, not just take their credit card, right?

Mike: So if you can eliminate all of those hurdles by having people there, that’s something that influencers are. Influencers are particularly good at.

Gil: yeah, yeah, and it’s just interesting you say, like from the, from the eyes down where it’s not identifiable, like I see a lot of folks nowadays, even like they’ll actually take the, the back, the back of

Mike: Yes, the back’s a good one too.

Gil: yeah, yeah. Especially in the hot tub and like all the places where you’re just like, you’re, what you’re trying to do is like create that moment that someone can then envision themselves specifically in that space.

Gil: It could be the couch.

Mike: and not to be competitive, right? You don’t want to put, you know, a model in there and put her face on there. And someone’s like, well, I don’t look like that. I wouldn’t have that much fun. There’s, there’s an instant like objection to it. Whereas if it is the backside, that could be me, even if it’s the exact same person, it’s like, that could be me guys to guys are the same way and we always envision ourselves being a little bit better than we actually are.

Mike: Right? So you get someone, you know, a couple of guys out there that are, you know, not both, but are, you know, good looking dudes. It’s like, Oh. I could, I could be out there doing that, you know, and, and you don’t have the face to associate with it. So it’s a little, little teeny little psychological tricks that really go a long way for, uh, helping build trust in those conversations.

Mike: I’ll say conversations because they’re usually happening online, but

Gil: yeah. And, and, and interesting, do you also use the same UGC type content in your listing photos? Non, like not on social, like on, on the OTAs as well too.

Mike: yes, some, um, we, we test all of them and I test all of them as if I’ve never tested any of them. Um, I’d say 60 to 70 percent do a lot better with. Um, people in them, at least some, um, but there are a couple that I’ve found for some reason that just didn’t, I was like, well, we’ll just take them out. And if our, if our click through rates and our conversion rates are a little bit lower when we have them on than they are with men, there’s no point in leaving them in.

Gil: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Interesting.

Mike: Yeah.

Gil: Any, any other tactics, uh, or strategies that you’ve learned along the way as, as you’re building the hideaways that you want to share with, with our audience today? Yeah.

Mike: direct bookings, the thing for me, I always wanted to get people off platform, right? Get them off Airbnb, get them off Roboto. They’re, they’re fantastic, uh, initial entry points and ways to build your database. Like Airbnb’s done an absolutely amazing job at building their platform.

Mike: However, they own their platform. Right. So when I was doing marketing, one of the companies for the companies that I worked with, they, they got really good results from Facebook ads and then iOS 14 came out and a couple of them went from making about 5 million a year and making 350, 000 a year, right? Now, if you have systems and products bought and people hired and whatnot for a 5 million company, and all of a sudden you’re making 350 grand, like that, they went out of business real quick after that.

Mike: And the reason is because they built their entire business on another business. Right. If you’re going to build a business, you need to either control the whole thing or you need to diversify the income sources that you have. So, for the people that are only on Airbnb or only on booking. com or whatever they’re on, right, that’s a very dangerous place to be because you have a mortgage, you have utility bills, you have loans, you have all this stuff.

Mike: And if Airbnb turns around tomorrow and says, hey, nevermind, I’m not going to let you stay here. You broke our policies or whatever. And I’ve heard that happen to so many people. Where all of a sudden it’s like, it was, it’s just D listed. It’s like, what are you going to do? So I’m hyper focused on building my business, right.

Mike: And Airbnb is a part of that booking. com Verbo. They are a part of that. The core of what I have is my marketing and my direct bookings. Right. And that’s what I want because I can control that. So what I’ve done since day one is tried to build all of the database that I can of my customers. Right. So if I get their phone number from Airbnb, great, put that in a database.

Mike: First name, last name, put it in a database, where they’re from, put it in dates, how much they spent, where they stayed, all of that. Right. So we use high level and then I back it up into Google sheets. Um, but I also have things that go out either in unit or via SMS after whatever it is that I get, if it’s their email or phone number, I send out.

Mike: A request to get more information on that platform, email or SMS and then say, Hey, you know, I’ve got this email list. Would you like to be on it? 99. 9 percent of people say yes. Right? And then they, then I said, okay, cool. I didn’t get your email from listening. Do you want to send it right now? And they’ll just text it to me.

Mike: Right? So then I update that database. So I have this 67, 6800 people now of, uh, all of their contact information. So that when I send out an email. Yeah. And say, hey, we’ve got a new listing. Hey, October is really busy. If you want it, you should book early, right? Um, or discounts, anything like that. We don’t do too many discounts, but, um, any, anything along those lines, I’m having a real conversation with my customers.

Mike: Instead of allowing all of those to live elsewhere. So if you have one listing or if you have a hundred listings, like that would be my number one thing is pull all of that information into a centralized place that you own and then make sure that you’re having a conversation with them, you know, monthly, at least

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I always encourage folks like start your email list early on. Like, even if you have that one single property day, day one. Yeah,

Gil: it shouldn’t stop you from starting to collect email. And like for us, we use rental agreements. So we get all the emails along with it already.

Gil: Um, but we also do like stay fi and we try to get emails on, on site as well.

Gil: But

Mike: State is a huge one, because, you know, if you’ve had, I think we’ve had a couple of thousand reservations now. But we’ve hosted tens of thousands of people, right? Because everybody that comes is going to bring XYZ person with them. And if you can put that wifi pop up in front of them for every single person that’s there, what person wouldn’t want to triple their list overnight just by adding a 15 a month.

Mike: You know, unit in there.

Gil: Yeah. So yeah, like for us, we, we’ve always started to collect emails very, very early on. And I think one of the main things that we did was we collected the emails and we sat on those emails and we never messaged them for at least the first year. Um, and when you do that emails, they decay. Um, and if you don’t message them and you email them out of the blue, they’re going to be like, who are you?

Gil: Where, why are you messaging me? So kind of like alongside of that start collecting emails, but also. Start to just email them on a regular basis, even if you do like a 12 month sequence where you spend an afternoon just writing the next 12 months and what it might look like and all the things to do, you spend a little bit of time up front, you’d let it, let us sit there, maybe you, maybe you give them an encouragement on month number nine, number 10 to stay on their annual visit, like those, those are things that you can just set and forget it and then start to create more content specifically around time, time bound events.

Gil: Thanks.

Mike: Yeah. We have a couple of Zapier integrations, like when they book, it auto sets a field called a booking anniversary. And then we have emails that, Hey, it’s coming up in two months. Are you going on vacation again? We’ve got all these different properties. Would you like to look at them?

Mike: We’ve got those. We’ve got, um, a couple that just tell our story. Right. A lot of people are like, I don’t know what to email. It’s like, well, who are you tell them who you are? Tell them how you got into this. Tell them how much you appreciated them being there. Right. And then you’ve got the seasonality ones where it’s, you know, our, uh, June, July, August are really, really busy.

Mike: Our October is our peak and they all book up way in advance. So we tell them, Hey, we’ve got this pricing strategy. If you guys want to go in there, this is the cheapest time to get it. And it’ll be full in 60 days. So

Mike: it helps

Gil: Yeah. So definitely folks, if you’re listening to this, definitely take advantage of those emails and start marketing early on. Um,

Mike: Sheets, man. You can just put them in a Google Sheet and start from there.

Gil: yeah, whatever tool, I think, honestly, you’re absolutely right. You don’t have to get super sophisticated. You don’t need high level or anything like that, like that, but you definitely should put some systems and processes in place so that you can start to read the benefit down the road.

Mike: Yep, absolutely.

Gil: Mike, we usually end the show with two questions. Uh, one of the questions I’ve changed more recently to really around your favorite book that has impacted you. Uh, and the reason why I asked that question now is I’ve been trying to, trying to read more often than I have the past year of growing the company.

Gil: I’ve hadn’t had much time to do so, but now that things are starting to pick up, I’m trying to get back to good habits. So any book recommendations from, from you?

Mike: Mine, I, I do a lot of audio books and a lot of reading as much as I can. I love reading. Um, I think the one that stands out right now is good to great it for me. I have a lot of, um, oh, I want to say imposter syndrome. Like I’ve been. You know, I’ve, I’ve run a marketing agency for the last decade and I started this one immediately after, right?

Mike: So I’ve been on this entrepreneurship journey and I’ve been pretty much the forefront of those companies and a lot of times I’m like, I always think that person’s smarter than me, right? So I’m gonna go with theirs and then like, uh, six months down the line. I’m like, what are we doing? You know, why are we here?

Mike: and I asked them a couple questions and I realized that they had no idea what they were doing and I’ve Been through that three times in my life. So why didn’t I just like lead with that? Right? And, and good to great really kind of reframed, like everything does start from the top down, you know, where you’re going, what your direction is.

Mike: If you’re successful or not, like it’s going to be top down. And, uh, I think I think it’s Jim Collins. I read it. It’s just such a well written book and had a lot of really good information for me.

Gil: Awesome. Awesome. Alright, Mike, last question. And you might have already answered this, but What’s the one piece of tactical advice Um, that you want our folks to walk away with that drives more direct bookings for them?

Mike: I, I think I had lean on emails, but let’s compound it with implement Staphy, right? I think collecting emails, organizing that that’s, we’ve already talked about that, but putting Staphy in a unit will, uh, a speed that that’s your process right there, right? They sign in, they get it. And then all there are all of your emails, you can export them into a list and email them right away.

Mike: Um, that’s a really good one and it doubles or triples depending on how many people you have come in the speed at which you grow that list. How about that? Do this with compounding with the viral coefficient, If you, if you put out there, you email or you market, right? You tell 1 person that person books and they tell 2 people to come because it’s a lot easier to get a referral to stay there than it is for me to actually go out there and introduce myself.

Mike: Um, but doing, if you’re collecting those emails and really focusing on increasing your vowel, vowel coefficient as you’re communicating with people, that’s a, a very easy, uh, path to success there.

Gil: you’re saying here is like Yes, start collecting those emails from your past guests. But the content that you put out, uh, is really one, value added content, but two, is encouraging them to share their experience with those that are around them and, and

Mike: Other people that they know that’d be interested because they’ve got a group of people that would love it. Everybody does.

Gil: yeah, that’s powerful.

Mike: Yeah.

Gil: Awesome. Mike, it was, uh, really good having you on the show. It’s really good to kind of hear how the hideaways came to be and kind of how it’s transformed and. Also, your mission on just like really helping more and more folks be successful in this. Um, so thank you for sharing all of that.

Mike: Absolutely. It was a blast. I appreciate you having me here.

Gil: Awesome. Thanks, Mike. Bye.