Balancing Tech and Human Touch: The Future of Guest Communication in the Hospitality Industry with SendSquared CEO, Nicolas Wegener

Alex Husner  0:36  
welcome to Alex and Annie the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex and I'm Annie. And we're joined today with Nicolas Wegener who is the CEO and founder of Sendsquared. Nicolas, it's so good to see you. 

Nicolas Wegener  0:48  
Oh, likewise, so good to see you guys as well. Happy to be on the program.

Annie Holcombe  0:52  
Well, we're so glad to have you. We know it took a little while but a friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours, and Rebecca Lombardo, she had brought your story to us. And we both read it. And we were just so amazed and so impressed. And just wow, the whole story is pretty incredible. So wanted to have you on and talk about that. Before we get going. Why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about your backstory and how you ended up in vacation rental industry. 

Nicolas Wegener  1:13  
It is pretty wild story. So yeah, I founded the company since we're about five and a half years ago. And before that I was running a different company, the Lemond companies with three time Tour de France winner and Greg LeMond, I spent almost a decade running that company. And upon leaving in about 2018, I was living in Knoxville, Tennessee. And then you know, I left that and moved my whole family back up here to Minneapolis met a bunch of folks that were working over at another company here in town track. And we started the company about the fall of 2018. And really got to work on a product that has become to replace Naevus and others in the markets. It's a full direct communications tool that specializes in house call centers, email marketing, text messaging, text message marketing, and we just built an owner system to that allows you to send your direct to postcards out to all the homeowners with sales rooms and performers and system quite a whole direct platform. And it's been a lot of work, you know, as an engineer myself, the build all of that, to scale it up to north of 20,000 units under management and getting close to 25. So it's just been, you know, certainly a passion project and kind of an all in one kind of thing over a subsidy years of cumulative work. And for a long period building it for nobody, because for years as you get started, and people just aren't on it. So building it have this larger vision that you're trying to execute on. We're trying to bring on the owners and guests into like one CRM and build build all of that. Yeah, that's the product. That's the company. That's a little bit of me, and thanks for asking. Okay, great. All right, well, coming from my perspective, and how important I know direct bookings are and having worked in a company that we were 95%, booked direct and didn't use Naevus. But use revinate. And certainly looked at Naevus over the years. And actually we built our own CRM based on a lot of how Naevus was built. But I think there's a lot of companies that are now coming into the vacation rental space that if they haven't been around for a certain amount of time, they're mostly reliant on VRBO, and Airbnb, and they don't necessarily understand the importance of having a good look at your guests data and being able to know if a guest books with one email address that it's the same guest if next year, they book with a different email address or a phone number, and how important that is to really be able to get that true landscape and bird's eye view of your guests who's coming back, who is repeat and how that helps build your marketing. But I'm sure a lot of what you do right now, because there's such an influx of those companies that are newer, a lot of it's gotta be education, right to make them understand like, this is why you need that so that you can get away from, you know, having to rely on the OTAs as much it really is. And there is a lot of that and we even set up programs to to help educate folks on a monthly call basis. But it has to be you know, there was a lot of growth that took place during the COVID years and a lot of folks that came in and that during that time, they just didn't have to worry as much about those direct relationships. But with EDR is getting scrunched and the market just being a more of a tougher year. That's a big piece of it, you know, having those direct relationships, having that Rolodex that you can count on people to market to, to drive that drug business where you get to hold on to the entire margin. It's a big piece of it. And if you're an operator in today's market, you need to be looking at that or at least considering one of the solutions out there. And that's why it's so critical as we're out at all the shows we even spend a lot of time just educating folks who combined so it is it's big piece of it is to learn how to works. 

Annie Holcombe  4:42  
So why don't we go back you started this after or you were working on this and you had an injury after you left Greg LeMans Company, which was kind of ironic. It was a cycling company and you got injured in a cycling accident. But you weren't with them anymore. So like you said could have been in the news but it wasn't but you're stuck in the hospital and you're working on this project and you  Your partner was very supportive and wanted to get this done, and was kind of helping you do the work that you couldn't do. So can you tell us a little bit about that story and how this all happened? And what brought you to like vacation rental specifically, but at that time, I think, again, it's a very crucial part of your journey as to how you got here. 

Nicolas Wegener  5:16  
Absolutely, yes. I mean, who to speak about was Roy Roy Collins, he's my co founder, I mean, just a wonderful human. And a lot of that was foreshadowing that I didn't understand or see, at the time, our relationship was brand new, and I probably only known him maybe less than a year. So you know, you start a business with somebody. And it's almost like a marriage. I mean, how you coordinate how you communicate, I mean, you're sharing finances, you know, to a degree within the business. So I mean, the had him do all the things that he did. I mean, it's, it's a remarkable and correct, there was an accident, um, cyclist, as you would hope I was running a cycling company. And you know, of course, I spent a huge cohort of my life biking all over the world. And so to come back to my hometown, you know, Minneapolis and St. Paul, and to get involved in that accident was a hit and run, and you kind of just had your whole world shaken up. And at the time, yeah, there's no revenue, you know, with the company, we were just, we were building the products and the build the kind of product that we have, you don't really just jump out with like an MVP and try to, I mean, there are portions where you can try to interact and work with different folks. But for the most part, nobody was using the system. So he and I had these grand visions on where we wanted to take the platform, but then to say, Hey, I'm gonna go for a ride one day, and one of the last most like gorgeous days of the year, and this part of the country, it gets cold. And so for four or five months, you can or you least you shouldn't ride even though folks do and yeah, and I went out and I was on Summit here in St. Paul, for those who know where there is, it's you know, it's right in kind of the heart of the city, very bike friendly area, you know, I was in a bike lane biking, and I got hit head on and I went into the windshields, I broke both my arms, you know, it's a very Angela attic moment, but I got put into a an ambulance and take it out to the hospital and try to figure out where I was. But Roy was one of the first people to come on and see me and even after the accident and in the recovery into the surgery until a cost which by the way, I mean, is a whole of the process behind it is just that's kind of a daunting scenario as an entrepreneur. I mean, you don't you don't have a job, right? You're trying to build a company, so you're pouring your own money into it. But at the same time, I have a family and kids, you know, it's just it's one of these things where it's like, everything that you're used to doing kind of falls apart. And so yeah, everybody has to jump in from your family to you know, the business when you're trying to put that together. And my role early in the days was to, you know, write code. It's hard to do that. To broken arm. Yeah. Yeah. Like literally put your hands on the keyboard. So there was a lot of that it was foreshadowing. Roy has been a tremendous partner. I mean, the business wouldn't exist without my partner is Roy in the hole. So I'm very grateful for both of them. Yeah, it was it was it was crazy. Yeah. I mean, he obviously saw something in you very early on that he wanted to make sure no matter what he was gonna get you through this, because, you know, he could have gone out and tried to find somebody else. But he obviously knew you were the band for the job. So hopefully, we'll get to meet him at some point in this journey as well. But he sounds like Oh, absolutely. Leader. Yes, no. And so it's it's really been, you know, the both of us as we've been trying to build up and get this company going. So and that's why and even part of that story and trying to innovate across, you know, it's one of those things, because it's a humbling experience, you know, and you go through this whole process. And I think, as I told even off camera, it's like the hero's journey, right? It's like, you have all these amazing accolades. And it's very circular, right. So it's like, you know, you go through like all these highs, like when I was at Lemond, and but we could open any door. It was an amazing experience. I remember POTUS calling, you know, answering the phones to that. And then because, you know, the president of France was coming into town, and they wanted Greg there. And so it's just, you know, the the amount of stuff that we were able to do there, and I've left and all that goes away, right. So, you know, your whole world kind of resets and to have the partners that I found to build the business with, and to land in this very unique and amazing industry, you know, I mean, it's, it seems like there's all kind of faded, and all that's gonna happen. So there's just parts of that where it's like, it's like friction, and you just don't want to let go of it. Just like, hey, you know, just go with it and don't fight these other components and just kind of let it all flow. Well, you landed in the industry, this time a little bit softer than some of the other lands at least.

Yes, true. Good for the industry. I do remember one part of the article that you sent us that we'll include in the show notes that goes into detail about this whole story. At one point, I thought to myself, at least I have my help, and then you didn't you know, and then I mean, you have to literally start from ground zero to build that back up. And really in a short amount of time. I mean, 2018 was not that long ago. No. And it is still a big piece of you today. I mean, I'm very athletic, try to stay in shape. You know, I have, you know, pretty serious workout regimes. Anybody who gets to know me knows that's a big piece of my life. But then I did I lost a ton of weight, you know, I mean, I remember I was trying to put into like my dress shirts, and I just remember I wouldn't fit into them and you kind of lose that other portion of your identity. So it's like, at the time, if I'm sure anybody who's ever had to go through, you know, big transition, job wise, you know, your identity kind of gets tied to that, right. So I was for so long, no one is like Nick from Lemond that I had to let go of that. And I already felt completely lost, then I became, you know, which is all broken in terms of physically, and then I lose all this weight. And then like that part of my identity is gone. I remember just looking out the window going, I just wish I could just go out there and run around, you know, with like, my own kids sort of running through the yard. They're playing around. And just like, because you can't do that you're stuck, you know, can't do anything. Yeah, both arms are broken, right? So is my collarbone up over here, then those my wrist and my arm over here. So both arms were just tied up. So we were healed. And you can pipe now, you know, you're doing well, like so positive to see. But I guess my question is, why vacation rentals? Like, what was it about our industry that drew you in, we're a great group of people to be with, don't get me wrong, but just Yeah, it kind of fell on my lap, you know, as much as I deviated round. And so it's funny, because the first client we had on the platform, and the platform wasn't actually originally called sin squared, it was originally called ad based AI. So we had to deviate away from that early on, because at the time in 2018, thought AI is like the TLD was just not very popular. Nobody cared too much about AI, that was really our goal. But then just it's like I said, it's very circular. So everything kind of kind of comes back. But our first client was a bowling alley, believe it or not. And

here, yeah, it was our first paying customer, you know, they paid not a lot of money, very nominal, in contrast to what we do today. But they signed up for just email marketing, because that's where we started, we built, you know, like a MailChimp equivalent. And when I was traveling all over the world, when I was hanging around, Greg, and I was like, I was all over the place like Australia, Europe, there, I mean, China all over the place, I noticed that I would always get these just flooded with emails, and I can have other artists times all throughout the night, and all in the morning. And I'm like, God help them can't they figure out, like when to send me an email, because I'm like it was I would just delete them all, because there's just no reason for me to read through them, they wouldn't send them to me when I was actually looking at it. So I wanted to create like a second time analysis, and that was where we started. So we created centime analysis to learn the best time to reach out to people. And we started that, like 2018 2019. And then as much as I just was trying to sell the platform to anybody, you know, hairdressers, anybody who is really looking to use the platform breweries and all types of different folks, you know, I think, you know, with the people that we had early on in the company, were in the hospitality industry. So then we when we started with hotels, and small boutique resorts, and then we eventually, we found a lot of stickiness with vacation rentals, particularly within the product within the in house call center, and then how that works together with their Automation Engine, automated lead, follow up, and then with all the rest of the email marketing kind of whole brought into the same suite. And it just, you know, again, it's one of those things, we're just going to start coming at us. And instead of fighting it and trying to stay, you know, agnostic against an industry, we really just owned it, I said, Hey, this is a and that's really where our focus one is. Now we're directly for vacation rentals. And in fact, we're one of the only CRMs that has owner and guests.

So I mean, I know I'm quite biased as I shouldn't be by birth to kind of fall in our lap. Again, it's just one of these things where it's this is very circular, like everything that was started at the very beginning with us, you know, over a track that kind of come all the way back around, and then this, we're just focused right back there vacation rentals, it is a great group, I love it. 

Alex Husner  13:28  
And it came in as interesting and probably opportune time for you as well, when Naevus decided to move outside of vacation rentals. And, you know, back prior to 2018, there were a lot of occasional companies that use Naevus. And they used to be a very big player at these events. And the call center component used to be a pretty big thing that a lot of companies focused on. But you know, as I mentioned earlier, I feel like that's kind of it's gone to the wayside a little bit. But the companies that have continued to do really well in pushing those direct bookings building their brands, they still focus on call center components and having a reservation team and with large properties you want somebody to talk to, and that's the one thing that VRBO and Airbnb can never give these guests is they're not going to talk to guests about it. So you came in with a product that filled the need, where it was leaving the industry and probably refined some of the things that nav has had that I know at one point when we were looking at it part of the cost association that was prohibitive was the revenue that they charged and they were doing the outbound calls and that or they were coaching us on the outbound calls, but they would still take a percentage of any of those bookings. And I mean, it was gonna be a pretty big chunk of change for you know, an annual basis there. But as far as what you've built on that call center side, tell us a little bit more about it, how it works, like, what are the things that you've taken and learn from 

Nicolas Wegener  14:46  
Correct? Yeah, and we don't do that. So we don't actually, I think you're speaking about rubs for us candidly, but if that's what's the case, but yeah, we don't take a percentage of the bookings, you know, we're solely a software platform. So, you know, we're not actually taking During the calls for you, we're not doing the bounding work, we just provide the set of tools that your own team or staff can use. Now we work with a lot of other particular maybe like Bas, or third party companies that might bring some of those services in. But again, our focal point is really on the platform. And so exactly that we are a telecom, right. So I mean, we're even an FCC registered telecom. So that allows us to buy numbers or port numbers to us. And so we don't have to do so through a broker. And that's one of the ways that we were able to even extend the service offering as well as just focusing in on the heart of the technology, and then extending that Furthermore, so that you can, you know, have your call trees and call plans and all those components working with that, not just stopping that phones is taking that further and working through the emails, and then the text messaging, and then kind of harmonizing all that together, monitoring our Wi Fi technology, so that you can do a better job capturing those emails for all the other guests that are inside the units. And then kind of bundling that entire communications platform together is one package. And so those who are familiar with now this kind of recognize it is that on steroids, the timing kind of was right. We didn't launch that platform until maybe 2021, we spent many years building it, because it's not something that just shows up overnight. And so, you know, it took us a while to kind of really retool it, and we're a contact for a system. So we it's a little bit different. Now this was we first so they were just focused on leads. So you know, we tried to remove contact duplicates, we tried to add, you know, multiple email addresses for each contact, multiple leads for each contact. So it really is the next generation of the technology. And it is designed to do exactly what they were doing back then. But in today's market, which a modern way? Yeah, the direct relationships, the direct bookings, and you're absolutely right, when you know, ADRs and purchases are just so high, folks want to call, you know, if they're gonna spend, you know, $10,000 on a vacation, they don't just want to punch it in over the net, they, they want to talk to somebody. And that's your opportunity to really establish your brand. And make sure that they know who they're booking through, which was part of our ethos and why we're here doing what we're doing. Yeah. So and it records the calls I'm sure to so you can go back and do agents, boring coaching, stuff like that, of course. Yep. And all the KPIs almost wrestlers, components behind it, we partner with Doug Kennedy, too. So he's been a champion of our product, you know, and it took a while, of course, to meet all these people. And for us engineers, who we are and probably not always at all the shows, but camera learning, hey, we need to be at all the shows. And so that's why we're we're at all the shows now to just making sure we're meeting everybody. 

Annie Holcombe  17:33  
Well, you mentioned that you had about 25,000 units on the platform right now. And so obviously, you started had to start out with just a few or one, how did you scale up to that, because that's a lot of inventory over a short amount of time. 

Nicolas Wegener  17:45  
It is, and it's a lot of it's been within the past even years. So it's really sort of the different partnerships. You know, it's funny, I reached out to streamline early on thinking like 2020, but you know, I didn't actually get connected to them until 2023. So it took a long time. And perhaps they wanted to put us through more validation. But it's truly been through all those partnerships, and you know, just kind of word of mouth, and we don't spend a lot of money on marketing, if at all, the only expense on that is truly the trade show. So this point, but you know, we took on some of the big folks that were on now this, and a lot of that helped us is that, you know, Naevus got bought out by revinate. And you know that m&a action worked to our favor, because, unfortunately, and fortunately for us, they've left the vacation rental industry for the most part. And as they've done that to kind of left a hole for those that are using that product.

And then we come in and we say, well, we charge differently, but in a lot of ways, it saves folks a lot of money. But on top of that, we just have a lot more of the tools that they look for 2024. And so it's kind of just makes it really easy to over scaling the business was me, I can tell you as a founder of like, that's what I did at my mom, it was my role there I was fundraising and I raised a lot of money while I was there, you know, 10s of millions of dollars. And you know, it was a big company. You know, we had tons of employees, we had two different plants. You know, we had one out in Australia, we had one back in the states here in Tennessee, you know, but kind of hit the reset button. And you lose that name and the moniker that brand name right. And you want to build something from scratch, like nobody's ever heard of it, right? Like in the Start with a different name. As we were add days thought AI is so much iteration, it is incredibly difficult. So for any founder who's out there, they're trying to build something from nothing. It is a journey, absolute journey. And you got to like prepare for it. And it's not one or two years, it's you know, five to 10. It's hard to know that and have the vision and the optics on it, which also makes when you do fundraising, it's totally different because we raised cash ourselves back in 2021. But to have find investors that come on with the same type of optics is also a very, very difficult thing to do. When I was at Lemond and I was fundraising there. It was entirely different. The terms are way more favorable course because we have much better name. I wasn't able to get those kind of terms and we were very new. We didn't have all the credibility, the stuff behind us so it's

It's an enduring process course we're incredibly proud to get where we are today. We're continuing to work with all those people out there. It's an amazing experience really is, and it's unlike anything else you'll ever do. You mentioned the hero's journey. So where in that circle, do you think that you are right now? I think we're right at the very bottom, we kind of just kind of got past that. Haha, because we finally found that stickiness for us and the vacation rental industry, we found, you know, good partners and people we can work with. We go to the shows people know us now. And you know, we're kind of eccentric guys and see us. You know, like, Roy has a really big moustache that he's well known for. Oh, I didn't realize that was Roy. I saw him at the at the event. Okay, yeah. So now you'll never build a mistake. Okay, and you'll never be able to shave it off.

Part of his personality now. We are who we are. And we're not going to be anyone different than that we are eccentric, maybe a little bit on the spectrum. But we're also engineers, but we're also just people trying to help our customers, right, and trying to get people that we know that we can bring really good credible tools that have a lot of substantive value and really make a difference. And today's day and age 2024, you want to talk about getting up every day and doing the same thing and feeling really good and proud about it. It's it is it's you know, it's a height of a career. And it's a very good place to be, but went through a lot of bumps and the road bumps. Yeah. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  21:25  
Lots of reasons. Yeah, we'll be back in just a minute afterward, from our premier brands sponsor extenteam 

Unknown Speaker  21:30  
So I'm Cheyenne Hayes, working with Red Rock vacation rentals in southern Utah. And we started working with extend team, almost a year ago.

Unknown Speaker  21:40  
So we have used them for our guest servicing department. I know that they offer employees for different things. But we've used in strictly for guest servicing, we work really hard to kind of protect our brands and kind of have everybody operating at the same level of service. And when we considered going with extend team, and we told them kind of what our apprehension was. And they reassured us and they have completely delivered on that promise. So we were very clear to extend him of, you know, we want somebody that has some hospitality background, huge customer service focus, we specifically were looking for somebody that could continue to manage all of the leads and inquiries that were coming in, as well as handling all of the in house guest communication that's going on through the evening. Without question, partnering up with extend team has one been one of the best decisions that we've made in the last year, we take a lot of pride in the customer service that we can offer during business hours, and to be able to extend that all the way to midnight every single day with the same level of customer service. And the response times has been absolutely amazing. Our guests review scores have gone up, our team members are feeling more connected to the process going 24 hours a day almost. It's been a huge blessing in every way. It's been helpful. As far as labor management, it's been helpful for continuing our brand, you know, more hours of the day, guests get responses faster. Everything about the partnership has been a huge blessing for us, we would do it again. For sure. The best news is extend team has an exclusive offer just for listeners of Alex Nene podcast, receive 50% off your onboarding fee, when you visit, extend team.com forward slash Alex and Annie are mentioned our podcast when you contact them.

Alex Husner  23:32  
They will streamline Are you integrated with the other property management systems in this space? Most of you know a lot of them. 

Nicolas Wegener  23:38  
Yeah, and it's still been, you know, kind of a slower process, we connect directly to them. We don't use an aggregator we don't go through a third party. You know, we don't want those additional costs to be contributed anybody else. So, of course, but that's always good to meet the right folks, you have to sit down with them and shake hands, of course, come to terms and then even after that you have to find clients in common. So but we're connected the most of them now, whether it be escapia or streamline our friends, even LM pm live res most of them were connected with these days. So good. 

Annie Holcombe  24:06  
Now, are you just in the US? Are you in international markets as well? 

Nicolas Wegener  24:11  
I mean, we're in the Caribbean, so which is also international. But you know, we haven't ventured off to Europe, really, I mean, you know, to build out your team and kind of create, you know, your GTM and go to market strategy and all those components. I mean, there's a lot here in the US. I mean, I was just speaking with my friend Andrew Kitchel about that. It's like just staying, you know, we're gonna continue to say really?

Annie Holcombe  24:30  
Literally, yeah, it seems like we find like companies either they they kind of develop themselves in Europe, and it takes some time to really get a foothold and then they'll come to the US and vice versa. And I think everybody that we've talked to kind of has the same mentality. It's just like, you know, get it right, get your momentum, get your brand settled so people know what it is. And it'll kind of organically take care of itself that growth will naturally happen. You know, if you have a good product, people are going to talk about it and they're going to recommend it and share it with other people. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Nicolas Wegener  25:00  
Absolutely, I see it the same way. So I mean, our focal point is really just focusing in on. I mean, even having a word of mouth as a good way for others to know about us and hear about us. I mean, it's the best source to have a bunch of old Naevus people, too, that are very friendly to us and promote us like Michelle Marquis, you guys might know her. Yeah, I was just on a webinar with her. And Jeff, from shortcuts, like two weeks ago. But yeah, it really is. I mean, we want to get eventually into the European market, people reach out to us from over there. But again, it's just we're not quite yet their numbers out, there would also be another thing, we'd have to work on getting more phone numbers into different locations and sorting through all the rest of the parameters. So I mean, there's more to it. But I think that's the story, friend, business, truly, definitely stay in our lane. 

Alex Husner  25:42  
I'm seeing a lot of companies now too, that are making a concerted effort, if they're newer and building to get things done the right way first, before they go, and they grow. And then they have to look back and be like, Oh, my gosh, I've got been in business for five years, but I haven't made any efforts on direct bookings. And I've got to unravel it, do you have clients that are kind of like that, that they're newer, or they are a newer company, at least, but they're trying to get these things in place? Or is it mostly existing companies that were using a similar product that switch over to you, 

Nicolas Wegener  26:12  
it's a little bit of both, and the ones that are familiar with the type of offering, you know, it's a bit easier, of course, to train and their agents are somewhat familiar with it. And then, you know, those who aren't, you know, they're maybe their agents, if they have vas a little bit more tended to, there's, I mean, all the workshops and things that are happening all the shows, it's evident that they're preaching a lot of this, you know, like, own your own email lists, build those up, be able to market to them control that debt, you know, create a deviation a bit in your revenue streams, so that it's not all based on verbo, or Airbnb. So it's, you know, by channels, you know, I mean, there's a lot of folks that come to us, but, again, I mean, there's always the shock to like what this system takes and costs, and then, of course, the learning to adapt it. So, you know, it is it's educational. So some people again, like who understand it really well, you know, they'll sign up quickly. And so it might be a shorter time, you know, for us to educate them. But then there are others where we have to spend six months or four months, you know, teaching them and all that kind of stuff, a lot of back and forth. But I mean, regardless of what it is, it's always an honor, you build the whole system that you're showing. So you know, between Roy and I, we built each build half of it, if you will, and he spent more time on on the phone pieces, maybe I spent more time on the email and CRM, but it doesn't matter. We built our, our hearts are so into it. So you have an opportunity to show that like, it's like, hey, look what I built. And then at the same time, I can help you and as I tell him, like, it's purpose built for you. Like it's, it's built for your type of business and in your industry. You know, you're not going to find this in a HubSpot, you know, because you're just not you know, it's purpose built for the industry. And so but it's always it's, it's an honor, anytime they can get about and show it and educate and teach or all those kind of components. 

Alex Husner  27:53  
Yeah, no, that's awesome. And I think we talked about this a lot on the show, you know, whether a property management system or a software can be truly an all in one offering. And I think you can debate it both ways. But at the end of the day, I mean, what you do, it is the overreaching way to communicate with guests and owners. And that's not just email marketing, or just texting or just phone, there's a lot of things that go underneath that. And the broader purpose of it is to provide better service to be able to generate more bookings, more revenue, more repeat revenue. And as you look at things, I think a lot of companies, they look at email marketing, or texting as just individual outputs of what they're doing in the marketing. It's like you can't look at it that way, you have to look at the broader picture of that whole lifecycle of the guest and how you're communicating at different touchpoints and brings an operations been texting your guests a couple days after they've arrived at the property to make sure that things are going well, if they are not, I mean, trying to get ahead of things before they go and leave a bad review. Or worse, wait until the end of the week and ask for money back. No, it's a it's a more comprehensive look at what is the true beginning. And hopefully there's no end but like the whole process of how a guest engages with the brand and I think that's what I like about what you guys have put together is it really it does take into consideration all those different phases and, you know, allows you to tell the story and communicate with the guests in the way that you want to and we all know when you booked on Airbnb, you can't do that. That's the biggest problem is that you are not able to communicate in the way that you want. And this allows you to start driving that and really building up you know, that cadence with the guests. I absolutely agree. 

Nicolas Wegener  29:28  
I mean, you're preaching to the choir. It's communications are holistic, right so it's our whole thesis who we are as a company want to talk to folks like so everybody knows your first name right? It's like needed or cheesy but I mean as I was traveling all around the world we would constantly go back to the same places that knew us right and so even at Lamont we would go to this smaller hotel I think ran out of the five star in Paris but they just the newest by our name so they would have out like the Diet Coke with you know, like ice which is pretty rare, you know, ice soda in Europe and they would greet us With that, and you know, they would know our names. And even we would travel down to Australia, we would have the same thing, they would just say, Hey, Nick, we see we're coming, hey, we will set you up the way you want. And that's a piece of, you know, I think in hospitality with all the hospitality, tech, it's a lot of stuff out there. You know, I mean, it's the essence of travel, it's why we got into all of this to begin with is, we fell in love with it. And I truly believe on the communication side, I mean, I would just get to me every time are those like emails that you everybody sends out, they talk to you, like, you've never been there before. And like, I think it's, it's like one of the easiest things you can do. It's just such I mean, it's low hanging fruit, to be able to just very quickly tag off an automation or work through the processes, and so that you can at least greet them saying, Hey, welcome back, you know, and then just use their first name, versus like, their whole name and all the different bits behind them. And while some of that, yes, you have carried across, but it's such an opportunity to make that relationship, just so that when you are talking about taking that trip, again, with your family, you're talking about like, Hey, let's go back down to like, let's go back on the call. And so let's go back to wherever we were last. And you have that conversation so that when you make the booking, they're speaking back to you just like you're speaking about them. And I've had countless of conversations about with Robin from moving mountains about all this. And I know he sees a lot of in the same light. And it's refreshing to hear that even from the operators that they want to do the to. And so yeah, the communications, it's so critical, because it's like, you can't just have a solvent, your email, and then not take care of it on your text messaging.

Annie Holcombe  31:29  
It's like who's talking about who will talk about that a lot. And we actually been talking about recently with some gentleman that are we called the OGS, of vacation rentals, and they're, they live in my market and the panhandle of Florida. And I think that sometimes we get lost in the sauce, so to speak, it's like we forget, we're in hospitality, and we lose, and things start to become cold, and, and very technical. And again, we need the technology to be able to do all these great things. But don't forget that the technology can also help you be more hospitable. If you're using the right technology. So you've done all the things that can make the two worlds merge really well together. 

Nicolas Wegener  32:02  
Absolutely. And that's exactly the case, it's like, don't get lost with just like these generic pieces of communication, were just like, you know, just spending a lot of money to go there. And it's this as almost like a romance, you know, you're going there with your family and all these components, it's gonna be memories that you'll never forget, if the memories are grand, you're gonna go back there, just so you can rekindle the memory. So if you can at all, just try to, you know, wherever you can do to make it so that it's more intimate. And you're actually speaking to somebody with their first name. I often use like, the most obtrusive examples, but it's like if I saw you again at one of the next shows, and I came over and introduced myself as hey, I'm Nicolas, walking around with my whole spiel on who I am, you'd be like, I already know who you are. Why you say?

Annie Holcombe  32:43  
Did you bump your head?

Nicolas Wegener  32:46  
So how do you take that? Do you distill that down into a piece of technology to solve that problem? Because right now, every single system out there that sends out those emails with this text messages are doing exactly that. They're telling their whole life story all over again, every single time and the cadence and is so easy that that you can create that relationship so that it's like, we all know, it's those tiny little experiences that we all remember. So if you're communicating to the people before they come out there, and especially when they're going to a foreign place, places they've never been or police they're not that familiar with, that's the only tangible resource that they know of any allocation. So it's like you're traveling to this place, like that's the safe haven, how do I get here. So those people can make you feel better in that route on that path. That's the essence that we want to solve. And that's the component that we really do bring, which is entirely different from anybody else in the market. How much has AI changed the platform? I mean, in the last year or two, when you guys already when you were building it, five years ago, you had AI in mind, but even though nobody knew what that meant at that point, but how have you integrated it? And what have you seen on that side? Yeah, no, it's great questions. I mean, I am have you brought it up for us, you know, we don't connect the full feedback loop, we believe you can spot it, I think of somewhere. And because Connor, you guys probably know him, he actually wrote a good post about it, because it's like your next flavor of licorice. Because you can spot the textile. I think LLM is a huge place in the market. I just think what they are is they're more they're used differently. I think they should be used more back office and to automate some of your other processes. But they shouldn't ever be 100% connected through the loop. Like you don't want the AI ghost writing you to your guests or whatever, come out there. You don't want the AI ghost writing and sending that response off, you know, let it help let it create some of the messaging, but then have an auditing process in front of it, which obviously saves time. That's our viewpoint. I know others probably tried to automate it and all the way through, but I think you can spot it. And it's like, if you do have I mean, travel is it's a human experience. I mean, at the macro, we're all want to be engaged with other humans, right? You go on this trip, hopefully to be around other people. And if you're starting it out, it's like, you wouldn't want a robot on your front desk, right.

You know, greeting your people and it's just like, here it is. So don't put a robot

I'm responding to your guests as well. I mean, it's your most precious commodity. Both the owners and the guests are in the same criteria. You know, you don't want a robot responding to your owners about whatever they might have questions about as well, because we had a lot of that communication as well, too. But I do think you can find a way to do like centime is a great piece for it. Obviously, we're biased to that. But of course, quick replies and those kind of components, drafting some of those out, trying to get some of the nuanced basic responses, sentiment analysis. Those are areas where you can really create some focus on AI. Hopefully that kind of resonates with some folks. But you know, that's your generally our viewpoint. We do have a lot of it under the hood. It's not 100% connected, the feedback loop, 

Alex Husner  35:41  
listen to a podcast this week, while we were at the show with Megan Moylan on her new podcast. I think it's workflows and espressos. And she was talking about all the different things that she uses chat GBT for and she's got the premium version of it. And I mean, just it's unbelievable things I had never even thought of for how you would use chat GPD. But it's amazing. I think the the one thing that a lot of companies have adopted is, you know, the ease of being able to respond to reviews to being able to write email responses to guests and inquiries and things like that. It's just, it's made life a lot a lot easier for all of us. And I totally agree that AI is never going to replace people, but it's going to make people able to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. 

Nicolas Wegener  36:22  
Sototally, yeah, it's a tool, it's another tool in your arsenal, and you should definitely be using it, you're going to be left behind without it. So you're not learning to adopt it and bring it into the ecosystem. You know, we bring different instances of AI to the table, but the way that we do it is generally encompass through our system, there's different facets for it, you know, and there's a lot of different flavors out there. You know, I mean, there's obviously open AI, there's Claudia, I mean, there's a lot of different tools to choose from as well. But not all LLM are equal either. But it's definitely gonna continue to change the world. And I think I've had more than one occasion to like, oh, you should go back to a.ai. And because, you know, we started out as one yeah, we're like add day start AI. And and it's so funny, because now we're since we're a.com, but we've renamed the company many years ago, we're now well known as n squared. We're not going to rebrand or any of those components, and we don't need the.ai to come back, say that we have it in there. But it is a really funny story for us, at least looking at it, because we're like it were that and then we renamed because everybody's doing it. So yeah. Where do you see you guys? Five years from now? Like, what is what is on your roadmap or wish list for SETsquared? Yeah, you know, I'm a, we're constantly adding more to the platform, you know, we spent a lot of time with our customers, obviously, owner and guests continue to own that as a CRM, eventually, at some point down the road, and it's probably no time in the future will probably get back into, you know, maybe into hotels, boutique hotels and resorts at some point down the road. But it's certainly not anytime in the next few years. But a lot of the communications and the tools, I mean, we truly are trying to try to become like the HubSpot for hospitality and not trying to give HubSpot more credit than they already have. But you know, that's really our focal point we're trying to bring and just be you know, the the quintessential CRM, and then have all those communications live in there. So if it's decided, like a lane of communications, we're definitely gonna attack it, we're gonna go and build it or put it inside of the platform, but we'll never get outside of that way, we'll never go and get down the road with like PMS or some of those other things like revenue management, you know, those kind of stamp will always stay as communications company, but a lot of fun things in that light, you know, what's between guide books on our owner side, and more components there as well communicating, you know, and trying to bring more relevance within not just the acquisition, but also the retention. You know, I know acquisition is really, really big on on the owner side, but retention is equally just as big, because it's a lot easier to keep going Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you know, how you speak to your owners, when you speak to owners, what you say to your owners, it matters, and all three of those criterias at the same chord on the guest side, as well, as you know, the when and what I mean, they're just equally as important. 

Alex Husner  39:03  
I love that you have the owners component in that as well, because I don't think that there is any other platform that brings the owner and guest marketing together in the way that you're doing it. And it's important because I hear this all the time from companies that they've got properties that are down, the property manager is emailing marketing and saying, we need to do a push on this. And so marketing does an email or social media posts, but now it's like, okay, now they have to communicate that back to the property manager. And now they have to communicate that to the owner that we've done something. And while my whole approach to marketing would be to have a more proactive scope of it so that you don't become that reactive. We all know that's still going to happen to some extent that there's going to be properties and owners that they're going to want to ask, you know, what have you done for me lately, today, tomorrow, next day, but being able to quickly get that information is actually it's a challenge for companies. So it sounds like I mean, you're able to see that from one view. I think the benefit there is it's actually moving to departments together that need to be more connected marketing and homeowner Relations. That third component is revenue management. But that's, that's really cool. I think that's a unique position to have. 

Nicolas Wegener  40:05  
Right? What I always try to say is owners with guests and guests or owners, I mean, they're not disconnected, you can have orders come in, as guests owners will bring and recommend guests do, they'll have people in their peer group, those people are other potential owners in your market, you should talk to him that way, you should definitely not talk to him like a regular guest. And again, at the naked to the extreme example, you know, if you were talking to those people in real life, you would definitely talk to them different. So as they come through your systems to book a spot, or if you make the booking for the owner, or the owners guest, the rest of those communications that come out of your company shouldn't be different, they should not be the same. And the idea is that so that you can attract them. And you can say, Look, we're on top of it. We're, we know who's coming here, we want to get to know you. This industry is entire relationship based. And it's across the entire board. So that's why we went off, we built all this and again, one of those things that was it just kind of fell in our lap. Yeah, it's kind of how it's a lot of that's been and we just don't go against the grain, if you will, of it kind of feels like this is something we need to enter into. And it's it's within that lane of communication, we build that. But yeah, it is it really is owners are guests and guests and owners. And so that's how we look at it. So great, man.

Alex Husner  41:13  
I love that. I love that. Well, we're super excited to see where you continue to go with this, Nick, I think you guys, the sky's the limit. And you definitely have all the right ingredients behind you. I mean, certainly the tenacity and the dedication to get it done, but also the curiosity and the flexibility to want to adapt with what the market needs. So it's going to be exciting to see where you continue to go with this in the future. Well, thank you. Yeah, and that's the thing. I always say, we're not going to stop. Yeah, we didn't stop after I got hit by a car.

Unknown Speaker  41:46  
Nothing.

Nicolas Wegener  41:49  
Yeah, gonna take a little bit more than a car, maybe a bus or something like that. But put bubble wrap around. It's always funny. We joke about it even within the company, like we were walking across the street, even in New Orleans. And you know, I'm like, oh, we'll be fine. I just was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's make sure look both ways. Yeah, you've had one bad thing. Don't bring on another one. Right? 

Alex Husner  42:15  
Absolutely. Well, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, and SETsquared what's the best way for them to reach out 

Nicolas Wegener  42:21  
just you know, Nick at City square.com. We also have our phone number. We're making phone calls, you can call us on the website as well. You know, shoot us an email. We're definitely an all the shows will be up in Idaho. Next coming two weeks things two weeks from now that I will definitely be at the exact conference. I'm hosting a panel there on CRM. I'm so excited about that. So, yeah, we're pretty easy to get ahold of go to send squared.com a lot of demo requests there if you want to see it or just reach out in contact form and say Hi, happy to jump on call or just chit chat about things even if you're not a customer. 

Alex Husner  42:50  
If anyone wants to get in touch with me and I can go to Alex and Annie podcast.com And until next time, thanks for tuning in everybody