Guest Data Collection that Drives Direct Booking Revenue through StayFi with Arthur Colker

Summary and Highlights

🎯 Meet Arthur Colker

Arthur Colker is the Founder and CEO of StayFi, a guest marketing platform that started as a WiFi data collection tool and evolved into a comprehensive solution for vacation rentals, boutique hotels, and independent hospitality brands. Since 2018, Arthur has been helping property managers capture guest data and build independent booking channels that reduce reliance on major OTAs.

Before StayFi, Arthur worked as a marketing consultant across various industries. His entry into short-term rentals happened almost accidentally when he took on a vacation rental operator as a client and discovered they had zero guest data despite managing 200 properties. That gap became the genesis of StayFi—a platform now used by thousands of operators who understand that guest data ownership is the foundation of a resilient, profitable hospitality business.

Arthur is passionate about helping independent operators compete with major platforms, not by undercutting them, but by building their own brands and creating direct relationships with guests. His latest project, StayFinder, aims to make direct booking discovery as easy as booking through an OTA—while delivering real savings to travelers.

💡 Key Takeaways

✅ Guest data is the most overlooked asset in short-term rentals — Most operators collect names and emails only from bookers, missing everyone else in the reservation
✅ Direct booking isn’t about replacing OTAs — It’s about channel diversification and building a resilient business that isn’t dependent on one platform
✅ Marketing works when it delivers value — Position direct booking as a “secret” that saves guests money, not just a way to avoid fees
✅ Your property needs to rank on Google — If someone searches your listing name and can’t find your direct site on page one, you’re losing bookings
✅ Unique property names matter for SEO — Generic names like “Cozy Creek Cabin” make it nearly impossible to rank and be discovered
✅ Founders need conviction, not just optimism — Arthur calls it “delusional self-belief,” but you also need to listen when customers tell you what’s not working🏠 How StayFi Started: Solving One Client’s Problem

Arthur didn’t set out to build a hospitality tech company. He was doing marketing consulting for various businesses when he landed a short-term rental operator called Heirloom, managing around 200 properties across New Orleans, Boston, and Scottsdale. Their goal was simple: build a brand identity and figure out how to get guests to book directly.

The challenge? They were 99% dependent on Airbnb for bookings and had zero guest data. No names, no emails, no phone numbers.

Arthur realized that acquiring new guests is expensive and trust-dependent. The easiest path to direct bookings would be marketing to people who already stayed and loved the properties. But how do you market to ghosts?

He looked for existing solutions—captive portal systems used in cafes, airports, and hotels. Nothing worked well for single-family vacation rentals. So he built a custom solution using white-labeled hardware and a basic splash page that collected marketing consent when guests logged into WiFi.

V1 of StayFi was scrappy. No customer portal. No self-service. Arthur manually configured everything for each client. But it worked. And when he looked around the industry, he realized the problem was universal. That’s how StayFi was born.

📈 The Evolution: From WiFi to Full Guest Marketing Platform

The early years were a grind. Through 2019, StayFi was still a part-time project. Then Arthur went full-time—right as the hardware partner got acquired and pricing became unfeasible. He had to rebuild the tech stack while simultaneously dealing with COVID shutting down his 10-15 paying customers overnight.

But instead of folding, Arthur used the downtime to build StayFi’s first self-service portal and flash page builder. By the time short-term rentals roared back in 2021, the platform was ready to scale. Timing couldn’t have been better—hosts were angry at Airbnb for how they were treated during the pandemic, and the industry was hungry for tools that reduced OTA dependence.

Fast forward to today, and StayFi has evolved far beyond WiFi data collection. The platform now includes:

🔹 Homepage Tool — A link-tree-style page for guests that consolidates all the resources they need during their stay
🔹 Email Marketing Software — Purpose-built for vacation rentals, not generic tools like MailChimp
🔹 PMS Integrations — Pulling data from property management systems to create a unified guest database
🔹 Upsell Amplification — Helping operators present offers like early checkout, mid-stay cleans, and local experiences to all guests, not just bookers

The guiding principle? Collect guest data from every touchpoint, then help operators monetize that data—whether through rebookings, upsells, or entirely new revenue streams.

For property managers who also run real estate businesses, tour companies, or retail shops, StayFi has become a powerful cross-marketing engine. Guests who stay in vacation rentals are often the same people who later buy properties in that market. The data becomes invaluable.

🔍 StayFinder: The Next Frontier in Direct Booking Discovery

Arthur’s newest project, StayFinder, tackles a different problem: guest discovery.

Most direct booking tools focus on converting existing traffic or remarketing to past guests. But what about people who’ve never heard of your brand? How do they discover your direct site when they’re used to starting their search on Airbnb or VRBO?

StayFinder is a meta-search platform for vacation rentals. Think of it like Kayak, but for short-term rentals. When guests search for a property, StayFinder shows them:

✔️ The price on major OTAs (Airbnb, VRBO, Booking.com)
✔️ The direct booking price
✔️ The savings from booking direct

The platform doesn’t process bookings itself. Instead, it drives guests as far down the funnel as possible on the property manager’s own website—ideally to the checkout page, depending on what the PMS or booking platform supports.

To build inventory, StayFi is inviting operators to opt in and share their guest data. In exchange, their properties get prioritized in search results, and they gain exposure to guests from other participating brands. It’s a network effect: the more data shared, the more discovery and bookings everyone gets.

Arthur positions StayFinder as education, not just marketing. The pitch to guests? “Here’s a secret most people don’t know: you can book these same properties for less.” It’s value-driven, guest-friendly, and aligned with the growing awareness around direct booking.

The platform isn’t live yet, but when it launches, it could be a game-changer for small to mid-size operators who don’t have massive marketing budgets but want more exposure beyond the OTAs.

🎯 Positioning Direct Booking as Value, Not Desperation

One of the most insightful parts of the conversation was Arthur’s perspective on how to frame direct booking to guests.

Many hosts worry that asking for emails or marketing to guests will come across as pushy or invasive. Arthur’s experience? The opposite. Guests rarely push back on entering their email to access WiFi. Why? Because it feels like a fair exchange. They’re getting something they need (internet access), and the ask is minimal.

The key is positioning. When you market to guests, it shouldn’t feel like spam—it should feel like you’re letting them in on something valuable. Direct booking isn’t just “avoiding OTA fees” (which sounds like the host’s problem). It’s about giving guests better pricing, better service, and direct access to the people managing their stay.

StayFinder leans into this by framing direct booking as a “secret” that savvy travelers are starting to discover. It’s not mainstream yet, but those who know about it benefit. That positioning flips the script from “please book with me instead” to “here’s how you save money and get a better experience.”

This is critical for building an independent brand that isn’t just an alternative to Airbnb—it’s a preferred option.

🛠️ Tactical Advice: Make Sure You Can Be Found

If there’s one thing Arthur hammered home, it’s this: Google your property names right now.

If someone searches for your listing and can’t find your direct booking site on the first page of results, you’re losing bookings. Period. Tools like StayFinder and growing awareness of direct booking mean more people are actively trying to find your site—but only if you make it discoverable.

Here’s what that means in practice:

📌 Use unique property names. Avoid generic names like “Cozy Creek Cabin” or “Mountain View Retreat.” There are hundreds of properties with those names, and you’ll never rank.
📌 Match your branding across platforms. Use the same name, photos, and descriptions on your direct site as you do on Airbnb and VRBO. This helps with both guest recognition and search matching algorithms.
📌 Invest in a platform with strong SEO. PMS-provided websites often have poor SEO foundations. Tools like CraftedStays are built with clean URLs, fast load times, and mobile-first design that helps you rank higher.
📌 Test your discoverability regularly. Make it a habit to search your property names and see what comes up. If your direct site isn’t there, troubleshoot immediately.

Arthur shared a story about Gil’s own property, “Cozy Creek Cabin,” which struggled to rank because there were three other properties in Gatlinburg with the same name. The lesson? Rebrand early if your name is too generic, or you’ll fight an uphill SEO battle forever.

This advice ties directly into optimizing your short-term rental website for both guest experience and search visibility.

📊 The Reality of OTAs and Direct Booking Coexistence

Arthur doesn’t see direct booking as an existential threat to OTAs—and he doesn’t think they should either. OTAs and brands have coexisted in the hotel industry for decades. Hotels list on Booking.com and Expedia, but they also invest heavily in loyalty programs and direct channels.

The same model works for vacation rentals. OTAs provide reach and guest acquisition. Direct booking provides margin, control, and long-term guest relationships. Both matter.

What’s shifting is that smaller operators—those with 10, 20, or 40 properties—are finally starting to invest in direct channels. For years, they were 100% OTA-dependent because they didn’t have the tools or expertise to do anything else. But platforms like StayFi, CraftedStays, and others have lowered the barrier to entry.

Meanwhile, large legacy property managers who were 100% direct are now listing on OTAs to fill occupancy gaps. The market is balancing out.

Arthur’s advice? Channel diversification is the goal. Don’t try to replace Airbnb overnight. Build systems that let you capture 20-30% of your bookings directly, then grow from there. The key is reducing dependence, not eliminating OTAs entirely.

This mindset aligns perfectly with the direct booking movement that’s gaining traction across the industry.

🚀 What’s Next for StayFi and the Direct Booking Movement

Looking ahead, Arthur sees StayFi’s role expanding beyond just email marketing and WiFi. The goal is to become a central hub for guest data—pulling information from PMS systems, websites, pre-arrival forms, and WiFi logins—then helping operators monetize that data in creative ways.

Some of the innovations on the horizon:

🔹 AI-driven email campaigns — Automatically generating and sending emails to guests based on availability data from your PMS, without requiring manual work
🔹 Set-it-and-forget-it marketing — Operators can toggle on automated campaigns that run in the background, driving bookings while they focus on operations
🔹 StayFinder ecosystem growth — As more operators opt in, the network effect should create a rising tide that lifts all boats, making direct booking easier to discover for travelers

Arthur also emphasized the importance of working collaboratively with other tools in the ecosystem. StayFi isn’t trying to replace AI chat tools, guidebook platforms, or unified inbox solutions—it’s trying to amplify them. By getting tools in front of all guests (not just bookers), StayFi helps operators maximize the ROI of every platform they use.

This collaborative, ecosystem-driven approach is becoming more common in the short-term rental tech space, and it benefits everyone.

💬 Rapid Fire Questions

📚 What’s a book you’d recommend?

“The British Are Coming” by Rick Atkinson — A captivating narrative history of the American Revolution, told from both American and British perspectives. Even if you’re not a history buff, the writing style pulls you in. Arthur says it’s full of parallels to other pivotal moments in history, making it both entertaining and thought-provoking.

🧠 What’s one piece of mindset advice for someone starting something new?

“You need a healthy amount of delusional self-belief to start a business.”

Arthur says when he launched StayFi, plenty of people told him it wouldn’t work and nobody would want the product. But you need conviction to push through early skepticism. The trick? Balance that self-belief with humility. Don’t be so delusional that you ignore negative feedback from customers. Listen, adapt, but don’t lose faith in the vision.

That tension—between conviction and flexibility—is what separates founders who succeed from those who burn out or pivot too early.

🎯 What’s one tactical takeaway for someone trying to grow direct bookings?

“Google the name of your property and make sure your direct booking site shows up on the first page.”

If it doesn’t, you’re losing bookings. People are actively searching for ways to book directly, especially as awareness grows. But if your site isn’t discoverable, they’ll default back to Airbnb or VRBO. Make sure your property names are unique, your branding is consistent across platforms, and your website is optimized for search.

Simple, actionable, and something you can test right now.

🌐 Connect with Arthur Colker

LinkedIn: ⁠Arthur Colker⁠

Company: ⁠StayFi⁠

StayFinder: Launching soon—the direct booking meta-search tool that lets travelers compare prices directly with property managers

🎧 Ready to Dive Deeper?

This was just a snapshot of the full conversation. Arthur shared stories about surviving COVID as a founder, the emotional rollercoaster of churn, and why hospitality is one of the best industries to build a business in.

Listen to the full episode on Spotify →
Watch the full episode on YouTube →

And if you’re ready to build a direct booking website that actually converts, stop letting your traffic go to waste on a site that wasn’t designed for bookings. Start your free trial at CraftedStays.co → and see what a purpose-built platform can do for your business.

You’re not just a host. You’re running a direct booking business. Let’s build it together. 🏡

Transcription

Arthur: As long as you’re providing value, hopefully your marketing will be mostly perceived generously and people will want to receive it. And you make it very clear. Also is like positioning it kind of like a secret, you know? Like here’s something that not everyone knows about, but you can actually save. On this platform that’s very ubiquitous.

Arthur: Like everybody knows what Airbnb is and most people know what VRBO and booking.com are. Now we’re kind of sharing with you like a secret that not everyone is gonna know about, uh, in terms of how you can book these same properties for less, right? So it’s definitely driven by value and from like a guest experience.

Arthur: Once they’re on the site, it’s all about like whenever they do a search, making sure we can fulfill those results and present you. Multiple examples of beneficial, of significant savings. Right.

Gil: Before we bring on our guest, I wanted to talk just a little bit about something that I’ve been hearing a lot from Host. I keep on hearing the same thing. I know my website isn’t converting, but I can’t afford $8,000 on an agency to rebuild it. Here’s the thing, you’re letting all these marketing strategies, you’re driving traffic and you’re putting it all to work.

Gil: But if your site isn’t really built to convert, you’re basically lighting your energy and money on fire. And even if you could afford an agency build, every time you want to test something or make a change, you’re having to pay them again. You can iterate, you can’t test, and you really can improve on things.

Gil: You don’t need a custom $10,000 website to get the conversion rates that really matter. You just need the right platform. That’s why I build craft estates. It’s purpose built for short term rentals and designed from the ground up to help you drive more direct bookings. You can finally turn that traffic into booking.

Gil: And you can keep on testing and improving. As you learn, you can make changes all on the platform. You don’t need to learn something new. So if you need some help or you wanna get started, go ahead and go to craft stays.co and start your free trial. Now let’s bring on our guests and dive deep into hospitality and marketing.

Gil: Hey folks. Welcome back to the book Solid Show, the podcast we’re bringing top operators to discuss short-term rental marketing, revenue management, and direct bookings. On this show, I have the pleasure of interviewing Arthur Colker. He’s the CEO and founder of Stay fi. I’ve met Andrew way back when we were just thinking about the idea of CraftedStays, and he was one of the folks that I bounced the idea off of and really got feedback, and he even connected me to other folks in the industry when we were just getting started.

Gil: So I had a. Really good discussion with them. He walked us through why he started Stay Fi in the first place, the problem that he was solving, kind of how he got into it, the first version of what Stay Fi was, and some of the evolutions of what he’s done and what he’s actually bringing to the market next.

Gil: So I’m super excited to have someone that is so pivotal kind of in the direct booking movement here, to really share why he grew this company to what it is today. So without further ado, let’s bring him in.

Gil : Hey Arthur, welcome to the show.

Arthur : Hey, it’s great to be here finally.

Gil : Yeah, that’s, that’s my bad too. I, I, I’ve known you since the inception of the company or close to the inception of the company, so I’m kicking myself for not inviting you onto the show sooner, so apologies there.

Arthur : It’s all good. Excited to chat today.

Gil : Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um, maybe just to get, give, uh, folks, um, a quick intro. Who’s, who’s Arthur and what do you do?

Arthur : Yeah, so I’m the founder and CEO of a company called Stay Fi. Uh, and we’ve been around for a while, so now it’s since 2018. Uh, and I started this business to help property managers and short-term rental operators to collect more data. From their guests, so they would know who they had staying in their properties.

Arthur : And then of course that helps them market to those guests so they could build their own independent brand and not be dependent on the big OTAs like Airbnb and VRBO for their entire business.

Gil : Yeah. What was, uh, what was the beginning like? Well, maybe just start off like, what was the inception? Like, what drove you to wanna start this company in the first place?

Arthur : Yeah. So I fell into short term rentals kind of accidentally. I was actually doing marketing consulting for a bunch of different types of companies, and one that hired me just happened to be a short-term rental operator called Heirloom that ran around 200 properties in New Orleans, Boston, Scottsdale.

Arthur : And when I started working with them, their goal was to build their first. Brand identity. They didn’t really have a brand outside of being an Airbnb operator. And of course then had to figure out how to get people to book directly with them. And when I started working with them, I found that they were 99% dependent on Airbnb for all of their bookings.

Arthur : And that they had no guest data. So they actually had no first party data names, emails, phone numbers they could actually leverage for marketing. And when we were coming up with a marketing strategy. It’s very hard to get net new guests to book with a hospitality brand, especially a short term rental that they’re not familiar with.

Arthur : You know, are you gonna trust this company you’ve never heard of, uh, with your $8,000? Vacation rental, or you just gonna book through a trusted platform like Airbnb or vrbo. So to get over that kind of trust gap, uh, the first place you wanted to start was with people that already stayed with them and love them.

Arthur : And that’s when I found they had no data on who those people were and how we could market to them. Uh, so initially I just wanted to find a way to systematically collect all that data, and that means not just the booker, since these were large homes, everyone staying there. So we looked at a variety of products that could potentially help them collect data, different processes.

Arthur : Um, and then we landed on, Hey, why don’t we just implement what we’ve seen at coffee shops, airports, hotels, where when someone joins the wifi, they have to enter marketing information and consent to marketing in order to gain access, because that would really touch everybody staying in the reservation. Originally, I just went out to go and purchase one of these systems that you’d find in a cafe or any of these other, uh, hospitality use cases. And there wasn’t anyone who had the both technology and service that would work in a single family home or a vacation rental. It’s all very much, or. Oriented towards these more enterprise locations.

Arthur : So V one Offi was just, uh, collecting this type of data and sending it to MailChimp, uh, which is what heirloom used at the time. And so I built a very simple system for them. And then I looked out and saw if there were other operators like heirloom that needed a similar service. And we discovered that this problem was universal across the industry.

Arthur : Uh, people being completely dependent on. OTAs like Airbnb and VRBO for their booking. So I thought, hey, I could probably sell this to company two and company three. And that’s kind of how State FFI got started. So built this tool for one specific customer and then found there was a need in the market, uh, that more companies could take advantage of.

Gil : Yeah. What was, uh, that first proof of concept, like for, for you? Like, did you end up using a different platform or did you piece together everything from the ground up? What was, what was that like In the very early days?

Arthur : Yeah, in the early days it was a kind of like a hodgepodge of. White labeled software and hardware from this company that doesn’t even exist anymore, called Open Mesh. Um, and then just kind of the most basic capture portal you can imagine was no bells or whistles or functionality. So it was literally, you, we talked about MVPs or minimally viable products.

Arthur : It was that, it was, you know, the least there, there was no like portal to log into. It was just really this, uh, s. Custom built splash page for heirloom, uh, runs through a cloud-based wifi system that doesn’t even exist anymore. Um, and then built with an engineer that I hired, um, off, off work. So it was, it was very much deep and not very sophisticated, but it did do the basic task.

Gil : Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, I remember those like from, for us, I craft this days like the scrappy part is actually where a lot of the fun is because you’re, you have no bloat, you have nothing to kind of constrain yourself. You can just pretty much figure out how to solve that one problem for that one client there.

Gil : And so like taking that. How did, what was the next few years look like? So like, fast forward to now 2025, what, seven years later? You guys are pretty well known in the industry. Um, pretty much everybody has heard of the name State five before, whether or not they’re a user or not. So it’s, it’s pretty ubiquitous at, at this point.

Gil : But what were the kind of the earlier days in that, in the 20 18, 20 19, like when did things start to pick up for you and what was that like even before the pickup? Like what was, yeah, what was it like building out the company?

Arthur : I mean, it was, it’s kind of crazy the way that things ended up turning out just because through 2019 now, going back, um, I still safe. I was still like a part-time job. Like I still had my other business. Um, and then right as I transitioned to full-time in 2019, um. We ended up the hardware that we were compatible with that kind, we ended getting acquired and became like economically not feasible to use.

Arthur : So we had to find a new hardware partner. At that point too, there was still no customer portal. It was all just like, oh, you wanna use Safe five? We’re just gonna custom build everything on the backend for you. Um, so they were, and so you couldn’t like, you know, it wasn’t self-service in any way. It was all kind of done manually.

Arthur : With me and one part-time developer for the first almost two years, and then right as I transitioned to full-time in 2020 and we started building things to make the product more scalable, that’s when COVID started. And then, so my like 10 to 15 paying customers all stopped paying me. At the same time

Gil : Oh

Arthur : though, it was kind of just like a, a crazy, uh, vibration of circumstances where then luckily by that point I had. The business had generated enough money that we could keep, uh, employing our one developer, and then we still kind of developed the V one of the stay portal and like a self-service flow. And that way when short-term rentals started picking up. which thankfully for us in this space happened like the first vertical in the hospitality industry that started seeing a big pickup in demand in 2020.

Arthur : And then 2021, uh, we were ready to go to market with a product that people could actually go to a website and sign up and use. And it wasn’t all manually constructed. Like we had our first flash page builder and things like that. Um. We were well positioned to take advantage of some trends at that time, which also were a lot of angry people who were angry at Airbnb in particular for how they treated house first guests during that period too.

Arthur : Um, so people kind of left that experience realizing that OTA dependence was an existential threat to their business. We kind of have some. Bigger industry trends towards building independent brands at that point as well. So that was definitely helpful when it came to kind of reintroducing yourself to the market and bringing a real product that, you know, was a little more scalable, uh, back to the space, full-time now.

Gil : Yeah, it sounds like 21, 22 was probably a phenomenal year for you folks. Like I probably was using stay fi back in 2022 is when I probably bought my first modem. Um, with you folks or first? Yeah, first router with you, with you folks. And it’s. And then we’ve scaled pretty much every property, so we now even have it in some of our smaller properties that in the very beginning, like that doesn’t make sense.

Gil : But after seeing us like collect so many emails, we’re like, we we’re rolling this out everywhere.

Arthur : Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of, yeah, 20 23, 20 24 is really when the business started to grow a lot faster, and that’s also when we started adding additional product lines. So then, uh, starting, we’ve added a lot of new functionality. Whether that’s to the wifi experience itself. So we added this, uh, tool called homepage, which is kind of like a link tree for your listing, so that when guests access the wifi, they’re also presented with all the relevant links that you need during this day.

Arthur : And that webpage also exists outside of the experience so that you can send it through our email and texting tools. So of course, it made sense to bolt on marketing as well, because we’re collecting all this data. What are you gonna do with it? And most people were either just dumping it into a generic tool, like MailChimp or not doing anything with it at all.

Arthur : Uh, so we built kind of the first purpose built vacation rental. Email marketing software as well. And we have that in within state too. So it’s been pretty clear, uh, at least from my standpoint, it’s, we’re pulling in data now from wifi. We’re pulling it from the PMS, we’re pulling it in from your website.

Arthur : We’re pulling it in from, uh, other pre-arrival forms that we send or can integrate with. So, you know, since we’re becoming the center of all of this. Valuable guest data are really kind of our biggest initiatives at this point are how do we help our customers monetize and create value out of that data, even if that’s outside of rebooking, right?

Arthur : So there’s a lot of ways you can create value with the data we’re collecting outside of just driving direct bookings and finding more ways to help our customer do that is kind of like our North Star.

Gil : Yeah. Yeah. So I, I saw a little bit of that in 24 when you started, when you started working with Via Tour and the Host Co. And you’re starting to, to prevent upsells as part of, kind of like the, the guest checking process. Is that right?

Arthur : Yeah. Yeah, because so many of these products that are out there, we really just kind of help amplify their reach. So a lot of people are using, whether it’s one that we’re like directly integrated with, like the host code, but it could be. Any product out there that helps you drive upsells. People are typically only communicating with the booker in this pre-arrival communication that’s driven through your software, right?

Arthur : So any tool that you have or any guidebook or information that you want to get in front of more people, the wifi is the best entry point to get that information or tool or whatever it is that you’ve spent time and invested in this platform in front of. Your non booking guests, because that is often the first touch point with your brand as well, is when they log into the wifi, your first chance to communicate with them.

Arthur : Uh, so you can think offi as just a really powerful tool to amplify these other tools, whether it’s a, you know, guest engagement, AI chat tool that has like a guidebook component or anything like that. We’re just helping you get it in front of, uh, more people in the actual listing when they’re there.

Gil : Yeah. And you guys have done, I think like little carrots because I think when you started incorporating the homepage, you’re also inco encouraging folks to actually pull you further upstream as well too. So you’re not just collecting emails during when someone logs onto the wifi. Do you see yourself doing more of that where you’re not just that one touch point when someone books in, but some of the things that you possibly can do even before someone checks in.

Arthur : Yeah, so I mean it’s really, I’d say right now the, I was just at the GUESTY conference you were discussing earlier. Right now just the amount of. Tools that people use for guest engagement and management are very heterogeneous and they do many different types of things. Uh, whether it’s like AI chat, whether you are moving this whole unified inbox outside of your PMS into another tool like NSO Connect or So Suite, um, we really see ourselves as kind of a great.

Arthur : Way that can integrate. Very flexible, I would say, and how you can integrate with all these tools, right? Because, um, some people, everyone wants to kind of manage this guest pre-arrival flow a little bit differently. Um, so you can use us to kind of send important information to guests prior to the stage, like the homepage.

Arthur : But I’m not gonna lie and say there are tools that are a lot more sophisticated when it comes to guest engagement prior to the stay. Uh, that are presenting a lot more intelligently driven upsells. And in those cases, it’s really like once they come to the property, we’re just a great way to amplify your reach with those tools and present them to every single guest there, not just the booker.

Arthur : So we really see ourselves as very flexible in this ecosystem of, of whether you wanna leverage us for some pre-arrival engagement and upsells, or you want to use us to drive more engagement with other tools that probably do a better job at that than we do.

Gil : Yeah. Now, now that you’re seven years in, you’ve gotten quite a bit of traction in, in our space in this, in the short-term rental space. Um, you’ve also, we haven’t talked about this, but you’re also creating a line of products, hardware products. Now, uh, I saw what you guys did more recently with allowing you to use your existing modem out there.

Gil : Um, what maybe you, maybe you may wanna speak to this, a little bit of the, the other hardware products, but what are you. Most excited to focus on now and probably for the next 18 months.

Arthur : Yeah. Also, as mentioned, we launched a product called Fi Express, um, which is the first product, first tool. Out there in the world that exists that turns consumer grade mesh wifi systems into one with a captive portal. That would be things like an Amazon Arrow is by far the most common one we see. And then we also work with all the TP link products and their main mesh system is called Deco.

Arthur : And this state express device will plug into those devices and allow you to keep that mesh network you already have in a home. Uh, but now that network for guests will be. Having that splash page we talked about. So we collect data from all your guests, and this is a lot cheaper and more efficient way to add a captive portal, especially to a large property where an owner or yourself is already invested in that kind of mesh technology.

Arthur : So you don’t have to add a whole new parallel that of ubiquity, unify devices is what we would’ve been having you do before. Uh, and that device is also, we have a patent pending for that device because we’re the. It’s a, it’s our first unique adventure at Defi, which is pretty cool since we’re the only one that has a device like that in the world, which I think is pretty awesome.

Arthur : And then going forward, our number one focus as a business is how we can help our customers, not just drive new bookings from existing guests that have stayed with them before about how we can help more people discover their direct booking website. Um. Who haven’t stayed with them before, so I could talk a little bit more about what we’re doing there.

Arthur : Uh, but we really wanna increase the ability of more people to find great direct book brands and achieve savings versus what it would cost to stay at those listings with Airbnb

Gil : Yeah, I would love, I would love for you kinda share like we’re both in the, the huge like direct book movements and we already know just the amount of impact and what we’ll get into like case studies and, and wins down the road. I would love to hear kinda like how you’re thinking about reaching new guests that haven’t stay with your property and, and how like Fi is in a unique position to, to do that.

Arthur : Yeah, so I don’t know if it’ll be out, uh, when this podcast is released, but I’ll say we’re working on a new. Platform called Stay Finder, and it is a meta search for vacation rental listings. So essentially when you search, uh, for a vacation rental on Stay Finder, we will return all the results that we can and we will show you both the price to book direct versus the price to book on a major OTA that I guess can see what the price savings are.

Arthur : The way that we’ll drive demand to this platform is that for those operators that use Stay Fi, that opt in, they will also share their guest data with Stay Finder and Stay Fi, and we will market this platform to their guests so that they can then discover other vacation rental managers to book with.

Arthur : And of course, by sharing data, you’ll be referenced higher. In the search results, the idea is we want to take as much guest data we can from those companies that wanna participate. Of course, it’s totally optional. And then, you know, benefit you by then exposing your brand, uh, to guests, hopefully from all these other.

Arthur : Uh, operators that want to work within this ecosystem, and that way we can help continue to elevate book direct overall by just pushing education with guests, whether they can book these same listings for less directly with a rested property manager or owner.

Gil : Yeah. That’s awesome. So are you therefore someone creating some sort of marketplace where you can see all properties that are on stay finder, many of them, which are stay fi users that may opt in and share kind of guest information. Um, are, is that like kind of the, the, the idea is like, I as a guest can go log on to state finder and I can find any property kind of within, within that area.

Gil : Um, and then kinda the follow up question is, are you redirecting them to their direct book site or are you booking directly on stay finder?

Arthur : Yeah, so we call it a meta search because we call it a marketplace meta search because like it’s like kind of like a kayak where you don’t make the booking on kayak, although they kind of launch that later. But the original intent, right, was that we were gonna show you all the different options where you can book and then we’ll take you to the one that you wanted to go to.

Arthur : So, and at least in this version of Stay Finder that we’ll be launching, we’re gonna take you to the direct booking website as far down the funnel as we can. And that really just depends on the PMS or platform that they built their website through. Uh, based on that platform, we can hopefully take them to the checkout.

Arthur : If not, we’ll take them to the listing. If we can’t do that, we’ll take ’em to the website. So depends on the, on the, on the direct booking website and like what it can handle itself. But we are going to take you as far down the funnel as we can on that website to actually complete the booking.

Gil : Yeah, it’s very similar to kind of like GVR how and how, how they work. Because Google, when you do a search on, on Google, they’ll try to drive you to the checkout page, and oftentimes the checkout page is the PMS checkout page. So even if someone has a direct book site, they redirect them to like the pm s’s like checkout page.

Gil : Is that, is that, is that kinda how you’re thinking too?

Arthur : yes. But you know, that’s the thing about, oh, I found that GVR experiences, a, they don’t have great inventory and matching ability, like it’s pretty constricted. Uh, in terms of their ability to match OTA and direct listings, is that really built for price comparison or they’re not? Pushing the fact that the direct listing is often cheaper.

Arthur : It’s not like the orientation of the website or ours will be really about driving discovery of better pricing. So it’s just a little bit different of a use case. And also, uh, we are going to present as many matches as that we can find between OTAs and direct book sites, and hopefully deliver better pricing in whatever search that you are doing on the site, uh, for listings that you wanna stay at.

Gil : That’s awesome. It sounds like, uh, throughout this and pretty much your entire career building this company, um, you’re really combating the, the OTAs and really allowing. Host and property managers to become independent. Um, earlier this year we had this whole thing about like off platform policy. I’m sure that has caused a wrinkle or at least a lot of buzz, um, kind of around all things that we do on the direct side.

Gil : Um, kind of throughout this has one Airbnb, mainly Airbnb. I know they’re, they’re a bit more aggressive than than VRBO, but have they ever approached you and, and like. Try to like nudge you off or scare you off. Um, and just really like how, how do you, how do you think about just really making sure that you’re building products, but also mindful that there’s someone with a lot, a big pocket out there that doesn’t want you to exist.

Arthur : I don’t know if they don’t want us to exist. I don’t know what they’re, what if they care or know about what we’re doing. So I, I wouldn’t know. Um, I would say that we are just, I think, uniquely positioned for a few different reasons, because. A, uh, we don’t have to be a partner of theirs, which is very different than the property management software, obviously.

Arthur : So we can be, you know, do more interesting things than a PMS could, in my opinion. I think that’s also one of the things to think about, like, just like the strategic vision of where we’re positioned as a company. Um. The PMS are trying to gobble up as many verticals as they can and incorporate them into their platform, and they wanna launch pricing, they wanna launch ai, guest communication, right?

Arthur : They want to kind of be an all in one. You know, for us it’s like, how do we d differentiate our business and grow in an area? PMS can’t grow or won’t grow. And that includes also things like locks, right? Like I think some companies thought, oh, they would never like come for my lock business, and then they come for your lock business, right?

Arthur : So like, how do we incrementally build features that are gonna stick, uh, safely outside of what, what’s in the scope of a property management software? Then, you know, two, it’s, it’s very much like we are not dependent on communication within the OTA platforms. And I think that’s another huge thing, right?

Arthur : Like a lot of these other guest engagement tools or forms or whatever their people are sending, they are leveraging. Airbnb or VRBO messaging. Right. Um, and though that means that your business is like dependent on whether they allow your links or they allow this type of communication. So we just don’t want to be in a position where we’re like, dependent on one of these platforms to deliver our service to the end user. And then as you said before, I think you’re right to say that, you know, the, the OTs sometimes wanna scare people off from doing direct bookings. Um. Which I think is sad and anti-competitive to be honest. Um, I, I don’t think, you know, I don’t wanna give legal advice obviously, but you know, there are definitely limits to what platforms can do to restrict their users from engaging in commerce outside of the platform.

Arthur : And I totally understand the standpoint of an OTA saying, Hey, once this transaction starts here, it needs to stay here. Um, but it would be. I think out there to suggest that because I transacted once in a platform, all my future transactions are legally bound to take place within this platform. You know, that would be as if, if you booked a Marriott on booking.com, booking.com can tell Marriott, you have to cancel this person’s loyalty program and they can only book through us in the future.

Arthur : Right. It’s like kind of nonsensical. Um, so, you know, I think Airbnb and VRBO, it’s obviously to their advantage too. The press knowledge of independent OTA brand, I mean independent, uh, PM brands because they wanna be the brand. They want people to talk about staying at a VRBO or staying at an Airbnb, right?

Arthur : But, uh, it’s definitely our job to help combat that narrative and really give people the tools to develop an independent identity, uh, because that’s how you’re gonna build a thriving, more profitable business in the long term, especially since, you know, these platforms can change there. Policies, they can change their revenue take at any time in the future, right?

Arthur : Uh, without your consent really.

Gil : Yeah, I, I actually seen quite the opposite where yes, it has deterred some hosts from even acting or even pursuing the, the book direct kind of movement there, but it’s almost gone now to the extreme where predominantly Airbnb, even VRBO, they’ve made changes more recently about their cancellation policies as well too.

Gil : But it’s gotten to a point where. I actually seen because of all the policy changes and because they, their hosts are feeling like, oh, actually now Airbnb has a lot more control over my business. There has been, over the last few months a heavy influx of folks going into the direct book movement. The, the amount of growth that we’ve had in the last three months has been massive compared to.

Gil : Any prior months, and I don’t know if you’re seeing the same thing on your side, but I definitely see a lot of folks now investing pretty hard on book direct.

Arthur : Yeah. And that’s, that’s kind of also the reason why I don’t think they won a they out of a threat is the book direct movement to their actual business. I don’t think very much. Um, you know, OTAs have a list existed alongside brands forever. They’re kind of mutually codependent. You know, uh, hotels need to list on OTAs.

Arthur : Um, and hotels also want to, they would never fill their rooms in the OTAs, but they also can have strong, resilient brands and programs at the same time, right? So these two things can coexist very well. Also, when it comes to just like market share, uh, you know. Over the last few years, like to share people booking direct as a high is still shrinking, like Airbnb share is still growing just because so many legacy brands that we’re all direct have also moved onto the platforms to get more bookings.

Arthur : Right? So. Uh, you know, I don’t think, you know, Airbnb m probably adds more listings to their platform a month than we could even like attempt to drive, uh, more bookings directly, right? So, uh, their growth is, you know, same with booking.com, they’re growing like crazy. Um, and. What we’re doing with Book Direct still right now is just very much nibbling at the edges of their business, which is why I don’t think it’s even anything close to an existential threat.

Arthur : I think it’s just a natural evolution that hopefully as people’s businesses mature, they will just realize that booking diversity of channels is important, right? And you just don’t want to be, uh, completely dependent on one or two, uh, which is, you know, kind of where a lot of people are today.

Gil : Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve seen, I forgot what the report was, but. There was a report about kind of the, how direct bookings has changed throughout the last 15 years and kind of the rise of market share, like you mentioned with about the OTAs and what the report had was that for larger property managers that were a hundred percent book direct, probably 10 years back now, a much bigger share, like you mentioned, is going through the OTAs.

Gil : And then on the flip side. The share four property managers that have 20, 40 properties. That actually has increased over the last few years, and actually like more specifically the last few years. So there’s this weird shift happening where larger property managers, really legacy property managers, are now diversifying towards the OTAs, but also independent property managers, smaller ones.

Gil : Are actually rising their stake in Book Direct. I don’t know if you’ve seen, you’ve seen that article or

Arthur : agree because yeah, ’cause both were unbalanced because, uh, if you were a hundred percent book direct in a large PM and you weren’t listing in OTAs. You are just missing out on, you know, your occupancy is not a hundred percent, so you’re missing out on, on bookings by not being there. And then the flip side is true.

Arthur : Right. I think right now I’m sure you work with these companies that started as quote unquote Airbnb businesses. Right. And I think it took those folks a while to realize that as part of their business maturing, you know, being on only one platform has a lot of risk. Um, and even just, you know, even when people talk to us.

Arthur : That have, you know, 10 listings. And I talk to them and they say, we don’t, we list directly on Airbnb. We don’t even have a property, empty software. So from my standpoint, I’m always like, get a property management software book for new, for property managers that comes to us, that tell us that they’re only listed on Airbnb, you know, our recommendations is always first get a software list on. Booking for about other channels and build your direct website obviously, and then stay FFI is like a great compliment for your business, right?

Arthur : But uh, it’s not just about moving from Airbnb to direct. It’s about diversifying across as many channels as you can. That’s still our producing some bookings for you.

Gil : Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s, so I think, like, what, what have you seen, so you, you’ve, you’ve now, you’re, you’ve gone through massive growth, you’ve gone through a lot of property managers that now leverage your platform. What are some of the wins that you’ve seen, um, some of the, kind of the feedback that you’re getting from your users?

Arthur : Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of different examples we could talk about. Um, I would say, you know, number one. I just, I’ll point out some interesting things that I’ve seen this probably not the predominant examples, but one thing that I, I’ve seen a lot of is we have a lot of customers who also do real estate, like they’re also real estate agents in their market, which I think is super common to get vacation rentals.

Arthur : And I think they’ve really come to see the data we collect as so incredibly valuable because in all of these markets, people that stay in vacation rentals. Then the often the ones that end up purchasing properties and having them managed by those same companies. But I think that’s just one example of where the data we capture is valuable for their vacation rental business.

Arthur : But it’s also valuable for ancillary businesses. And so many of the people we work with are entrepreneurs and they run torque companies. They run like stores or shops in the market. They run real estate businesses. This is a diversity of interesting kind of entrepreneurial. Endeavors our customers are engaged with, and then our data becomes such a powerful way to market those as well. Another big trend we’ve seen is definitely this push for upsells. I think a lot of people did not realize that these large PMs are driving a huge amount of their revenue from things like early, late checkout, mid-state cleans all of these services that folks are offering. And I’d say that’s the other big one where we’ve seen people achieve.

Arthur : Huge percentage increases in revenue per stay, uh, by offering either their own services or by contracting with third party service providers. And getting kind of rev share or affiliate, uh, dollars has only been another big one and trend. Um, and then the last thing that I think has been really interesting is just seeing how our customers have implemented AI tools in their business.

Arthur : Um. Kind of just the, the tension I would say between personal one-on-one communication and building guest relationships, and then how those also, uh, work with kind of talking with AI agents. I don’t think people have quite figured out like what the right mix is, but really seeing different wide range of different approaches depending on, on the brands.

Arthur : So that’s, that’s definitely an area that I’m, I’m watching with a lot of interest.

Gil : Yeah. I, I don’t know if you remember this, but a, a little while back, as you mentioned, kind of the, the different use cases outside of really. Bringing folks back to your website and having them book a grant again, like that’s, that’s one of the kind of core use cases and core things that you wanna try to drive towards too.

Gil : But what you’re saying is also there are other use cases that starts to unlock when you’re really tapping into the data there. One of the things that I did early on, and I don’t know if you remember this, but. We started taking our Fi data. All the guests that have been, that have visited our properties, and we’ll segment individual lists for each property and then we’ll upload it into.

Gil : Basically meta our bi meta business profile and allow us to run ads on it. So what we do is we actually use that to create a lookalike audience. And that’s actually really neat because now Facebook or Meta didn’t have to figure out who do I serve this ad to? You’re now giving them a list of folks that have Visier property and maybe hundreds and hundreds of profiles of people that have visited your property, and you’re now telling Facebook, go ahead and find people that look like this.

Gil : And then bring them towards my ad and the impacts on ad spend is amazing. It’s amazing. I don’t know if you’ve ever talked about that or, or dug into that.

Arthur : Uh, I haven’t talked about it too much. I’d say like, that’s general. I’d say paid Digital advertising is an area that’s pretty undeveloped outside of Google Ads, which I still see some larger companies are running. I think a lot of people don’t quite get there until they’re at like scale or pretty large size.

Arthur : I’d say people struggle a lot with meta advertising, especially just because audience definition is so challenging, like you just talked about, um, because you can really spend money on the wrong people and you can blow it really, really, really fast. Um, and then I think the other thing that’s like so important to this that I don’t think the software companies have quite uh, got to yet, which is why I think having like a website from someone like you is so important is that a lot of these property management software websites are still terrible and they don’t really have great.

Arthur : They don’t have like e-commerce integrations for, for Google Analytics, it’s very, it’s like, it’s not easy to place pixels on them. It’s very hard to report back to Facebook ad tools like you’ve got a booking. So this is like, what’s the R way of this ad? So a lot of these website tools are so basic, they don’t really.

Arthur : Integrate well with like modern digital ad serving. And so it’s like very hard to measure the efficacy of ads as well. And it’s also very hard to measure the efficacy of email marketing too. A lot of these, uh, property management software websites. So that’s kind of been one of my, my gripes with some of the software websites is they’re so.

Arthur : Basic and they don’t perform very well. That’s kind of like we’re delivering a lot of leads to the website through email marketing and people are not converting ’cause the quality of the site is so low. But I, you know, I know, uh, maybe it’s not the best thing for you, for your business, but I would love to see just the general quality of websites from PMS also be better.

Arthur : Right. Because I think people are missing out by, by relying on some of these sites to, to like look. Authoritative to guess and have a good booking experience. And then also track, track those bookings, uh, in third party tools in a way that makes sense.

Gil : Yeah, and we find that a lot of hosts, they’ll maybe start off with the book, like the website that the pmms comes with, because a lot of times those are the free tools, but when people are starting to implement. Perhaps wifi, they’re starting to do email marketing. They’re starting to do a lot more. That’s when they’re starting to figure out like, oh, actually I need better tools to really make sure that I’m not losing on the conversion side of things, we, on our platform, you’re absolutely right, like we allow you to add pixels, we allow you to add your GA code in there.

Gil : We actually encourage you to do that. We allow you to, we encourage you also to like add your. Uh, add a snippet from snippet of your code that will have a popup that collects people’s emails, that goes back into your stay. I like those are the types of tools that we want our hosts to manage because by then you’re really amplifying your overall reach there.

Gil : You’re really be able to measure where people are coming from, which marketing campaigns are the most effective, and therefore you can really. Double down on the areas that work really well for you. So if you find that specific emails are driving the most amount of traffic, which email is it specifically that’s driving the most amount of conversions, then you can really figure out, okay, how do I tweak that?

Gil : How do I make it better? Or how do I get rid of the laggers? Um, so you’re absolutely right. I think there’s a lot of tools that folks just really don’t know how to just utilize yet, and I think over time. As we build, as as us on the software side, as we build better tools, but also as hosts like really mature and have the capabilities, I think things are gonna change and people are gonna really take advantage of it.

Arthur : Yeah, I mean, I think it’s, it’s a lot to ask for of people, especially when they don’t have the resources or size yet to have like a marketing generalist on their team. And even for that person, it’s hard to manage all these different types of tools and strategies, but to understand. How to use, you know, Google Analytics and how to use Facebook advertising, how to use email marketing software, and also measure all these things.

Arthur : It’s not simple and it does take like some time and building of expertise and we try to make it as easy as possible, but it’s, it’s always going to be a learning curve there. So, you know, it’s kind of important that we all continue to kind of work together just to make sure that these things work seamlessly together for folks.

Arthur : Um, and I think hopefully over time, you know it from where we’re standing when it comes to email, uh, one thing that will be coming in the future is just kind of more of us even more set it and forget it types of approaches of can we let leverage. Data we get from your software in terms of like, which of your properties need booking?

Arthur : So where do we see availability and how can we just generate emails on behalf and send ’em to the right guest for them to hopefully book them? Right? So just doing more things where obviously if you are. You want to be in control of the message and you wanna control everything you can. But also if you say, Hey, I just trust, stay find to go and try to drive bookings.

Arthur : Like, can I just toggle on a switch and we will go and try to fill these nights with email marketing? That’s, that’s where we want to get to. And that’s also kind of the approach of stay finder, right? Is Yeah, I’m gonna market to my list, to my guess, but let me just send my data over here. And combine it with everyone else’s data.

Arthur : And then state Finder will use email marketing to try to drive me bookings, right? So really, how can we do things on behalf of folks that we know are very busy and can’t be an expert in everything?

Gil : Yeah, you, you mentioned state finder, um, and kind of how you’re rolling that out. What do you think is gonna be kind of the. The guest perception there and kind of the feedback that you’ve gotten so far? I get asked all the time where folks that haven’t used stay fi, they’re nervous about adding stay fi in kind of in their workflows because they think that, oh, guests are not gonna want to gimme their email address.

Gil : They don’t want me to market to to them. And I actually find it quite the opposite. Like I don’t actually get any pushback of people and like not wanting to. Enter in their email address to, to get on the wifi. I actually rarely, if anything, get, uh, any questions about that. And I don’t know, like kind of your feedback and whether or not you see the same thing across the board and kind of how that rolls out to state Finder.

Gil : Aware you’re not just getting marketing from the host, but also from a third party.

Arthur : Yeah, we’re definitely conscientious about how that is like gonna be timed out, so we’re not all sending people emails at the same time. There are a lot of scenarios where you are like, like you stay at a, a certain hotel. They, if they’re part of an association, they might market you directly and then this association market you as well for the bigger group, right?

Arthur : And so that’s kind of how we see ourselves, right? Like you stay at this, let’s say like a design hotel. That one’s gonna email you, but then you’re also start getting emails from design hotels, right? So really see ourselves as like an umbrella, uh, that you’re kind of like volunteering to be a part of. Um.

Arthur : That’s kind of how it’s positioned, I think from the guest side, right? It’s all about value. You know, as long as you’re providing value, hopefully your marketing will be mostly perceived generously and people will want to receive it. And you make it very clear. Also is like positioning it kind of like a secret, you know?

Arthur : Like here’s something that not everyone knows about, but you can actually. Save on this platform that’s very ubiquitous. Like everybody knows what Airbnb is and most people know what VRBO and booking.com are. Now we’re kind of sharing with you like a secret that not everyone is gonna know about, uh, in terms of how you can book these same properties for less, right?

Arthur : So it’s definitely driven by value and from like a guest experience once they’re on the site. Um, it’s all about like whenever they do a search. Making sure we can fulfill those results and present you multiple examples of beneficial, of significant savings, right? So we definitely wanna make sure we’re delivering value with every search that someone wants to do in the platform.

Arthur : And that’s kind of like the number one thing we’re looking for our launches, making sure that we’re covering most searches with results that deliver value to the user in a very obvious way.

Gil : Nice. I can’t, I can’t wait for it to roll out because I, I think, I think hosts are itching more and more, more recently, uh, at least, at least in the last five months, we’ve seen hosts like really itching for more and more tools and really more exposure to just diversify their revenues just away from such a big concentration on the OTAs.

Arthur : And only getting more concentrated.

Gil : Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Arthur, we usually end the show with three questions. Uh, I’ll start off with the first one. What’s, uh, what, what’s a good book recommendation for me? Uh, I’ve been doing a lot of reading. I read a ton. I would love to know kinda like what’s going for me from, from your point of view.

Arthur : Well, I’m a big nonfiction reader and I actually just finished the second book of a series of three, which the third one isn’t out yet, but the first book is called The British Shortcoming, and it’s kind of the, the story of the American Revolution told. An extremely captivating narrative style. Also with a lot of perspective from the British as well, uh, as definitely as some someone who loves history, like a whole new look on the pre-Revolutionary War period and the Revolutionary War period.

Arthur : Um, and I found that to be a very, very engaging read with a lot of like parallels to other times in history that we’ve also lived through as well. So definitely recommend.

Gil : That’s awesome. That’s, I haven’t picked up a history book in a long time, so if I do, if I pick up a next one, it’s, it’s probably gonna be that one just

Arthur : I, I know people have read this that don’t read a lot of history, and just the way the writing is done is it really grabs you in.

Gil : Okay. Okay. All right. I look forward to it. Um, second question, what’s one piece of mindset advice that you would give to someone that’s starting something completely new?

Arthur : Um, I think it’s so interesting, like going back and thinking when I started Fi and how many people told me that. It wouldn’t work and nobody would want this product, which is kind of crazy. So I do think you need a healthy amount of like delusional self-belief to start a business. Like, but you can’t be so delusional, uh, that you don’t like when you get negative feedback from customers, you don’t refute it or think it’s not real.

Arthur : So I think you just need to like find the right. Amount of delusion when starting your own business that’s gonna make it work for you. ’cause you need that amount of self-belief that’s gonna happen and conviction.

Gil : You, you definitely need a lot of conviction. It, I, I would say, I don’t know how your first year was from a, an emotional standpoint, but I would say like I crafted days, like we had some pretty good, good wins in the very beginning, but the novelty wears off pretty quickly. And when you’re having to make.

Gil : Make pretty big sacrifices on your life to make sure that you can build the company of your dreams. Like it’s hard. It’s really, really hard where you’re thinking like, was this worthwhile? Was this, is this something that I should be devoting my time and my energy, my life to? And

Arthur : I still think that today, that never ends. Let me tell you. I think no matter, maybe that’s also my personality, right? I think that’s the other thing of like every time you think that if you reach this milestone in the future. You’ll like be content, but for me it’s never like that. Uh, no matter whatever milestone we reach, I’d say like going back to the, to the first point, it’s like you need to find your early adopters that have like conviction around your product that is so important.

Arthur : Um, it’s so crazy. We actually had someone who was an early adopter whose business closed during COVID, got vacation rentals and now just. Started again in 2025 and is using STA five again after like five years, which is just crazy ’cause he’s just such a believer in the platform and what we’re doing. Um, ’cause those people are gonna get you through like all the nos, especially at the very beginning when your product really isn’t probably the right fit for 95% of people you speak with ’cause it’s so narrowly focused.

Arthur : Um, but yeah, that feeling never goes away.

Gil : Yeah, I, I, I play, I. Pay pretty good attention to like our churn numbers and just like how much adoption that we have, like the number of people that are trying us out, like how many of them convert. And then also how much of them like stick around. And we actually have a very, very low churn rate, probably less than one or 2% on a month, on month basis.

Gil : And we got a, we got a, a cancellation for someone that, that had been with, been with us since the very beginning. And I was like, my heart sunk when I, when I saw they come in. And then we get a reason code or like a reason that they, they type in of why they canceled. And it turns out that they ended up folding their company.

Gil : They ended up selling their property mansion business, but that followed by them saying that when they start up their new pro. Property management business, they’re definitely coming to build their next site with us like that. Like yes, I’m sad to see them go. Um, but it’s really good from a founder’s perspective to know that like you’re building a product that people really love, appreciate, and get value out of.

Gil : Like those are the types of moments that like, make, brings me a lot of joy.

Arthur : Yeah, I mean, I like this whole cycle again. ’cause state Finder is kind of like a new. Product and so I’m already getting a lot of opinions about whether people think it’ll be successful or not, but that’s fine, as long as, I mean, I have, we have conviction on, on the team that we’re doing the right thing.

Arthur : So that’s all good. I would say, you know, the churn thing is very painful and I think with time it will inevitably rise. I think we learned a lot of painful lessons early with scaling, is that we were adding people so fast. Like a lot of people didn’t get a chance. You know, our assumption was that people would just self onboard and do a great job, which turned out that a lot of people did not do that.

Arthur : Um, which is just natural, right? ’cause people get distracted and they don’t follow through with sending email campaigns and they don’t set up every device correctly. Right? So there’s a lot of kind of. Kind of like we call tech debt. I think we had onboarding debt of now going back and trying to help people to fix issues, and it’s a lot harder to go back and fix issues.

Arthur : After the fact, then it is, you know, doing it the right way at the beginning. Um, and as a result, you know, we saw, we went from having no churn for a very long time to seeing churn slowly, slowly, slowly creep up. Um, I think that’s just kind of a natural part of what happens when your business scales and matures and.

Arthur : And then you kind of go back and revisit assumptions about how people engage with a product, how we can do a better job to support them, how we can redesign things, what should be done by product, what should be done by people, and just keeping that conversation going and uh, adding more ways for customers to give us feedback as well so that we can improve what those processes are.

Arthur : So I think it’s kind of the never ending evolution at whatever stage you get to is what it feels like to be.

Gil : Yeah, I, I think one of the things that I’m still very proud of is that we still, I still onboard every single one of our customers. Um, and I don’t know how long it can sustainably scale to this, but that has one, it’s slowed us down in terms of like how quickly I can grow the company. But what that allowed me to do is as I’m bon onboarding every single one of our customers, I understand what they’ve tried, what they failed, and where are they getting hiccups when they’re connecting their PMS and building out their first website.

Gil : What are they, what feedback do they have on the templates that we have? And that has given me a lot of data points to really refine our product and really improve on it while we’re, while we’re actually like launching new customers. And again, like I don’t know how far and how long I can actually sustainably do this, but that was like one of the biggest blessing.

Gil : And I think I’m glad that I came from a product background where I love that type of stuff. I love getting in front of customers, I love understanding their pain points. Um, and hopefully as, as much as that can continue to be part of our DNA, I think we’ll be in a very good spot.

Arthur : Yes. I think that’s, that’s definitely the hardest thing is like you as a founder start handing off these really important functions to people on your team and. And you know, your aspiration is to find people that are better than you at it. Um, but that’s definitely really hard because, you know, no one is gonna probably feel about your business the way that you do, and that’s totally normal and to be expected.

Arthur : And so I think, uh, that’s been one of the most challenging things is. Uh, you know, developing the right team and finding the right people to do sales and to do onboarding. And I definitely learned a lot of lessons on the way to get to the right people. And I think we have great people today. Um, but I can’t say like every hire we ever did was the right one.

Arthur : And I think that’s one of the things you learn as a founder pretty early on is like, how do you build the team of the right resources, um, that are doing a great job and doing, you know. Right by your customers.

Gil : Yeah, yeah. In the very beginning you’re, you’re having to do almost everything and your success and failure is pretty much dependent on you. And then you get to a point where like you can’t sustain that, and you have to hire folks that are possibly better than you.

Arthur : Hopefully that’s the goal.

Gil : That’s the goal, or?

Arthur : Yes,

Gil : Yeah, or at least as good as you.

Arthur : yes, that, that would be nice. But I definitely, you know, you, you know, in my experience. I liked sales and I liked account management and I like customer support, um, and the things that I got a lot better at because I had to do them. Uh, but I definitely think that there are people out there that are way better than me.

Arthur : And so that’s what I’ve, you know, been been working hard to bring those people on board because, uh, when I see like a real, someone who’s really great at it, do it and it’s so natural for them. I’m like, yeah, I still have a lot to learn.

Gil : Yeah, yeah. I, I see my customer service rep, um, customer service manager, when he answers tickets, they’re such high fidelity, high quality. Whereas for me. I try to answer the question as quick as possible to get back to them, and so they’re a lot more brief and they’re probably more to the point. And when I reflect back, I was like, actually, he writes much better responses than I do.

Gil : Yeah. Uh, awesome. Arthur, last question for you. For folks that are either just getting started in direct bookings or trying to amplify their direct bookings, what’s one tack tactical takeaway that you have for them?

Arthur : I mean, obviously for us it’s. Develop a strategy and a plan to collect marketing data from everyone that stays in your listings through market to them. I think that’s kind of like the given for fi. I think there’s definitely some other practical tips to do that are outside of what we do. I think number one is make sure that when.

Arthur : If you google the name of your property that your direct listing appears in the first page of Google results. That to me is so, so, so important. Especially as you know, tools like Stay Finder, come to market. We’re trying to build awareness around book direct. You need to make it so that when people find you on an OTA, they can find your direct booking website.

Arthur : And that means like having the names and the photos and the descriptions and things that it match in a way that’s coherent. Um, so that’d be the one thing. If you went home and had to test something, I would just google the names of your Airbnb listings and see if you can find your direct book listing.

Arthur : If you can’t, you know, get crafted stays so that your website performs better in SEO.

Gil : Yeah, you definitely need to do that. I, I’ve learned that the hard way. Um, I, I’ve told this story a few times, but. I have my first ever cabin. I named Cozy Creek Cabin because we have this nice creek that’s right in front of our place. Our, our home is very like, warm feeling. Um, and I was like, oh, this

Arthur : I think we might have 300 customers named Cozy Creek Cabin

Gil : and that was the mistake is that even in Gatlinburg, there’s three other properties named Cozy Creek Cabin and I, for no matter what, I cannot get on first page on that one.

Gil : And I’ve been wanting to rebrand it. I just haven’t had the time. But every property after that has always had unique names. So like kind of piggybacking off of like what you’re saying there is, yes, you wanna make it so that your property comes up, you’ve ever searched for it. And if you’re having trouble getting there, it’s probably a combination of one poor SEO on the site platform that you have your direct booking site on.

Gil : If you have capital stage, you should be on there. It should be, it should be automatically handled for you on our platform, but two. Uh, figure out whether or not the name is too generic, where you might need to do some branding rebranding on it. And if you do it, rebrand it or as early as possible. Don’t be like me where I’ve sat on this mistake for, for a number of years now.

Arthur : Oh, for sure. I mean, even now we’re, we’re building a, a matching algorithm between OTAs and direct sites and. So many of them are extremely similar, that it’s actually very hard to determine which OTA listing is the direct listing in many cases, like it’s the multifaceted problem because of named photos communities, every property looks almost exactly the same, right?

Arthur : So it’s super interesting process we’re going through now. Um, but yeah, it’s kind of like you wanna make sure that you can be discovered directly.

Gil : Can you get it directly from the homeowner? Like can you ask them to provide their Airbnb link and that way you don’t have to do a separate match on it?

Arthur : Yeah, so I mean, obviously if someone connects their property management software, we can determine the match. We also wanna match properties that are just out there in the wild. So.

Gil : Mm. Okay. I can see that. Yeah. Awesome. Arthur, it was a huge pleasure finally having you on the show. Uh, hopefully I’ll have you back, uh, after the Stay Finder launch and we can talk about all the lesson learned. What’s the greatest wins there? Um, definitely probably eight months to a year from now. I’ll definitely have you back on and kinda have you

Arthur : Yeah, hopefully we’ll have a lot of interesting data by then, so I

Gil : Yeah.

Arthur : wanna share that.

Gil : Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for sharing kind of the early days of how you started this company and kind of the, the journey that’s been, and also the impact that you’ve had on, on the industry, so I appreciate that.

Arthur : It’s been actually really fun. I would just, if anyone thinking about starting their own company, working in this industry is fantastic because we’re in the hospitality space with people that are genuinely very nice and kind, and most of them are. Not corporate. Everyone is very entrepreneurial. So I think if there’s any space to start a business in, or if you wanted to start a technology company or get into short term rentals, um, this is definitely a, a fun and exciting industry.

Arthur : So.

Gil : Yeah. Yeah. I, I a hundred percent agree with you. Like you, I remember when I first talked to you, it was because you were just launching your new homepage product and you were asking folks like, give me feedback. And I raised my hand and we had a chance to talk and I was like, well, I’m starting my own business.

Gil : I would love your feedback, and you took the time to give it to me and make, make connections. I appreciate that. I, I never forgot about that. It’s been almost two years since that.

Arthur : Yeah. ’cause I like, people need better websites so you can help them get more bookings. Right. Like we’re all working together towards the same bang goal, which is what makes this so much fun.

Gil : Yeah. Awesome, Arthur, it was a pleasure to have you on.

Arthur : Yeah. Thanks for having me. And uh, we will chat again soon. I.

Gil : Awesome. I’ll see you later. Bye.