00:15:40 · John Reynolds, Dan Lifshits, Din Bisavak
[00:15:40] S0: Okay. Right. Dan, you... You've been... Can can you talk about... Can you kind of give us some color on some of the challenges you faced? And I think the idea of just trying to get to which I took some there was some of the challenges of integrating kinda AI into the... Generative AI into these organizations. And then, Sure. You [00:15:58] S3: And, I mean, I think that you can relate to that yourself. Right? I think [00:16:01] S0: that sorry. Can we... Dan, can we [00:16:04] S1: The the names are too similar. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. [00:16:07] S0: It's my accent.
00:16:08 · Din Bisavak
[00:16:08] S1: Don't worry. I mean, the funny thing is I heard the term roll up for the first time after we bought five or six companies. So to really underline what Dan just said, we started out building kind of the best possible property management system that existed. And the first thing we tried to do was actually to sell it to traditional mom and pop property management businesses. And in kind of that sales process, we learned that doesn't make any sense. Like the owners of those businesses, they won't buy any kind of third party software and then transform their own business. They actually want the opposite. They want the way out. They want to retire and they want to sell that business to someone who will actually do that. And that's what we then started doing. And obviously, you know, the first couple of times when we acquired businesses, we faced a lot of kind of integration challenges. You will face all the challenges that you think you will, from employees in the beginning being sceptic about the new ownership of the company to customers being sceptic about the new ownership of the company to employees being more or less stubborn on, you know, the processes that they have learned over the last fifteen to twenty years. But we have learned that essentially all of that goes away if you do one thing. And that one thing is working on a product that provides a better service to the customers. So if you can give the tools to the employees to provide a better service to the customers, the employees will be happy because all of the sudden, you know, the counterpart, like the customer that they're speaking to is more happy, the customer will be more happy because he receives a better service, and the business will be happy because the business has a better top line and bottom line in the end. So you will face all of the challenges that you can expect, and our main learning was it all can really only be solved through one way, and that's building the best possible product.
00:18:20 · John Reynolds
[00:18:20] S0: Okay. Yeah. Konstantin, can you talk... Can you also... I mean, what was the... So the fundamental reason you started on this path was to to acquire customers to take it. Can can you talk about this too and some of the challenges you've had?
00:18:31 · Constantin Schröder
[00:18:31] S2: Yes. So we we saw... For us, it was a little bit different to what what Dean just described, think. We scaled the company to quite a sizable sizable business in in two years. Think we're doing around 15 to 20,000,000 g b... GBV top line. And we saw that we were struggling on many parts of managing that business basically. And so we stopped growth. We focused on what actually is going on in the business, on the processes, on the things that are driving the business. And we started kind of really in a very detailed manner kind of pinning down to the really the ultimate last process, how the business is running and mapped all these processes from the starting point of acquiring a guest or acquiring a company, integrating a company, a guest staying in your apartment, to actually the guest checking out, or you having a fully fully running company that you acquired. I think so we mapped that in a really really detailed fashion, and we basically started looking at what are the big drivers that that make this business work successfully and have the biggest impact on on guests at the end of the day. We have compared to to Dean and Dan a lot more kind of exposure on the service quality that we actually deliver, because we distribute on Airbnb, on booking.com, and these guests leave reviews after staying with us. And so they really look at how is their stable, and how is communication being cleanliness, all these things we get rated on these things. And so we said most importantly, we have to deliver service quality to guests, and that is the biggest kind of driver to it. And what we did there, we looked at traditional businesses, we looked at our business, and we saw that communication nearly in all these businesses was the main reason why guests would leave bad reviews. And so what we did last year, we built a chat agent that I think is... There are some companies actually focused on just doing that and selling that. We built it for us internally, and I think it's probably the best version you can get out there, which supports our guest communication team and took away around 80, 90% of the workload that they have day by day.
00:20:45 · Constantin Schröder, John Reynolds, Din Bisavak
And so that was the first kind of way we took this AI injection and we built it and built the first kind of internal product for us that we could easily also sell organically, but that has really helped us kind of to deliver higher quality to our guests and to help us also to become a very lean and focused team with team members that actually focus on not the manual work but the work that creates value. And so that was the first thing we did internally. What we also did is a very robust database architecture from the day when we acquire a company and all the data that that company has to once that business is live and kind of fully integrated, that is a really, really crucial step for us to not lose data and to not create chaos. And also for us it's extremely important that we have everything in one place, that team members can access data at a snip of a button that we can see performance of the businesses that we've acquired really well, and we don't have chaos so far as this single source of truth and really kind of strong database and data architecture is what we've been working on in the last couple of months. And now we are step by step building a AI infused ticketing system that basically covers all the aspects of the guest journey and the owner journey and supports our team members and turn. It's something I think that Dina's been working on already and is a step ahead of us, I think, so far already with the ticketing tool they've built. [00:22:17] S0: Can you touch [00:22:18] S1: on John Can you touch just I can quick Go on. [00:22:20] S0: Go on. Yes. I can
00:22:20 · John Reynolds, Din Bisavak, Dan Lifshits
[00:22:20] S0: Go on. Yes. I can [00:22:21] S1: quickly jump in. I think there's one philosophical distinction that I would like to make. Because we keep kind of throwing around the word of... Or the phrase of AI injection. And, I mean, I can only speak on myself, but I think the others would agree. We don't see ourselves as kind of a roll up company that builds software to make their businesses better. We see ourselves as a software and product company who happens to have kind of the go to market of a roll up, at least for now. And that might change in the future, as Dan said, but at least I think when we talk about Buena and for the others here, I would really like to go away from the AI injection because that's not how the business actually works. It's not we buy a company and we introduce one feature that has some AI to it. But my time and most of the time of the people in the company is spent on building the best possible software and product for currently property management and, you know, not thinking about kind of from the upside first and then building a product, but building from thinking from building the product to to the upside after. [00:23:38] S0: Can can you can you all talk about a bit about how supportive or not supportive your VC backers are about this model too? Can we talk about that, Dan? [00:23:47] S3: This Dan or Dean Dan? [00:23:50] S0: Yeah. Yeah.