Boostly Town Hall Meeting (9th December)

All right. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome, everybody. Who is, who is with us now? I'm trying to see if this technology will help me in the, in the Facebook group this week. Those of you that are with me last week, you'll know that it was a little bit temperamental, but let's see if this works. If not, we're on the zoom and I'm going to record it as per. As always. Hope you are all well. Welcome, everybody that's with me in that old, old zoom room. It's good to see you all. I'm gonna do this here. Boom. All right, everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Weekly town hall. This is where, as we do per week, every week, I share with you what is happening in the world of Bruce Lee. Show you a couple of things that we are working on, but also as well go through everything that you want to need and more. If you've got anything that you want to chat about, please do drop it. In the chat in the zoom, I will get to it. These Normally last about 30 minutes. I've got a lot that I want to get through, a lot of things that I want to show you. So make sure you got your pens and papers ready because we've got a lot, like I said, a lot to get stuck into this week. So if you can see me, okay, if you can hear me, okay, just again, leave that little chat. I'm always a bit paranoid when I come on here, especially when I'm on the Facebook live at the moment. But as far as I'm aware, everything is looking fine and dandy. So let's kick on, shall we? So I sent the email out like I do every single week round about 1pm UK time. So morning over in the Eastern time, very early morning over in Australia time. 55% of you opened it. So we sent this to, I think it was 800 people, 794 contacts, 55 of you have opened it. Couple of clicks and all that good stuff. So that means that 45 of you haven't seen this email yet. So what I do every week is I jump into the group and I prepare a weekly report for the town hall meetings. And that's what we're going to go through back. What I do is I go through everything. I go through our. Our teamwork desk. I go for our reports, I go for our projects and all that good stuff. And what I like to do is I like to break it down on a zoom camera. Working again, Should be on now. What I have to do is break it down. Hang on a second. Mic muted my back on. I'm going to turn my camera off for a second because it's not playing ball and what I like to do is just go for everything. So this week, like you've seen in the report and I've shared it for you here on your screen, we had a happiness score rating of 60%. So that means that everybody that we helped and we helped over 300 tickets, we had a 60% happiness rate and couple of the things that people marked us down on this week, easily fixable and amendable. One of the main things is that somebody asked a question that wasn't Boostly website related. It was more a case of the, the behind the scenes. So the more things you do with the pms. We advise that this question isn't a website one. This is the things that you've got going on behind the scenes about rental agreements. The person who had that response didn't like it and gave us a, a really bad rating on it. So again it's just education. It's happy, it's fine. You know I'm really glad that we had that question through and it really does help me on, on the education that I have to help with our, with our hosts and like say we've got 800 customers at the moment and, and it's grown all the time, which is cool. One of the cool things to see was our team getting good marks down for customer service. We love to see that. One of the main things that I've been working on over the course of the last two months since coming back into Boostly, really working in the business is being to get the customer service up. So that is fantastic to see. So thank you again to everybody and thank you to the team behind the scenes. That is great. We had three websites go live last week. Now I did anticipate this obviously the week before in America, those big holidays going on, it is starting to become that holiday season where you know, life can easily get in the way. So when we need to have the attention of people to get us domain access, give us those two factors so we can get in and get websites live, it's going to be a bit slower. My, my goal is always to have between 10 to 15 websites that are going to go live every single week. But obviously with, with, with holidays that's going to slow down. But we did get three really cool websites live. Again really, really happy about that. And the sites just look amazing. No, that camera's not going to work, is it? So we had created Gatorades, Cascadia and Holiday Europe Rentals. We've also added a ton of new videos into the vault. So please make sure you head over to the vault, do go and check that out. And We've currently got 128 active projects that are going on now. We did have last week the Book Direct Virtual Summit. So please make sure that if you haven't seen the videos, go over to the group. They're going to be up there for one more week before we pull everything down. So you've got a week to go check them out. But obviously, if you're part of Boostly, the Boostly members group, as you are, by seeing this, you get full access in the vault for that. And that is a very quick little roundup of what we've been doing behind the scenes. Let's see how this camera. No, see how I can change this so I can get this back. One sec. Does that have anything. If I turn it off and turn it on again, what's going to happen? Is this not going to be having it, is it? How do I. No, looks like that is not going to have it. It's just gonna be. It's just gonna be sat there like that. Which is. Which is not gonna be fun for anybody. So let me go back and share my screen. So let's go over to what we have been working on and let's go announce some cool new things. So one of the things that we've been doing behind the scenes and one of the things that I want to be working towards in 2025 is, is to help as many of you as possible capture as much extra revenue as possible with upsells and all of those cool things. And so with that being said, I've been out there trying to work and find people that. That we can. That we can work with and most importantly, put them in front of you so you can tap into those resources to. To help generate more revenue. One of the things that I've been talking about a lot of over the last year is that it should get to a point where the booking value, sort of amount of money that you take for your booking should be one of the lowest revenue generators in your business. Okay. So you've got to think about the things like upsells, cross sells and all those cool things. Now in the past it was really tricky to do, but now going into 2025, there's so many more cool things that are available now. One of the companies out there is called why Hangry? So if you go onto Google, type in why Hangry? Now they're based out of the uk, they are going to be worldwide but we, I met them, the founders, a conference in London recently and what they have created is where for anybody around the UK you can get private chefs for your next event without having to break the bank. And what they realized is between 60 to 80% of all of their bookings were coming from short term rentals. And so they've made a big effort recently to go out and sort of network with more short term rental owners. And at this event they were telling us about what they were doing and I said well this would be fantastic to build into our Boostly websites. So that's what we've gone ahead and done now. Now as always we like to use Liam Carolan's Ginger and Gold as a, as an example. We've created with why Hangry? A landing page that is going to be available for every single one of our UK based customers. And over the course of the coming months this will then get spread out to America, Canada and all over the world. So the copy will be consistent throughout and it'll be on here. And all we have to do is just add that page onto your Boostly website. Now if you want it, we're not going to do it automatically. You just got to send an email into support.co.uk and we will add that page in again. Just very, very clear. Just so we're all clear that this is only going to be available to UK customers at the moment and it's going to get spread further afield very, very, very, very soon. It's no cost, none at all, non cost to you, it's your guest that pays. But it's a lovely little page to have onto your website to make you and your business stand out. And again, Liam has just added this in as one as the tabs here in his welcome emails and welcome messages when people have made a booking he will send them back to here and again once they click on this link they'll go straight to the the Wire Hangry page and they'll be able to go ahead and make a booking which is fantastic. So that's one of the things that we're looking to do. Another thing that we're looking to do, and this is very cool, is I've been looking for a way where you can have your check in process as epic as post as possible. So from that point of where the guest books to the point of where the guest arrives and further beyond, how can you make it where that guest experience is as good as possible. Now I know that your property management software may have automated emails, but as we all know, email open rates are dropping further and further down. And very recently we had the founders of Happy Guest do a little presentation during the September version of the book Direct Virtual Summit. Now what we've got coming up is where they're going to be rolling this out and available to all. And the best way to describe Happy Guest is that it syncs in automatically with your property management software. They will set everything up for you from your email templates, your messages, your text messaging templates. They will set up everything, everything that you need to send to your guest. The guest can also sign damage waivers. They can do all of those cool things and they are working on a basis that they will also do upsells as well. So for example, if you wanted to do late checkout, early check in, if you wanted to do whatever, welcome hampers, etc, you can do it all in in this app. And I've been chatting with the owners for the last couple of weeks. I had a meeting with them in London with one of the founders and today we announced our partnership and our link up, which is, which is great. It's going to make life so much easier for short term rental hosts. Number one, that's a benefit. Number two, another benefit is that you can make a ton of money off upsells. That's all done within this app. And yes, I know your property management software of choice may do it but, but it is not as smooth and as clean as what this is. Now if you were to go to Happy Guest Official and if you scroll down to the bottom here, it shows that they don't price per listing, which is great. They only have an annual membership fee of $99 a year. But here's the really cool thing is that if you go in on this link and do forward slash boostly so Happy Guest Official hash forward slash boostly B O O S T O Y they're going to scrap that fee. So it's going to be absolutely free for you to get started. Now the only way for you to get going, you have to book a call and get onboarded, which is absolutely free. They're going to set it up for you, absolutely free and they're going to work with you. They make their money on upsells. So for whatever you charge for an upsell, they'll take a little bit for it. But this is a really cool way of getting going on your guest experience. Journey. I've had a sneak behind the scenes. They just now need to get more and more people who want to be part of it and I think it's a really, really cool idea, especially for those who are under 100 properties who maybe haven't built this tech themselves or can't afford the more expensive softwares like this. This is a great way to go. So for those of you that in my Zoom room right now, so I'm going to put the link in, this is an exclusive link, we've just created it today. You can get going, you can have a call with them, it's totally free. If you decide not to go ahead, don't worry about it. If you do decide to go ahead, it's free. They will set it all up with you. They will sync it in with your PMS in terms of setup again because they're going to sync all the information in. There's nothing to you to uplift on your end. And I'm really excited to see how this is going to work with Boostly customers. So that's two things we've given you there absolutely free as part of being a Boostly the why Hungry, which is going to be private chefs on your Boostly website page and the Happy Guest official. Now this is only available in the US for the next couple of months. So US and Canada for the next couple of months. So I know that in the Zoom room we've got a lot of US people. Please do take advantage of it. If you're based in the uk, you can just register, put your name down, first come first serve. When it is available more in the uk, you'll be the first to know, which is really cool. If anybody has any questions on that, please pop it in in the chat. Okay, so the next bit of information is important for everybody. So we are very rapidly going through our upgrade of moving everybody over to our 3.5. Let me just have a quick wee drink. Let me see if I can get this camera working as well. It's annoying me. I can't get this camera to work. If I tap on this now, let me see if this is frozen. Nope, still frozen. I'm gonna have to get another camera lead I think. But anyway, so one of the things that we've been working on massively behind the scenes is getting as many of you as possible over to our new 3.5. We have finished with the host fully conversion and we are rapidly moving through to owner as logify super control moving through them at a pretty cool pace. Now One of the major things that you are going to notice isn't even going to be on the front end. This is our framework site. The major differences are going to be on the back end because we were going to be able to make changes at a larger and faster scale. But there's one front end change that I need to show you about and I've been explaining to our team today why. So in the past we have had on this listing page, so when somebody comes and runs a search, they put in the, the date, the departure, how many guests, they hit search, then these results show up. Depending on availability. This all sinks into your pms. Okay? Now these are dummy listings, so please don't think these are real. Now what we've had here in this section is that we've had pricing and that pricing has had to be static. Okay? It's not dynamic in any way, shape or form. It's a price that you put on here. And normally what would happen is they would put from $500 a night, from $200 a night, from $100 a night. But the problem is, is that A, when you click here and you go to the next page, it's a totally different price. That's problem number one. Problem number two, from all the A, B testing that we've been doing on our sites this year, on all of the studies that we've done into the buying psychology of people in 2024, from the studies that have been done, is that at this stage in the buying process from your future potential guest, the majority of people, and again, don't just cast these assumptions on how you shop, but the majority of people are not looking at a price at this stage. A, it's, they're buying with their eyes. So again, is this what they're looking for? So the cabin is, is it there? Is it that, is it an apartment, whatever. But B, what they're also looking for is location. So they're shopping with the, with. With the map in mind. So convenience. So if you've got, for example, somebody who is going to be staying in London for a month, I literally had this inquiry today. They wanted something that was near the certain area where they were going to be working and it had to have X, Y and Z. So they were, they were buying with their eyes for the map. Okay? And as soon as they see that, once they get to this, this section and once all of this aligns, then they look at the price. So what we've done moving forward is that from the map page, we are going to remove that static pricing, because that static pricing from the, from the stats that we've done, from the tests that we've been doing on our sites for the whole of this year, and we've had a lot of data points, we could see that on this stage. Here is where the guest is getting confused. And when you confuse, you lose. It's a famous Donald Miller saying from the Story Brand book. So when you confuse, you lose. And so I made a decision last week. I've informed the team today at our weekly meeting and it's going to be impacted in all of our 3.5 websites moving forward, is that you're going to start to see the pricing get removed from here. Now, I know, and I do know there are going to be some customers of ours, some members of ours who are going to be insistent on having the price in here. So although we're going to remove it, we are going to have give you the ability to unlock it and add it. But here comes the caveat. Once we unlock it, we remove all accountability for that section. So if there's something that you get wrong on that section by putting price in him, you have to fix it yourself. Like I say, we treat everybody like adults. We don't want to be like other website designers that lock up the page, don't give you any access. I want to do the opposite of that. But at the same time, if we're going to do that, you've got to be like saying, listen, Mark, I understand you've got that on your framework, that's out your scope. We will do that, but we will take care of that and it's up to you to fix it on your individual site. Now, if you look at your website right now and if you go, well, Mark, my, my pricing's there. That's because your website is not yet moved over to the 3.5. Again, for the most part, for 99.9% of you, you won't even know when your website's being moved over. For most of you, it will look and feel and work exactly the same. You will notice on the back end when you log in, because on the plugin, instead of saying Boostly, it will say connect. And connect is a big clue of what we're going to be working on in 2025. I can't see any more than that right now. So that's that. Any questions? I can see that a few of you are liking that in the chat, which is lovely. The other thing that we need to go over is hostfully so if you are a Hostfully customer, who is watching this live with me now or or is watching on the replay, we have changed our partnership with Hostfully and we have upgraded our API connection. But that means that we no longer can be on our old partner API. We need for everybody on Hostfully to look out from an email from us, from the support team asking you for your API key and your secret key. It takes two minutes, two minutes for you to go and get it and it takes two minutes for you to paste it and send it back. So if you can please look out for the email and can you please respond back as soon as possible. We need to get that activated. If you notice that your website is not working properly, as in images aren't syncing or something's wrong and you're a Hostfully customer, this is why, because we need to update every single one of our keys. Ayni from our team is going to be messaging Everybody. We've got 89 emails that we're going to be contacting over the course of the next couple of days. Please, please, please look out for them and reply. Unfortunately, the only way that you will know this is if your website isn't working correctly. Everybody else, you don't need to worry about it. It's just hostfully. Great question from Robert. Do I understand that the price from my PMS not pulled through to the website calendar? Do I understand that the price from my PMS is not pulled through to the website calendar? So that's a question. Do I understand that the price from my PMS is not pulled through to my website calendar? I don't really fully understand what you're saying, but what I'm saying is the price will be there at the checkout. The price will be there when the guest goes through to here. And when the guest puts in their information and they click on book, now that's where the price will be. But just to make sure that I'm clear and if I, if I don't explain this correctly, please do watch back and then email in support. But when the guest comes through to the map part of the search. So again, if we break down the five stages of the guest booking process, this is step number two. When they're doing the research, okay. And they come to here, there will be no price on this page. Again, Robert, if I haven't explained that correctly, I apologize. Please rewatch the video email support and they'll be able to extend. Okay, brilliant. Thank you, Robert. And then the only final thing that I have to Let you know about. And I feel like we've gone through a lot. No, two things. Sorry, two things. The first thing is this. So I wanted to show you something that we've been working on with Chad of Eco Escapes. Now, this is STR calculator. So this is an STR calculator mortgage. This is something that we have bespoke done for Chad and Chad has said that he's more than happy for us to duplicate this and offer this to other members moving forward. This is something that he goes and puts in front of homeowners, landlords to show the return of investment to letting Chad take over the property. Now, this was very complicated to build, but we've built it. And this is a really good lead generator. Now for Chad and Eco Escapes, we have got the ability to duplicate this and do this more and more and more. But caveat, there will be a cost and it's custom for each client. So if you feel like watching this, and I'm only going to mention this once for now, I may come back and talk about this in Q2 once we've rolled out 3.5, rolled out 4.0 and we're really on track of everything. I'll talk about it more then, but I want to see if we can duplicate this for somebody else somewhere in the world. Could be Canada, like where Chad's based, could be America, could be UK if you're interested. And if you think, well, hang on a second, I think I could do with this lead gen calculator. Let us know. It's something that is working well and I'm excited to test it on more and more people. Now, the final thing to let you know about, let me go to another web page because I can't show my face because this camera is proper froze, is that we are coming up to a point of the year where it's obviously holidays and we have got 33 members of the team and we've got people in projects, we've got people in support, we've got people in, in all sorts of the team and there are going to be people that are taking time off for, for holidays to be spend time with their family, friends and loved ones. So as of the 23rd to the 2nd of January, so 23rd of December, so two weeks time to the 2nd of January, we are going to have skeleton staff. Now we're always going to make sure that we've got staff on behind the scenes, team members on behind the scenes, workers working behind the scenes, but we're not going to be at full capacity obviously on the 25th, on the 26th, on New Year's Eve, a New Year's Day we are going to be office closed and then around it will be open obviously not at weekends but it means that we will have like a skeleton staff. So that will mean that tickets may take that little bit extra long to respond to. I mean we are getting very very good at responding to tickets in a really good time time way. I normally show these reports so I haven't shown it yet. So we are average response time is 20 hours now that has gone up since last time but that's fair. We've had one member of the team who had all of week off last week in support so that was down to two people but this has got up to 16 hours. So being decreased to 16 hours got shutting down to 14 hours at some point. So I want to see this getting lower and lower and lower. But I want to let you know now to be proactive and just save it. If you send us a ticket after the 23rd of December, whether your website's in build or if it's in support and we take a little bit longer to get back to us just know that we're having a skeleton staff while we have the holiday season. We're not doing on purpose, we're not doing it to be mean. We've not mischiezers. We're not looking at that ticket going ah, that person messages. Let's not respond to it. It's it just means that we're just got a bit of a skeleton staff. Does that make sense? Everybody who's in the chat just give me a thumbs up if that makes sense. Thank you. Thank you everybody. But with, with all that being said I think that is everything that we wanted to let you know about the the main thing that I'd love for you all and this if you're in the zoom please go and get this because you get free access again they've said that this free this we're going to wipe out that $99 thing. So it's going to be free for you can't last forever but if you're in America or Canada go and check it out. Go book a call with the team. Happy guest official.com Boostly totally free to get set up. Go check it out, have an onboarding, have all that cool stuff. I've got slots available today, slots available on Thursday and all that good stuff. And then the other thing to be aware of in your if you are based in the UK and you would like this private chef's page or on your website for free. Reach out to support booster.co.uk and we'll go ahead and do it now. I always like to finish these town hall meetings with a chop. Opportunity for anybody in here to come on and share their feedback, have a rant, tell me if I'm doing somewhat wrong, tell me if I'm doing somewhat right and, and all that good stuff. So if anybody would like to do so, jump into the chat, type it out, let me know. The next time that we're going to be back is on Thursday. Thursday. Within the group, we've got Liam, who's going to have our weekly Thursday resources call on those Thursday calls. It's a mixture of things, it's CRM related, it's training related or everything else in between. But with that being said, give you five, four, three, two, one. Oh, the one thing that I will do is I want to show you this, Drew, for those who are not yet on 3.5, how will we know when that is planned? To be honest, Drew, you won't. I didn't want to put pressure on the team behind the scenes to, to do this big announcement. I wanted to roll it out slowly because we're working on each PMS at a time and obviously when you work with one PMS to the other, there's different rule sets, different endpoints and all of that things. Then what we've got to do is we've got to take your theme, which is on 3.0, and we have to move it over to this new theme of 3.5 that we're using, then we have to match it all up. So this is why I'm saying is that if it was going to be a massive, if it was going to be a massive shift from 3.0 to 3.5 in terms of looks and style etc, I'd have told you, but the, the, the front end, you are not going to notice. I'll be amazed if anybody can spot it just from the front end. Obviously, without the pricing on here, the major thing isn't going to be for you, to be perfectly honest, the, the major thing is for us behind the scenes, for the private chef you showed. Is there an affiliate option? No. As far as I'm aware, no. But if you start getting bookings coming in from. Why hangry? If you get bookings from private chefs, then you could always reach out to them, but for the main part, no, I feel like for that one, for the Private chef, it's not going to be one where you're going to make money on Happy Guest is where you'll make money on Private Chef is where you'll get the guest experience will just go through the roof as in a guest will go save will book. I mean I'm no, I can't say that I nearly spoilt the surprise. Then a guest will book a surprise whatever for a member of their family and then, and then they'll book a Private Chef on the back of it and it'll be wow, we did this at here. Boom boom boom. Five star reviews. More than the actual monitorial thing that I know where you're getting at. I was talking about 3.5. So the major thing is going to be for us behind the scenes because I've mentioned this at a couple town hall meetings and at these town hall meetings I've I've mentioned about the fact that when there is a a fix in the back end so let's just say we have to fix a load of Host Away sites, right? We can't just do one fix that updates all. We have to go into every individual site and update all of those individual ones. So for us and our team it takes hours. But what we're going to be able to achieve with 3.5 is that when we do a fix on Host away let's just say image sync is an issue or let's just save as an endpoint broken that connects A to B. We we can go and do the update in the back end and it will update everybody just like an app Update or a WordPress update. Can you at least give me a sense of how much more time remain if we upgrade are the PMS is being prioritized based on number of so our my deadline is the end of January. No, we don't, we don't. We don't based anybody on the on the how many sites they are or, or how nice they treat me. We are just literally working on one one PMS at a time. There's no rhyme or or reason. Our team are in a flow. I trust my team behind the scenes 100%. This is the route that they're working and they just send me daily and weekly updates on it. Like I said, we've just completed hostfully for the most part. There's a couple of bugs that we're ironing out. We're on to Smooboo, Logify, Ownerz and they're really ramping through it. I put the end of January because ideally it would have been end of December but we got caught with Thanksgiving. We are definitely going to get caught with Christmas and New Year. So it'll just set us back a few weeks. I like to under promise and over deliver if it comes to it's like the middle of January and we're done. Phenomenal because as soon as we get finished with 3.5 then we get working on 4.0 and 4.0 is, is, is going to be. It's going to be epic. And again the most important thing for everybody to realize who is part of Boostly. I am not going to come back and ask you for any more money. This is not a paid upgrade. You don't have to pay to go from 3.0 to 3.5 to 4.0. It is all part of your monthly fee. We did our price rise last year back in May. Now it's a case of cracking on and getting it done. Makes sense. Knowing you're not targeting end of targeting end of January is helpful. Hopefully hope isn't too difficult. I want to get rid of listening page. That's why I was asking. I want to get rid of the brilliant. So yeah, this is the reason why we've done this isn't on a whim. Isn't. Isn't the reason why we've got rid of the pricing on the listing page isn't me just doing it on a whim. We've done a lot of research on this. We've listened to your feedback and we've combined it with the other studies that we've shown with like the booking process and et cetera and we've looked at other outsources from third parties. So this is why we're doing this and this is why I believe that being with Boostly gives you that upper hand because we're here doing the work for you. Yes, you could go and find somebody on Fiverr. Yes, you could go with a free PMS site. Yes, you can go with these sites that are built on third party things that aren't WordPress. But at the end of the day we know what works, we know what's best and we're consistently always upgrading it and we do that for you. So I hope that you save it and appreciate that. But with that being said and all being said. Oh, the other cool thing, I don't know if anybody's realized this but if you were to go onto your sites, you've got this ability here for a live chat tool that syncs straight into your Boostly CRM which is, which is lovely. Again, this is not AI based. Obviously Host Buddy and all those other cool AI messengers have got them all AI related. This is manual, but it syncs straight into your CRM, which is also nice. And that is part of Boostly. Okay, with that being said, we've been going for 40 minutes. I really do appreciate everybody for joining me live. Let's see one more time if this camera is going to work or not. No, it's stuck. It really is truly stuck. So with that being said, I'm going to let this freeze frame say goodbye. Thank you very much, everybody. We'll be back next week for the final town hall of 2024. Thank you so much for joining me. And hopefully by then someone will get me an early Christmas present and get this camera sorted. Thank you everybody.