Annie from HelloHost

0:00This is short-term rental management, the show that is all about short-term rental property management with your house, your truly lived carl. Short-term rental management, we are here, we are triumphant, this is fantastic to have a guest today, we have a guest today so introduce yourself and you've been on every show that's the extent of my knowledge so we're gonna dive deep into this today so hello how are you and tell us about yourself. Yeah so it's so great to be on the show I'm Annie I'm the co-founder of hella host AI a little bit about myself I have been the short-term rental industry since 2014 with my own Airbnb so at the time I was traveling a lot and just had my apartment in Toronto up for rent and then that really opened the door to

1:03everything that came after which more recently was an acquisition of a retreat three hours north of Toronto it it it was an incredible experience at the same time I experienced a major pain point with our guest communications and just being able to kind of be on call 24-7 for guests and then that led later to sort of the problem that I ended up solving through hello host which was how do I automate some of these guest communications and started co-founded this company based in San Francisco in 2013 and sorry 2023 and so now it's been a couple of years I think the technology has progressed rapidly and it's really sort of making a dent in solving this problem I originally set out to to solve so I know that's a very incapsis encapsulated summary of of everything that happened but happy to kind of talk

2:04about any any part of that. I love it so you are a Canadian resident or where does that like what is your your Canadian Canada? It's Canada I am well I was very young I immigrated from China with my parents to the US and then as result of their work we ended up moving to Canada and I became a Canadian citizen and I grew up went to school in Canada and I also went to school in the States and then worked a bunch in the States I was a consultant in the States so that I was just sort of traveling all over the US but also internationally as well especially in Europe South America and then finally did my I did my MBA at MIT and then post MBA moved to SF where I essentially found it hello host and that was an intersection I think of two of my passions while obviously short-term rental slash property management slash

3:08I think just real estate in general and then secondly artificial intelligence so yeah my goodness this is been intimidating to be talking to an MBA from MIT just to get in there I mean I'm married to an MBA but not the MIT very impressive very impressive so you called Toronto home yes okay you liked you're there now I'm here now you like it there we're going to stay there I like to hear I'm gonna stay here okay it's January at the recording of this podcast I'm in Florida and it's cold so I can't imagine I grew up I grew up in the cold I'm much closer to where you went to college in the Midwest and what that said I think I was still I'll still be traveling but you know I

4:10reluctantly moved to Florida on the suggestion that I had no a choice on which was you know from from the higher up and we moved to Florida and I now realize that you don't have to live in the cold now I'm not saying that that Florida is the answer to your problem to anybody's problem I think it could be I've really seriously considered being a sober and not being there for the hurricane and if you're from if you live in the pretty part of Florida which is the Gulf that's where the hurricanes are if you live on the not so pretty which is the ocean side it's much less chance for hurricane or less severe hurricanes but the beach is not you know it's it's like going to New Jersey you know it's like just a just a beach anyway that's neither here nor there so at some point you did move to San Francisco with was this just after college or I mean it was it like you had a dream to take over the world kind of a thing

5:13yeah so moved to San Francisco after I completed my MBA mostly so that I could focus on starting a company and at the time I wasn't really sure if it was for sure going to be in the vacation rental space because up until then my background was in consulting followed by just early stage technology startups but this was something that I was highly passionate about on the side so then moved to San Francisco got to meet my co-founder and then the two of us sort of landed on this is sort of the right problem space to explore and at the same time as I mentioned to you I had my big project which was acquiring with a number of investors and partners a property in Toronto so I was kind of handling that half remotely so I was trying to talk let's talk about the property so you you mentioned a quote unquote Airbnb that was that was an apartment or a condo or something that you lived in is that what that was yeah

6:15that kicked off like my entry into into the industry because it's very expensive from what I understand is that true yeah at the time I actually just rented my apartment it wasn't rental and I was traveling for four months out of the country and so during that period of time I was like I'm my apartment's empty I'm going to rent it out if not medium term then on Airbnb and I put out Airbnb I had a really great experience I had guests who this is early and in the history of Airbnb guests who would leave you little notes and gifts and also recovered my rent so I was just I had a fantastic experience and then I helped some of my friends get into Airbnb so I had operated a few Airbnb's in Toronto and so that never really stopped until more recently sort of switched to this property that's three hours north of Toronto Toronto to your point is very expensive and also has a lot of rental regulations or short-term rental

7:19regulations yes this is what what you're the primary home the apartment the rental we would have when I'm in my New York City days we would have called that a sublet yeah yeah and essentially you know this is what Airbnb was was founded on they they said you know again I'm not here to put it words in anybody's mouths but my interpretation of it was they you know they saw what Verbo was doing Verbo had been around for a long time like 20 years already at that point and they said well you know we live in San Francisco whereas extremely expensive but we do want to rent these rooms while we're not here so it's almost exactly what Airbnb was created to do and and you were in early adopt 2014 was very early yes in the Airbnb grand scheme of things all my friends are like are you crazy people are gonna destroy your home that was the conversation that I was having at the time is this legal now in that in that building in other words would would you be able to put it on a sublet or an

8:20Airbnb it is legal if you're living in it so technically in my situation yes it would still be legal but there are restrictions such as the five but it's subject to 189 occupancy per year and what do you think you could sub lease it or you didn't look and didn't care I mean this is we're past the the point of you getting in trouble I would assume here so yeah yeah I could sublet it in my presence just without partner building yeah extremely come again I lived in New York City which is sort of like the American Toronto I would say right yeah and it was very common when I lived there everybody's everybody I knew sublet you know there's what they call it at the time yeah because you couldn't afford your apartment if you weren't living in it you know and if you were traveling and this is very common of big city people that we like to travel we like to go see things right we now I live in a town of 9,000 people which wasn't my choice but that's another story we go to New Orleans all the time I love the

9:22big city and and when I was living there in that time frame actually in the same time frame you're talking about if one of my friends was leaving the country to backpack or you know going to San Francisco or however long to work or whatever they would rent their unit while they were had no choice yeah because you had to pay like if you're going to San Francisco for three months you're paying another extremely expensive rent you know exactly so you gotta you can't pay the two expensive rents when you're you know at least for me I was you know a little bit younger at the time and kicking and screaming and trying to get somewhere in life you know but anyway resonates with me I appreciate the hustle and so you you like the experience of hosting it sounds like yeah I enjoy the experience of hosting I think if I didn't do the Airbnb experience I probably would have just subletted it to a person I found off a Facebook or so you know so my network just to have someone stay there while I'm not there and help help

10:23help put the rent um yeah I did like the experience the guests uh as I mentioned you know left me little presents and notes and I did the same for them and and that I think that was a part of my Airbnb experience from the beginning um and also and more than covered the rent and so I thought I would just continue to do it and when I got back to Toronto whenever I would leave it was still just with my own apartment I didn't really think about scaling that because it wasn't you know that was not my um what I thought you know my career path at the time so it was just a a passion project or a hobby that I had on the side absolutely for for many years yeah and tell me about the retreat to some provocative word uh so what what is it exactly yeah so it's just um think of uh um like a lakeside uh four or five acres uh 16 cabins slash suites there's a chalet with eight suites

11:28eight cabins and is three hours north of Toronto so a lot of folks in the summertime will head up there to get away from the heat yes it does get because it's really hot in the summertime in Canada as well um and so it's just a really beautiful place that people want to go and relax and sort of um enjoy enjoy nature um I uh I spent some time in a town called Orelia is it anywhere near there yes it's very close to Orelia okay I would say about still a like an hour and a half drive away from Orelia but just in that region yeah further okay yes yes I have a buddy that lives there and I went and visited him uh and I actually ran a 20 mile uh well I had a marathon coming up but I ran a 20 mile long run by myself on a snowmobile trail outside of Orelia my my buddy just said you can do it here because he needed me there for an event or whatever and uh so long story but

12:29I said I got to run I have a marathon in like three weeks and you know I was much younger I still run marathons but I was much younger and like really into it and uh he said just do it here we got these snowmobile trails and I was like that's no way there's no way so I looked into it and this trail actually did look really cool and uh he took me up there and he knew everything about it and he just dropped me out like we it was in it I hate to go on about this but it was an amazing experience I he knew what he was doing he's lived there forever he's born and raised in Toronto and he dropped me we drove like all the way to the end so I was to do a 10 10 plus miles each direction which I know you guys do kilometers either way yeah um and he drove me to the end where I was to turn around and we dropped water and snacks we're talking the middle of no absolute no yes and this story actually gets really good but I can't tell the really good parts on the air um if anybody hear not now I'm curious it's very it's a very good story actually and I would be

13:31happy to tell it to anybody off off of a microphone should should somebody reach out and I'll tell you later as well but uh some crazy things happened on this journey on this 20 20 plus mile journey yes so I hit this snowmobile I went left his house drove I ran down to the lake there's a lake there in a casino and all that and I hit this snowmobile trail and just went and it was the most gorgeous it was probably I've run a lot in my life uh Annie and this was probably top I would say top three or four most gorgeous runs I've ever done and to have it not even be a race of any kind or organized in like you know put put together for money was even more it was surreal anyway long story short I ran this 21 it was just over 21 miles I think and uh it was extremely enjoyable the every moment of it was like a perfect weather the course was extremely flat and it was crushed um crushed pea gravel uh perfect underfoot uh no no issues anyway uh nobody cares

14:36about running except for runners so I'll change the subject but I did really enjoy my time that area and I learned that that area is very heavily uh what you're talking about it's almost like the Hampton's kind of a thing or like um the the Poconos kind of a thing where people they go here on retreat in the summertime on vacation uh to get away from the city uh is is that's kind of what's going on here right they're driving up from Toronto to get away from it yes pretty much and this particular property originally was um established by I think uh doctors from Rochester New York who went up there in the 1800s in order to treat tuberculosis patients because of how you know fresh the air is up there and that's how this property was that's why it was built yes that's why it was originally built fascinating and where did you find it where did you come across it it was through just uh uh through my network so I'll find it by fun mm-hmm yeah so who introduced the property and then obviously got pretty excited um about

15:40the prospect of I think at the time I was kind of uh deteriorating in both condition but also the way it was being operated so really saw an opportunity to preserve the character of the space and at the same time sort of turn it around and turn that that neighborhood improve the neighborhood a little bit when you say neighborhood I'm picturing this thing to be in the middle of nowhere there's other properties surrounding it yeah just just similar uh not not similar more residential um people live there properties when yeah people live there is there a lake it's not completely remote there's a little town that is uh 20 minutes away and there is it's um actually technically it's part of the lake of these township so um all along the lake that is one town and then we're next to a small city 20 minutes away I see uh what did this property cost the property cost 2.8 million my for eight structures

16:47for uh 16 oh 16 yeah 16 units and they're all uh separate uh stick built structures with the foundation 16 separate buildings no so 16 units eight of which are separate and then there are two main buildings and water house and like little small structures um because it's on the grid but the water water house obviously so it just gets the water from from the lake and filters it and that pumps it into the cabins yes exactly so if I'm looking at this thing on your website or on Airbnb uh how many of them are for rent 16 16 okay yes yes just eight of them happen to be in one building they're like little sweets oh I see so it's like a hotel kind of thing yeah exactly is it seasonal um it is four season but we experience most of the gas coming in the summertime are you managing it yourself um yes my husband and I are sort of managing operations

17:53alongside with our partners so yeah it's fascinating can I have the name like uh how do I find this thing I'd like to look at it if not go there something yeah for sure it's called Ms. Goca Waterfront Retreat oh my spell that M-U-S-K-O-K-A Ms. Goca and that's the region as well uh waterfront retreat and it is waterfront I would assume is the lake or yeah it's it's just alongside the lake and am I using the rig recreationally for fishing etc for fishing yes exactly you can go fishing boating one of the three big lakes and it sounds absolutely wonderful to do the the individual standalone stick built cabins rent better than the rooms in the yes they do they do they do I could I could have actually seen that going either way mm-hmm the prices are a little bit different but I would still say the cabins are more popular

18:54how is your heated um we just have a base for heating mm-hmm okay for everything so we're on the grid yeah uh no air conditioning this air conditioning needed air conditioning in all of the units as well okay uh it's a central error it's a window unit it's a it's um um yes exactly okay okay and uh do you go up there uh and do maintenance is there a front desk person yeah let me tell you a little bit more so no front desk person it operates kind of like a self check and self check out process so just like an Airbnb uh with that set we do have um folks who live on site and they are cleaning team so we have two members uh of our team who live on site and then one person who's uh working on maintenance on a part-time basis so three days a week and so we have essentially just this that staff with three who for you know constantly present

19:55on the property obviously myself and has been visit very often um but otherwise all of the operations is handled will handled remotely the team of two is it uncommon um no they are relatives okay like cousins or something yeah and uh they uh how long have they been with you they've been the best first like two three years now and um do you like them no problems yes i like them no problems okay that's good yeah it's guy does not live on property or he doesn't he doesn't yeah he just comes in and he's servicing other homes in the area and things like that uh yeah i he is a um retired fire marshal and so he is just working on on miss koko when you purchase the home or the property when was this this is back in 2022 oh peak covid mm-hmm peak covid the height of the market the height of the market but also i think there were still concerns about

20:59you know lack of uh tourism in the region maybe not necessarily um i think just air being meeting and impacted in general when i meet 22 purchasers uh generally i'm worried that they're not happy with their purchase because of the rates and because of the prices are we we're three years now i guess almost four years you're happy with it you ever considered dumping it or we're going to keep it um we're i'm very happy with it um one thing to know for us is that we didn't come in there was a thesis around this meaning that we just thought that this was really good and must not opportunity because the um i'll just give you an example of the booking system i mean i think a lot of the reservations were still being taken over the phone on notebooks right and um um the the property just wasn't maintained so i think there was mostly about amesting into the property and then

22:00getting everything operational so we ended up renovating all of the cabins um so i think where it's landed today i'm very very happy with it wasn't just like a acquire and keep operating as it was kind of turn around the the entire operations and hold you do plan to hold um i do plan to hold in the medium term i would say okay okay interesting not that i care i'm just curious um i mean carry the way is what i mean uh would be a smart movie the way we're hiring realtors this show is brought to you by the short term shop join our exciting team in the best vacation markets in america we're currently hiring agents in gold shorts the poke nose and outer banks email us at careers at the short term shop dot com that's careers at the short term shop dot com

23:04okay so this is uh uh what where when did the move to san francisco take place the move to san francisco took place in 2020 also in 2022 so you graduated from the san francisco rehabbed it and moved simultaneously yeah this this purchase was actually end of 2021 closed at the beginning of 2022 okay um came back to toronto moved to step sf was very fast very pretty intense period of my life did you did you raise money to put for the purchase um we just found i mean we had as i mentioned investors but no uh we did as an investor indication of 506b or anything you know no no yeah just partners okay like a group of think of of a group of folks who know each other are friends who wanted to undertake a really fun project yeah that's a cool project yeah love it okay so we moved to san francisco

24:06and it was time to get in on the the the tech thing uh which i all i my extent of that is a massive amounts of podcasts and uh and you decided to go with the uh with staying the same space so it makes sense and now i guess my question is i'm just gonna jump right ahead how do you deal with the competition there's a lot of competition in your space now uh for the um yeah yeah yeah yeah so i think um we made a very strategic decision at the beginning which was like this is just from my personal experience right so my personal experience was i was handling a lot of the gas communications so when we first acquired the misgolka property we didn't we did have a general manager um and then the general manager left the um left the company and at the time we made there was a there was a decision point like should we hire another general manager to replace her or maybe this is something that um myself and my husband can can figure out but obviously the

25:12most immediate problem to solve was the gas communications piece and also creating a team we're building a team around this and we just thought with 16 properties for 24 seven coverage you're gonna have to have at least like two three people who are just you know full time this is definitely a cost low on the on the property so that was that was the problem that we were facing at the time and then tried to actually solve this problem myself with hello hopes so that was that's kind of the origin story of of how hello hosts came to be okay hold on before we get because we're gonna cover the we're gonna cover the competition thing but now i have more questions so you are renting this yes this this property on Airbnb and burbo yes exactly okay um where do you see we draw the line because i'm sitting here thinking to myself you know hotels don't need don't need it uh the hotels uh just have a phone number at a front desk and you call and uh they don't have like this messaging system or maybe are in other words are they doing it right or are we doing it right uh why do we

26:13have no they also have messaging systems in the sense that you might yeah you yes um if you respond back to a email that hotel sends you saying you know i want to cancel this reservation or let me know if this amenities included or all these types of things it's going to go somewhere someone has to go and manually respond to it um so even though hotels may not have a platform well like a OTA platform is there which messaging is obviously occurring um they will also deal with messaging i see is this something that could be used for hotels um i think potentially down the line right now we're not really optimized for hotel use except in cases where they're already using a property management system that we're familiar with in the short-term rental industry um so think like guesty host away these type of property management systems and was that or maybe the hotel like there are a lot of boutique hotels on Airbnb so I think in general if they're using Airbnb BRBO for acquiring new guests then yes right for smaller properties

27:19yes exactly it is uh is that how you got into broke into this was to to kind of crack the code with these management softwares uh or was it to in other words you got to you got to be able to work i'm not good on the tech lingo here but you know like they integrate well with them with them hostfully and all the you know yeah we integrate well with all of them or so on the Airbnb and the BRBO yeah we integrate well with all of the property management systems okay because this is ultimately still for professional hosts and not for think like individual owner of an Airbnb for guest communications um and so in other words if i'm just a person with one or two houses i wouldn't want this if you're already using a property management system so if you are what if you're someone with one or two houses and you happen to also be on you know BRBO booking.com Airbnb then I think it could be for you but i think if you're just like i'm only on Airbnb i only want to stay here

28:21this is already getting me to my max occupancy then um that i would say probably in that not worth it i see i see yeah um and now but now all the management software is back to the competition thing they have their own AI right i can just put a button on hospitable and will do AI forming i would assume yours is better well again back to that strategic decision mostly based on my own experience which is i don't want to be in my inbox all the time so if a guest messages me i want someone to handle it and that really requires a person or i thought okay an AI can just handle it for me without me going again and i think everything that's on the market um at least a majority of them they're on the market still requires you to go and review they as message before it's sent you know you're not going to trust that is just going to send the right message at the right time so that's kind of how we differentiate from all the competitors on the market i see right so it just it doesn't require you to go and look at the AI message and go

29:25like this is not quite right let me go and edit this message right and i just wanted to be free from messaging when i'm having dinner or taking a shower or like in the middle of the night i just wanted that to be handled and at the same time the company is just hard to staff or support for twenty four seven coverage yes i use hospitable and their AI is good but it's extremely limited i don't have ways to tweak it and make it my own and sometimes it just doesn't send a message and says we're not going to send a message because we don't understand this or something right um it's not sophisticated and that being said it is fairly new um and uh i do like it but it's very limited yes it's um i think that's the main thing which is just the message quality so what that means to us is because it's only our product offering is only on autopilot right it is going to just answer about the guest message as it comes in i think a lot some users at least are a little bit

30:25intimidated like what if it says this right or wrong and i wanted to say it's in a different way one thing to note is that we've now had you know we have thousands of properties on the platform and so so many iterations of issues that have come up and all the edge cases which we focus on solving but i think if you're not focused on the audit pilot problem and instead you're focused on a here's what they i suggest as a response type problem you're not actually solving the true problem which is what should the correct answer be to a guest question let me ask you this like what if it's a situation where the host the every host has a different opinion on how to handle it such as uh this weekend we're about to get snow in the smokies which is rare and everybody loses their damn mind in the smoky which again this is the biggest overnight rental single family home overnight rental here being be if you will market in the world and when it snows there people lose it lose it the host lose it the guests lose it because it doesn't happen very often and

31:27and it's a it's a it's a long conversation it really is because people think mountains and they think snow so then you got the contingency of people that just assume it snows there all the time which is mostly guests and then of course you got a lot of out-of-state owners that live in Arizona and just don't even realize that it doesn't snow any he's tendency and when it does know there's no snow plows there's no way to get around there's a good chance there's no electricity so everything is shut down there's nothing to do we're dealing with that right now this weekend so i've noticed that we have mostly two different types of people when it comes to this there's the people that i guess for lack of a better way to put it roll the dice let their guests come see if they get stuck then you have the people that correctively reach out to the guests and say it's going to snow this weekend you aren't not likely to get to the property and even if you do you're sure to sell not gonna be able to go anywhere because everything can be closed would you like to cancel and then they offer their money back so there's the like the people that don't want to give them their money back and i hate to make that way but yeah you're right yeah everybody yeah i mean is this is an example

32:31like how would i handle this if i'm using hello host would i need to manually take over how does hello host know how i like the host versus the other guy yeah so i think there are still a a type of industry knowledge so i think there is before um the i is trained on your data and is looking at your data it first is position as experienced vacation rental manager so things someone you might hire who already has some years of experience but they still maybe don't know your specific policies and procedures but they understand okay they have to make sure the guest experience is great and they have to understand you know they um they have to wear the customer customer support hat and not like dispute with the guests over over over over over an issue because they they they just happen to be very emotionally involved in that in that moment they they understand some of the best practices across multiple users is how i might condition it on on the topic of like how would you handle snow um it might look at your past conversation

33:35history to see how you've handled it in the past if it hasn't it might say something that it knows is not really going to upset the guys but it might not be exactly what you want and then and then you're like okay i want to change this i want to customize it so this is this leads me to the second part of how we're pretty different from competitors the AI is fully customizable for you by conversation by conversation what that means is that we're not really like a software where you go and you kind of click on buttons you input data you put information and you kind of use it like a software because fundamentally the AI's not doesn't really operate like a software it's not always going to give you the exact verbiage of an answer there's a probability of a distribution of of of answers that you could have um so we kind of treated like a person so what that means is you you you you would just literally write in a WhatsApp group conversation with one of our AI operations agents and go like hey moving forward i want you to handle snow questions like this and then you just give an example and then that information is then routed

34:39into our system and a combination of the AI and our team will help ensure that moving forward the the AI will answer that appropriately my see and um just like how you might work with a person right so that's a little bit different from like okay this is a traditional software i'm going to go i'm going to have to input this data and it gets it wrong and then let me go into a software system input this data we kind of want the experience to be like you working with a person who already is a trained experienced vacation rental manager about the same time knows everything about your properties already does uh do the plot do the OTAs ever have a problem with uh with AI in other words uh the their is it great might or is it like they're not really paying attention to it yet and there's for guest message yeah so the OTAs are already using AI significantly in all their operations Airbnb's um milk may use at the moment it's still on sort of ID

35:43verifications of of both guests and hosts and just keeping the platform safe for all the users um so seeing people who have a track record of maybe like parties and things like that that's number one number two i definitely think is still in in the guest messaging so so they are monitoring guest messaging to understand what Airbnb policies have been violated so i think num i i think they're just very they are definitely using AI in their own operations and they expect operators to also use AI in their operations especially experienced operators okay and uh how customizable is it as far as like um can i say hey i don't want you to be that nice yes you can customize the tone just like how you might you might speak to the AI how much you might tell a person what to do right so so just like chat GPT yeah just like chat GPT i see so like yesterday i was asking chat GPT about um the difference between two guitars and i told it i said it sounds to me like you're pulling

36:45this information from a website that sells Yamaha guitars because you're just giving me Yamaha stuff and i don't even want a Yamaha and it was like we will try not to do that you know so is that kind of thing like i i talk to it or it has like sliders or i guess i should have done it yeah it's a little bit defined on the business use case so it's not like chat GPT where it's free wheeling you can take the conversation in any direction all the topics i mean we just expect the conversations to be really around the operations of of your short-term rental and so as a result um a certain business operations you can actually ask it to do things which chat GPT you you you can do you can ask it to do certain research the single online is going to pull different data sources but um i just want to clarify there's two one that's going to communicate with with the gas so one that you get to communicate with right there are two AI agents here and so for the one that is communicating with guests it it has actions that it can take such as look up your calendar

37:47and see which dates are available or unavailable or because there's the same day turnaround you know a late checkout is no longer allowed so it's capable of answering handling those types of complex situations um it can go and look up the uber pickup location it can go and use google maps and um and just web search that's that's one agent the other agent lives inside a conversation with you and then that conversation it can do things like you can tell it hey let this guest know you know maintenance is going to come by at 2 p.m because because there's all these operational things that only you and your team will know so there's there needs to be a method to get that information to the guest and so that AI agent helps you do that right like you can tell the AI to send a message to the guest you can tell the AI hey for for future guest messaging i don't want i wanted to sound more professional or sound more friendly or hate for this specific message the verbiage is a little bit off i want you to say that it's moving forward hey add this information

38:49for this property so in the future i can always um you know always answer this way will it pull information from my guidebook yes if you provide the guidebooks to us um during the onboarding process it will or or through the conversation process with the second agent um so when i come on board with you there's some sort of uh there's an actual consultation with a human yes there's a consultation so it's just a 30 minute onboarding call with a human not yet yeah and then afterwards the conversation you can change anything you know that that you discussed in the consultation with the human um do i talk to a human to make changes no you you talk to our you just you just say things like hey i want to change my response time from two minutes to three minutes so you just kind of do everything by conversation instead of using a software like normal of course we we do have the software we have an interface but

39:53these changes can be made through conversation as well would you do that on the host uh the hello host website you would do that and you're inside your whatsapp chat whatsapp yeah inside whatsapp or slack and the reason for this is that um the it's so it zaps to my slack yes exactly really even though we don't use zap yeah is that is it here but i would have a slack channel for hello host hello host correct say hey hey hello host can you do this for me yes that's cool but you want to say hello host you call it's it's name is wally but yeah you say at wally like can my whole team can be in there your whole team can be in there wow i like that i wish i was using this to be honest because this conversation would have gone a lot different so let me ask you another question um when i'm again i'm using my management software's AI which is not sophisticated but it's fine um and i also have full-time employees so that makes things a little easier but uh when i send my when i have when when when my management software sends an

41:00AI message um what you gain i can't there's no way for me to change the tone of it there's no way for me to adjust uh you know like a lot of times it'll just say we're not going to reply to this mm-hmm you're not going to do about it yeah um it when i when it when it when it does send messages i have at the bottom a little signature if you will like an email signature that says this message was sent by AI if you want a human please reply do you recommend doing that or should i should i mask the fact that it's AI this is up to the individual users but the option definitely exists for them to add for for any user to add a signature that they want across our user base we generally see that they're they're kind of blending the AI into the team so the AI is speaking on behalf of their team versus stating that it is an AI um the rationale mostly around this is not really to obviously to to mislead guests by any means but more so because when you stay at an AI there there's just more

42:01opportunities for abuse possibly by guests or um it just changes the guest's behavior but i'm concerned that if the AI says something i don't like that now i have no excuse if i don't do a signature that says this was sent by AI do you know what i mean yes i think it's me or a human representing me in the AI is something i don't like then i'm in trouble right right that's what i'm worried about yeah so i think it kind of falls into two categories one is more you know excusable types of mistakes like oh i'm sorry i just double checked this and um you know we do happen to have um a particular amenity like we we do have um um i don't know salt and pepper being offered so i think one where the guests are not really going to care about what the what the specific cancer was and then the second type are more like hey i promise you know the the AI when i'm quote this is what people are afraid of but like the AI promised a refund but i don't

43:05actually agree to to the refund right so this type of instance and for the second instance we've worked on this so much that obviously it's operating for completely five for thousands of properties and then we're constantly giving out free refunds we wouldn't be in business and we have a policy whereby if AI creates a real loss for you then hello host will help cover it so that just goes to share our confidence in like the state of our system now where it's really not saying things that's going to get you into like monetary trouble yeah that wouldn't be a concern for me but what happens when the guest says hey i want to cancel i'm outside of my cancellation policy can i have a refund can i tell it's a not respond to certain messages yeah you can say don't respond to cancellation messages that's perfectly fine or i just say hi hey hey what is it all yes wally hey wally don't respond to cancellation messages on slack and it will right be back and say no problem yes oh this

44:07is fantastic this is great i was not expecting that the i'd be so turned on here this is i like this a lot this is cool great to hear that yeah so yeah uh and and uh let's say you're a guy like me that's got you know a couple dozen properties or whatever and uh you do have somebody full-time looking after the inbox but they're you know they do they're for you know like let's say i've got maybe not maybe i'm not a good example i have multiple employees but i got one full timer working 40 hours a week um how would how would this be managed in other words i don't think i want to replace the human i want to keep the human right but i just turn the slack messages and all notifications yeah yeah exactly so instead of responding to every single message like hey i'm about to arrive hey i'm checking out the or like um you know where can i park and it's the same repetitive thing and i think for that human they're they're not excited about these messages either

45:10they might even already have a safe reply that they're using for you know if not if not 80 percent now at least 60 70 percent of their messaging anyway um so we just think that maybe they can do something more valuable with their time and then come back into messaging and they can check it on a regular basis right so like here i'm going to set because one of the problems is that there's a high switching cost which means that when you're doing as messaging it's kind of difficult especially if you have a lot of messaging come through it's very difficult to do something else and then come back to the message because each time that switch takes you like 10-20 minutes for you to focus on your new task again um so then you can set a time instead like hey in the morning i'm gonna check and after you're gonna check on the messaging i'm gonna handle any escalations that have come through unless it's super urgent um and obviously the AI can tell the guess what to do if it is super urgent like if there's a leak call the sound right during during work hours and things like that um and then with the rest of this time we just think that they should

46:14be there should there should be additional value add that they can bring to the company because the marginal cost of applying AI to one of these properties is very low and then the human value that can be created it should be much greater than than AI in doing relatively repetitive guess messaging uh price is according to your website 20 dollars per listing per month uh that's uh across the 100 yeah to 100 listings and then after that it's kind of enterprise blah blah would you say that uh what would you say the average number of homes your clients are bringing to you are they property managers most of these folks yes they're mostly property managers i would say the average we have a good range we have folks with one or two all the way to over a thousand um so uh i would say probably 30 30 250 in that way 30 to 250 units is the average

47:17no sorry that's 30 to 50 so yeah still on the smaller side but we have lots of users who have a few hundred properties yeah so it works i'm i'm intrigued here i'm going to check this out and uh i appreciate your story and uh the hustle seems like you really care about what's doing here and uh uh i'm impressed yeah i'm really excited to bring i know there's a lot of AI companies out there but really really excited to bring really cool technologies there's so much progress in terms of what's been happening with AI to this industry so i think that's something overall that um is very exciting to me let me ask you that what's the future what is the future of uh this business as far as OTAs and bookings and uh all that kind of stuff i mean i think the future is still going to be oriented around people right people human to human relationships i think that this industry is going to continue shorter mental in general it's still going to grow and then it's more about how do you utilize really cool uh technologies to help support your operations or

48:22how do you find advantage um i think overall for guest communication side unless you plan to make guest communications a competitive advantage and maybe some some users will which means that um you know perhaps the margin again the margin cost of of an answer message of the human is ultimately going to be higher than that with an AI and if it turns into a true competitive advantage for a user such as okay for every single message i'm going to uh for every single guest that comes down and they give them a call and ask them about you know crafting a really really guest great guest experience i think there's a group of users who are going to go in that direction and then make that a differentiator and i think a lot of users might go in the other direction which is um that's not where like communications may not be where i'm going to plan to have my competitive advantage and so i might just use AI to take care of messaging is going to be a part of my automated workflows it's very consistent this is what i can't expect i can get certain reviews that are like that so i think that you're going to see this bifurcation with a vast majority heading towards

49:27more automation of guest messages over time i'm impressed let me ask you a question uh one of the most common things it comes up all the time with uh you know overnight rentals is like because we don't have a front desk in most cases um i can't figure out the tv i can't get the roku's on the wrong input or something like that what's the best what how do how do i do that with uh with hello host you know what's the best way to automate that now i will say that my process right now is to call them we've found that this is the only thing that we feel is worth a phone call because they are agitated they've generally just checked in they're annoyed because their kids are screaming and they're trying to get blowy going etc and uh messaging it just tends to make it worse so our policy right now is to make an actual phone call i would like to change my policy what do you do there on your resort um so just to confirm this is when they can't get the tv going with their favorite show right like signing to Netflix and all that kind of stuff yeah so um we have a combination we have a

50:34combination of messaging on a resort one is our AI guest messaging and the second is actually a text messaging system to to a person again to a person because we have onsite staff which means they can actually go to the property and per to to the cabin in person and then physically help them set up and i think this is pretty unique to us but this is what has worked uh for for for the business so which this is what it looks like they'll send a message typically for Airbnb my net flex is of working and then our team is going to get that message and then literally say how i'm going to be here in like 10 minutes just to make sure that you're settled in right um have the human that can show up yeah yeah then the AI um in most cases for troubleshooting as long as a common troubleshooting issue they i can actually help the guest troubleshoot through that and that's not just on tv it could be a lockout like a guest is at the door the door code is not working they're like messaging and what's going on how do i get in very frustrating experience lots of our users have

51:34backup lock boxes they i will say you know double check hey have you um try it again like try the code again double check it's the correct code um and then if that doesn't work here is the backup lock box where it's located and obviously the host is notified right but it's it's no longer i i must respond within a two three minute time frame and more of a hey i'm going to check in an hour later i noticed this happened and it was already resolved with but obviously the AI is not capable of resolving everything that's happening on the property such as as i mentioned earlier a leak right so so there are like maintenance emergencies and things like that that will no matter what i think there needs to be a person stepping into is there is there a particular management software that you see your clients using more than others saw in other words are are more owner as people coming to you are more uh hostfully people coming to you or is it across the board and i think it's across the board yeah lots of yeah just across across the board and people have their preferences

52:36over though we don't have a specific recommendation there i love it i love it and it's how do i find you um um my emails Annie at hello sayi.com website hellohostayi.com and you can book a demo of your interest in the product um yeah so feel free to not share if i'm opening the doors to everyone but feel free to to give me a shout happy to talk to any host i think what has really for me in terms of building hello host the number one most fun thing i've done is just talk to so many hosts about all the problems that they faced and then incorporating that into the product that it's just baked into the DNA of the company love it all right well thank you so much for your time and uh we hope to see you again thank you so much look thank you