Welgo [Startup]
This is a story of how you can go from $0 to $500K in ARR in just 5 months.
It all started with a lunch to talk about what a Go For Vertical-supported founder (who had just had a successful exit with his most recent tech venture) wanted to do next. And the answer turned out not to be more tech.
Ed Gomberg grew up in a family in the hotel business. His mother opened their first hotel when he was young, and he grew up seeing her run and grow it into a successful venture. So no surprise that as his next act as an entrepreneur he would look at something in the hospitality industry.
When Ed and G4V CEO Edward Cruz met for lunch to talk about his next steps, Ed expressed this interest, and that is what started an interesting conversation about short-term rentals and how to turn them into cash-flow positive investments, but without making the investment.
It turns out that in Tucson, which is now a popular destination city for tourists, there is both a lack of hotel rooms and an oversupply of what was once student housing in close-in, historic neighborhoods. Many of those former rentals have great locations and tons of charm, but have fallen on hard times since students nowadays want to live in more luxurious student housing, not old houses.
So an opportunity was born: approach hard-up landlords and secure longer-term leases at slightly-above market rates (which they love), offer to make cosmetic improvements to the properties, furnish them beautifully, and then put them on Airbnb as short term rentals. No need to purchase investment properties to turn them into an investment. The supply and demand behind this idea matched up perfectly, and a business was born.
Ed soon scaled his new venture to 14 properties not just in Tucson but throughout the Southwest, with over $50k per month in revenue (which means over $500K in ARR), and margins of over 40%. And the entire tech-enabled venture was build on the Airbnb platform, so no code needed to be written. With new ventures, it isn’t the platform, it’s how you find a new, scaleable and profitable way to deliver value to an audience, and that’s exactly what Ed did.
Go For Vertical supported Ed along every step of the way, since helping founders build new ventures is what we do. And Ed as a seasoned entrepreneur knew exactly how to make his new business grow and scale. And that’s how another successful G4V-accelerated no-code venture was born.