Superhost (YC W14) Is Your Personal Assistant For Your Airbnb
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Many people want to rent a flat they live in, only when they are away. However, they struggle to organize cleaning, keys, change of linens etc.
We are actually building a service to help them and launching soon in London. Contact me if you want to hear more and potentially try it soon.
The fact that they can provide it for that low of margin is actually pretty impressive.
We are aiming to offer you a full service, which consists of welcoming guests in the flat, giving them keys, and then checkout plus cleaning for about 60 pounds.
From my experience for many people this is worth cost as otherwise you are just unable to rent out a flat, and this fee is less then one night in flat in London.
Sounds like something that YC backed homejoy could get involved in solving. That's my keiretsu of the day. [1]
[1] http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/...
Plus we would take care of liaising with guests etc, so it's less hassle for you. All you would do is just approve guests in airbnb.
On one hand, I think we'll see more of these "management layer" businesses on top of other services (I have a couple friends who make good side money building out sqaurespace sites for people).
On the other hand, it seems opposed to where the actual service will head. AirBnB wants it to be easy to rent your place out. They will keep making their tools/calendar easier to update. They will keep looking for ways to improve logistics (cleaning, key exchange). That's the risk, IMO.
If YC liked it enough to invest, there must be something to it. But, unless it's an acquisition to AirBnB play, I'm not sold.
"We love innovations like bitcoin, But unfortunately our payment supplier don’t process bitcoin yet."
Still, I am going to talk with them shortly. I like the idea, and 1% is low enough that it would be well worth the headache since I currently am at about 75% occupancy on my listings, and just getting the cleanings and linens scheduled is a PITA.
Nice one!
Vacation rentals market is estimated 23 Billion dollars in the US alone.
Or are you planning on offering a different service once you're big enough?
So we are very happy about our market size :-)
I think it was one of the reasons that helped us realize what our true potential was and plan accordingly instead of saying we are going after the 100 Billion dollar travel market or whatever.
I would like to know how do you feel creating a startup totally built upon another company's service? How do you deal with and mitigate the risk of it?
My own startup is completely based on Facebook's check-in feature, and this worries me a lot. I deal with knowing I am still under their radar, but it is the first thing I want to create a plan b to after I get some market validation.
I mean, don't you fear AriBnb pulls a twitter on you somehow? Do you plan to expand your services further than AirBnb?
Secondly we believe in Airbnb and we only encourage more people to join their platform. To give some numbers - 30% of our users are new to Airbnb completely. So we feel Airbnb will have warm approach to Superhost rather than alienate us.
At this type of pricing (1% - seems very inexpensive) you should be selling into larger property owners. Such as condo associations where you pitch it as a controlled way for the association to make money and set boundaries on a practice that is probably going to happen anyway. And keep an eye on things and report back.
So in other words you lock up larger buildings and then come pre-introduced to the owners of individual condos as the suggested source of making all this work. And figure in a way for the condo association to offset expenses and thereby lower their monthly fees to owners.
What you need to get started on this is a few test cases which can vouch for the benefits to the building as a whole.
Your website mentions that Superhost will examine your "message history and other resources" in order to effectively speak on behalf of the property owner. Can you be more specific about what kind of data would be useful to Superhost?
What kind of experience does the Superhost team have with property management?
How are you planning on providing support (such as how to operate appliances etc.) to guests during their stay? Is there an FAQ of sorts that you'll have an owner fill out so Superhost can answer those questions on the owner's behalf?
Like how Trump just collects money by lending his name to other people's buildings.
You should think of us as your personal assistant - we don't go and clean ourselves but arrange a cleaner and coordinate everything. So we take care of all the hassle for way less than other services cost - only 1%.