⚡ How this Start-Up Enables Boutique Hotels to Compete with Global Giants

Morning Innovators ⚡ In less than 5 minutes, we’ll cover…

🥳 The best funding opportunities, events and jobs in the Start-Up world this week
📰 This week’s biggest news stories in the Start-Up world
🛏 How this Start-Up enables boutique hotels to compete with global giants
💗 How you can use your mission to create viral content
✍️ A tool that enables you transcribe audio and video in minutes

✨ Last weeks most clicked link was this link taking you through to Bling Capital who have just raised $270m to invest into early-stage companies with global ambitions.

Happy hustling,
Rich

🎤 Events/Opportunities

🪵 BlackWood Ventures have just closed a €15m fund to invest in Pre-Seed European FinTech, CleanTech and Web3.0 companies. You can apply here.

💥 Booom VC have just closed €17m fund to invest in Europe’s best Pre-Seed 2B SaaS companies. Check them out here.

📣 Britain’s Got Start-Ups are hosting their national pitch competition, with their last series of pitches helping early stage companies raise £2.5m. You can apply here.

💼 Start-Up Jobs

🏃 Founder’s Associate, FitXR
🍇 Retention/Growth Lead, Grapevine
🧾 Full Stack Developer, Cocoon Pay

🗄 Iconic London co-working company Second Home moves to appoint administrators. Sifted

🚴‍♂️ Sir Chris Hoy has invested in Skarper, with the goal of making any bike an e-Bike. TechCrunch

🍦 AWS bets on liquid cooling for its AI servers. TechCrunch

🛂 Corporate ‘Virtual Passports’ could save UK £600m in fraud prevention. UKTN

Enhance My Stay: Empowering Independent Hotels with Upselling Technology

Transforming Hospitality: Enhance My Stay’s Mission
Enhance My Stay is a hotel technology company that empowers independent hotels to generate additional revenue before their guests even check in. Through a custom-branded upsell platform, hotels can engage guests in advance, offering services and experiences tailored to their stay. By focusing on smaller, boutique hotels, Enhance My Stay enables them to compete with larger chains by using data-driven technology to maximise revenue opportunities.

The First Customers: Hustle, Focus, and Outreach
Securing the first customer took extensive outreach, involving cold emails, phone calls, and focused targeting. The team started with boutique hotels with fewer than 10 rooms, narrowing their focus to local properties to streamline communication. This laser-focused approach helped the team break into a niche market and refine their customer acquisition strategy early on.

Building the Product: Adapting to Opportunities During Covid
Initially, Enhance My Stay began as a platform called Porter, a hotel booking agent that matched travellers with accommodation based on their personality, their likes and their dislikes. However, competing with billion-dollar hotel booking platforms proved unsustainable. When the Covid-19 pandemic upended the travel industry, the team pivoted to creating technology that allowed independent hotels to upsell services, something typically available only to large chains.

Working with in-house tech experts, the team created a bare-bones prototype and iterated it alongside hotel partners, ensuring the product evolved to meet their needs. This lean development approach, combined with existing relationships and trust, allowed the team to deliver an impactful solution in a challenging market.

Recruiting Early Talent: Luck Meets Vision
The company’s first employee came aboard serendipitously. A colleague seeking a side project had the right skills and jumped in to help build the initial version of the product. Later, the founder leveraged a strong relationship from a previous startup to hire another key team member. Selling the vision of Enhance My Stay proved critical in attracting and retaining top talent.

Fundraising Amid Challenges: From Pandemic Setbacks to Closing the Round
Enhance My Stay’s fundraising journey faced significant hurdles, particularly as Covid-19 decimated the travel industry. Initially, the founder secured soft commitments from early investors, including a former colleague turned angel investor; Who, in turn, introduced the team to other potential investors. However, with the pandemic halting global travel, those commitments fell through, forcing the team to restart their efforts.

The breakthrough came via the Angel Investment Network website. By purchasing their premium package, Enhance My Stay attracted a handful of angel investors who provided enough momentum to kick on and get towards closing the funding round. Those first investors provided a form of credibility to new angels, making it easier to close them. Additional support came from professional connections who believed in the company’s vision, ultimately enabling the startup to secure the capital needed to scale.

Carta is a platform that helps people manage equity, build businesses and invest in the companies of tomorrow. Our mission is to unlock the power of equity ownership for more people in more places. Carta is trusted by more than 40,000 companies, over 8,000 investment funds and a million employees for cap table management, venture capital solutions and more. In the UK, we support founders who are raising money through SEIS/EIS, helping with Advance Assurance, round modelling and more. To find out more, take a look at their website, or get in touch with [email protected].

As a Founder, it’s so easy to want to show off how good your product is, but that can be a really good way to lose people’s interest. La La Land Kind Cafe understand this and have built one of the best social campaigns in history.

Instead of showing off how good their coffee is, how it’s made, or the benefits of it, they decided that their social campaign would have NOTHING to do with their product. As a business, their mission is to encourage kindness. So, they’re kind to everyone! They were able to build a following of 6.3 million on TikTok by just shouting compliments to random people on the street. People loved to see the reactions of those receiving the compliments, they could see the positive emotions the compliments brought out. This, in turn, made the watchers associate this feeling with La La Land Kind Cafe and made them more inclined to purchase coffee from them.

How can you build a social campaign that has nothing to do with your product, but creates a feeling that the watchers associate with your brand?

Each week we highlight our favourite tools - either something we’ve been using in our businesses, or tools that our innovator community have recommended.

Voiser AI: Transcribe Summariser transcribes YouTube videos and recordings in minutes. You can summarise and ask questions based on these transcripts. The app recognises different voices, automatically adds punctuation, and translates into 75 languages.

Next week I’ll be highlighting another awesome Start-Up, as well as sharing all the usuals including funding opportunities, Start-Up news, plus plenty of awesome tips, tricks and tools.

P.S. Connect with me on LinkedIn…