The Smart & Easy PMS: Insights from CEO Shaun Shirazian

We are moving from a world of software as a service to a world of service as a software. The software is going to do the work for you. The competition is fierce. And so then the key question is, how do you stand apart?

He is the CEO of a company you've probably heard about, Lodgify. Sean Shirazian.

We have over 25,000 customers all around the world. Independent hosts, small scale property managers. So we go from this system of record to the system of action. So you, you can look to Lodify in the future to be.

Welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches podcast. I'm really excited to be sitting here virtually with Sean Shirazian. He is the CEO of a company you've undoubtedly heard about, Lodify. They're one of the industry's leading property management software platforms, helping tons and tons of owners and businesses run their short term rentals. Sean, I'm really excited to have you on the show today. We're going to dive into some details. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Tim. Appreciate it.

Yeah, yeah, it's always a pleasure to talk with the CEOs, you know, the founders, the people kind of driving the ships of some of the industry's largest providers in the technology space. And let's see, you have a background in technology. You want to tell us just a little bit of how you became the CEO of lodgefi.

Yeah, absolutely. I joined earlier this year as CEO and before that my career has been in production at a number of tech companies. So before Lodify, I was Chief Product officer at pipedrive CRM Software for those familiar. And then before that was at Intuit, the financial software company for a number of years in the US and in Brazil and in Europe, which was an incredible experience in both of those cases to learn from companies that are incredibly customer obsessed, but also create software that is for the small guys, the underdogs in the spaces.

Right.

You know, Intuit was all about creating software for those that were going out on their own, that wanted to be their own boss and be their own small business owner to do their taxes on their own. And they it created incredibly easy to use software that is the leader in those categories. And same thing with Pipedrive. You know, Pipedrive came out when Salesforce and HubSpot were the dominant CRM players, but no one was really focused on how do we create a CRM that a sales team is actually going to use. And so pipedrive was just easy to use, you know, just the right amount of features that you need for your use case, not anything more than that that completely disrupted the CRM space. And so I have always been attracted to working at companies that have a product that's disrupting the space and in particular serving an end of the market that is underserved and overlooked. The underdogs, right? We all love a good underdog story. The David versus Goliath. And that's something that has always attracted me to the companies and the products I work on. And so when the opportunity at Legify came about, this was definitely a core part of their DNA and their origin story. The company has been exclusively focused on the long tail end of the short term rental market. Again, serving the needs of the independent hosts and the small scale property managers that have been overserved and underlooked by software that's been around historically. And Lodify was really there to serve their needs and to ultimately help them become independent. And independent in the sense of financial independence, independent in the sense of independence from your time so you're less time managing the day to day and independence in the, in the sense of location. Right. You're, you're, you know, we were just chatting. You're, you're recording this from Brazil, got properties, you know, around the world, which is incredible, you know, and it's because of software and because of the setup that you set up that's probably allowed you to do that. Right. And so we, we try to do the same thing with Lodfi to help our customers with that. And in my early days when I was living in San Diego, I was an Airbnb host in the early days of Airbnb and had an incredible experience doing that and meeting strangers. I never thought I would meet and love that. But now kind of fast forward being on this side of it, seeing the software that we've got at Lodify, I definitely could have benefited from using that when I was a host. And so it was that combination of, you know, working on products and working for companies that are serving the underserved and the, and the mission of Lodify, really helping these hosts and small scale property managers become independent that drew me, drew me to this opportunity. Yeah.

Awesome. Awesome. There's just so much to do in the short term rental space and if we're not using software that helps facilitate all that, like, we're really at a disadvantage. And so I know you guys have just tons and tons of features and things that LOD helps short term rental operators with, but curious, what, what does your user base look like right now, Sean? I Mean, how many properties are, are you guys serving? What's the average user kind of look like?

Yeah, sure. You know, one, one of the things as I, as I started earlier this year, one of the things that I'm asking a lot of external folks I meet with, you know, like yourself and other folks that have been in the industry is, you know, what, what do you know about Lodify and what, what is what usually come comes to mind. And what's interesting, one of the takeaways that I've, I've had this year speaking to folks is a lot of people don't know about Lodify, you know, that aren't really ingrained in the industry. Usually they think of a few other brand names in our, in our category that come up and Lodify is usually further down the list and we kind of like fly under the radar. And when I start to share some of the stats on the company, people are like shocked. They're like, whoa, you're like one of the top three in the space when you speak about the customer base that you're serving. And definitely look, this is a reflection of, we've been hard at work for a number of years. The founders have done an incredible job with the company getting us to this point. One of the things that we want to do differently going forward is to get our name out there much, much more than have in the past because we're proud of what we're building, what we have built and what we're building going forward as well. And we want this, the industry to know about that. And so some of the stats, to answer your question, we have over 25,000 customers all around the world. And you know what's really unique about us is that although we are born and raised in Barcelona, I'm taking this call here from Barcelona. We've got an incredibly internationally diverse customer base from all around the world. You know, whether it be in North America, South America, Europe or even in Southeast Asia. So incredibly diverse from a geographic footprint standpoint. And then when we look at the customer segments that we serve, the primarily two big segments that we serve, they're the independent hosts that really have a handful of properties, usually less than 3. And this is our primary segment. And then the second segment we serve are the small scale property managers that have less than 15. Look, they're, they're looking to grow, but really kind of stay in that small scale range because they want to maintain their independence. Now look, we've got customers that have many more properties than that and, and don't fit the mold and so there. But these are, I would say the, the two primary segments that we've got.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, 25, 000 users is an awful lot. And I think one of the exciting things about the industry and as you mentioned is that doesn't matter where the properties are. You know, you guys were founded in Barcelona, but you could have a property in Indonesia or you could have a property in California and you still have all of the operation side of running a short term rental, which we found, you know, from our end working with lots of owners as well. It's pretty much the same, you know, I mean you've got to make sure that you have a really good guest experience. Yeah, maybe the, the language changes or the market changes, but there's lots of data now to help us with all that. So streamlining operations is essential really to success with a short term rental these days. Tell us a little bit more about Lodify and how you guys help owners or investors or managers streamline their operations.

Yep, absolutely. So the way we think about everything we do is customer backed and we think about ultimately there are three primary areas of customer benefit and value that we're here to provide. And it ties to that point about independence. Right. And then three flavors of independence. So ultimately the financial independence. So what are we doing to help our customers become more financially independent? And that breaks out into a few areas. Number one is their occupancy rate. Right. How can we help you increase your occupancy rate? One of the primary ways that we do that obviously is to help get you cross listed across as many OTAs, predominant OTAs as possible in addition to your own direct booking website and channel as well. The other component of financial independence in addition to the occupancy rate is when it comes to price and revenue. So how can we help you maximize, you know, the nightly rate that you're getting for, for your property? And we do this through a combination of our own pricing tool that we provide from Lodipy. But then also we've got a marketplace where you can connect to whatever pricing tool that you have the best, you know, experience with. You can do that and connect that with, with logify. So that's what we do when it comes to helping you with a few examples when it comes to financial independence, when it comes to operations. This really fits into the two other flavors of independence which is around, you know, independence of your time and then independence of location and so on. The time piece of it. Look, there's the Top areas. We know that where our customers are spending the most amount of time when it comes to managing the operations, the number one offender is the guest communications. Right. The back and forth guest communications that happen. This is a clear one where we're automating and have AI all over helping our customers streamline, save a lot of time. The other one is when it comes to task management. So we've got a great capability around task management that helps you automate, whether that is with you and your co host, whether that's with you and your partner, whether that is with you and external teams that are helping support your property, whether it's a team of maintenance providers or a team of cleaners as well. And then location wise and independence on location. One of the things that customers love about Lodify is the mobile app. And you know, we get really high marks on our mobile app from, you know, industry evaluators out there and this gives you a lot of the same capability and functionality that's in the web app. So when it comes to streamlining operations and being independent from location, be in Brazil and manage a property in Sacramento, like our customers are doing this all the time via our mobile app and that helps them quite a bit.

Yeah, pretty much everything is going mobile these days, isn't it? I mean people are making the reservations on the mobile platforms versus the desktop. So that's really important. We, we've used multiple different PMS programs over the years and I know none of them are perfect. You know what I mean? There's just so many pieces to tackle. But I'm curious, you know, and some, you know, some programs maybe have a little slight edge on another one in a certain area, but then, you know, you guys have an edge on, on the other company in a certain area. I'm curious, kind of what do you, what do you think's going to keep Logify competitive like three years from now? Or a property management software platform like your guys is what, where are you, where are you thinking that you'll need to be to, to continue to lead the market as one, as one of the industry's top providers?

Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. Basically three things that differentiate us today that are going to be the, the key things for us going forward as well. Number one is that for the last 13 years we've been exclusively focused on a specific customer group within the short term rental market, as I shared before, and we're going to continue to be exclusively focused on that end of the market going forward Now Why does this give us an advantage versus others that are out there? Because we can obsess about our narrow set of customer use cases. It increases our ability to serve those narrow use cases incredibly well. We're not trying to be something for everybody in the market, from a independent host to a large scale property manager. We can't do either of those things very well, but we can really focus on the segments I mentioned and absolutely knock it out of the park for that. So we're going to continue to obsess about a narrow set of customer segment profiles. That's number one. The second one is around ease of use. You know, we track customer feedback and sentiment in a number of ways. The number one thing that customers love about Lodify, whether they've used PMS before or they have or they haven't, is our ease of use. This is incredibly important. It's an easy thing to say. It's a simple set of words to say. It's really, really hard to execute and deliver on ease of use. And I know from my experience at intuit, working at QuickBooks and TurboTax and Pipedrive, it is difficult, but once you have it, it's incredibly special. And the origin story of Logify and where the name came from was the founders were inspired by Shopify and what Shopify did to what you can do to create your own website. And they said, we want to be the Shopify of lodging, hence Lodgify. And that, like part of our DNA, has been there since day one around simplicity, ease of use and serving the needs again of those that want to do it on their own. And then the last piece that is a core part of our differentiation and will be going forward is the level of service and support that we offer our customers. This is whether it's an engagement with our sales team, whether it's an engagement with our onboarding team if you need it, or an engagement with our support team. We fully recognize that we're going to continue to make the product as easy as possible, but there are cases when you're going to want that extra, like, support or that safety net of like, hey, am I doing this right? Or hey, I like to get input or advice on this particular area of my direct booking website and how I can maximize SEO on that. You've got a team of experts here at Lodify that you can call on or you can reach out to and get that level of service and support which customers love about Logify. So these three things are what differentiate us today and we'll continue going forward.

That's awesome. And that's such a great point about usability. I mean, you can have the most advanced, sophisticated platform in the world, but if people only know how to use 10% of it, it doesn't really help you a whole lot. And we see this all the time working with a lot of different owners. It's like a lot of times they'll be using software maybe that we use ourselves or that we've used in the past, and they're like, oh, I wish it could do this. And you're like, oh, it actually can do that.

You know, such an important piece.

I'm curious, you know, you guys have access to a lot of data with so many users. Do you have any interesting insights you could share about your, your users? You know, you know, maybe we, I met with some of the other PMS founders and CEOs recently and one of them just shared the fact that you guys can see what your users are connected to through your, your marketplace. Anything you can share there that you found on, on the back end about your users.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a ton of insight that we get from, from that, but then also just qualitatively speaking to customers and learning what's going on, I think one of the, definitely the kind of main takeaways from this past year of insights is that for a lot of our customers that are in urban areas, the competition is fierce, right? When it comes to the number of short term rentals that are in their neighborhood or in their city, and especially when you've got regulation that has heated up in some of their locations. When you have the combination of those two, it makes for competition, you know, making it much harder to get the occupancy rate that you were achieving before. And so then the key question is, how do you stand apart, right? In a competitive short term rental market that you're in, how do you stand apart? And there ultimately, where we are looking to support our customers and where we support our customers today is through a combination of things. Number one is how are you going to differentiate yourself and your property in this market? You know, are you wanting to be a premium stay? Are you not? Are you looking to be a discount stay? How do you think about, given the amenities that you have, given the property that you got, the work that you've put into it, the investment you put into it, where you want to stand, are you going to be a premium brand or not? And it's okay either way, right? There's no right or Wrong. But you need to be intentional about it because then ultimately from there everything flows. Your pricing decisions flow from there. The type of guest experience that you want to provide flows from there. And so if you are, have made the conscious choice where it's like, hey, you know what, I'm going to be a discount play. Nothing against like the Walmarts of the world, but I'm a Walmart, right? I'm a discount play. You know, when you come in here it's going to be a like no frills, you got a bed, you've got everything you need, it's going to be in good condition, but you're going to get the best price. And that's my conscious decision. I'm going to make a choice of on and my pricing is going to reflect that and then everything from there is going to reflect that as well. And so this is the key thing. And so our customers are looking at, you know, their guest reviews to provide insights on where they can improve relative to the strategy that they've, they've lined up on this. They're looking at their pricing to understand when they're above and below market, to calibrate that versus this decision that they're making on premium versus discount play. So these are a few areas that we're seeing is just competition, especially in the urban areas intensifying and so the need to differentiate is even, even more important.

Yeah, great points, great points. And we've, we've definitely seen that as well. I, I actually started my short term rental journey in a lot of urban areas and some of them have become very, very competitive for sure. And. Well, one of the things that lets you stand out, as you said, is really understanding your guests, knowing who you're marketing just as you guys do with Logify. You know exactly who your, your user, your, your ideal customer is. The guest experience is crucial and we see just the massive difference in revenue potential between a property that's operating well and has good reviews and one that doesn't. I mean it really is, it's just, it's just crazy sometimes. You mentioned AI and we love AI, you know, for so many reasons, but one is because it can make the guest experience a lot better. Can you tell us a little bit more about AI and how you guys at Logifier are incorporating that?

Yeah, absolutely. We, we've got AI throughout the end to end customer experience right now. You know, one example of AI that's there today is when you sign up for Lodify, we offer you the ability to speak to an AI agent to give an overview of the product experience. Because we know a majority of our trialists and new signups have not used property management software before. And so the terminology, the orientation of the user experience, these are all things that you kind of want somebody to walk you through it. At the same time, you don't want to wait for an onboarding call with somebody. You want it like right then and there's. And so we offer the ability to right then and there speak to an AI agent that fully understands your needs and what you're looking to get out of software. And then we'll give you a personalized overview of the software based off of that. We're seeing a ton of great engagement from that. We've got AI helping you when it comes to guest messaging, which we know is obviously a hot area we spoke about earlier, helping you save time when it comes to crafting messages, which is incredibly important. We have AI in the product today when it comes to, hey, how do I do this in logify or I've got a question on this, how do I get this answered? We've got AI to help you with that as well. And then a number of areas that are in the pipeline to help in these customer benefit areas I mentioned earlier, where again, everything we do is customer backed. Technology is a means to an end. And AI is one of those hows of how we can solve those customer problems in magical ways. But there are other ways that we can solve that as well. And I'll give one short example on this. This is from a customer of ours in Florida, Dominic, who's an amazing, amazing guy who's actually building an app to support short term rental owners that's going to be in our marketplace as well, called Host iq. But Dominic was telling me, you know, one of the things that stands out about him is the guest experience he provides. And so I wanted to understand from him, like what, what does he do? What is the, how does he get these insights? And he was sharing a story about a family that was staying with him. It was the mother and the two kids and they had an incredible stay. And the kids left him a handwritten note when they left. And he joked about, he was like one of these, like the letters were all like in different font sizes and it almost felt like a ransom note that you see in the movies that the kids had done. And they talked about how like they had such an amazing stay and they wanted to, when they grew up, they wanted this to be like their dream house. And they had just the best time. And so he was just like blown away by this to get these notes from these kids. And so the family had booked a repeat visit. And so he asked the mom, he said, hey, what are the favorite sports teams of the kids? And so she told them and she said, hey, they're really big into soccer and these are the teams that they're into. So the next day they came, he had a goal set up in his backyard so they could shoot the soccer ball. And then he had put the mascot and all this like posters and stickers of the favorite sports teams in the kids rooms. So when they stayed, they could have that, you know, much better of an experience. Wow. So if you think about like what did Dominic do that separated that experience that made it magical? He listened, he was empathetic and he kept that in mind. Right. For the next time. You don't need AI for that, you know. Yes, AI could help you keep track of these things and we've got things in the works that are going to help you with this. But ultimately asking a simple question like that, listening to your guests, understanding where they're coming from, their stories can separate you right now, today, without AI.

Yeah, for sure. Listening. Such a powerful skill, right? I mean, you can win guests over for the rest of their life, as you mentioned. You know, come back, that's how you fill up your direct booking calendar. And that's awesome. Yeah, well, it's, you know. Yeah, go ahead.

I was just going to say the other thing I'll say on the AI front as far as how we think about it. You know, we're in this incredible shift right now as a tech industry and particularly for us in the short term rental industry. What's so exciting about what's going on around us is we are moving from a world of software as a service to a world of service as a software. Right. If you think about the products and companies that were started the last 10, 20 years, we created products and tools where customers and users had to come to, to do a bunch of work in, to get benefit out of. We're moving to a world where the software is going to do the work for you in a lot of those major workflows. Right. So we go from this kind of system of record to the system of action. We were in a world where you had these user experiences and menu driven UX where you had to learn how to navigate and it was sometimes unnatural to a world where the experience with software is going to be just like as if you were talking to a Friend, like we're experiencing today with ChatGPT, right? It's multimodal, it's conversational. And then the other big area that is changing is the kind of value exchange. Right. Software as a service was traditionally a monthly subscription or annual subscription type of business model. It was like a utility. You paid. You paid to get access to a software, to a tool that is shifting to a world where you're going to be paying for outcomes. Right. Because if I am providing a service which is to increase your occupancy rate, to increase your, you know, your revenue, to help you save time, then I'm going to charge for those outcomes achieved, not necessarily just access to a software. And so this is a massive shift that's happening around us, which is so exciting for us in this space to think about not only pushing the boundaries on what we can do to deliver those benefits, but then ultimately completely shifting what software experience is going to look like in the next five, 10 years.

Yeah, such great points. And exciting too. You know, I mean, that's similar to, to what we're doing at Coorsley here, is we're offering the service. You know, I'd love to hear what does that look like for you guys and Lodify, like five years from now? Can you give us some insights? I mean, where, where do you guys see yourselves with that service model in the future?

Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, what you doing at Coorsley is it's a great point on this, right? And what we see from property managers and property management companies that are out there is, in a way, you all are the gold standard. Right? So if a. Of an owner says, I don't want to do it on my own, right, they're most likely coming to a service like yourselves or a property independent kind of property manager to outsource the work because they don't want to deal with it. Right. And it makes sense for, for many, for many hosts and owners that are out there today because the technology's not where it's at, because they just have decided this is not an area they want to invest any time in, which is all good. I think over time, as the technology gets better, as software gets better, there's more of those workflows that can be much more automated, can deliver much greater benefit than they're able to deliver today. And so what that looks like for Lodify is today something as simple as what may seem as simple as, you know, connecting to multiple channels and figuring out what is the pricing that you want to charge for your property is not that simple.

Right.

There's a lot of steps. There's a lot of steps in that. And you know, it should be, it should be. And that's the, that's why, you know, companies like yourself and property managers, you know, do incredible work because there's value, there's service, there's benefit there, there's a lot of pain and you all solve that. And you know, we're trying to do that from obviously from the software side, but there's more that we can do. And so as the technology gets better and better, then our ability to deliver benefit in these areas will increase. And so you can look to Lodfy in the future to be, you know, your co host when it comes to your virtual co host when it comes to providing you services that are like a property manager but via technology. You know, we're never going to get to the level in a, in the short and medium term, to the level that you all are providing or a property manager is providing, but you know, definitely significantly better than where we're at today. But the great thing is you all are the gold standard. And so there's a bar that's been set in the industry on the kind of like, get it off my, get it off my mind, get it off my chest. And so our job now in this category that's do it yourself is how do we continue to make that as easy as possible so that those are thinking about, hey, I want to do this on my own, I can do it. Then they've got a service partner in Lodify that can help them with, with that.

Yeah. If you, you know, if there's a hundred steps and the, the more steps you help your user eliminate, the easier it is for them, the happier they are and the happier everyone is, Right?

Absolutely. And I think there's, there's, you know, a benefit for you all as well. And, and to property managers. Right. Like in, in the analogy for me was in, like with QuickBooks and in the accountant space of small business, right. For when QuickBooks came out, there was all this fear that accountants jobs would be displaced. Right. Like, hey, now all of a sudden all the small businesses are going to do their, do their taxes and do their finances all on their own. And what ended up happening was like accountants didn't go to school to do data entry. Accountants went to school to be business business advisors. What ended up happening was they were spending a lot of their time on manual work because the technology and the software wasn't great. And so they were having to do a lot of that like low value work for small businesses at the trade off of higher value work that they did go to school to go to school for. And so the way I view that in our industry is like we as a software and as a future, as a service are going to take a lot of that work off of our customers shoulders. But there's still going to be a lot of high value advisory needs that are going to be there for these owners that, you know, folks like yourself and other property managers can provide. Because ultimately the channel management, the pricing decisions, a lot of the automation should be fully automatic in the future. Right. And, and then that way the value of work can be at a different level for those involved.

Well, Sean, we have limited time. I know there's always so many questions I want to ask, but limited time. So Lodify is helping tens of thousands of users out there. You guys are at the leading the pack, you know, in the industry. How does, how does someone get started with Lodify? What's the easiest way to do that?

Absolutely. So go to lodgify.com l o---G-I-F y.com you can sign up for a free trial, play around with it yourself. There's no better way than to jump into the product. You can start connecting your channels in the free trial to see what it's like and you can experience the AI agents giving you an overview. Or if you want to speak to human, one of our people from our, from our team, you can get that overview as well. If you've got any questions at all, if you do that and you've got questions, please reach out to me directly. My email is Sean shirazianlogify.com I read every piece of email, I read every piece of customer feedback that comes in through our channels. We've got a Slack channel. I'm reading it all the time. The team knows this and so I care a lot about what you think, where we're doing well, where we've got room for improvement. So that's what, that's what I recommend.

Awesome. Well, thanks, Sean. It's been a pleasure having you on. I'm really excited to see where you, where you take things and to stay in touch and we'll touch base soon, hopefully.