The Real Scoop Behind Hospitality Daily - Josiah Mackenzie x Zach Busekrus / Behind The Stays

Josiah:
Zach Busekrus has one of the best hospitality podcasts I've come across. It's called Behind the Stays. And like its name suggests, he gets the backstory of some of the coolest people in hospitality and does a deep dive into how they built what they built. That's why I was thrilled and very honored when he reached out and asked to do a story on Hospitality Daily. The inside story of everything that led up to it and the opportunity I saw here for all of us and where we're going. Zach graciously allowed me to share a conversation that was originally published on Behind the Stays on this podcast that's coming up in a minute. But I do encourage you to subscribe to Behind the Stays podcast in your podcast player and check them out on YouTube as well. He has created and shared some of the most beautiful stories I've seen in hospitality. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Zach.

Josiah:
There's a great documentary series on Netflix from Arnold Schwarzenegger's life where the one thing that stood out to me was this notion of being useful. And I feel like I watched it a couple of months ago, but it's just stayed with me. And I think it factors into what I'm doing now as I try to think about, regardless of what you're up to in this world, what does it look like to be useful? And so I think that helped me back then with that site. And it's been really interesting as I've seen the Hospitality Daily community grow as well over the past year and a half.

Zach:
Welcome to Behind the Stays, a podcast that shares the stories behind your favorite Airbnbs, boutique hotels and hospitality brands and the hosts, operators and entrepreneurs who have brought them to life. Every Tuesday and Friday you'll meet the military veterans, the retired flight attendants, tech entrepreneurs, the school teachers, the single moms, and the real estate investors who are all, in their own unique ways, shaping the future of travel and hospitality. Discover how these visionaries from all over the world have built chic cabins in the mountains, designed bohemian bungalows on the beach, erected eclectic off-grid and nature immersed escapes, and so much more. Behind the Stays is brought to you by Sponstayneous, the internet's best destination for last minute Airbnb deals. You can subscribe for free at sponstayneous.com. And I'm your host, Zach Busekrus, co-founder and CEO of Sponstayneous. All right, friends, enjoy the show. Where does the story of Hospitality Daily actually begin?

Josiah:
Yeah, so it's hard to pinpoint an exact moment. I feel like it is something that I've been building towards my whole career and I am pulling from different elements of my career experiences and life experiences to create it. I spent about a decade helping build technology companies that ended up serving tens of thousands of hotels and other businesses in the hospitality and travel industry. And what I found from that is what initially got me into the industry was that fascination with travel. I spent a little bit of time working at this small property on the California coast. I love the lifestyle and how engaged and alive I felt providing hospitality. I wanted to get involved in that, I wanted to spend my career doing that. I wanted to do that at scale as well, so I ended up working for technology companies that were serving the industry.
What I found is that a lot of times, especially get into these larger organizations working in "hospitality", and I'm using air quotes there, would often be working in the basement of some suburban office park and spending all day in spreadsheets and bad fluorescent lighting. And so regardless of how corporate your work environment is, my takeaway there is a lot of folks had gotten initially excited about hospitality and then over time, lost the vision and the magic and the excitement of what it means to be in hospitality and travel. And if you think about that, it's a huge opportunity because it's so exciting. I think if we think about that, our listeners think about that, probably a lot of the peak moments in their lives were around a hospitality business.
So that could be a lodging business, it might be a restaurant, but hospitality is often the stage or the backdrop of all these incredible peak life moments. And as hospitality providers, we get a chance to participate in that, help create it and make people's lives the better for that. But we can't lose sight of that. So that's initially, or not initially, but what ended up inspiring me to start Hospitality Daily about a year and a half ago. And every day I talk to a new person in the hospitality industry broadly. A lot of hoteliers, but there's a lot of people from across the ecosystem, sometimes people in creative practices or people who used to work in hospitality. And the whole goal is to help you start every day excited to work in this space and excited to innovate.

Zach:
Wow, dude, that's impressive. And I think you're scratching a really important need. Hospitality, it's very much like a sexy business. And yet a lot of the times, to your earlier point, when you're working in it, and full disclosure, I've never actually worked in a proper hotel or anything like that, but I can imagine it's high burnout. When you're dealing with people all day and especially when you're dealing with people, yes, peak excitement, but also peak expectation of what kind of service they're going to get. And if you fail to meet that expectation in whatever category you fall into, that's problematic. People will let you know that you failed them.
People are very quick with their words when they are served an experience that they did not sign up for. And so I love what you're doing because I think the mission is so pure. It's so important to get people, to really remind people we're humans and our memories are terrible. We need constant affirmation and reminder that we're doing something that matters and we're doing something that's actually meaningful. So love the mission. How the heck do you produce daily content though? I produce a fair amount of content myself and it is freaking hard, dude. There's no way I could do it daily. What does your workflow look like?

Josiah:
Yeah. I'm happy to get into workflow. But I think at a high level you have to stay excited and interested in it. And so I think when this stop's becoming fun and interesting, I won't be involved in this. So for me, I want this to be my life's work. I want this to be what I'm doing for the rest of my life, which is a very tall order. And so every decision, from the big ones to the small ones, is designed around how do I maintain longevity? How do I maintain excitement?

Zach:
Wow.

Josiah:
I do love talking to people from all walks of life that are engaged in the practice, but also the business of providing hospitality. And so that gives me energy and I really enjoy that. But it's really important for our listeners to think about wherever you are in this ecosystem, to stay connected to that, otherwise we're going to burn out. And so that's something I think a lot about. But I think to your point around the details of how I do this. Yes, I do about half my interviews virtually, so people all over the world. Just before this, I was recording with somebody in Madrid. And so of course the beauty of technology helps bridge that distance. And then after this, I'm going downtown San Francisco and interviewing someone in person, so I enjoy those.
It's a whole different experience. Get a little coffee before and we spend time together. So I enjoy that whole range of experiences. But I think I spent a decade in a marketing role and used to oversee teams of people that were creating content and got a chance to see that. I actually started, early in my career, I ran a blog and website that was focused on helping tell the stories of others. So I've been in and around this and seen this for a lot of different angles and I've seen what parts tend to work well. But it's always an experiment. I find even month over month things change so much. So I think it's more helpful to think of it from the perspective of what am I trying to do here? What's the why? How do I make this sustainable and exciting? And then how do I keep experimenting around maybe fresh ways of sharing these stories?

Zach:
One of the big challenges that I face, and I feel like a lot of folks who are listening to this conversation, most of whom are short-term rental entrepreneurs, they might have a portfolio of unique stays. They might have just raised a bunch of money and they're going to go develop a collection of unique stays. They might just be starting out in their journey and they've got one or two short-term rentals that maybe they're exclusive to Airbnb at this juncture, but they want to build a real hospitality brand, so they want to build a direct booking strategy and whatnot. The folks that tune into this conversation are pretty entrepreneurial, but again, most of them fall into that short-term rental category. I know that your experience extends far beyond vacation rentals, and so I want to pick your brain on that a little bit.
But one of the big questions I have for you as a content creator is how you decide on the right format of content? Because I am a podcaster, simply because I like to talk, I connecting with people, and I like long form discussion. When it comes to short form content, I'm horrible. I cannot, for the life of me, put together a really good reel. So many of my friends are freaking amazing at it. And I see a lot of folks that listen to this show who've built these incredible brands on Instagram, and I'm like, I could never do that. And so how do you think through content formats, specifically because you have a very story-driven approach as well. You've got this whole humans of hospitality shtick going on. And so how do you come to figure out what format makes the most sense for the mission that you have?

Josiah:
It's a good question because processing this is obviously much bigger than you and I. I think for everybody listening to this, there's an opportunity. So whether you're involved in short-term rentals or something else, or you just love the format of the show here and that's why you're listening, it's really important for all of us to think about what does it look like to share the things that are important to us? And I find that helps build momentum in whatever direction you're going. So if it's developing short-term rental properties, that could build momentum there. If it's something else, it's probably going to help you. Because what happens is you're able to clarify your thoughts as you're sharing, you're able to develop this community of like-minded people and you learn from them and you grow.
And I find it's been really helpful on that level. To your question though, of what format do you decide? I think the approach that you took is actually a really good one, to think about it's a certain level of self-awareness of saying, I enjoy conversations, probably an audio or video format is going to be useful for me. Others enjoy the short format of X, formerly known as Twitter, and so it's all about that. And I spent the last couple of years when I was working in a technology environment for a company called Juniper Square, which is a real estate investment management platform. And that community I found to be highly active on X/Twitter. I don't know when we stopped saying X instead of Twitter.

Zach:
X/Twitter, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Josiah:
But I think the point is, I would say it's sort of this combination of what format you enjoy, and then also I would say on a practical side, a little bit of where's the community of people talking about what you're talking about? And I think there's a really strong short-term rental community there. But I would say that probably, if the goal is to engage people in the topic you're talking about, to think a little bit about the place that you have these conversations or share what you're making.

Zach:
Yeah, yeah. No, I think you're 100% right. I was talking to a very well-known podcaster in the tech ecosystem, and one of the things he told me, which has really stuck with me is you have to be talking about things that you really care about, not what you think other people care about. And that's one of the hardest things when it comes to creating content, because you can think, oh, well, the thing that I'm interested in, how many people really care about this? Or like for me, I'm a brand nerd, and so I really, really like branding. But not everyone wants to listen to a conversation about branding every week and how that intersects. I think the intersection of branding and hospitality is super, super interesting. If I had a show just about that, I don't know, maybe 10 people would listen to it every week. Who knows?
But I found what is super helpful is when it comes to thinking about the conversation that you do want to have with a guest, making sure that we'll just use a very tangible example, Josiah, you've done a lot. You've had a really cool career in hospitality. We could talk all about the hospitality tech companies that you worked at. I really want to talk to you about content and where you're going and how you're thinking about developing an audience and community and whatnot, because that's selfishly just what I'm interested in. And so when you're talking to another person, people are layered. People have a whole collection of life experiences. You don't need to do a quick little SparkNotes version of who Josiah is. You can pick, hey, here's a chapter in Josiah's life story that he's writing right now. And you could dive just into that chapter without spending much time acknowledging the chapters that came before.
And I think that that's hard to do, especially in the context of an interview style podcast, where you're trying to prove to your listeners that the person I'm talking to is worth listening to. If you've been here for a while, you at least will tolerate me as your host. But I want them to understand that the people that I bring onto this show, I think are interesting and therefore, I think that they should think are interesting. But it's really tempting to craft content around what you think will perform well versus just crafting content around what you're actually interested in. And yet, every time I do find a conversation that I'm really just interested in, I have way more fun and I hope the listeners have more fun. So anyways, that was a soapbox moment. But thank you for your patience while I unraveled that.

Josiah:
If I could just add one to one thing to that. You and I were talking privately around, this is sort of the big fallacy of just looking at numbers is it totally misses who we're engaging with and being valuable to, maybe it's an individual person. And so if we're just looking at, okay, there's these dozens or hundreds or thousands of people that interacted with this thing I put out there, that doesn't make it necessarily more valuable. And so I think that's where if you combine those two things, it's really fascinating. To your point of this is interesting to me and also potentially, I find that you'll attract really high quality people that are aligned with your interests and what you're doing. So it is sort of this perfect combination.

Zach:
Yeah, yeah. And one of the things that I do think is challenging from a guest acquisition, if you will, standpoint of bringing people onto the podcast, it can be tempting to go and just find people, and you probably get this too. You get people that are DMing you and saying, "Hey, can I come on?" And some of these people or their PR people, they've got big followings, they're big names or whatever. But you're like, I know the conversation this person is going to have on the podcast, they've been on every other podcast recently. They don't necessarily need to come on this show too and give me the same story. And so I find that figuring out if you are going to bring on a more popular figure in this space, how do you design a podcast interview that's very different than the other ones that they were just on?
And that requires work for you as the host upfront to basically be like, okay, they were asked all these, the five to 10 basic questions that every podcaster asked the guests, how do I not ask them any of those questions? And yet, if you do that and it's successful, people notice. And people are like, "Oh my gosh, that was like, thank you for challenging that person, or thank you for not asking like, 'So tell me about your life story,' for the third time." So anyways, we can stop nerding out about podcasting and content creation. But at the end of the day, I think the big takeaway that I'm trying to communicate to folks is if you care about creating any sort of content, if you think that that's important to your brand, it's really just not worth your time trying to create content for what you think other people will enjoy. Create content for what you enjoy. And I think that you'll naturally and organically attract the right audience to come along with you for the ride.

Josiah:
Yeah. And I guess something I maybe see a little bit differently is it's not just... Well, let me say it this way. I think we all need to be content creators in a sense of we all need to be talking publicly about what we're doing, what we're learning, what we're interested in. And so everybody works in marketing, whether they know it or not. We're all in this environment of communicating, persuading, educating people around us on what's possible. And sometimes that might be for business partners and collaborators, it may be for guests that you're trying to attract to your properties. But the people that I see really thriving, succeeding really focus on that. And their title is not always marketing. It's more they understand to do anything in this world, you need to be out there in sharing what you're up to.

Zach:
Yeah. Well, speaking of marketing, you founded a company called Hospitality Marketing Strategies, I believe. And it looks like you worked on this company for a few years. What ended up happening to that? And I guess how does marketing intersect with your career within the context of hospitality?

Josiah:
So it sort of came about in a bit of an unexpected way. Basically throughout high school, I taught myself to code. I built a couple of software products. And what I was finding is that, okay, that was all well and good, but until you sold anything, it was kind of like, well, great, it's listed out there on some website and you're not making any money. And so I became fascinated by marketing and specifically digital marketing through that. And so it was the early days of Google Ads and things like that. And I taught myself how that whole world works, and I was mowing lawns and shoveling snow off of driveways to make money. And so I had very little money, but I would invest some of that back into some Google Ads. You could buy some clicks and bought the software.
But anyway, it kind of exposed me the whole world of how do you get and convert attention online. And so through that and then kind of parallel, I was just fascinated by travel and hospitality. I, in college, had the chance to study abroad and just met so many great people through that. So these two things were happening simultaneously. And so what I was finding then, this was early days of Twitter, early days of Facebook and a lot of hospitality providers were thinking about what does it look like to engage on these platforms? And what piece does this play in how we provide hospitality? And so I basically said, "Hey, I want to go talk to people who are in this, doing this, experimenting here and see what they're up to." And that was the origin of it. It was basically conversations not unlike, this was about 15 years ago, but I think we were using Skype at the time. And we would jump on there and I would talk to them and I would write articles based on what I was hearing.
And I knew nothing, I think we were all trying to figure this out. Social media was brand new, and it showed the power of learning together and growing together. So it was a website, I think sometimes I wrote articles that were sort of roll-ups of things that I had learned. But I ended up working on that for a few years and growing. And a lot of that growth happened pretty organically. I was not super smart around monetizing it. And so I think later I understood a little bit more of you need to have some sort of business model built into what you're doing. And if it's just a pure play brand building exercise, that's great, but treat it as such. And so eventually what happened over a couple of years is it just sort of petered out. I was focusing all my time and energies on building these software companies. And so I think that was a big mistake in retrospect. And honest, I had a big community there and it just dissipated and ended up not going anywhere. And so I'm trying to do things a little bit differently now with Hospitality Daily.

Zach:
Wow, okay. Because it grew to be a fairly popular site. I think it was the number one hotel marketing website, at least at one juncture.

Josiah:
Yeah. There was about 70,000 unique monthly readers of the website, email and things like that. So a decent amount of folks that were listening and reading. It was more reading. It wasn't an audio show, but they were reading it. And so it was, I think, I focused on a lot of things. I would say the stories there and the nature of everybody learning from each other was influential in that. I did a lot of technical search optimization, CRM driven email marketing to subscribers and things like that.
So I think that played a role, but I think the biggest was the being useful. I think there's a great documentary series on Netflix from Arnold Schwarzenegger's life where the one thing that stood out to me was this notion of being useful. And I feel like I watched it a couple of months ago, but it's just stayed with me. And I think it factors into what I'm doing now as I try to think about, regardless of what you're up to in this world, what does it look like to be useful? And so I think that helped me back then with that site. And it's been really interesting as I've seen the Hospitality Daily community grow as well over the past year and a half.

Zach:
Yeah, yeah. Very, very impressive. And it's always funny when you tell stories like this. To think about how content marketing and really building a business around content marketing, it's still relatively new. People were creating content and people that content was being indexed by Google. I remember HubSpot was hugely influential in my career and my own learning on all things marketing. But I remember that was a decade ago, 10 years is not... Like a decade ago all this stuff was really, really, really, really, really new. People were creating content, it wasn't clear how to monetize it.
Obviously Google AdSense kind of came in and shook some things up there. But even then, this whole idea of being a podcaster as your career or being a newsletter creator, all that stuff, having a following on X, that is really new. This is like in the last few years it's exploded and it might feel like everyone's trying to do it. But it's still super, super new. So anyways, I appreciate you sharing that story. I did want to ask Hospitality Daily, you've built up this really large following on LinkedIn, and I'm just curious about your platform choice. Was that super intentional? Did that happen organically or why LinkedIn as opposed to Twitter or Instagram or another platform?

Josiah:
LinkedIn has so much potential, and I think even now it's still underrated by so many people. A lot of the information sharing, community building that I used to see on X and still happens there to a large degree, I'm finding a lot of that is increasingly happening on LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time in the hotel world, so this might be, you have to think about where you're building and where those people are. But I think it really comes down to some of the elements of what we talked about before of the format that's interesting to you. And then think about the people that you want to associate with and learn with and grow together with, where are they spending time? And for me, that answer was LinkedIn. I was finding people were increasingly active there. So there's a little bit of the content format. Obviously LinkedIn, you can share video, you can share photos, you can share text updates.
But what I was also finding is I find it useful from a growth perspective to think about where algorithms or network effects can be in your favor. And so historically, X has been more algorithm driven around engagement of that content. And so the network still plays a role of course. But on LinkedIn I found from its early days is highly dependent on the social networks of people. And so if I think about, okay, I'm trying to tell a story of someone in this organization. If I do that, my whole goal with Hospitality Daily is to help us all be inspired and learn together. But when I'm interviewing someone, my goal for them is to help them tell their story in a way that they're proud of, excited by. This becomes something that is valuable for years and decades to come. I don't want it to be an ephemeral we created a story and it's gone.
I want to produce a really high quality story from what they're doing or what they've created. And so if both me and the person I'm speaking with are going to go to all this trouble and time and expense of creating this, I want the people that are important to them to be able to see it as well. And so this is where LinkedIn is interesting. Okay. So think about I do a story with you. It's all of the people that you know, and then that way, as the host of the show, I help you with your objective of telling your story to all the people you're connected with. And so maybe a little bit too in the weeds, but that's-

Zach:
No, this is good.

Josiah:
... why I focused on LinkedIn.

Zach:
Yeah, yeah, no, it's incredibly intentional. And I think that that you're spot on. It's funny, I think X has evolved into a place where at least a lot of folks from tech and startups tend to live and create content and interact with one another there. But I think that the startup ecosystem is certainly more prevalent on X, and I think the hospitality folks are. There's obviously the real estate folks are traditionally quite active on X as well. But I have seen this migration to LinkedIn, as LinkedIn, I think, has really done a good job at helping creators get content quite frankly, just seen, it seems like when you post on LinkedIn, impressions are significantly greater than that of any platform. And maybe that's just the fact that my audience isn't that large or whatever. But I see way more interaction and more engagement on LinkedIn than I do on X.
So it's super interesting. I did want to just pick your brain a little bit about what you think when you think about marketing right now. You've got a background in it, you built a resource for hospitality marketing, you've worked in technology companies in marketing capacities in this space, and now you're doing Hospitality Daily. But where do you see the biggest opportunities for folks right now? Are there secrets, whether it's like a platform secret, whether it's a, "Hey, this kind of content, I think, is performing really well and here's why." And/or just I see a lot of opportunity for folks to be having conversations about X, Y, or Z, and I don't see those conversations happening in a particular meaningful way. When you just take a step back and assess the current state of things, where, as a marketer, do you see the most opportunity?

Josiah:
Honestly, it's in what you said. You're really interested in brand. It comes down to brand. There's so many ways you could describe this. I think it's all about that strong differentiated point of view and not being afraid to get into whether you want to call it a segment or a niche or something else. But it's saying, "Hey, I've seen this. I observe this. I see potential to have this strong point of view. I'm going to build around it." And this is where it's really important to go back into the library of this show and listen to some of the people that you've spoken with, because I've seen this to be a consistent theme, which is super cool. I was listening yesterday to Eric, who has this bourbon lovers property. I was like, wait, bourbon lovers property. So niche. But I think this is the future, because especially as providers or hosts of properties that are smaller than maybe some of the big commercial box hotels, where you win is by almost big polarizing, where some people are going to love you and some people are going to hate you.
So lean into that. And I thinks it's also true if you have a larger hospitality business. You need to think about what it looks like in that context. But one person I spoke with that does business in the short-term rental space is Richard Fertig at Stomp Capital, and just a really interesting person on a lot of levels. But on the perspective of he'll go all out to create this edge camp sporting club, which is the most over the top niche focused experience, but people love it and they'll fly in on private jets for it. And there's an obsession that people have around this property that it's hard to imagine a hotel will have that level of... Or I would say, I mean like a big box branded hotel is going to have that level of loyalty. And so I think this is true in short-term rentals. This is true across all aspects of hospitality, and Eric obviously has a hotel. But I think this is the opportunity I see.

Zach:
Yeah, yeah, I think you're spot on. What I think is so interesting too, is that when it comes to creating something that is unique and distinct, a lot of the times, at least a lot of the folks who listen to this podcast regularly, you're building maybe a collection of really cool unique stays. You're typically not trying to build a hotel with 250, 350 rooms, meaning when it comes to occupancy, you really need three, four, or five, maybe seven people to stay in one of your seven units. And there's only so much room. The place is either booked or it's not.
And so if you can do the work of building a really cool brand around your collection, it's so much easier in one sense than what hotels have to do, which is meet a certain level of occupancy because they have this incredibly large building with hundreds of rooms to fill and lots of staff. You've got a bed that's either used or not used for a given night. And so I think that that framing can be helpful, and I hope, is also just a reinforcement of why doing the work to build something that is unique, doing the work to build an audience, especially if you are trying to build a true hospitality brand, why that is so worth it.
Because it's freaking hard. You look at some of these folks that I've had on the podcast, I'm sure you've talked to several of them as well. Richard's a great example, where you're like, how the heck does somebody do all of that? That's a ton of work. And how much money did you have to raise in order to bring that reality to life? But when you create something that is truly unique, and it is almost like this one of one experience, Ben Wolf from Monero, who I've had on the pod a couple of times, his whole mission is trying to build stays that are truly one of a kind, so that people want to go there to check it off their bucket list and be like, "Hey, I stayed at the Monarch," which is this butterfly inspired stay that he has in Fredericksburg.
And I think that on the one hand, that's totally ridiculous. Why would you do something like that? But on the other hand, it's like, okay, well hey, no one else has a Monarch. Ben's got a Monarch. So anyways, this whole idea of uniqueness, I think, is totally worth leaning into if you want to build a brand. If you just want to make a bunch of money investing in real estate, I would spend your time there and not worried about brand building because it is a lot of work. But if you really care about building something that is differentiated in hospitality, I think we're really just in the early innings of what unique really means.

Josiah:
Yeah, I'll make the case though for the other side of that. I don't think it's an either or situation. I think the biggest challenge in any business is being a commodity. And you lose pricing power, it becomes harder to build guest loyalty. And so yeah, you can make a lot of money as a real estate investor in some pretty boring businesses. I think that's a fine and good business. But I would say there's an equally interesting financial case as an investor to think about what does it look like to build a brand that's differentiated, that engenders guest loyalty, that earns referrals, that gets that organic word of mouth? So it might not be an either or situation.

Zach:
Yeah. No, you're 100% right, and I appreciate that clarification. I did want to ask, since you talk to so many people in hospitality, and I think your guests and really quite frankly, just like your network is significantly more diversified than mine, one of the behaviors I've observed, there's a lot of people right now who come from the short-term rental space who are trying to get into hotels. And they're building boutique hotels, or that's what they're talking about on X at least. And then you've got hotels that are recently merging into the short-term rental space. You've got homes and villas from Marriott. Hyatt, I believe just launched their own collection of short-term rentals. Why do you think this is happening? Is this just a sign of a dynamic ecosystem and marketplace, that hotels are coming into the short-term rental space, and then short-term rental operators are trying to now launch their own boutique hotels? Or what, from your perspective, is happening here?

Josiah:
Well, the answer is yes. I think that is a sign of a dynamic ecosystem. What's really fascinating to me is going to all these hotel investment conferences when Airbnb was first starting, there was a lot of fear, a lot of paranoia. And people on the hotel side saying, "Okay, this is the end of our..." Not the end of our business, "But this could really hurt us." And then watch it play out over the past, what has it been, 10, 12, 15 years? And to see, there's actually a really good article yesterday on Skift that Sean O'Neill wrote around Airbnb and hotels and the peaceful coexistence. So leaders of both these companies are saying there's a role for each other. But Sean makes the case for it's actually, there's going to be some competition and conflict down the road because as you pointed out, you have these two elements of the hospitality ecosystem creating offerings that overlap in terms of market segments, in terms of type of guest trip.
What's been interesting though that I've seen play out that is a huge, huge trend is just I think short-term rentals have unlocked a lot of demand. And so it's sometimes helpful to uplevel the conversation and look beyond just, okay, what's the market share of this one versus that, to say the meta trend beyond all of this that is likely to continue for years and decades to come is more and more people moving spend from physical products, and I'm going to get this new barbecue, which I'm less likely to share a photo on Instagram of and more towards this trip. You have the big shift in consumer spend toward experiences, and that's driven for a lot of factors. And then you have all of rising wealth of other countries of people that want to experience new things. So travel at large, hospitality at large is a lot of tailwinds behind it.
All that to say that is driving a fair amount of both of these sides of the equation experimenting with offerings on the other side because there's money to be made here. And I think that is a good thing. I think what's fascinating is hotels often look to short-term rentals, as I've heard it called like the testing lab or the innovation lab of hospitality because you have operators and developers that are doing highly differentiated experimental things that people love. And hotels at their scale, obviously want to take elements of that and bring that to their business. I would say also for the short term rental folks listening to this though, you could learn some things from hotels on process, on how they really dial into the needs of consumer demand as they think about operations, as they think about technology. And obviously many of those aspects need to be adapted to the business of short-term rentals. But there's a lot that both sides of this equation could learn from each other.

Zach:
Yeah, yeah. No, those are really, really interesting observations. And I think one of the things that I've heard a lot about that's been a knock on hotels from the short-term rental community has been, oh, hotels are all just about consistency. And almost as if consistency is in conflict with uniqueness, if that makes any sort of sense. When in actuality, I think a lot of times short term rental operators would actually do well to be more consistent when it comes to the basics at least, like making sure the place is freaking clean, making sure that you spend what you should spend on a high quality mattress.
Be differentiated in the design of the space or the architecture of it or whatever it is. But I also feel like one of the things I love about going to a hotel brand that I've built a lot of affinity for and trust for is I know I'm going to get this exceptional experience, even though the room will look more similar than it does distinct from any other room I've stayed in that hotel chain, which is where I think short-term rentals have a leg up on hotels. But I know that I'm going to have an exceptional bed. I'm going to have really great concierge, and I'm going to have this very, very great night's sleep and this wonderful experience. And so I do think that there's a lot to be learned from both.
I'm curious, from your perspective, from a business standpoint, do you think if somebody is a young entrepreneur building a collection of unique stays right now, do you think there will be lots of acquisitions that happen with hotels buying short-term rental portfolios? Fast-forward five years from now, there's a ton of institutional capital now that has come into the short-term rental space, you think about what Wander is trying to do. You think about what these Onera, Bennett Onera are trying to do. You see these really interesting professional operators coming in and building truly exceptional experiences. What do you think the most likely exit is? And I'm sure there will be lots of different kinds of exits. But from your vantage point, what are some things that you expect to happen?

Josiah:
Yeah, I think you're spot on. I think especially for the more organized institutional friendly operators and developers out there, that becomes an attractive investment. It's an asset class that I think has long-term potential, and so I see a lot of interesting opportunity there. I think to your question of those that are building right now, it might be more personal. It might be more around what does success look like for you? Because I think a lot of people within short-term rentals and beyond, a lot of folks I talk to want more of an ongoing lifestyle. So it's not about an exit, but there's a lot of people that do want that exit, and that's valid and that's great. But think about what you're building from the start. I think if my own experiences were on the media front, building hotel marketing strategies, I didn't necessarily do that, and I think that was a mistake.
So it's helpful to think from the start versus Hospitality Daily for me is my life's work, so I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. So it shapes the decisions I make now. I think of the real estate front, obviously great real estate that is developed in a unique way becomes a really interesting business. And I think whether it's institutional capital or just other brands that are more vertically integrated, I remember talking to CEO of Graduate Hotels a little while back and was talking about this interesting connection. Their whole thing is to provide hospitality to people within these collegiate towns where they have hotels, but they also want an offering there for folks that want that sort of an experience, and then you get access to their hotel property. And so I think having that level of specificity might be more valuable because if you're looking to sell to a hotel brand, it might be different than an institutional investor that will treat it as a standalone business.

Zach:
Yeah, yeah. No, it's super, super interesting. I know that Hospitality Daily is going to be like your life's work, and so an exit isn't necessarily something that you're looking to anytime soon. But I do want to just ask you a question around, so one of the things that's happened in the greater tech ecosystem is you've seen CRM companies buy up media companies. You've seen HubSpot, for instance, they bought The Hustle. You saw Stripe buy Indie Hackers. And so you're seeing this trend of software companies being like, acquiring customers is really hard and it's really expensive. What if we bought the media that they all consume?
And I think some of these acquisitions have done a really good job of... I'm an avid fan of The Hustle, and I listen to My First Million Podcast, which is one of their entities every week, and you barely know that HubSpot's behind it unless you do some digging. Do you think that that translates or that will translate at all into hospitality? Will we see proptech companies buying media companies? Will we see even sort of like larger hotel brands deciding, "Hey, you know what, we'd love a podcast network that was Marriott sponsored,"? What do you predict will happen with respect to the relationship between big hospitality brands, hospitality tech, and media in this space?

Josiah:
Yeah, I fully expect to see that. I think technology companies often do things before people in other industries or companies in other industries do. And I think being on the other side of it, being in these technology companies and leading teams that were creating it or buying ads on other places, what you find is that can be powerful, but it's really hard to do. I think as you and I both know, building these businesses, you got to be all in on it. It's really hard to do on a part-time basis. And so I fully expect to see a lot of that trend that we saw on technology companies happen here. I think it's a broadly applicable lesson though, because at the beginning of our conversation, we were talking about creating and sharing from an individual perspective. But I would say I had the most exposure to this at this real estate investment platform because I saw the people that were raising the most capital, that were accelerating their businesses the fastest, were leaning into this personally.
But obviously it was part of their business because they were the principal of their firm. But it established those connections, it created that demand. It created media coverage. So all the benefits that you'd want as a business I saw happen on like the CEOs or the founders, the principals of these companies. And I think that only becomes more true at scale, where if you have a business that's 100 times the size, you need 100 times the attention. And attention is the most valuable commodity in the world. It's only going to become more valuable as our media landscape becomes more fragmented. And so this is one of the highest leverage things that you can do now. Regardless if you want to build a career in media, if you want to build a career in real estate, investment, it doesn't matter. Thinking about how do I be so valuable and helpful that I have the attention of the people that will matter for me?

Zach:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, gosh, we could talk all day just about this. And I would love to, but I have a couple of final questions for you before we wrap, Josiah. One is around when you're interviewing somebody, how do you decide who you want to interview? And what would you describe as the soul of Hospitality Daily? If you had to package that into a few sentences, what is it that you believe to be the true character of the media brand that you're building?

Josiah:
Yeah, it's a great question. I think we've talked about some of Richard Fertig's work, and he said something that has always stuck with me in the sense of to inspire others, you have to inspire yourself. And so what I seek to do is find those people that are going to inspire us all because they're out there doing, creating, learning, growing, and they're inspired to themselves, so they're able to do that. And that's really what the soul of it is all around, being inspired, learning and growing together. It's very much of a community. Yes, we have a podcast and email. But at the core of it, it's a community of learners and builders and doers that are all in this together.

Zach:
Yeah, yeah, wonderful. And we will have those links in the show notes below folks. So if you want to go binge Hospitality Daily and/or just check out any one of those episodes that Josiah just mentioned, you can find them in the show notes below. Dude, thank you so much for your time, man. It's been a real pleasure to get to know you. I am a huge fan of your work. And folks, I highly encourage you to go and subscribe to Hospitality Daily wherever you get your podcast. Thanks so much for your time, man.

Josiah:
Thanks, Zach. This was a ton of fun.