What's up party people? My name is Sunny Ray. This is the Sunny Ray Show. My next guest, his name is Akaran, the founder and CEO of Maronei. He ran 100 short-term rental properties by hand, then used AI to automate the work. We discussed the real operational pain points, what AI can actually improve in property management, and how hands-on experience shaped the product. How's it going, Akaran?
I like that name, by the way.
Like that name. I never Yeah.
Do you know what?
I want to say something about the sky, but I don't know.
It means attraction.
Oh, hello. I was going to say you do have some animal magnetism going on, buddy. Are you like a Hollywood actor? Bollywood actor or what? No, I'm kidding. Oh my god. you're an AI guy. Okay, so AI native man short-term. Take us right into the deep end. What are you building? Why should people care? What's the problem you're solving?
Perfect. So, what we're building is an AI native short-term rental chain. We're building a brand, a hospitality brand. So, it's a property management company. you know, just like all your other hospitality companies like your Marriotts, your Hyatts, they're all property management companies. They don't really own the hotels that they operate, but yeah, they operate almost a million rooms globally. So, that's what we're trying to do, but for short-term rentals, I'll give you a little bit of background on like why I'm building in this space specifically. so, I myself I'm from IAT Delhi. It's a college in India. I did computer science in my bachelor's and a lot of people you know in my final year they asked me that why do you want to go to the world's largest gathering and sell tents and honestly you know at that point I really honestly really wanted to build a startup and had just raised $100,000 and you know the idea that I initially had was to build like an experiences marketplace and we you know the moment we launched Airbnb came out with Airbnb experiences and you know we just felt like we need to pivot we need to find something else. And we went to Mahakuma which was like the world's largest gathering like 50 sorry 500 million people attended that event. Yeah. So I just knew that if I go there like in 3 months I'm sure I'll find some kind of a problem.
500 million.
Yeah.
That's half the population of India.
Yeah. I mean like you in fact you can put two Pakistans together in that.
Okay. I mean, are you sure it's not 50 million?
Yeah. 50 CR people.
Yeah. 500 million. 50 CR.
That that's like one out of every 14 people on Earth.
Imagine all of Mr. B's subscribers on two river banks.
Okay. Keep going. I've heard about this. I didn't realize it was I mean 500 million is.
It happens once in a century.
What's the name of this? I got to fact check.
Yeah. It's called the Mahakuma. You can just you can check it right now.
Mahakuma. Wow. Yeah. Okay. How many attendees?
650 million people. Oh my god. That's.
I was wrong. I'm sorry. I was wrong. I was lower.
That's nuts. Okay. Keep going. That's crazy.
So, I knew that, you know, I'm going to find some kind of a problem there. And what I did essentially, I went there. I started, you know, trying to sell tours and boats and stuff like that. But yeah, and I realized everyone needed an accommodation. They needed a place to stay. And our USP essentially was that, you know, we won't let you walk. And everyone was walking kilometers, you know, like for getting to essentially the guts and going for like B the baths and stuff like that. Essentially, that was the whole ritual. And yeah, that's when I got into property management. I managed almost like 150 properties personally manually you know on call on WhatsApp. I was managing a team of almost 100 caretakers and cleaners home stays tents even hotel rooms. So that's where I you know actually learned firsthand you know that hospitality is understaffed. We did $50,000 in revenue but what I learned was essentially priceless you know and a lot of this work was basically just communication and coordination. So that's you know when I started building essentially these AI employees for hospitality we worked with like top hotels like top hotel chains in the country like you know for example ITC hotels is like a company that we're working with. So but what we realized is that you know if we need to bring disproportionate value using AI then we need to make AI the manager and not an assistant because everyone right now in the industry is looking at it as a tool. In fact, we were also selling it as a tool. But we realized that, you know, maybe a year ago, it was just good for communication. These were just chat bots and voice agents. But today, that's commoditized. What they can do, they're intelligent enough to actually, you know, run an entire chain, a hospitality chain themselves, like a manager, like a supervisor. There are these layers of middle management that we're essentially removing. So that's why we able to, you know, offer property management services at like one-third the price that other traditional property managers do while having like 80% 90% margins.
That is absolutely nuts. 100 properties and a thousand guests run by hand on almost no sleep. Can you walk me through one of those nights?
Oh yeah, of course. So all right. So I'll tell you about the Shahis. Okay. That was like the most traumatic night of my life honestly. So it's it's the like a little bit of a trigger warning here. It was the night where you know a lot of people you know essentially there was a stampede and a lot of people you know even lost their lives and it was the most crowded day of the entire me and that night I had to take an 80 yearear-old uncle and his son he and they had paid me two lakh rupees for just one day and this was like a founder tour that I used to sell to just you know international customers so two lakh rupees that's like I guess $2,000. Yeah. So, it was a pretty decent you know, and it was just for like one day. It was and it was just to get them this naan done without letting them walk. And what we had to do essentially, I had not slept like the previous two nights. I was awake for the third night in a row because the shai nan essentially lasts for like three days and this was the most crowdest the crowdest day. and that day, we had like three bikes. I was sitting on one of them. One was for the 80-year-old uncle, one was for his son. And I had a wheelchair, 45, 50 kilo wheelchair on my lap while we were going on the bike at 3:00 in the morning. We started at 3:00 in the morning, reached the bridge at around 4:00 in the morning. The police stopped us there and it was just a 50 m bridge. And to cross that 50 m bridge, it took us almost 45 minutes. And once we crossed that then we were able to go let's say another kilometer. And the reason I chose the you know other side of the river was because you know that side was a little safer because this is the side where the stampede eventually happened. So we were we I actually saved his life technically because if we were this side we were gone at that time. And so yeah we went that side and they eventually stopped the bikes and that's where you know I pulled out my wheelchair. I put I the uncle sat on the wheelchair. We took him to the boats. We went for this naan and in fact this nan is basically a bath and we go to the center of the river on the boat and you like take a bath and you take a dip essentially inside the river and what happened is like while we were on the boat we could hear like lots of people chanting and screaming and that time you know I we just thought you know maybe they're just saying they're just you know the naga babas and those sadhus screaming her mahadev but when we you know reached back we realized okay actually those were Not those are not chance. Those are actually, you know, that was actually a stampede happening. So that was like a very scary day and like the toughest day of the entire thing. But yeah, I mean like we got him back and then I got back to work for another customer and that was basically how every day went.
Hey, and then I guess like what was the exact task you were doing at 2 in the morning that made you think a machine should be doing this? I mean none of this a machine can do to be very honest but what a machine could have done and made my life a lot easier was like all the phone calls all the messages all the talking to staff talking to guests I mean that was most of my call most of my work like these are all the exceptional events because see every day I had a few high value customers who I was you know giving these kind of services to but majority of the people were you know just you know mainly looking for an accommodation and there essentially you know most of my work was just coordinating with staff and guests essentially and that's something like a I can fully automate right now if I have to give you an example I've also been running my own Airbnb for like almost three years now so initially when I used to run my Airbnb I have two listings I had two listings and I used to spend almost one to two hours per room you know talking to guests answering their inquiries you know, handling their bookings, talking to the staff, begging for reviews, you know, handling check in and check out. So, it used to take me one to two hours per room. Once I used Maronei in my own listings, that went down to one to two minutes per room because the AI decides when it needs me. I don't use the AI, uses me, if that makes sense.
Yeah, totally. Wow, that's a meta. hey, you know, traditional managers take 20 to 35%, you guys take 9.9. like what exactly did you have to automate to make that kind of math work?
Perfect. I'll give you a very simple example and then we'll work our way up. Okay. So during kum for example most of my staff were bluecollar cleaners housekeeping staff that was majority of the workers that I had. They're very cheap in India. The monthly salary is $150. Yeah. They're the cheapest there. But you know the moment you I mean obviously they're underpaid so they're the most incentivized to not do their work well. So you need to hire a supervisor to supervise them and then that supervisor is like four times the cost and then that supervisor you know because he has a very high level job and he also had to like you know send me photographs because I was essentially his manager but you know typically in like bigger chains what you have is like a manager on top of the supervisor and they have multiple managers and then you have a general manager on top. So essentially that's almost 10x the price of the supervisor like the salary essentially. So that's that's where you know the value comes in. If the cleaning staff is like for example his salary is 15,000 rupees, the supervisor is 50,000 rupees, the manager would be like 1 lakh rupees, the general manager would be like three lakh rupees and in that value in that amount I could like hire so much more of housekeeping. I could invest so much more in giving like a better experience and that's what we want to focus on and yeah that's where we essentially bring the value by automating.
And when does where does AI genuinely beat a good local property manager and where does it kind of still lose badly? All right. So where it would lose badly first of all I would say you know places like for example Mahakum that's a place where there's too much of an uncertainty. You absolutely need to have some human there because every day I mean I'll tell you how volatile the situation was. They would close off the city at any random timing and we had people planted at the borders to let us know so that we could let our guests know that okay this is going to happen so we have to send a cab for you because that was an upsell opportunity for us because anyone was you know willing to pay like 20,000 rupees just send us a cab because they're going to stop us there and the situation was so volatile I can't do that with AI like probably in with robotics that's the plan ahead but not right now but right now what we can automate very easily is like the reservations desk, the concurge, the revenue management, accounts, you know, compliances, taxes, all the boring work as well as coordinating with the staff, telling them, you know, where to go, what needs to be done, giving them a checklist. In fact, the supervisor, as I mentioned, you know, we've automated that in a very simple way. so earlier as I used to watch photos and you know verify if the room is clean or not we have made a vision model that does the same and it does it to like such a granular level that you know if I click a picture of the kitchen it'll see there are supposed to be five plates but there are fourth so it'll tell the staff it'll send a voice note because they're Indian staff it'll send a voice note that where is the fifth plate so then and it'll also escalate it to the manager so then the manager can also you know investigate if it's if the guest has broken it or if the housekeeping staff has broken it where is the AC remote you or like the toiletries are not replaced, stuff like that. And we manage the inventory as well. So all of this work has been automated.
Wow. That's crazy. So you know, occupancy and nightly rate are the two numbers every owner watches. Like which one is easier to move and why?
So first of all, honestly, occupancy is the easiest to move because in fact, nightly rate is very linked to occupancy. but you know what we do the moment you know we onboard a customer is that we give them a lot of direct bookings so that just immediately shoots up their occupancy rate. how do we do that? You know we've got like a lot of u okay I'll say a lot of that a lot of it is secret source but I'll mention a couple of examples that will give you a good idea. So you know we have like a team of agents AI agents that create a calendar of all the corporate events happening in the city you know mice events conferences etc. So it it'll create a list of the companies that are attending those events and it'll find PC's you know reach out to those companies and autonomously you know send them emails and messages on WhatsApp that you know you're coming for this event you should stay at our stay these are our photos we'll give you a special rate and that gives like a long-term booking as well you know for like two three weeks perhaps or even a month another thing is like medical tourism especially in India it's picking up really well you know u like shout out to the medical tourism company. I would love to partner with them like because it's doing so well. We have already partnering with hospitals and you know we see a lot of NRIs coming to India just to you know get the treatment done because it's cheaper here but they get a better service and I've heard from a lot of people that healthcare is not a good industry like healthcare is not good in the US. I've heard so from a lot of people especially these NRIs who come to India that's why they come to India because they get cheap like comparatively cheaper healthcare at like good quality and what these hospitals don't provide as like accommodation for the entire family so you know we give them like these are the direct bookings that we give but as you ask me like with nightly rate the next thing that we do is like we change the nightly rate every single hour or even you know every 15 20 minutes the AI decides the decides when it's time to change. But, you know, I'll tell you, it's to this precision that, you know, it'll analyze billions of data points. It's like typically what every, you know, pricing dynamic pricing company does and it's we've not reinvented the wheel here. but yeah, it'll analyze billions of data points and it knows the exact price at which it needs to, you know, price the property at so that Airbnb pushes the listing to the top.
So, essentially, that's how we immediately, you know, increase the occupancy by, you know, changing the nightly rate.
So, smart. Can you explain maronei to a to an owner with let's say three properties in 60 seconds and tell me what changes in their first month?
Sure. So, if you've got three properties right now and let's say you you're thinking about you know and these are not places where you live you want to get an ROI on it. So let's say you want to put it out for rent. you're going to get typically just 3 to 4% yield in a year. If you give it to me, I'm going to triple that and I'm going to do it at one/ird of what it'll cost you to get any other property manager and I'll also double your direct bookings because that's what we try to do. We because if you typically try to run an Airbnb yourself and you try to get it yourself, you pay twice. You pay once to get discovered. You pay to OTAAS, you pay 20 to 25% to Airbnb and Booking.com just to get discovered, and you pay another 20 to 30% to your property managers. We take all of that headache at just 10%.
Now, that's a pitch.
My proposition to you, honestly, my better proposition to you would be that, you know, you have three properties, you made it in life, you need financial independence. Give me your properties and go travel and I'll give you the money required to do so. Yeah. Wow. How did your first owners actually find you before you know there was a brand or case study to point at?
So, you know honestly like I found my first owners myself. after that you know it just went kind of like through word of mouth and that was the strongest signal for us and in fact we did it pretty slowly and you know carefully because like I wanted to make sure the quality was up to the mark. In fact, I still am running like almost 100 units myself because I want to make sure I'm closest to the product. And that's why, you know, I'm increasing our listings along with the bandwidth that I can handle. And, you know, I'm training my own team to handle this as well. So, you know, once we're ready to scale and, you know, in fact, now we're ready to scale. So, you know, I've started social media more seriously again because now that is going to be the best channel. In fact, on my own channel, I'm going to talk about how you are supposed to host if you're someone who just wants to start on Airbnb. How do you do it? How do you set up? How do you become a superhost in under a month? We teach all of that on our channel. So, that's going to be our primary channel in the future.
So, we got a couple more. We only got two minutes left. So, I guess when a family or like a small fund owns the properties, who else has to agree before the manager changes?
So, who owns the properties? Like when a family or like a let's say a small fund owns the properties, who else has to agree before the manager changes?
No, I mean just the owner needs to agree. I mean just the owner, right?
Yeah.
And there there's a kind of a date inside the next 90 days that matters to you like what has to be true by then?
So in the next 90 days we're trying our target is to hit a million dollars in R. That's our target because we're about to start raising our seed. So, wow.
Let's see. It's a it's an ambitious goal, but it's it is possible. I've done the math.
And you said the first like automated hotel on the moon had better been yours. So, what's the real kind of 10ear version of that? And then, yeah, help me land a plane after that.
I mean, the reason I even got into this is because, you know, I want to do only like three things in life. I want to travel the world. I want to go to space. I want to discover something unknown. That's my selfish goals in life. And that's why I'm building a business. It's not to earn money but like we need money to do ambitious things. So right now you know I'm trying to automate hospitality. You know the next most obvious industry that I feel is going to explode if someday hopefully soon is like space travel and I would love to be a part of that and I feel automated hotels would like make a lot of sense on the moon and I would love to be the first one to do so.
Dude, I don't say this usually but I feel like you're going to be so successful. you've got like this like entrepreneurial like zest about you and you're just like so funny and personable. So I wish you the best of luck. I'm going to bring this stream to an end. Where do people learn more about Maronei and you?
You can check us out on Maronei.ai and you know we're on Instagram as Maronei and my Instagram handle is Ashdrienox and yeah you can just DM me and you know you can talk to me anytime and you can see you can find me on LinkedIn as well. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. My name is Akarian Saxa guys. Awesome. And we have like almost 20 people watching live. So, thank you all for tuning in. And with that said, I'll bring this one to an end. Hang on for one minute. I'll see you on the other side. Just give you.
