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For students interested in entrepreneurship, Jaideep Patil has some advice. “There are so many resources in the university’s entrepreneurship ecosystem. Use as many UT startup programs as possible where you can meet like-minded students, ”says Patil.
Patil (chemical engineering, 2021) and his Longhorn co-founders Avner Khan (MS, computer science, 2021) and Collin Betori (business administration, 2015) have been working on their startup Explorastag for almost two years. Your only regret for not starting earlier.
Explorastay is a search engine for subleases (one to 11 months) that compares the inventory of over 25 residential locations worldwide and summarizes one semester working in your company in a seamless interface. It encourages students studying entrepreneurship to get started at UT Austin sooner rather than later. “Start early if you can! [If you’re looking for a co-founder], look across campus for opportunities to network with students outside of your major, ”says Khan.
The idea for Explorastay came about for CEO Patil when he experienced firsthand the shortage of medium-sized rental apartments during his second year at UT. Patil was planning on studying abroad for the spring semester, so he only needed an apartment in Austin for the fall. When looking for a five-month lease, he was overwhelmed by the difficulty, time, and effort involved in finding a mid-term rental. Although the inventory is there, he had to jump from website to website every day in his search – constantly looking for informal subleases, monthly rents, and flexible rental terms. Without an aggregated platform, finding the right medium-term rent turned out to be expensive and time-consuming. He and his co-founders decided to take on this challenge themselves.
“The problem is that tenants spend a lot of time visiting websites to find the perfect rental apartment because there are so many different websites for apartments, rentals, co-living, and so on, making it a less time-consuming experience for the tenant,” says Patil.
Unlike most rental sites, Explorastay compares all types of rentals side-by-side, whether it’s a long-stay hotel, multi-family apartment, single-family room community, or something else. Prospective tenants can filter by type of accommodation, budget, rental period and more. The platform is aimed at students abroad, digital nomads and traveling professionals (e.g. consultants or nurses) who are moving for several weeks or months but cannot conclude an annual rental agreement. The trio has been addressing this niche in the market since early 2020, shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic.
“With COVID, this medium-sized sector has really gained momentum. When the pandemic broke out, skilled workers were suddenly able to work from anywhere, a lot of people were migrating from big cities to less populated areas, and there was massive demand for traveling frontline workers like travel nurses, “says Patil.
Customer acquisition began in early 2020 with cold calling and other grassroots efforts. Patil worked with Texas Global to attend study abroad briefings, where he distributed flyers and introduced the platform to students who would need accommodation while abroad. When Explorastay started growing off-campus, the team struggled with Google rankings and paid advertising. “It became clear how expensive and time-consuming it would be to rely solely on Google rankings. Paid ads just didn’t work, ”explains Patil. In order to accelerate customer acquisition, Explorastay has switched to hosting widgets on well-known partner sites that are heavily visited by potential tenants. Its widgets include pop-ups, directly embedded maps, and connected links to take advantage of the traffic generated by its integration partners. Today Explorastay is the largest database for one to eleven month rentals worldwide with over 500,000 entries. Its integration partners include Vrbo, SpareRoom, KAYAK and Zumper, to name a few.
Jaideep Patil pitching at the virtual Longhorn Startup Demo Day in 2020.
Recently, Explorastag was inducted into the Student Entrepreneur Acceleration & Launch (SEAL) program 2021, a prestigious nine-week summer accelerator for aspiring UT startups, to examine a core hypothesis of the company and ultimately decide to accelerate, turn around, or lawfully close the company shut down. “The Explorastay team has planned its start perfectly as the mid-term rental market exploded with a more remote and traveling workforce, not to mention the recent surge in vacations,” said Bart Bohn, director of SEAL.
In addition to SEAL, the team plans to set up sales and business development pipelines in order to expand integration partnerships around the world with a special focus on Europe. To fund this phase of growth, Explorastay launched its first official phase of equity funding, or seed round, in hopes of raising $ 750,000 from angel investors. Prior to the start of this seed round in April 2021, the company was mostly self-funded, save for a $ 25,000 convertible bond from Capital Factory, which was the first prize for winning the Longhorn Startup Lab in 2020. You are now a portfolio company for Capital Factory’s Tech Startup Accelerator and are well on your way to $ 25,000 monthly recurring revenue for the third quarter of this year.
On August 5, 2021, Explorastay presented their companies together with 13 other A&M teams from UT Austin, UT Dallas and Texas and announced a public “Go / No-Go” announcement at the SEAL Decision Day. The event took place at the Capital Factory in downtown Austin. You can watch the recording here SEAL 2021 Decision Day.
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