I founded my first company, a content platform around TV shows, at 18. After I sold it, I focused on marketing in the media industry for many years. What led me to misterb&b is that I had a terrible experience booking a short-term rental. I’d booked a private room on a mainstream platform with my partner. When we arrived at the destination, the host was very uncomfortable having two gay guys sleeping in a room together. After that very awkward and sad experience, I decided to create misterb&b so my community would not face this kind of situation anymore, and we can feel welcome and safe everywhere we travel in the world.

The company was launched in France at the end of 2013. We had difficulty raising institutional money there because we served the gay market, so we moved the company to Silicon Valley where we finalized a series of seed rounds totalling  $2M in early 2015. Then, we were invited into world class startup incubator 500 Startups in San Francisco. That was definitely a milestone. After Demo Day, we raised another $2.5M round in December 2015. It was also during 500 Startups that we brought in our first marketing expert and learned so much about how to grow the platform and how to better balance supply and demand in the marketplace.
 
In 2017, we raised $8.5M in our Series A round and that same year, we reached 1 million USD in transactions per month. 

In June 2018, for Pride, Apple featured misterb&b as App of the Day. We are the first gay app named App of the Day. And that's because they believed in our mission and purpose and were willing to associate their brand with ours.
 
misterb&b now has offices on three continents. We have more than 210,000 hosts in over 135 countries, and we continue to grow. 

As a sharing economy company, we believe our community of hosts and guests should have the opportunity to invest in the company’s growth. We want to give the community the opportunity to be part of our success. The funds will mostly be used to accelerate the integration of gay-friendly hotels in our inventory and to drive demand for this new offering.

The success of misterb&b is partly due to the fact that we are a gay operated company for gay people which creates trust and loyalty from our users. Our business is mostly done with private room listings, where guests and hosts can connect while traveling. It’s basically easier for a gay traveler to get insights about the city he’s visiting from a gay host. Helping people make a personal connection, not only with the local culture but with the local people, is how we give back to the global gay community. Our unique value proposition is so strong that we bring new exclusive hosts to the sharing economy. We think that life is about connections and helping create a more welcoming world.

If a mainstream platform launches tags like “LGBT welcome” it will make all the other listings that didn’t check this "LGBT Welcome" box homophobic. We don’t think it makes a lot of sense.

The first KPI is Growth Monthly Volume summing the total transactions coming through the platform. As I mentioned, last year, we were doing more than $1 million USD in total transactions per month. Then, there’s the number of hosts we have -- over 210,000. These are our main KPIs, along with measuring repeat business. That’s a very strong KPI for a company like us. Currently, more than 50% of our business comes from guests who have previously booked on the platform. That’s a huge number.

Hosts can be on multiple platforms. It's the same way someone could be a Lyft driver and an Uber driver at the same time. It's just distribution for them. It’s to their advantage. 

From a guest standpoint, it's about awareness. We had to make sure that people knew that we existed and then whether or not someone felt the need to travel or stay gay, et cetera. What we didn't anticipate was that we were actually bringing new people into the sharing economy. There are many people in the LGBTQ community who had space in their home that they wanted to share, but they would not put it up on a mainstream platform because they wouldn’t want a stranger coming into their home without knowing how they would react or how they would treat them. As it turned out, the majority of our hosts are not on any other platform. They just did not feel comfortable using mainstream platforms and welcoming random people into their homes.
 
On the demand side, you have a traveler looking at misterb&b, booking.com, Expedia, and other sites. They're comparing their options, and they're going to make a decision based on location, price, community affinity, and that trust and safety.
 
So, it's on us to ensure that our community understands that we're an option and that we're here. You know, please consider us, but we certainly understand if there's price sensitivity and we don't have the right price listing available in that city for them at that particular time. This is one of the reasons we will add hotel rooms to our inventory.

For our community, what we have learned is that the first thing hosts look at is that to connect with the community. That comes first for them, before making money. What they want is to be able to host their community and show them the city. So, all the messaging we use is focused on community and connection. 

For guests, what works is messaging about connecting, making new friends, being able to stay like a local, and get host tips. Because, for us as a community, when we travel, sometimes it's hard to connect and find where the good things to see and visit are and where the gay scene is. It’s easy to find lists of bars on the internet, but how do people actually live in the city and participate in the gay scene. This is of interest to our guests. This works to connect the community.

And like every tech platform we use the major social networks to recruit hosts and guests.

The total addressable market on the short-term rental for the LGBTQ community is around $16B today. We continue to expand to more cities. Also, members of the gay community who were previously mostly using hotels where they felt safe, are discovering short-term rental. We are just opening the market! We have no competitor in the US. It’s a huge, huge market, and our goal is to become the largest booking platform catering to our community, not only for short-term rentals, but also for hotels, and to continue to expand in other vertical markets. So, for us, this is just the beginning. 

The LGBTQ community is a premium segment in the travel industry. Many hotel chains, especially in the US, target this community because they travel more. They are not wealthier than anyone, but they have more money to spend on leisure, and most of the time, they don't have children. This community travels a lot, especially off-season. 

We feel that misterb&b has the potential to go beyond short-term rentals and become a comprehensive travel hub for the LGBTQ community.

We recently launched Experiences helping travelers discover their destinations from a new perspective with gayborhoods tours, clandestine dinner parties, photography lessons, etc. We also now offer tickets to gay parties in targeted European cities.

In terms of content, we already have an entire section dedicated to gay city guides, gay events and also a gay travel blog. And there’s much more we can do to help travelers decide on their future destinations.

If you consider accommodations only, our next move is to grow inventory by adding hotel rooms. At some point, it could make sense to add cabins on gay cruises. And there are plenty of other travel-related services to consider in the future.
 

Yes, hotel rooms will be the next big milestone. The idea is to offer hotels in cities where we don't have enough inventory. We will connect to hotel APIs, grow the inventory and increase the business. We’ll have our content team reviewing and curating the hotels to ensure they are the right fit for our community. 

By adding LGBTQ-friendly hotel rooms to our inventory, we stay true to our unique value proposition, helping LGBTQ travelers to connect (by knowing if other misterb&b guests will stay at the same hotel, allowing them to get in touch if their dates coincide) and to travel safe wherever they go (since our team selected truly LGBTQ-friendly hotels and that our community will leave exclusive reviews from LGBTQ travelers).

With this crowdfunding round, we will be able to connect with hotels around the world in all our top cities and offer very competitive pricing compared to Booking.com or Expedia. It will have a direct impact on our gross monthly volume. As you can see, it’s a big opportunity for the community to travel safely and feel welcome in even more places around the world.

We also recently launched misterb&b gift cards. Now you can give your loved ones the freedom to book a gay welcoming/friendly home or private room in a host’s space throughout the world for their dream vacation. 

With our Series A, we grew the team from 20 to 50 people. We doubled our Customer Service team, hired a CMO and grew our marketing team, and built a Data Science and a Legal team. With the Series A completed we believe the company will be profitable within two years. The idea with this crowdfunding round is to accelerate growth with the hotels project. A small percent will go to technical integration and legal aspects of the hotel sales, because in some countries, we’ll need a travel agent license to be able to offer hotel rooms.  But most of the money will be a marketing spend around gay and gay-friendly hotels. 

I would say our main mistake is that we did no anticipate that it would be so difficult to raise institutional money in France because we were serving the gay market. We lost many months until we understood that our only way out was to raise funds in the US. If we had to do it again, we would start the project directly in the US and not in France.

Today, the municipalities are targeting private owners with dedicated apartments for short-term rental. They don’t target people who live in their homes and rent it for a few days or a few weeks a year. Most of our business is done on private rooms therefore we are much less impacted by these regulations. This is a strength for us. 

What's also a strength is that where regulations do affect us, we abide by them and we have negotiated agreements with an increasing number of cities, in the US or in Europe.

We hired a new CMO a few months ago, who comes from the hospitality industry. We will continue to grow and put an emphasis on marketing and retention (CRM, loyalty program, referrals etc.). Additional key hires will focus on the product.

What keeps me up at night is my ability to continue to protect my community around the world. I think that more than ever, we need to be able to provide a safe way for the community to travel around the world. This is really key and we spend a lot of money and effort on delivering this promise.  

I don't see that any mainstream player will launch a vertical brand. They are focused on building their own brand and proving they are inclusive. So, we don't see that as a threat. 

There's an interesting corollary if you look at online dating. Eharmony did not allow men to search for men or women to search for women, they were sued and forced to create another site that was for the gay community. Needless to say, it lacked trust and credibility, and it wasn't used, so it died. You look at Jdate, which is for the Jewish community. Why can they thrive and still exist to this day with so much competition? It really goes to credibility and trust in community. So, our community, like any community that's marginalized, understands when they're being pandered to or when they're just being tolerated. We also know when we're being authentically celebrated and welcomed by a company such as misterb&b, which was created by and for the community.
 

Because they know that 2 of the 3 co-founders are gay. Because they see it in our advertising, in the events that are promoted on our page, and the experiences that we promote locally. 

What we do is helping our community connect and travel safely and understand what it’s like to live like a gay local, and that means more than just knowing where the gay bars are. 

Giving Back thru mister for good
Last year, through the mister for good initiative, we supported 5 non profits fighting for LGBTQ rights. This year, through mister for good, we will also support a LGBTQ entrepreneur by incubating his startup Rainbold Society in our Paris office. Stéphane Sauvé’s dream  is to design and develop the “House of Diversity” : an inclusive, cross generational co-housing project tailored for the older LGBTQ community (but open to all) and designed to help LGBTQ elders age better, without discrimination. Through donations, office space and mentorship, misterb&b helps Stéphane make his project happen.

One way we build credibility is by having reviews, where you can see thousands guests and hosts experiences. Another way our guests get user-generated content is when they talk with their gay hosts and get trendy local recommendations from them. But we also have an editorial approach. I mean, we look at the major gay events around the world, and we're bringing them to our city guides. So, I would say that we have a combined approach. Online, we curate and edit, but offline, you interact with the community, and when you travel, you get their particular point of view.

User-generated content is tough because it requires solid guidelines and monitoring. It's kind of a lot to take on operationally. But we have “mister of the week” tips with hosts sharing what they like to do in their city. So, when you search on misterb&b, you will be able to learn from locals about the trendiest places to go.

This is key to differentiate ourselves from mainstream players because we provide so much content around gay interests when it comes to destinations and recommendations.

At the beginning, misterb&b was focused on the gay male market because we know this market very well. Now, misterb&b is pushing toward diversifying. We are open to the entire LGBTQ community and allies. We are  focused on the gay market, and we are open to anyone who accepts our LGBTQ community..

Early on we discovered that about 5% of our bookings were done by straight women. We looked into it and asked them why they were booking on misterb&b. We discovered that there were really two reasons. One was safety. Some women feel safer staying at a gay guy’s house. And the other thing is fun. They think it's going to be more fun and fashionable and trendy.
 
So, from the beginning, we've had women traveling on the platform, we're targeting that audience and we find that interesting. Obviously, if we pushed the scale too far, and 80% of the travelers were women, we’d lose our specific focus. But we do have women travelers using our platform, and we actually have women as hosts as well. One host happens to be one of our best in Hell's Kitchen in New York, she does a ton of bookings, and I believe she's heterosexual. So, anyone can travel and host on the platform, but everyone has to indicate that they're either part of our community or friendly to it, period.

We've never had any homophobic issue or incidents to report, except for the usual hate messages on social media. I've seen on social media where an angry guy has said, “Why am I getting this?" because he’s receiving our ads. Some other times, it's just plain homophobic slurs. But we've never received threats. Maybe it will happen because we intensify our PR efforts across the world. But look, if we have an article somewhere, and we get these homophobic comments, they will just make people realize that misterb&b is really needed. If people still say homophobic things about us, it means that misterb&b is still something that needs to exist.

Winning is when our community wins. In terms of exit, that could include being bought by a mainstream player or a gay player. There could be an acquisition from within the travel industry. There’s also an option to go public at some point.

The best exit option will be the one that will allow misterb&b to continue to serve the community. This is essential for us.

misterb&b is not just another business. We have a purpose and we have had it at heart since the beginning. This is what has been driving the co-founding team all along and allowed us to be so successful so far. This commitment to our dream is also why I see us continue to grow and scale and why our company is headed toward continued success.