Get paid for your pad with Jasper Ribbers

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The book get paid for your pad. Well, today I've got the author of the book, one of the best selling books about Airbnb. On the Boostly podcast we've got Jasper Rivers who is all the way speaking to me from Barcelona in Spain. He's originally from Amsterdam. He was originally in the day trade. Realized after doing it for six years that he didn't want to do it anymore and he stayed, started to rent out his property, put it on Airbnb. Before Airbnb got massive and popular and started to travel around the world, he set up a travel blog called the Traveling Dutchman. That's where he got the inspiration for writing his book. And then from there he grew his portfolio business. He met his business partner online and now they've got a very successful group coaching program and mastermind business. And you know, I really wanted to get him on the show just to sort of pick his brains. This is an interview that I wanted to do for a while. Jasper has been a massive influence on me with his podcast. I really want want you just to all check him out and go check out get paid for your pad.com and just sort of get into his world because he's a, he's a very clever guy. Please do go check out Hostfully. Hostfully are the sponsors of this podcast. Go to hostfully.com everybody can get one free digital guidebook that you can wow your future guests with. And when you are ready, if you want to upgrade, put Boostly 2M in the promo code and you get two months for free. In the meantime, what I would love for you to do in the comments right now before we we get started with this interview is tell us what you're going to be doing right now to be proactive in getting guess what new marketing tactics that you're going to do. Whether it's email, Google Social media, any of those, let us know in the comments and then sit back, relax and enjoy this conversation with Jasper Rivers from Get paid for your Pad.

My name is Jasper Rivers. Started on in 2012, Airbnb hosting back in Amsterdam. And back in the day there was not a lot of information about Airbnb, so I kind of had to figure everything out by myself. And so I came up with the idea of writing a book about it, get paid for your Pad that turned into a podcast. Yeah, launched that 2014. So we're six years in now with the podcast. 330 episodes deep. I'm still, I'm still excited to be the host of the podcast, but Also to be on other people's podcasts such as yours. So thank you for the invite.

So let's get, let's just delve back a little bit. How so? Before Airbnb and for all those things, I was listening to a podcast in the research for this with an interview that you did, and you were talking about life before short stay accommodation. So how do you go from working with numbers and stocks to then going into short stay accommodation? What's the sort of connection? How did you sort of end up going down that route?

It was out of necessity. I mean, I worked for six years in finance. I was trading first in Amsterdam and then Chicago in the US Went through the financial crisis, which actually turned out to be quite good for our company because we were day traders. So the volatility did as well. But after that, you know, I just, I just realized I didn't want to sit in an office the rest of my life and just looking at these flat screens. I had eight flat screens. Like, they're big, you know what I mean? And every single flat screen is full of numbers. So all I did all day was just looking at all these numbers. And I am a nerd, so I do like numbers. But after six years, I was just like, you know, I need to do something different with my life. I want to travel, I want to see the world. I want to just see what the world is like and get to know different cultures and be in different countries, different continents and everything. So I decided one day to tell my boss that I was going to quit. That also meant that I wasn't getting paid anymore, which I did have some savings. But my biggest asset was my apartment in Amsterdam, which at the time I was renting it out long term. But I didn't like that because I wanted to be able to stay in my own place when I was back in Amsterdam. Plus, it's, it's really when you have a long term renter and I had several, it's. You're kind of. You kind of lose control over your property in a way, at least in Holland, because it's very hard to get people out if you ever want control back over your home. Yeah, I, I bumped into Airbnb, I think it was back in 2011. I stayed at an Airbnb as a guest and I thought, hey, what if I put my place on Airbnb? At the time, nobody knew about this, only my. I was kind of like in the travel, travel blogging scene at the time. I was writing about my travels. And so you know, I knew a few of my blogger friends that knew about Airbnb, but that was about it. I had no idea what. What would come out of it, but I thought, you know, I just put my apartment in Airbnb and, and see what happens. And, you know, if it wasn't for Airbnb, I might have had to go back to a trading job or something. But with Airbnb, it's. I just started just cashing in the traveling.

Dutchman, explain to us a little bit more about that.

That was also born out of, kind of out of necessity as well. What happened was, you know, when I started traveling 2010, we didn't have WhatsApp and you couldn't call each other for free and stuff like that. Technology wasn't as advanced, and so people were still communicating over email a lot with, you know, as a way to keep in touch. And I was just getting tired of having to write back to everybody. So one day I was like, you know what? I just start a blog, and then every week I'll write a story, put some pictures in there, and I tell everybody, you guys, just go to my blog, read my story, because I'm going to go surfing, I'm gonna go lie on the beach, I'm gonna drink caipirinhas, but I don't want to spend two hours a day writing emails.

Would you say that you've always been. When it comes to social media, is this something that you've learned from the days when you were blogging and writing about your travels and adventures and sort of those sort of skills that you've learned then, they helped with everything that you do now as far as your Airbnb. And so basically what I'm getting at is the skills, obviously you picked up from, you know, starting to write and keep everybody informed. Instead of writing two hours of emails, you put into that, you've got, you know, you've got the rental thing going on and everything else? Those sort of skills that you've learned that have helped you today, it did.

Not come naturally to me. Not at all. My brain works really well for solving mathematical problems, analyzing things. You know, I studied econometrics. This is a combination of economics, statistics, and mathematics. That kind of stuff makes sense to me, but not. What does not make sense to me is, and I'm learning a lot from just watching you not make sense to me is that, you know, if you, if you want a lot of likes on your video or something, like, you know, you tell people, hey, like the video, that, like, my brain doesn't get that. My brain thinks, like, no, people want to like the video. They'll do it. You know what I mean? If they don't like it, they won't like it. But you know what I'm saying? So it's a different. It's a totally like writing and social media. That stuff definitely did not come naturally to me at all.

When did that sort of take up a notch? So when did you go from just the one property sort of on Airbnb? When did you decide that, right, I'm going to go all in on this. And what was the sort of the decision behind it?

What I really went all in with was not so much the property side, right? Like, so I had my one apartment in Amsterdam, and eventually I, you know, now I have three properties and I manage a small boutique hotel and I help some other people, you know, manage their listings and stuff. But I never had the ambition to grow like, a big portfolio of management properties or anything like that. What I was, I was passionate about the hosting, you know, about the connection with the people. I love to travel, I love different cultures, so I'm always interested in meeting people from different countries. But what I became really passionate about was the education. Right. So, you know, after I wrote the book and started a podcast and stuff, I started realizing that I was able to really help people and empower them to make big changes in their lives.

And you've mentioned the book a few times. What is the book called and why did you want to write a book? You know, writing a book is a mammoth task. What was the thinking behind it? What is it called and where can people get it?

When I. When I started writing my travel. Travel blog. Well, let me tell you the book first. So the book is called get paid for your pad, right? And it's on Amazon. You know, I originally wrote a travel book after I started writing on my travel blog. I thought it'd be really useful information for people to know how. How to travel the world, which was what I was doing. And so I wrote a book. I hired a cartoonist, I hired an editor. I spen quite a bit of money on it, actually. And I was. I had high expectations. I was quite kind of naive, but. But yeah, it was called 10 Small Steps, One Giant Leap. And it was, it was 10 chapters on. They were all travel tips, you know, like, basically meant for people that wanted to do the same thing that I was doing. Travel the world. The day I wanted to upload it to Amazon, Amazon actually. They actually, like, a couple days later they got back to me and they said that I couldn't sell it on Amazon because it was too generic. And I spent six months and probably. I probably spent like $3,000 or something on that book, you know, other than my time, which at the time, I had some savings for my. For my finance career. So, you know, I was fairly comfortable with my savings. But still, that was a massive blow. And up to until this day, it's still in Smashwords. I don't know if you heard of Smash Words. No, I just put it up there for free. But anyway, you know what it did, what it taught me was that I enjoyed writing. You know, when I started with Airbnb, like I said, there was not a lot of information right now. I mean, there's. There's so much information, right? I was. I was eager for revenge on Amazon for not accepting my book. So I was like, you know, I learned a really good lesson. And so I'm still thankful for actually them refusing my book because it taught me that if you want to write something or if you want to sell something, it always have to. It has to be a niche product or you have to have a reputation, right? You have to have a following.

So we're around about 2015 in your life. And when did you meet Eric? So Eric was on the podcast a couple of episodes back. When did you first meet him? And then when did you first start you two working together? And. And obviously you've got the Facebook group, which is the Airbnb profit club, which is a Facebook group that everybody can go join. So where did you first meet and when did you start working together?

So we actually started working together before we met. So Eric used to do a summit, which was called the Airbnb Mastery Summit, and we might do one this year, actually, but we'll just drop the word Airbnb. I spoke on this summit and we started talking, and I just recognized that him and I had a very complementary skills. He's very good at thinking high level. He's very good at being organized and finding a structure or a system around things where I'm kind of the opposite. I just want to do stuff and create stuff. I don't really want to think about a system on how to do it. But, yeah, we just both kind of realized we had complementary skills. But also. But the one. That one thing that we had in common, I think, was our mindset. We're both very into the same stuff, like Tony Robbins, you know, self improvement, growing as a person, expanding your mindset, improving your mindset. So we're both, like, really, like, growth oriented.

So obviously, like I say, you've been doing this for a while. The podcast has been around for a long time. You've had the book out since 2014, and you've seen people that you've helped and coached go from one property to all these 50 properties and there'll be people watching, whether it's live or people tuning in on the replay. And they might be like, right at the very start. And what I would love to hear from you, and I think this is a real good advice to pass to everybody, is when you see people getting started in short term, renting short term accommodation, what is the one main mistake that you have seen new hosts make when they get started?

I think they don't realize what it entails. What a lot of people do is they just create a listing, they put some pictures up, they take them with their smartphone, put some pictures up, a couple paragraphs of a description, and then they sit back and then they are like, why am I not getting bookings?

What would be one of the first comeback questions that you would normally give back to your students to people that are part of your program?

You know, look at the. Look at the customer journey on Airbnb or whatever platform you're on. You got to understand the customer journey. I always say, if you haven't been an Airbnb guest yet, if you haven't stayed at an Airbnb, that's the first thing you got to do, because you got to understand your customer, right? And the best way to understand your customer is to be the customer. You know, you got to understand, like, why? What do people look at when they look at a listing? Right? So start with yourself. What do you look at when you look at a listing? Right?

You've obviously been down in Colombia, you were in San Diego. You're now back in Spain where you live. So you've been doing a lot of traveling when a lot of the world has been on lockdown. Can you just sort of describe that journey from San Diego to Holland and then to Spain? Because, you know, I was following on Instagram, it looked pretty crazy. It looked like from a movie set. Can you just sort of describe to everybody what international travel is like in the midst of it?

I mean, my year has been crazy in terms of traveling because I celebrated New Year in the French Alps skiing with my family. Then I flew to Barcelona. Then one of my buddies, his mom died, unfortunately, and I. I ended up going to Dallas to support him. So I was in Dallas and then I had Legends event in Cartagena in Colombia. So then I went to Colombia. I stayed at my own place. I have an apartment in Colombia. Stayed there for about a week. And then, yeah, I came to San Diego to work with Eric on our courses and our groups and everything seemed perfect. But, yeah, everything fell apart. I stayed in San Diego until early April. The immigration officer, he didn't renew my stamp when I flew into San Diego, which meant that when I first entered the US Going to Dallas to see my friend, that was beginning of January. So that meant, you know, you get three months, right? As a non American, you get three months. But because I don't know, I don't know exactly why, but the immigration officer, when I, when I came to San Diego, he just looked at my passport. He said, oh, you already got a stamp from January, you know, you don't need a new stamp. So I was like, well, that means I'm not going to be able to stay for very long then. So I had to leave because, you know, you don't want to overstay in the U.S. they really, they give you a lot of trouble. So I had to get away. My flight was canceled, but I contacted KLM and they had a. That's the airline that I flew with. They had a. Another flight for me. So I had the weirdest journey in my life. I took a train from San Diego to Los Angeles wearing one of those, one of those mouthpieces, you call them face masks. Hardly anybody on the train, no one on the street. Los Angeles took a taxi to a hotel, the Hyatt Airport Hotel. No one. No traffic. No traffic in la. I've never seen that before. The hotel was completely empty. I was surprised I could still get a room there. Literally, when you're half a mile away, it could still take an hour because it's so jammed up. Usually like t say, security check, nobody there. And then at the gate there's hardly anybody. They're handing out face masks. I had to wear a face mask on the plane the entire time, which was. Became really annoying after a couple hours. Yeah, yeah, plane was almost empty. I mean, actually, I mean, to be honest with you, it was a quite a relaxing flight, you know, because I had the whole, the whole, the whole aisle to myself, you know, the. What you call it, the free seats to myself. But yeah, we had a very strange experience.

And then you got into Holland there and now down, back in, back in Spain.

So Barcelona. Yeah.

So the reason why I'm asking is that, you know, we're recording this on the 29th of April and you'd like to think over the course of the coming weeks, you know that countries like Spain and France and Holland and England, you know, wherever you are watching this in the world, they will start to relax their current lockdown policies. And from, from your experiences, from just, you know, witnessing what a flight was like, say in February or January to what March was like, you know, how do you envision international travel? How do you think that will, that will come back and when do you think that will come back on the back of this coronavirus?

That's a really interesting question. I see two opinions on this. There's one camp that says there's going to be a lot of pent up demand and people are going to want to travel. As soon as it's possible to travel again, people are going to ju jump on those planes and they're gonna go on all those trips that they couldn't go on. And then there's another, another camp that says people aren't gonna do that because people are still, even though the restrictions are gonna ease, people are gonna still be worried about the virus and about, you know, about just being in crowded spaces and stuff like that. My guess is probably number two, I think people, I think this whole crisis has, has, it's gonna have a long, a long term impact on the human psyche. I think people are going to avoid crowded spaces for a while. I don't expect that as soon as you are allowed to travel that everyone's just instantly going to jump on a plane. I think it's going to take a while.

So it's going to be the host watching. And we're really. Now before we wrap up and we're going to the quick fire questions, the host that I want to talk to for this last segment of those hosts around the world that rely on people flying in to their country or to their city or to their town. So say that there's a host and it's like a scenario based question. I guess there's a host who relies on 70% of their guests are international people flying in. What advice would you give to that person on what they should be looking to do to sort of fill their rental or fill their guest house or fill their hotel? What should they be looking to do? Should be looking to pivot or should they be looking at doing other little things?

I think right now you have to be very opportunistic. I mean I am in 100% in that category that you described. I've got I own three places, one in Colombia, one in Thailand, one in the Philippines, and I run a small boutique hotel in the, on the Red Sea in Egypt. So two out of four are closed down because they're not allowed to be open place in Colombia. Colombia, the country shut down. I mainly cater to Americans there. And then, you know, Thailand is obviously also a very touristic country. So what I personally do is, you know, I look at the old opportunities that are out there. Like right now, you got to be open to any way that you can monetize your space. You got to jump on it. You're no longer catering to international vacationers, Right? You have to cater to anybody who's looking, anybody who's looking for a space to use, whether it's for a staycation, like you mentioned, if you care and time themselves.

We can't just be lazy anymore. We can't just put our property on one platform and just think, right, they're going to bring me all the bookings. You're going to have to do things that you're not, not used to. You're going to have to, you know, go on to Facebook, you're going to have to utilize other marketing channels, you know, and if you want to, you know, get started straight away, visit. There's a free guide on Boostly. Everybody knows where it is, it's booster.co.uk, put in your email and you get that guide that shows you what you need to be doing, but you need to be doing things that you're not used to before. And I think the people that are in my world that I can see in the comments in this live video, the Georginas of the world, because she's right down there. She's pivoted and has brought in income in a way that she never thought before with takeaways and offering her breakfast and afternoon teas and pancakes out in a takeaway style where she's based is fantastic. Doing things that you never thought that you needed to be done. And the more people like Georgina, then there's going to be more people that are going to not only just survive this time, but thrive on the rear end. Buddy, I appreciate you doing that. But before we're going to let you go, we have got some quick fire questions. First question, you could be on lockdown or in isolation with any celebrity or popular famous figure, who would that be?

I mean, I was gonna, I was gonna say Steve Jobs. Yeah, I'm just so fascinated by him and, you know, I've listened to all of his speeches there's one that's really, really good. 2008, Stanford. For anybody who's watching or listening, just go on YouTube and look for Steve Jobs. 2008 or 9 Stanford commencement speech.

Okay, so if there's been that one movie or that TV series that's been on your to watch list on Netflix or Sky, or whether you just download it on your computer and you've just been waiting to watch it, and obviously during lockdown you've had that chance to watch it. Is there any recommendations for anybody of someone to watch maybe on Netflix TV series or movies, something that they should be watching?

You know, for me, I like to watch series when all, all the, the seasons are out. So I've been, I've been holding up on Game of Thrones for years. Yeah. But I started watching it a while back, but I got stuck in season like three or four or something. Well, I don't know. For some reason it didn't engage me enough. One of my favorite series right now is Casa de Papel, which I think in English. They brought it out as a money heist, dude. I'm a Tiger King fan, dude. I watched it in San Diego, like.

One after the other six or six.

Weeks ago or something, or eight weeks ago. I didn't know it was going to be so popular, but I watched it right when it came out, when it wasn't on the. In the top 10 and everything yet. Yeah, I remember like Eric would, would walk in the living room and I'd always be a little embarrassed, you know what I mean? Because I'm like, I just felt like I was a bit of a weirdo for watching it. Yeah.

The whole world caught on.

Yeah. And then I, I was so happy to see like, oh, the whole world's watching this thing.

On the course of the past year, so past 12 months, what has been your favorite purchase under £100 or €100?

I love drinking wine.

Right. I can tell you've been having sips as we go.

That's one of the reasons I moved to Spain. Yeah. You know this, the wine is incredible here and it's every day when I go to the supermarket, it blows my mind that my favorite wine, which is an amazing wine from its local wine here. It costs €2 for a bottle. I just kind of.

Yeah, no, I totally relate. So I, you know, live in Spain, live in Darien, Javier, and you go to the supermarket and you can get some pretty good wine for like, you say less than a couple of euros. So I like that. Do is, Is There a particular make? Is there a particular, you know, say it's a local wine. Have you got the, you got any, any names to hand, or is it just the one that you see in the store?

I like the. I like the Verdejos. Yeah, yeah, those are my favorite. The whites. The white Fedejos. Yeah.

Obviously, apart from your own and apart from the Boosty podcast, your favorite podcast, is there one recommendation, one that you like to tune into? Or it could be an audiobook or just something that you like to put on, whether you're walking or wherever. Traveling podcast that you like to tune into?

Yeah, absolutely. So I listen to one podcast every single episode, immediately after it comes out. And it's. I guess it's slightly. It's on economics, essentially. It's. There's a guy called Peter Schiff, I don't know. Have you heard of him?

No.

So he's essentially an economist. His dad wrote, I think, one of two books that have ever been banned in the US he wrote a book called the biggest Con. It basically talks about how the US Government kind of went against the Constitution in the way that they started taxing its citizens. So that's his father. But this guy has a very outspoken and a very, you know, his opinion on things. It's very, it's very direct, it's very blunt, but it's. I always like to listen to people who don't beat around the bush who are like unfiltered.

Yeah.

And just give you their raw opinion, regardless of what the response is going to be from other people.

What would be your number one advice to anybody listening to help them increase their direct bookings? This is obviously a direct booking podcast. A direct booking show boost is all about direct booking bookings. What would be your number one little bit of advice to help?

Well, I'll go with, with the medium that has brought my. Myself a lot of direct bookings for our boutique hotel in Egypt. We, we have a kite. It's a kite. Surfing. Surfing school slash hotel. Right. So we get a lot of leads through Instagram because sky surfers, they're all on Instagram. Right. So my tip is. And you know, you gave this tip to my group when you were doing your training in our group, you got to think about your avatar. Right. So for me, it's Instagram.

Jasper, buddy, really, really appreciate you doing this. The book is obviously get paid for your pad. You can get it on Amazon. The podcast is called get paid for your pad. If anybody wants to reach out, find out a little bit more about the work that you're doing, the Facebook groups is where's the best place to go? Is it a website? Instagram? Where do you want people to go and check out?

Just go to get paid for your pad.com youm can sign up for my newsletter. We have all sorts of goodies and, you know, emails, tips and all kind of all that kind of stuff.

Really, really appreciate everybody. Can you just please give, give Jasper a massive round of applause. All right, so we are done with this episode. I just want to say thank you to everybody that's tuned in on the live, everybody that is watching back on the replay. What I would love for you to do is make sure that when you are listening and tuning in, make notes, try and figure out what you're going to do and then try and implement it into your business. Whether you're going to check out Instagram a little bit more, maybe you're just going to go and do that one thing that you didn't think you were going to do. You're going to have to do something a little bit differently than before when it comes to market and getting your property seen. But please let us know what you're going to implement. Please leave a little link in the comments, little, little comment, just what you're gonna do, what you've learned, your feedback and your takeaway from it. We do appreciate it. And like we always say, go and check out more the podcast booster.co.uk podcast this is. We've got 30 other episodes in this season alone and this is only season eight. We've got 765-4321. We've got loads of other ones to catch up on and go and get on itunes, Spotify, you can find them all there. But for now, thank you so much. Like I say, for all of this amazing free content, all we ask you to do is one thing and is that share this share this video into a group, a Facebook group that you are a part of on your personal wall on your business page. Tell all the hospitality owners from around the world the help that we're trying to give to get everybody Kickstart. From here on in, it's Project Kickstart and I'm going to need your help to spread the word until the next time, I'm going to leave you with Terence.