Countdown to Launch
This is the sixth article in a series I call ApartmentJet: The Story of a Startup, chronicling my most recent startup success.
January 2017. With our team in place and development underway, the next critical milestone was to secure our first pilot customer. We struck gold with a tech-forward multifamily property management company headquartered in Chicago. They had been part of the feedback group we approached the previous summer during product ideation, and they offered up a couple guest suites to list on Airbnb.
This relationship came about largely because of Eric and Andy's networking skills, and because of goodwill we had built up with customers in the past. It was a huge win so early in the process, and we're eternally grateful for their trust.
Ready, AIM...
Our preferred launch date had always been the Apartment Internet Marketing (AIM) Conference scheduled for May 2017. Four months away.
There was a lot of real-world testing and vetting to be done before an official launch, so we set an aggressive two month timeline to have a pilot property live and accepting reservations.
Development Mode
I don't remember much from those early days. We were in heads-down development mode, which means we spent every day surmounting one insurmountable obstacle after another.
We made choices in those months that would serve us well in years to come, but we also made choices that would haunt us until the end. You never get it totally right. You're trying to achieve desired results while simultaneously causing as little future waste and rework as possible, knowing some is inevitable.
Personally, my prioritization skills skyrocketed during the ApartmentJet years, as did my understanding that product management is a mostly thankless task. You will, at some point, frustrate every customer segment (both external and internal) for the benefit of others. You walk a fine line trying to prioritize the most urgent needs for the business, for the users, for the product, for the engineers, for the sales people, etc.. You won't always choose correctly. You must trust your experience and instincts while facing pressure from all sides. Process becomes incredibly important. You want to be able to clearly explain the reasoning and justification for certain priorities and to demonstrate the impact of various alternatives. I tried like crazy to implement good tools for this, but (in my mind anyway) I mostly failed. More on this later.
Ops Prep
By March, Andy had assumed a more operational role. He worked with our pilot client to prepare their launch properties. He created checklists and best practices. He gathered listing content and photos. He served as our primary tester.
By the end of the month, even though our software was only partially functional, we had our first official listing live on Airbnb, and he managed most of the communications manually.
Reality Check
We had no idea what to expect when we created that first listing. Naivety and optimism continued to serve us well. Between the launch of that pilot listing in March and our official launch in May, our eyes were opened to many realities.
We learned how difficult it was to manage arrivals and key exchanges remotely. We discovered the substantial effort involved in answering mundane questions from travelers before and after their stay. We realized that travelers ask questions at all hours of the day, and they expect quick responses. We learned that Airbnb's unsupported APIs were not always reliable.
Beyond Engineering
We had designed our system to allow multifamily operators to manage listings for an entire portfolio of properties from a single, centralized interface. We expected their marketing teams to hire communications people, almost like a call center, to manage reservations. We knew they wouldn't want local leasing agents and property managers doing all that work.
Andy, who is always quick to understand customer sentiment, realized early on that our users didn't want to take on the burden of communications. Certainly not before they understood the revenue gains they'd see from the short-term rental experiment.
So he began to build an internal team to manage communications on the customers' behalf. Carly Keller became our first non-engineering hire. She and Andy would help create an incredibly efficient (and forever exhausted) traveler experience team.
The Bigger Picture
As we neared our launch date and continued having discussions with potential clients, we recognized a larger truth: short-term rentals would require a fundamental shift in the multifamily industry. From bankers to insurers to owners and managers, success in this space would demand a recalculation of how the industry viewed property revenue and valuations.
We weren't just offering incremental revenue—we were asking an entire industry to fundamentally alter its economic model.
That was scary. But it was also the opportunity that would define our journey.
Next: Coming Soon
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