Week 1

Idea Discovering.

The idea to Orderstay came after travelling across Southern Europe and Northern Morocco between 2014 and 2015. The keywords for both were the awful hotel experiences. We typically checked ourselves into four or five star hotels, the nicer in its category. Sometimes we liked to order food and drinks, ask for a cab, or in need of other in-house services such a laundry service. Services we as tourists wanted to pay a premium for to thrive a nice vacation.

Nevertheless, they were similar struggles on the hotels; the in-house service was terrible. To be more specific; the communication with the staff and access to service info when needed destroyed the satisfaction. Room service were a pain of a process; you were lucky if the 5th call make you through. Basic info about laundry service were a pain to find. And, eventually when getting through and submitting a room service order, it was unreliable when and if the order were shown up at the room.

To summarise; it was clear that something needed to change. The communication as a guest willing to pay a premium to get a basic job done, was a headache. The underserved situations mainly did that we just went outside the property and instead had the need met from elsewhere, such as restaurants and local places. Not only did it contributed to a terrible guest experience, it too was a clear loss of revenue for the hotels.

• Bad guest experience = less satisfied —> negative review —> decrease in bookings —> less revenue

• Guests fulfils their unserved needs elsewhere during stay = less revenue —> less satisfied —> negative review —> less —> decrease in bookings

In any rational ways of structuring the equation, the hotel is the loser. Most of the hotels were owned by mid-sized hotel brands that, despite the popularity of useful hotel management software such as from Oracle, rating platforms from TripAdvisor, etc, they still failed to do much of the guest experience right.

My entrepreneurial character were eager to enhance changes so I decided to explore the market for filling the gab between guest and hotel. My main questions to answer in the initial discovery part was:

• What does the world’s largest hotel brands do? Do they’ve any solutions implemented that actually deals with this underlying issue and guest need?

• How does they solve it for the guests?

• What are the existing alternatives at the market, are there and who are the startups with available solutions? What are their value propositions? Market share? Demographic? Persona? UVP? Business Model?

Week 2

Business Model.

After analysing the market and gaining a better understanding for the hotel industry, I talked with people. I tried to define a potential idea that could be transformed into a business to solve the problem. I summarised it through a lean canvas answering questions such as:

• What is the problem?

• What is our potential solution to solve it?

• What is our unfair advantage?

• Who are the customers?

• How can we reach them?

• What is the business model?

• How do we measure key metrics for traction?

Week 3

Test hypothesis with audience.

Before investing resources and founding the concept as a startup, the idea were tested by a smoke testing with real customers.

1) First part were to visualise the defined solution by a Minimum Viable Prototype. This were discussed and iterated quickly into a mobile app prototype.

2) Second was to find a brand name and identity to communicate the product benefits and concept in a logo and a style.

3) Third was launching a landing page to visualise the prototype with its initial business model (a subscription fee of €150 per month) for hotels to digitalise their guest services into being available in ‘the pocket of their guests’.

Week 3

Validate concept with early audience: Luxury Hotels

The smoke testing were executed to validate the concept; are hotels interested in the solution, and to actually pay for it? A hypothesis was that the timing of a solution like this was on its peak, so this was an assumption that needed to be tested too before allocating finance, focus, and time for Orderstay.

To do this, I acted fast. My hypothesis was that I’d identified an underserved market need that sooner or later would be met, and I could be the one to have an early-mover advantage (PS. it isn’t always an advantage).

I defined a list of 20 target hotels across Scandinavia with its relevant contact person mainly the CEO or Marketing Director. Within a week, I got invited to Oslo to sign an agreement with one of the world’s largest hotel brands that didn’t had any innovative solution like this and were very interested. The coming week I flew to Oslo to meet the executive and to sign the contract at their head office. Within same week, I communicated with a handful of other hotels and started to learn patterns in their feedback about what they really were interested in by the solution. It felt like I’d found a product/market fit with an MVP that was great but needed to iterate fast to be a problem-solver of other problems that hotels faces such as gaining more direct bookings from repeating customers.