PushInterview 12:
How Blaze and Sanchit built StayUncle- A couple-friendly hotel booking website generating $160k per month
Though India has progressed rapidly in the past ten years, it still attracts a lot of stereotypes.
“Stereotypes related to unmarried couples” leads the lot.
A relationship between unmarried couple is considered as impious in the Indian society, and those who seek privacy are often harassed and judged.
Couples are usually left with no options as they are beaten up at public places and denied hotel rooms if they are not married.
Read through this interview to know:
How Blaze and Sanchit solved this problem and built StayUncle- A couple-friendly hotel booking website generating $160k per month.
This is the twelfth interview of the series “PushInterview: Interviews that help you Pushstart” powered by Pushstart.
Check out our previous interview on “How I built one of the most active startup communities in India” if you happened to miss it.
🕴Who are you?
Hey Pushstarters! I am Blaze Arizanov aka Blaze Uncle, co-founder and chief marketing manager at StayUncle.
The team members at StayUncle are addressed either as aunty or uncle!
I come from a small city called Strumica in Macedonia. I came to India for an AIESEC internship and soon started working for software development companies (mainly cloud computing and mobile app development).
Four years later, I left the corporate sector and dedicated myself to entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship was the most logical next thing to do for me, as I was not able to fit in the constrained corporate environment.
When I was about to leave India, I met Sanchit Sethi. A lengthy discussion with him made me join StayUncle; I have been living in Delhi since then.
🤔 What’s the deal with StayUncle?
StayUncle is a website for searching and booking couple friendly hotels.
Unmarried couples with local IDs are allowed to book rooms without being judged.
Couples can book the room either for the day slot or the night slot and pay accordingly.
The needs of an unmarried couple are different, and we have adapted our hotel rooms to cater to them.
We have services and products specifically designed for couples like do-not-disturb service, special love box, etc.
Recently, we launched rooms with bathtubs to spice things up.
💯 What motivated you to start StayUncle and how did you validate the idea?
Sanchit was working in Zuari Agrochemicals in Goa and was looking for some relevant ideas or rather problems to solve. He started by surveying people in his network.
Hotel bookings with flexible time slots emerged as a significant problem, and he set out to solve it.
When Sanchit contacted me two and a half years back, StayUncle was a website for business travelers who needed hotels for a few hours but were forced to pay for 24 hours.
A lot of unmarried couples used to approach us for rooms when we were running StayUncle for business travelers. I thought of investigating the reason behind it.
I found out that it was difficult for unmarried couples to get a hotel room. Not only were they denied rooms but also harassed and judged by the reception staff. Practically, unmarried couples had no safe place to go.
I told my team, this could be the opportunity that we had been waiting for all this while.
I always wanted to solve a problem for which I would give my everything. I felt that this was the problem that I could die for and came up with the idea of modifying StayUncle to become couple friendly.
We had an option to continue serving the existing customers and start our services for couples side by side. But I was against this idea as I wanted to solve this stereotypical problem wholeheartedly.
So we decided to pivot and reestablish the brand as a destination of couple friendly hotel rooms.
🛠 What all went into building the initial product?
Initially, apart from Sanchit and me, two people were into business development, and one lady helped us with customer support, marketing, and business development.
Our website when we launched the revamped version of StayUncle:
It took us three months to launch the basic version of the website and another six months to launch a fully functional product. The entire process was more like patching up the holes and revamping the website that we already had for travelers.
Sanchit’s father helped us a lot with the initial money. Later while we were trying to get more people to our website through linkedIn, we stumbled upon an opportunity.
Ajay Naqvi, former general manager at Coca-Cola, was looking to invest in startups, and he found our idea amusing.
The mail from Ajay Naqvi:
He liked our idea and invested 20 lakhs in StayUncle. This money lasted with us for not more than ten months, and sadly, we ended up achieving nothing substantial.
We spent all invested money foolishly on hiring the services of digital advertising agencies and were back to square one. That stage was very critical, and I remember surviving on bananas at times.
We handled the situation by saving up on every possible item and focussing only on activities which brought us revenue.
🤝 How did you get your initial clients (hotels) and how did it grow?
We faced a lot of opposition from the hotel owners when we started out.
- The hotel owners were worried that people in the society would judge them if they start accepting unmarried couples.
- They were confused and unsure about the laws regarding giving a hotel room to an unmarried couple. We had to clear the air and tell them that it was legal for an unmarried couple to book a hotel room.
We converted just two hotels out of the ten which we approached in the first month.
To overcome their fears, we started explaining them about the depth of problems faced by unmarried couples and the opportunity that we have to become the market leaders.
We showed them the progress companies like Airbnb have made in other countries with a similar concept.
These statistics along with our experience of seeing a huge influx of inquiries from unmarried couples helped us in convincing the next set of hotel owners.
Sanchit secured most of the first 30 hotels. I would accompany him whenever we were targeting a big hotel as the owners saw greater credibility and impact when they found a white man involved.
It took us around six months to onboard first 50 hotels.
Hotels profit scaled by 4x after partnering with us. This progress was enough to facilitate our process of onboarding other hotels. Now more than 50% of hotels approach us on their own.
Currently, we have 900 hotels across 40+ cities in India.
🤝 How did you get your initial users and how did it grow?
The first few customers we got were from the inquiries that we received while we were functional for travelers.
Soon we started running digital marketing campaigns on Facebook. Here is an example of our most successful digital marketing campaign back then:
The campaign went viral; media caught it, and our phone lines went mad. But despite the buzz, we didn’t get much of sales. So we decided to switch to 100% sales mode by going on the street.
We started this by going out and distributing visiting cards to people in areas that were hot spots for couples and youngsters.
We distributed around 5k visiting cards.
On one of these card distribution nights, a journalist from Quartz India picked up our card, found the concept to be interesting and decided to do a cover story on StayUncle.
The tagline on our card was- ‘Couples need a room, not a judgment.’
We got the much-required push after this coverage, and our growth journey began.
Now we run digital marketing campaigns on Facebook and Instagram:
We regularly organize competitions to keep our followers engaged and retained.
We make memes and posters around trending topics to stay in the league.
We regularly share dating and relationship advice through blogs and FB live to maintain a connection with our users.
We crossed 35k unique customers recently, and our website has over 200k visitors per month.
We faced a dip when OYO introduced the concept of couple friendly hotels in August last year. It was temporary as they couldn’t match up with us and propagate the idea that well.
One thing that differentiates us from other players in the market is “We are dedicated to solving problems of unmarried couples and not everyone.”
💰 What is your business model and how have you grown your revenue?
We buy hotel rooms and sell them by applying a markup. The model is based on the margin that we get in the process.
I remember we didn’t take any money from the company for the first year.
StayUncle is profitable and clocking $160k monthly recurring revenue.
🏁 What are your future goals and how do you plan to achieve them?
We don’t own any hotels right now; we have partnerships. We aim to open our chain of hotels in the near future. They would be our own ‘Love Hotels’.
We will provide more flexible time slots and better couple friendly products once we have the ownership.
The first step towards achieving this aim is to gauge the target market accurately. Next would be to seek funding by showing investors the scope in this market.
A family might travel twice or thrice a year for a holiday, but a couple might want love stays every week. The scope in this market is immense.
🌋 The biggest challenges you have faced till now and how did you cope with them?
We want to introduce things like love box having condoms, toys, etc. for couples but, it is difficult to get the partner hotels to agree to our concepts.
So introducing a new feature is always a challenge.
Our penetration in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities is also challenging as it takes a long time to break the stereotypes.
Many times we find trolls related to us on the internet, but we take them in a stride and get past them.
We have to be careful in verifying our customers and eliminate any possible wrongdoing that can happen.
🗒 What is your advice to Pushstarters starting out?
- Look out for a problem that really needs a solution. Look for something to die for and do it with full dedication.
- Have a personal aspect attached to your startup idea.
Thanks a lot for reading! If you liked it, please support by clapping 👏🏻 and sharing the post. Feel free to leave a comment 💬 below.
Want to become part of India’s most active startup community?
Send a request on Pushstart and become part of our ever-growing family.
Hey! Neeraj here, the founder of Pushstart, India’s most active entrepreneur community. I release interviews with successful entrepreneurs every week. Feel free to reach out to me on Facebook | Linkedin | neeraj.joshi@pushstart.in | Twitter.
- By Anjali Arora and Neeraj Joshi
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 317,238+ people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here.
