Batch: The Ultimate Party Marketplace for Group Travel

[00:00:00] Mike: Mike Petrakis is founder and CEO of Batch. Uh, we are building the world's greatest party marketplace now. Uh, we started as an app to plan a bachelorette party where you could invite your friends, chat and figure out what you wanna do, put an itinerary together and split up expenses. Uh, we launched our app in 2020 as background.

[00:00:21] Mike: Great time to launch a, uh, travel product. We. Our first hundred thousand users in about three months. So we knew we had something special. And then, uh, when COVID happened, it led us to build a marketplace for bookable experiences. Now, um, between COVID and now, I can get into a lot of detail, but I will just say.

[00:00:43] Mike: Since in the, over the past five years, since we've launched Batch, we've expanded from just this planning app for bachelorette parties to now an app, uh, that serves all parties, uh, in all group trips, birthday parties, bachelor parties, girls trips, guys trips. We see divorce parties on the platform. Uh, and you know, what's most exciting and relevant to today is we've also expanded into.

[00:01:08] Mike: Not only experiences across 75 markets, but we're opening up accommodations, uh, like short-term rentals for groups specifically as well as restaurant recommendations and bars on the platform as well, with the goal of being, uh, your one-stop shop, you know, for a group trip to get to do everything that you'd wanna do on a trip in one place.

[00:01:31] Mark: Nice. Well, I would say that normally we have a worldwide audience, but looking from the chat, we've got AuSTRn, we've got Missouri, we've got New York City, we've got Denver, Kansas, so I assume, uh, North Carolina. Sorry, Delilah. I assume that batch is just a US thing. Am I right or am I wrong?

[00:01:48] Mike: We've recently expanded, so we're in Cabo, Cancun, uh, you know, a number of different places in Mexico and the Caribbean, so we're super excited for.

[00:01:58] Mike: Uh, you know, north America and a little bit of international expansion as of this year.

[00:02:03] Mark: Alright, well let's get stuck into today's agenda. So this is obviously all about batch. Um, Madi you were the person who brought, uh, Mike and Batch to my attention. Why did you think that it was, this would be a call idea for, for a mini STR CoLab session.

[00:02:20] Madi: Yeah. You know, I, uh, when Mike and I first met a few weeks, months ago, um, I had been fascinated by what the batch was doing, which was basically just targeting a very specific niche of traveler, which is bachelor bachelorette groups. And I think it's no secret that when you're traveling in one of those groups, they're not staying at a hotel like that is not common.

[00:02:38] Madi: They want a house, they want a short-term rental. So, you know, typically they'll look on Airbnb or whatnot. But, um. At Mount, you know, we're all about direct bookings 'cause OTA fees, all that craziness, don't really believe in it. We do direct bookings for the local businesses too. And so, um, Mike was talking about opening that up and like, it's such an audience that is.

[00:03:01] Madi: Planning things to do, why not also just find a place to stay and then get directed directly to the book direct website of that property manager or host and then you can capture that all. So it just seems like such a natural fit. And I was like, you know, someone that did this for me like three years ago, market was probably you, where I got introduced to the short-term rental industry.

[00:03:20] Madi: And then, you know, you meet everyone and it kind of takes off. So I was like, this is kind of a cool find. Let's introduce batch to the STR world and see what happens.

[00:03:29] Mark: Nice. So, um, go ahead then, Mike, tell us a bit about the, the background, like your background before. Coming into obviously short term rentals, like where, where were you?

[00:03:39] Mark: Obviously 2020 was a, was a, was a launch pad. But what were you doing be before this and, and how did you get to now like five years later?

[00:03:47] Mike: Sure. Um, I have been an entrepreneur since I graduated college. Basically, uh, prior to this I bootstrapped two e-commerce companies. One was called Boast. That was a tennis brand that I relaunched.

[00:03:58] Mike: Uh, or helped relaunch as the first employee in 2013. Um, it was a super fun business to build where it looked like a pot leaf logo, but it was a Japanese maple leaf. It used to be on the biggest tennis stars in the world, and we helped revitalize this brand 30 years later and bring it back to life. And I sold that to a bunch of country clubs and urban streetwear companies.

[00:04:18] Mike: And, uh, long story short, short. First entrepreneurial experience. Number two was taking that experience to build something that I own myself, which was, uh, a company called Walco that was a performance activewear company. Um, again, this is early days for learning how to scale an e-commerce site, so that's where I really sharpened my knowledge with, uh.

[00:04:38] Mike: You know, e-commerce and CAC and LTV and unit economics and all that sort of stuff. And then, um, I actually bought a gym while I was living in Brooklyn. That was my neighborhood gym, uh, which was kind of my first foray into wow, brick and mortar and small businesses are really, really cool and a lot more straightforward than some of the more technical stuff I was working on.

[00:05:00] Mike: And that's honestly what led me to the. To be fascinated with the business of Batch, which is, you know, helping small businesses across the country grow. And so what really caught my attention and sparked my interest from like years ago, helping build this gym and just drive revenue over expenses was like, wow, there's so many companies like this that exist throughout the country that just want to cater towards people and are so good at what they do, you know, serving excellent product and experience to people.

[00:05:28] Mike: And my job was really. You know, how can I market this and bring it to life? And that's kind of in essence what Batch does with experiences and now what we're starting to do in other verticals as well.

[00:05:39] Mark: Nice. So over the last five years, what would you say has been your biggest sort of learning curve?

[00:05:46] Mark: Obviously you offer more than just bachelor parties, but what has been like the, the, the biggest sort of learning curve that you've, you've had, uh, outside of Don't launch while COVID is happening, so.

[00:05:58] Mike: I mean, there's so many and every year we have something that hits us in the face and almost implodes the business, you know?

[00:06:04] Mike: But I think especially something that's a venture company from Day Zero where you are gonna say, okay, we're gonna take big bets and really try to ramp this thing, right? So we've seen, we have 700,000 parties that have been planned, uh, since launching, which is a crazy number. But I think, you know, part some of the things, first off, you know, the big bet that I had to, that we had to.

[00:06:28] Mike: Figure out was how do you expand from just bachelorette parties to all parties, right? So that was a big bet where it required an entire rebrand and product design overhaul that was tons of learnings that we had to put together to figure out what, how to build an experience for, you know, bachelor parties and girls trips and birthday parties to the same rate of bachelorette parties.

[00:06:49] Mike: So that was the first big thing. I can speak to many more though.

[00:06:54] Mark: Hmm. Well, let's go into 'em many more. 'cause I, I'm, I'm fascinated with this. I think one of the first things that I would come to my mind, and we've got a lot of people tuning in now live, and there's gonna be a lot more people who listen to the replay when we put this on the podcast.

[00:07:06] Mark: But the thing to me would be, you know, bachelorette parties. Parties. That sounds like it's gonna, you know, it's gonna cause a lot of damage. It's gonna be like loads of drunken people, et cetera. Like, how have you been able to sell this to. Business owners, property owners, managers, operators to say, Hey, no, this is, this is a niche to go down.

[00:07:28] Mark: What's sort of like the data that, that's backing you, that's driving you, that's getting people to sign up to this platform of yours and, and, and, and how have you sort of navigated that?

[00:07:37] Mike: I mean, first off, I, I think, um, we are still 60% bachelorette parties and I would say bachelorette parties are a lot safer of a party to host than many other types of groups that would stay at a house.

[00:07:49] Mike: Would you agree with me?

[00:07:52] Mark: Well, I dunno. I've seen, uh, I've seen some bachelor pies get pretty wild, but I dunno. I'm speaking, I'm speaking from the uk, not the us You all look a lot more s civilized over there, uh, than as as UK gr over here. Yeah.

[00:08:06] Mike: No. Second, I would say we, um, we are not trying to appeal to everybody.

[00:08:11] Mike: We are appealing to, you know, the houses or the properties that are perfect for our customer. That's when you find supply and demand matching. You know, that's the most important thing that we're looking for. So, for instance, you know, Airbnb has, uh, services that j they just relaunched, right? And an example of that would be my, my parents are going to Jackson Hole and they'll hire a private chef for their Jackson Hole trip.

[00:08:33] Mike: That's not our kind of trip. For the parties that we're catering towards, we're looking for people that are looking to have a fun time in Scottsdale or Nashville that are gonna book, book a party bus, and they're gonna look for super tailored, you know, group stay that are relevant for them, which would mean does this house have enough bathrooms for.

[00:08:52] Mike: You know, 10 girls who are on a bachelorette party, does it have enough hairdryers? Does it have good communal space to hang out at? Does it have a pool that we can bring, you know, higher cabana boys as a service to, you know, that's the major difference, which is we're not trying to appeal to everybody, right?

[00:09:08] Mike: Mm-hmm. We have a very specific customer.

[00:09:10] Mark: I love that. Don't try and appeal to everybody. Send you appeal to nobody, which is good. So what's some sort of numbers and stats that you can, you can share with people? I can see on the website, a number of it sticks out to me is 3 million party planners. That's like a big number.

[00:09:24] Mark: What, what else have you got to, to, to share with the people that are maybe on the fence about Yeah. Uh, doing this?

[00:09:30] Mike: Yeah. Um, one in four bachelorette parties in the US use batch, so that's a crazy stat. Yeah, so there's probably, uh, you could do the math. There's about a million traveling bachelorette parties in the, in the country and 250,000 of which annually are on batch.

[00:09:47] Mike: So that's, that's my first fun fact. But, you know, for everybody, and we have a, we have a shit ton of data that I could. Talk through, like we get 35,000 itinerary events a month that are generated on our platform, those itinerary events we use to build up our marketplace. So you ask me, oh, well how do you guys find the right, you know, product market fit for your suppliers?

[00:10:08] Mike: And the answer is, we just look at our data. If people, we see their accommodations info, so the addresses that they stay at, we see the bars they go to, the restaurants they go to. We just call those people up. That's how we build up our supply and our marketplace. So, yeah, so, but I, I'd love to offer up, you know, some of the facts that I put alongside for, um, short-term rentals, whether or not it's a fit on batch.

[00:10:33] Mike: I have some data to share with you guys.

[00:10:36] Mark: Go for it. Yeah, go for it. I've teased us, you've teased us, us gone drop some numbers.

[00:10:40] Mike: All right, let's do it. So here are five facts about group stay. Number one, uh, this is all from our own data. Number one, average party is 3.4 days with an average house booking of 2,500 bucks.

[00:10:53] Mike: Number two, listings with the most popular search criteria for listings is a four bedroom house in our marketplace for five bathrooms and 12 mag, uh, 12 guests. Number three, listings with ratings and reviews get five x more review, uh, more views than listings that do not have ratings and reviews. Um, number four, adding video to your experience page doubles your chances of getting booked.

[00:11:18] Mike: And number five, listings with high quality UGC perform three X better than listings with photos alone. Those are some facts. Nice,

[00:11:28] Mark: nice. No,

[00:11:29] Mike: and that's whether not your on batch, right? Yeah. You could use that for whatever.

[00:11:34] Madi: We've been pushing the video angle for so long now. Uh, and like I even had a conversation with like the OTA Giants, because Airbnb is leaning into it on the experience side, like every thumbnail, uh, is a video and they'll send a content creator.

[00:11:47] Madi: But we've been trying to work with the property managers, just getting them to understand like, yeah, if you showed a guest perspective video for like 30 seconds of what this property was like, or a walkthrough, it's probably gonna get rented a lot more often. Yes.

[00:11:58] Mark: So this, this next question mad you actually put into the, to the slides.

[00:12:01] Mark: I think it'd be cool if you take this angle. 'cause obviously when I, as soon as I heard Mike say created, I was like, oh, this is, I can see why MAD has put this, this together because you create social media experiences, right? So w when, when you look at social media, do, do you wanna run this question? 'cause I think it's a really good one for Mike.

[00:12:19] Madi: Yeah. How we leverage or how can we leverage social media to appeal to bachelor, bachelorette parties? I guess I was coming at it from the angle of if this is like the niche you're trying to attract, like this is your guest avatar. 'cause we talk, uh, mark and I talk about that all the time. It's like, who are you targeting as a property manager?

[00:12:36] Madi: It's not gonna be everyone. Um, how can you start showing that? And actually, a really good example of this is, I was just in Aruba last week with Casola and 10 of our content creators, and we stayed at this house. It was massive. It could fit 24 people. Um, very much a bachelor, bachelorette like destination.

[00:12:53] Madi: And so as we were creating content that we're leaving Casola with, we created three or four videos of our perspective. And we actually did have, we, it was kind of a bachelorette, 'cause this woman just got engaged who was a creator with us there. So we're like, Christine, it's your bachelorette party. Um, and we did all this fun stuff.

[00:13:08] Madi: So, um, yeah. Mike, like what do you see on your platform from the social media side? Is it just for listings or do you find that the properties and the managers you're working with also have like a strong. Social media presence on their own.

[00:13:22] Mike: Yeah. So as I said, I think, um, the experiences and the short-term rentals that have, uh, UGC on their experiences pages are way more likely to get booked than if it's just professional photography.

[00:13:37] Mike: Right. So I think that kicks off the conversation about the importance of social and for us, um. We launched a feature called Batch Lens, for instance, that is our version of TikTok, where if you're going to Nashville or any of our cities, you can just swipe through this feed and see all the cool stuff that's happening.

[00:13:54] Mike: Um, but you know, since the beginning we've been very active on our TikTok, our Instagram page and our blog page. And how we work with partners by the way, is when they, um. Subscribe to Batch. They're, they're basically, we are a marketing engine for them and we're trying to push out marketing that's not just on our own platform, but it's on, you know, featuring, trying to get them to appear in TikTok search when they search, you know, best Bachelorette House in Scottsdale.

[00:14:21] Mike: We want to pop up there 'cause that's its own version of SEO, you know, same with ai, search for, that's the new version of SEO. Right TripAdvisor in the old ways that you'd look at to find ratings and reviews and validate interest in a place that's dead. To me, what we're focused on is like how do I appear in TikTok search and AI search, and how do I build an interactive experience on batch that looks like somewhere I could trust that other people like me go on and leave, you know, content like whether it's written and UGC submitted content about to give me validation that this is right for me.

[00:14:58] Mark: So we've obviously got property owners, property managers, and everything in between in this audience here, and they're gonna be listening on, on back. So from, from this sort of side of like the call for you, who are you looking to work with when it comes to the short term rental host and owners? Like how, who are you looking to work with?

[00:15:16] Mark: And most importantly, how does it work? Is this a commission model? Is it a subscription model? And so I'll go down that sort of route. Basically based it in mind that everybody's in here. And before you answer that, if anybody does has questions for Mike or just the, the, the, the party theme that we're obviously talking about today, please do pop it in the chat 'cause we will definitely get to them.

[00:15:37] Mark: But yeah, who, who do you wanna be working with, Mike?

[00:15:39] Mike: Okay, so first off, we want to find back to supply and demand matching. You know, we're not looking to build out a marketplace that has. You know, 2000 different homes in Nashville. We're looking for the top. That's our biggest city. Let's, so let's say we're looking for the top 50 to 75 group stay homes, right?

[00:15:58] Mike: So I said, uh, four bedroom, five, bathroom. You know, the, there's very specific search criteria. That our customers are looking for. So we want to find the best houses for our groups, right? So we want to fill out, you know, we have 75 cities. We want to fill out each of those cities with the 30 to 50 best places to stay for our groups, right?

[00:16:20] Mike: That's like number one for us. And then in terms of how we work. Um, we used to charge another, like major lesson learned was we used to charge a commission, just like every other business out there to be on our platform. Now we charge a couple hundred bucks a month. This was a dramatic shift in our market and how we marketed our business, but a necessary one because I thought that the future of how people search for.

[00:16:46] Mike: The best places to stay and the best experiences to do is changing where like people are trying to circumvent Airbnb right now where 55% of people who just look at a place to stay as of right now. Are just actively trying to circumvent it and find a way to book it direct, right? So I'm like, why the hell would we fight against this and like hide the business and like try to not try to prevent people from seeing the name of it and sharing the CRM data.

[00:17:13] Mike: Screw that. Our job is to be a billboard for businesses and to promote them, right? And so we're actually leaning into this, this like generational shift for younger travelers and we're like, Hey, we're just gonna promote this explicitly, you know, we're gonna find a great. House for you, we're gonna give you the name of the house.

[00:17:32] Mike: We're gonna drive the booking directly to that site of that house, right? And that house is going to get, that property manager is gonna get all of the customer info and if they want to upsell from there, by the way, they can. So it's a little bit contrarian from what you're used to seeing. But I saw this happen in a year ago and I was willing to basically bet on, make a big bet on it.

[00:17:57] Mark: That's good. That's good. So I'm just gonna share the, the, the screen here. Um, Matt, have you got any, any questions before I share the screen about, about batch?

[00:18:08] Madi: Um, I mean, yeah, Mike, I know the slides you sent me earlier, you had one of those really good stats in there about your beta user or test. Uh, do you wanna talk a, a little bit about that real quick?

[00:18:19] Mike: Yeah, so, you know, batch brings you a high value audience, so we're not just. Finding people on Google and like having a super broad audience. We target a, a very high intent, active traveling audience. Somebody downloads batch and they start planning their trip six months in advance of their trip. Um, these are type A planners with a lot of friends.

[00:18:40] Mike: It's a 10 person average party size. We have a good amount of repeat usage happening. 15% of total users come back and use it for another sort of trip, whether it's a birthday or a girl's trip or something like that. Our stays in general, in our, our early rollout are crushing it relative to experiences.

[00:18:57] Mike: Uh, there's two x higher click-through rates and three x higher, uh, favoring than than experiences, which I found to be super interesting. Now we tested the Stays platform, uh, a couple months ago and we did it with a company called the Muse Hotel that's in Palm Springs. It's a nine bedroom boutique hotel room, um, hotel that you can rent out for a couple thousand dollars.

[00:19:21] Mike: It is a perfect fit for our audience. So we were super excited about it and I was like, I bet this will do well. I mean, guys, in the first two weeks of putting this out, it got $14,000 worth of bookings, you know, and they paid $400 for it. You know, so like, we're like, okay, that's why you asked me, oh, are you going broad?

[00:19:41] Mike: Are you trying to sign up everybody? Are you going commission? Like, nah, just curated. We're gonna get the best partners for batch and we're gonna really promote them and ramp up their business and they're gonna look at us as a marketing channel. We're like, they're like, great, I don't need to hire like a in-house marketing person.

[00:19:57] Mike: I can just have this company drive, drive my traffic for me.

[00:20:01] Mark: See, I was just on the, on the listing page here and I'll share it again. And the video is the first thing that, that stands out to me. Um, a 110%, like how tricky from a technical point of view was, was it to add it in? 'cause like I said, I was looking at Airbnb experiences and obviously Airbnb listings.

[00:20:19] Mark: And you're right, mad, there's no videos from what I can see on, on experiences. It's just pictures. But the video to me. Sells everything about, I mean, I know this is obviously a, a bus tour in, in, in Nashville, but, uh, like what was the reason for video? How hard was it to get in and like, do, do you now see that others are adopting it as well?

[00:20:39] Mike: Months to build huge pain in the ass as well as everything in this margin place took months. Integrations. I mean, I can get going, I can talk all day about. Building infrastructure for this kind of thing. Click on eat and drink. Actually this is like a beta that we're rolling out right now. Click bar still Nashville.

[00:20:59] Mike: So I said, you said, how big is video video's? Huge. It took months to build, but we knew that it would resonate well with millennials and Gen Z and we knew that it would yield higher conversion. And I think I already dropped the stat that that produces in terms of ROI. Yeah. If you scroll to the top here, you can see a vibe check.

[00:21:16] Mike: This is what's coming next on accommodations where it's like, oh, that's, you know, this is a bar example, but like for age 40 and frisky for hype level dance till dawn, like we're taking a new approach to how people talk about and submit content for the different experiences and things they do on a trip.

[00:21:36] Mike: So again, the old way that people did this was they go on TripAdvisor and they write a review, but somebody talking about their family trip wasn't relative. Relevant to my bachelor party trip. Right. It was too broad. So we're super specific. Going deeper on user generated content that's not just video.

[00:21:52] Mike: It's like, Hey, tell us like is the bar fun to like get drunk with your friends at, or is it more low key like having a cocktail? You know, one or two drinks at Right. And we're trying to do the same thing with short term rentals. Next. We started with, with getting UGC and videos up, but, you know, we're gonna put vibe checks in here next, and we're gonna go all in on user generated content.

[00:22:15] Mark: So, so Mike, can I ask a question real quick? Yeah. Go Mike. You go. Sorry. I'm Matt, you.

[00:22:20] Madi: Yeah, no, I was just gonna ask, on the user generated content side, do you leave that up to like the business and property manager to go out and film their own video and edit it? Or are you guys doing that for them?

[00:22:30] Mike: So, um.

[00:22:33] Mike: User-generated content, uh, is, is far more likely to drive bookings than professionally or in-house submitted content. We found that ourselves. So what we're doing is actually sending QR codes to our parties, um, on the weekend and having them submit the content from their trip into batch. And then batch is just building this giant library to pull in.

[00:22:57] Madi: Okay, cool.

[00:22:58] Mark: I like that. That's good. So, um. Let's talk about the actual listing. Are you pulling this from anywhere? Are you manually setting this up? How does somebody create a listing on, on, on batch?

[00:23:11] Mike: Yeah, finally getting AI to do its job here where you can submit your description, you know, a couple points and it'll build out the descriptions for you and the about section for you.

[00:23:23] Mike: Um, and then we manually pull in like why we like it for groups. That was something important to us where we're like, okay, well what makes this special? So some, we have an uploader on our side that is helping upload your ratings and reviews, and they're also checking the boxes of why they think this is great for groups.

[00:23:39] Mike: So we do have a little bit of like, oversight on the submission process, but you know, as of recent, we've let AI go to work for us with getting these things up and running, especially since we're launching all these new verticals in cities. You know, and,

[00:23:54] Mark: and what I noticed here is, um, the, the link here is to go to the actual properties direct booking.

[00:24:03] Mark: Website, right? Yep. Um, which is, which is very cool. Um, and then you've obviously, you can track it because if you've got a little tracking code in, in there, so they don't really search for availability right here, they're just basically looking for a place they'll go through to their website and then they'll obviously go and do the rest of their, their research there.

[00:24:21] Mark: But if you've got the tracking code that says it's come from you, very cool.

[00:24:24] Mike: Yeah. You know what's crazy is 10% of those people who click that link end up booking. On the partner site

[00:24:31] Madi: that's high. Wow.

[00:24:33] Mike: Yeah. Yeah. As I said, very high intent audience.

[00:24:37] Madi: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:38] Mark: Um, okay, so if anybody wants to find out more, let's batch.com.

[00:24:45] Mark: Go ahead there. Click on the, on the link at the top to go and to go and, uh, apply to work with you. So how does this work? If, if we're, somebody's watching this now and they go, right, I want to become a partner. How does the sort of application process work? Walk us through that.

[00:24:59] Mike: I mean, as of right now, since we're trying to, there's so much, uh, room to build right now in terms of accommodations, restaurants and bars.

[00:25:08] Mike: Experience is a little more competitive and selective. But I would say if you are a good fit for, uh, property manager at this point for batch, you're, you're gonna click partner with us and then within 24 hours, somebody from our team is gonna reach out to you, you know, and walk you through the details of getting you set up for success.

[00:25:27] Mike: But the number one thing I would say is not just like signing on with batch and paying, you know, 200 bucks a month or whatever the rate is. The number one thing is like you have to do your job if you want it to be successful too, where like you should submit your ratings and reviews, you should upload content to a library that we can pull in because when we get good content to put out, we'll not only share it on your experience page, but on our socials, our TikTok, our Instagram, our Lifecycle emails as well.

[00:25:54] Mike: Um. You know, since we have parties, a couple thousand parties going on trips every single weekend, we'll send text messages out, you know, saying like, go do X, Y, Z. You could participate in deal drops where it's like. You know, last minute, get $200 off this experience. You could participate in those kind of things.

[00:26:10] Mike: So the more content, the more you interact with our team, the better you'll do. And the last thing I'll say on that front is the biggest winners from our experiences were the ones who invested, like landed and expanded on the platform. You know, the guys who had bar crawls in one city that are now in 10 cities or cocktail.

[00:26:28] Mike: Cowboys, uh, or Cabana boys, which is like a bartending service in one city that's in 14 markets, right? They're, they're spending their weekends looking at the data that they're seeing on batch. You could see not only your KPIs, but the market trends where you could see how many parties are coming to your city, right?

[00:26:46] Mike: So they're, they're doing something about the data to launch new markets and working with our team to do so. So that's the number one thing. If you're a property manager and you have properties in different cities. That's like a golden opportunity for us to say, okay, great. Let's launch you in two or three markets and look at the data.

[00:27:03] Mike: I,

[00:27:04] Mark: I think like the, the main takeaway from this for me, and I feel like for everybody, is that we are slowly walking into where niche online travel agents or niche listing sites are gonna explode. And batch is one of, of many that I can think of, you know, and it's, it's really interesting to see because there is this sort of.

[00:27:23] Mark: Um, not mass exodus from tools like Airbnb, vrbo, booking.com, but I feel like what you said right at the very start, Mike, like hit the nail on the head, is that when you try and appeal to everybody, you appeal to no, nobody. So you are burying yourself so far down in Anisha's room for nobody else. And this is what batch is.

[00:27:41] Mark: And I feel for everybody, you know, obviously you need to be listed. This, I'm talking to the property owners here. You need to be listed on the big OTAs because they drive so much revenue, but. You've got to also look further afield once you realize who your audience is for these types of sites, because these are the types of sites that will help you generate the big dollars.

[00:28:02] Mark: Also alongside Dar bookings as well. But, um, really, really interesting. So I've been asking everybody as we've been chatting to put questions in the chat, and obviously if you're watching this live, you get the benefits of asking the questions. If you're on the replay, you don't, so next time make sure you tune in live and one has come in from Julie.

[00:28:18] Mark: Uh, really good question. Is there a term contract you have to sign up for as a property manager owner? How, how does that sort the legal side work? Mike?

[00:28:28] Mike: No, you can literally sign up monthly and pay a couple hundred bucks a month and cancel any time. It's, that's, we decided that if we're confident in our platform, then we're gonna remove crazy barriers to entry.

[00:28:39] Mike: We recommend that you do a six month commitment or 12 months and get a good deal because, you know, we see strong retention and we think that the people that perform well are, as I said, you invest in the platform, you look at data for a couple months and you make changes. So once you get to that six month, that's kind of the inflection point for the business to start really taking off.

[00:29:00] Mike: Um, so it's super easy to sign up again.

[00:29:02] Mark: And this next question is a, is a good question. 'cause I know what Rob's thinking. He's already thinking with his entrepreneurial mind in it says, uh, Mike, do you have a list of Cs that you need inventory? Where could I go hunt for some listings that fit your need?

[00:29:15] Mark: So do you share your data? Do you, do you like publicly put it out there? Like how can, how can Rob help you?

[00:29:22] Mike: That's good shit, Rob, I appreciate you. Um, we have people from our team that are in this chat too, so they should, they should reach out to you directly. Uh, we, in terms of a city list, you could just check out our website and see the different cities.

[00:29:37] Mike: Um, but we will do more. As I said, we are sitting on a gold mine of data with 35,000 itinerary events a month. So we're gonna do more to surface our data in the next couple months, particularly in. Age of AI when we're seeing, you know, crawlers start to surface our recommendations and our data infrastructure more.

[00:29:54] Mark: Yeah. 'cause um, talking about another niche listing site, furnish finder, which obviously caters more to the 30 day stay. Fave said that they're, they're obviously as well sat on a lot of data and they're gonna start publishing, you know. Mm-hmm. More, more data in the backend. So I feel like if, if you've got the data.

[00:30:13] Mark: And you've got the niche. I think this is a good way to go. So I'm, I'm very excited to see what, what you guys do. And obviously, you know, once you're in this short term rental sphere, it's very hard to escape. So I'm looking forward to connecting and, and finding out more mad Before we go, have you got any final questions that you have for, for Mike or any sort of takeaways that you've had from the sort of 35 minutes we've been chatting?

[00:30:32] Madi: Honestly, I think my biggest takeaway is more about like the book direct movement, which Mark you talk about a lot as well, and you get property managers set up with, uh. Really good websites. But I think the thing not a lot of people think about is like, how are you getting traffic to those websites?

[00:30:47] Madi: Airbnb spends millions of dollars every month getting traffic to their website. That's why you're getting bookings. And so you need partners like Batch. You need partners like Mound. You need partners like Boly that are not only creating you a great place to take the bookings and creating that credibility, but you need the traffic.

[00:31:02] Madi: So Instagram, TikTok, if you're not on those places, if you're not on batch, you gotta really think about, okay, if I'm having a book direct strategy. How is it all gonna come together? And the answer is in this, this podcast, this meeting right here. So hopefully we just helped out a lot of people.

[00:31:19] Mike: Yeah. And I think look like the whole point of booking direct, again, like I love helping small businesses grow and giving, sharing CRM data and helping drive bookings.

[00:31:30] Mike: And so when somebody is going to their site and booking with that, with, uh, that property manager, it allows them to build brand, right? So that's really important to me. But the other unique thing about Batch and why we're able to grow is 'cause we go after groups. We pay to acquire a lead user who's actively.

[00:31:48] Mike: Trav planning something to travel and they're inviting 10 people to our platform that we're not paying for. Right. So that's like more exposure for us without having to pay like hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire at this at this point. Nice.

[00:32:03] Mark: Before we wrap up for today, obviously everybody go to let's batch.com, but any final thoughts, Mike, that you wanna, you wanna leave us with any words of wisdom?

[00:32:13] Mike: I think I, I look, I think the 2010s were for the OTA era, the 2025 and beyond is for direct bookings. Right. And UGC first content. So we're at the intersection of both of those things.

[00:32:27] Mark: Hmm. How, okay, here's a random off the cuff question. How long do you think it is until one of these big social media channels starts, like being an OTA, like Instagram, TikTok?

[00:32:36] Mark: Do you think that that's on the horizon? Or do you feel like the, that's not like the, the, the route they want to go down?

[00:32:42] Mike: I think chat, GT is building an OTA right now, right.

[00:32:47] Mark: Madi, what do you think, do you think Instagram doubles in it chat, GPT first, TikTok first? What? What? What, what do you reckon, do you reckon Meta OpenAI, TikTok, do you reckon any of them go down that route?

[00:32:57] Mark: Or do you reckon those will stay well clear?

[00:33:00] Madi: No, I mean, I, yeah, I, I think they might stay, stay clear. They have a very strong, especially Instagram and TikTok, I mean, their whole thing is community. Social media videos, I think they know that people are booking from them, but I don't see that happening. I think the savvy people that leverage Instagram and TikTok to drive bookings themselves are, uh.

[00:33:19] Madi: But really smart. They're making so much for ad revenue on those platforms. They're not giving that up anytime soon. They're just gonna keep focusing on that

[00:33:26] Mark: and seeing that. We've seen how effective video is on, on your listing page there, mic Batch. Do, do you reckon that Airbnb ever put video in on their listings, booking.com, vrbo?

[00:33:37] Mark: I'm amazed that they haven't, like, do, do you think, like, do you feel like it's, it's just a matter of time on these sites or do, do you not see them doing it? And the same question to you Marty.

[00:33:47] Mike: I think Airbnb does have video content on their experiences. On their experiences. I think that, yeah, the, the major difference or I think the reason why it will be difficult for them to scale that is because no one trusts, like the user does not have brand affinity towards Airbnb to be like, let me submit all of the house content or the experience content to Airbnb.

[00:34:08] Mike: Like Airbnb is PO positioned very much as A OTA and I think one thing, the thing that we are trying to. The bridge that we were trying to cross at batch is like more so being a friend and a trusted advisor to help facilitate travel decisions rather than a website to just like go swipe through a bunch of different stuff on.

[00:34:27] Mark: Hmm.

[00:34:27] Mike: Yeah,

[00:34:28] Madi: so the.

[00:34:29] Mark: I, I was gonna say, have you seen an experiences listing Maddie with video one? Please send it to me on a WhatsApp. 'cause I've been clicking on about 10 now.

[00:34:36] Madi: Yeah, I'll, no, I'll, um, but no, I can give you the inside scoop. So like, we have our creator army at Mount Content Army, um, which is just like this network of amazing content creators.

[00:34:46] Madi: We train them, but I can tell you what Airbnb is doing on the backend because they've reached out to a ton of our creators, um, is they will hire a local creator to go on the experience. They do not tell the business owner. The business owner gets no say in the content. They don't get access to the content.

[00:35:01] Madi: Um, the creator sends all the raw files to Airbnb, um, and then Airbnb edits it in-house. And so all the videos end up looking the same relatively. Um, but the amount of money they have to do that, it's like 200, $300 each time you hire one of these creators. Uh, and the creators are not happy. They're saying no because it's like not giving them creative freedom.

[00:35:21] Madi: Airbnb like really? Pigeonholes you into what you can do. And uh, then the creator also is like, okay, that's all mine and I'm getting nothing from that, and you're using it and driving bookings. So I think they're going about it very poorly. Uh, and they're trying to just recreate what they did in the old days with hosts where they're like, hosts are bad photographers.

[00:35:37] Madi: Let me send in a photographer. They're trying to do it with video, but it's, the world of creators is so different than it was in 2000. You can't do that anymore.

[00:35:45] Mike: I'll add one thing to that, which is like. Airbnb. There's so many rules. There's so many rules. Yep. I was just talking to the, um, the Palm Springs Hotel that I mentioned, and they're like, yeah, we used to have Airbnbs.

[00:35:56] Mike: Now we just have a hotel. 'cause we can avoid all the rules and regulations, you know, having a hotel and, you know, my, my thing with what we're doing with houses and bars and restaurants, it's early days, man. Like, it's like Facebook. 10 years ago when I was building my first companies where it's like I was, our CPMs and CPCs were so good.

[00:36:14] Mike: I'm like. Great. We're gonna have 40 houses that we're advertising in Destin Total, and we'll have, you know, 10,000 parties going there and, and I'm charging them a couple hundred bucks a month. So like, this is the year, you know, the next like probably 24 months is, is the time for these, you know, property managers to just crush it, you know?

[00:36:35] Mike: Mm-hmm. By looking elsewhere than the major platforms. I

[00:36:38] Mark: love it. If you are not psyched listening to this, then I dunno what's gonna get you excited on a, on a Monday in June. But Mike, really appreciate your time. It's been amazing chatting and it obviously this will not be the last mad. As always, it's an absolute pleasure to the people that joined in live, uh, Rob's already sharing his details.

[00:36:54] Mark: So, uh, Delilah and the team will know doubt. Get in contact. I'm excited to check in in like a couple of months time, six months down the line and seeing where we're with it all. Um, but yeah. Mike, thank you so much. Uh, so obviously apart from the website, is there any social media channel that you'd like to promote?

[00:37:09] Mark: Anywhere you want people to go and like find out more about your mus? Instagram. Yeah. LinkedIn,

[00:37:14] Mike: TikTok. Yeah, I, yeah, so LinkedIn, I just, I've, I've, one of my New Year's resolutions was post more, be more active on LinkedIn. Mike Raki, that's my name. You can find me there. Um, I will share a lot of our data publicly.

[00:37:27] Mike: So I, I am on the train of building in public. Uh, you should also follow batch at, at let's batch on Instagram. And then if you. Are a partner to batch. Uh, then we also get an exclusive group called Batch for Biz, which is our Instagram channel where we're just sharing proprietary data every, every week.

[00:37:46] Mark: Love that. Love that. Maddie, where do you want people to go to find out more about what you're doing?

[00:37:53] Madi: Um, yeah, LinkedIn as well. Everyone knows how I'm active there. That's where my hot takes, uh, live. Uh, yeah, so LinkedIn, also Instagram and TikTok, if you wanna see our next creator retreat I had there on Wednesday.

[00:38:05] Madi: We're going to Jackson Hole to partner with Abode Luxury Property Management companies, um, and bringing another 10 creators there. So, you know, we're just traveling all over the place.

[00:38:15] Mark: Busy, busy, busy. Love it. Okay. Well, thank you very much everybody for tuning in. If you do like this, make sure you, you know, drop all the things, like, subscribe, et cetera, and let us know.

[00:38:24] Mark: What you wanna happen on. The next one we do is one of these mini STR collab. All right, all, let's call it a close. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you, uh, to Mike. Thank you to Madi. We'll be back