Hacker News Reader

Comment by amiadsoto | Hacker News Reader

Hi, this is Amiad, one of the co-founders of Superhost. Feel free to ask me questions about our service.

Not a question but a suggestion.

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.

Hi Amiad! Congrats and good luck first of all!

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?

Hi and great question. First we don't limit ourselves in the long run to just one platform and our solution can work on all vacation rental platforms with not much to change. The reason we are holding back is that there is a big enough space for growth on Airbnb only at this tie and it's better to focus on the user experience than on expansion at this stage.

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.

Do you see being independent of Airbnb as a value add in that even if they did "move up the stack" so to speak and copy you users would still prefer you as they are posting to multiple rental platforms?

First off, great idea! And thanks for taking the time to answer some questions.

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?

Thanks! We look for repetitive answers like parking and information on the place and area. If we don't have an answer for guest we look to see if we can find it somewhere else. Directions is very common and easy example. Most appliances have manuals online. If we just can't find it we reach out to the owner and save his response for future times. All of our receptionist are professional in the hospitality business and been trained on Airbnb platform for long time. All guests receive our phone number and email for any question. We also have a questionnaire for our users but normally we don't need it all.

Sounds solid. Good luck!

Cool service, I signed up already. I wonder though, how big do you think this market really is? I feel like this might be just a small subset of the airbnb market.

Thanks for signing up!

Vacation rentals market is estimated 23 Billion dollars in the US alone.

So Airbnb is going after that market, 23B. You're going after a small subset of that market. But say you get pretty popular and 10% of every vacation rental is using your service then that's only 20M (since you only take 1%).

Or are you planning on offering a different service once you're big enough?

Airbnb is making 3% on each hosts and we are also planning to charge that. We are also able to upsale guests on simcards, transportation, etc..

So we are very happy about our market size :-)

Would you mind giving me an email regarding the up sell on SIM cards? Got something quite interesting coming up in the EU that may be of interest to you. Email's on my profile.

I'm interested to hear from other YC members and alum but when I went through an incubator and we talking about pitches etc talking about total addressable market in this way was really a no no under the idea that it made you look amateur. We were told the best approach and more realistic approach was to start from the bottom up instead of top down.

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.

Hey Amiad, this is a pretty smart service. Solves a real need.

Nice one!

Thank you! We actually had this problem ourselves and looked for a service like Superhost. Only after we couldn't find something affordable we went on and founded Superhost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com