December 2019
Staze was born.
After years of staying in Airbnbs as Management Consultants, Henry and Jay knew you could get a better deal if you booked late and negotiated.
February 2020
Goodbye consulting.
Corona was still just a beer. Jay and Henry quit their jobs to focus full-time on Staze and got 3 weeks’ worth of bookings.
March 2020
Lockdown.
What would happen to travel? Were we crazy to keep building a travel business during a pandemic?
Joined Geovation.
June 2020
Hello Dustin!
We found our third co-founder and CTO, Dustin.
July 2020
Beta launch.
We launched an MVP so we could get feedback.
August 2020
Customer interviews.
We spoke to hundreds of people and realised booking last-minute trips is fundamentally broken so changed our product.
October 2020
Raised £500k. Networked like crazy.
December 2020
Properties.
First integration with a channel manager which will unlock thousands of properties on our platform.
February 2021
Growth focus!
Emma joined the team to supercharge our growth plans.
Summer 2021
Plan to raise and scale our product in the UK and US.
Jay Olenicz
CEO
Henry Popiolek
COO
Dustin Silk
CTO
Showcase
We will become the last-minute brand of the short stay rental market. Our mission is help friends to travel more for less, matching demand for spontaneous trips with cut-price stays that in turn helps property managers to maximise revenue.
Problem
Holiday rentals are an under-utilised asset. For example, in the year up to February 2020 there were 47,116 dedicated rental properties in London listed on Airbnb which were empty 31% of the time. That’s 5 million nights lost revenue. This distressed inventory is often priced at 4x the profit line and is hidden away in search-directory styles booking websites which do not effectively cater to the needs of travellers looking for spontaneous trips.
Solution
Property managers can comfortably drop their prices by 50%. We help them realise that by calculating their cost per booking with them and then link into their calendar to automatically share their last-minute availability in our app. For Guests, we do everything to inspire spontaneous travel, that means all the best prices in one place, a focus on convenience with features such as travel time and weather, and crucially – we make it easy for friends to book together.
Market
We are targeting the last-minute portion of the short stay rental market, worth £16bn globally. We’ll build initial market share by focussing on demand from early adopters of our target market in London alone, worth £20m. Staycations in private rentals have proven resilient in times of Coronavirus, and local travel is on the up, two factors which make this excellent timing to go to market.
Traction
In our first three weeks we had £18,000 GMV, personally driving last minute bookings to holiday rentals. Within three months we had a network of property managers totalling over 5,000 properties across the UK. Since validating our core assumptions about the market opportunity, we’ve interviewed hundreds of Guests to learn about the spontaneous use case. The resulting value prop converts 36% of visitors, Guests say they love the app – our backend tech is soon to catch up.
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