Hotelify
Philly based SaaS B2B2C startup, Hotelify, is combining luxury, convenience, and urban living in the name of embracing the experience economy, and we are here for it.
It’s an 11°F morning and you are already running late to your first client call. You walk into the kitchen to discover that you just ran out of coffee and toast, and the living room curtain rod you recently installed fell to the ground overnight… Oh, and Tiny, your Irish Wolfhound mix is impatiently waiting for a morning walk, as you receive a text from your boss asking why you aren’t on Zoom.
Luckily, you have an app on your phone to solve every one of these inconveniences: UberEats will get your breakfast in 20, a Wag dog-walker can grab Tiny, and there is a TaskRabbit handyman available within the hour.
What if your building could do all of this for you?
Oliver Spalding, Wharton MBA ’23, began working on Hotelify in the months leading up to matriculation with one goal in mind: building a next-gen resident experience.
Setting up to address a disjointed and inefficient apartment services landscape.
Apartment services face two core issues:
It is difficult for residents to vet quality and price across crowded vendor marketplaces online.
There is currently no way to have one vendor service an entire building - providing economies of scale to both the vendor and the resident.
Hotelify’s resident portal features a digital marketplace with pre-negotiated community prices for high-rise tenants to revolutionize the way we interact with vendors. In essence, it “hotelifies” properties by bringing hotel-like services to residents’ doors, including room service, laundry services, and housekeeping.
Access to concierge services as an opportunity to support all transacting parties: residents, property managers, and local businesses.
By identifying quality vendors and negotiating bulk discounts prior to platform onboarding, Hotelify creates value on three fronts. First, vendors are incentivized to join to improve their unit economics, as access to multiple tenants in the same property will change the current model from 1-to-1 to 1-to-many. Second, building management can leverage the platform to elevate the property brand with a low-cost amenity. Third, residents enjoy cost savings given the pre-negotiated rates.
A fragmented market poised for disruption.
Existing services are largely delivered by small, local service providers or large nationwide marketplaces, all of which are dominated by a 1-to-1 model. Hotelify is focused on redefining the $50+ billion home services market, by allowing high quality vendors to be the trusted suppliers of communities, improving the resident experience and driving down cost for all.
Hotelify launched an initial beta in October and the product is currently live with four high rises in Miami and Philadelphia, several of which belong to the nation’s largest luxury property management groups.
A campus-based entrepreneurial ecosystem bringing together a diverse team.
Prior to Wharton, Oliver worked as a Director of Business Development at Groups Recover Together - a series C stage, mission-driven healthcare company focused on fighting Opioid Use Disorder in underserved communities. Before Groups, Oliver spent five years working in venture capital and private equity. He met Scott Hsu, Hotelify’s operations lead, working on a group project for an innovation class at Wharton. The two joined Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program-Community (VIP-C) where they met additional teammates: Kareem Itani and Harmony Xu. Kareem now leads partnerships with property managers and formerly worked in enterprise sales and strategy at Mastercard. Harmony leads Product and Growth after having worked in consumer growth at Instacart, Lyft, and LinkedIn.
From left to right: Kareem, Oliver, Harmony, and Scott.
So, what’s next?
The team has focused on bootstrapping the product to its initial launch and developing relationships with clients. Looking forward to building off its successful launch in its first four buildings, Hotelify plans to expand operations in Philadelphia, South Florida, and two new markets by the end of 2022. “We are extremely proud of the incredible building partners who have adopted us and the amazing vendors we work with,” Oliver shared. “It is our belief that if we continue to foster communities within the properties we work with and focus on continuing to create a more sustainable and convenient resident experience, good things will continue to happen”.
If you are interested in learning more about Hotelify, get in touch: Oliver@joinhotelify.com