What a ride! After the BSH Future Home accelerator powered by Techstars ended, we had to deal with an occupancy rate who fell from 90%+ to 20 to 30%, and a majority of the team who left. COVID 19 impacted us... But miracles DO happen! 🌟 We are now back on track. After sending weekly updates during the accelerator, we are now launching our monthly updates to keep you in the loop as we are SUPER DUPER grateful to be surrounded by so much support and love.
1) Updates
- The Virtual Demo Day of the BSH Future Home accelerator powered by Techstars was on April 29, you can find the pitch that was presented here for those who missed it:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbFA8jrNMME&feature=youtu.be
- During Covid19 we lost 90% of bookings and our team left as well. At once we had no team, no customers, and I had no visa… Quiet a stressful time isn’t it? But when I thought we needed to close our houses, we worked extra hard, Christine stepped up from community leader to be doing literally everything needed during the chaotic times we went through, Keerthana and Monika stepped up from their internship with us last winter to sales and marketing, an existing customer Noel stepped up as community leader. Serendipity struck again. #SerendipiaLife 🌈🚀🦄 Our team is now led by amazing women from diverse cultures. #DiversityMatters #BlackLivesMatter… We, at Serendipia, are standing up to build an inclusive community as part of our mission and this is literally what saved us. Grateful. 🙏INCLUSIVITY IS POWER.
- In the effort to cut out costs during COVID we decided to switch to no-code tools to build our prototype platform that we aim to release in September. So now we are getting used to Bubble.ioand Webflow to be able to iterate fast, be adaptive, and have our beta customers/investors to try out. Indeed, notable companies entered Y Combinator and went until Series A with it, which we aim to do.
- Fundraising-wise: It has been heartwarming to receive a lot of requests from Demo Day to build a relationship and work on the vision and mission of Serendipia together. We came into Techstars willing to raise a seed but the accelerator thought and showed us we had the resources we needed, for now, to build our platform V1, test out beta customers, and start to have paying customers. We aim to raise our seed round when the above milestones are reached. Aimed end 2020/start 2021. For the new potential investors and new friends now following us, welcome to Serendipia! Let’s reinvent the ways we live together! ☮️🤩
- We kept having interviews and inbound demands from potential beta customers
2) KPIs.
After losing more than $100,000 of our revenue and a booking cancellation reached to 90% or 2020 in 1 month from March 10 to April 10, we can be proud to say that we are back in positive momentum, as you can see below:
- May is closing with $5,090.39 in revenue and a 27% occupancy rate. (The worst month in the history of the company, even May 2016 our very first month was closing with $6000+ in revenue😅)
- June is projected at $12,220.79 in revenue and 75.98% of the occupancy rate as well.
- July is projected at $13,623.32. in revenue and 70.69% of occupancy rate. (Notice the daily price increase already)
- Despite circumstances we stay SuperHost on Airbnb for 12 months in a row, placing us in the top 1% of Airbnb hosts worldwide. We keep an average review of more than 4.8 stars.
- We have a list of 5 beta customers ready to try out our platform V1.
3) Roadblock(s)
- Keep the momentum going with a remote team and 9 hours of time zone difference. (Imagine the miracle we accomplished in that situation by the way)
- Bubble and Webflow learning curve. (Which will save us much time once on track)
4) Ask(s)
BLACK LIVES MATTER. ☮️🙏🌈