Episode 46: Can Voice AI Save the Hotel Industry?

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First week, I landed. I was like, Oh, shit, guys, I can't even tell this is AI. And I wish we had time literally could be the difference of life and death. Few concierge is in my opinion and Jonathan's opinion, the world's best voice AI for hotels and hospitality in the future. If you haven't already, you're going to call a hotel. You're not going to ever have to deal with being on hold again. You're going to get right to a person. They're going to know everything about the property. They're going to answer you really quickly and you're going to be able to make a booking, get everything answered up sell by whatever. And that's what we're providing. And it is the best because you can't even fucking tell you're talking to AI. Welcome to the funded. Now what podcast with your host Andrew Lee Miller brought to you by growth experts. Your in store for a chat about funding, marketing, startups and all things growth. All right, everybody. Hello and welcome back to the funded. Now what podcast? This is a really extra special episode. I know I say that a lot, but this is different because I actually know this dude and work with this dude. And I'm super excited to introduce you to Jonathan Lay, the founder and CEO of Q Concierge Jonathan. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Yeah. And like I said, full transparency. I work with Jonathan. I'm really focused on making him and his company very famous. So I have to get that out of the way. But he didn't pay for this spot. I just really wanted to get the company out there. And so we're trying something new. Normally I bring people on here that I don't know anything about their marketing and they get to ask me questions and I roast their marketing. But since I'm in charge of your marketing, we're not going to roast anything. But let me tell you about Q Concierge. Q Concierge is in my opinion and Jonathan's opinion, the world's best voice AI for hotels and hospitality. What that means is in the future, if you haven't already, you're going to call a hotel. And you're going to get right to a person. They're going to answer you really quickly and you're going to be able to make a booking, get everything answered upsell by whatever. And so Jonathan, tell us what did I miss? What else do people need to know about Q Concierge? Yeah. You know, we've been, it's an interesting question. Kissed you like basically cover all the points. Yeah, just a little bit background. You know, we started a company around two years ago, but the first year we were doing, you know, voice AI for pizza. So we were, you know, doing dominoes. We expanded to 42 stores and took it around like 50,000 calls before we realized, you know, the market is not as big as hospitality as not sexy either. But, you know, we kind of looked into the hotel space and realized, you know, the biggest problem with the industries that there's not enough people. They came in the front desk or the operations in general. So 30% of calls in the US are abandoned. And you know, imagine you go to a hotel, right? Or coins to a hotel you get on hold for five to nine minutes. On the in-room, you're trying to call for, you know, water towels, a few pairs. And it doesn't get there. Or nobody answers for like two hours. And the guests are pissed. Sometimes you walk into the front desk and trying to check in. And they're always on the phone as well. So, you know, we're really trying to solve like two problems here. One is really the challenges with hotels missing revenue. And another part is guest experiences in general, right? We want to make sure that the traveler has their own personal, luxury concierge and provide that experience for the consumer as well. So, yeah, I've been working really hard on both fronts and training R.A. animals to make it sound like you said, more natural, less latency, and really providing a good RRI for the hotels. Love it. Yeah. And I mean, for the there are a subset of people out there that are just like off the idea of having to deal with a either like, Oh, I don't like this. But then what we see in the data is people don't even know that they're talking AI, which is why I think this, you know, so for people listening to this, I'm teaching Jonathan and his company to say we're the best. We're no longer being the first customer to educate the market. I mean, there are voice AI tools out there. We have competition, but ours is the best. And I think I can talk publicly about the fact that we're training our models on professional voice actor. So you're dealing with multiple languages. It can respond if you switch to Italian or Spanish mid conversation. But also we have like this really badass background typing noise that keeps the customer like, Oh, shit, I'm talking to a real person. And I'm not going to make you, I should have told you before, maybe we should do a demo on the on the call. But when we have Jonathan speak at conferences and stuff, he pulls out his phone and calls the AI and people are like, jaw on the floor because it just sounds so damn human. And so that's why we think we're the best. But can you talk a little bit more about like the tech on why it's so much better than other existing companies and products that are out there? Yeah, I think the first part is that you're looking at the competitors and what's in the industry rate. This historical trends in the hospitality industry is that it's super back towards people are not attacked like adopting tech as other industries like startups or you know, fintech or insurance in general. So really bring the so com Valley, the most advanced tech in general. That's feature tech, Texas, PhDs is a big part of it. And then, you know, being in the industry and knowing the problems that the hotel managers, the asset owners and that took us a while, right? Like my equivalent of Carlos last startup, so to 6000 Mary Austin, and his resource, so you know the industry really well. So that's the first one. Because we understand the customers and problem were so focused on this vertical that we have an edge versus some of those horizontal players like, you know, land or call the AI and stuff like that. And you know, in general, we train our models really on real world, world, customer calls. And we analyze every single call, look at the transcript, look at the customer interactions and sentiments and analyze what they're calling about and also detecting if they think they're talking to AI and how we can handle that case better, even if they detect as AI and where their sentiment is in general. Really having the proprietary data help us a lot, right? Like, voicety, I in general, it's kind of commoditized in terms of the base layer technology. And really the differentiation here is to know the customer really well, understand their problems and really using AI itself to iterate over our product, right? You see a lot of, you know, by coding going on for different stuff, right? You can like build a product in like a day or a weekend, you know, prototype that works that used to take, you know, two months, three months to fill with that team engineers, right? And nowadays you can fill anything. That's not the biggest part. The biggest part is that you understand the customer and really deploy to the real world and actually interact with your end customer and getting feedback from there. Just like building MVP, right? And so that's part of our differentiator and also just some, you know, versus some of the vertical players like Hineri or, you know, Saber, recently released a voice agent. We really focused on voice as a, you know, customer interaction type. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense. And I love that you mentioned early on focusing on the guest experience because, you know, we're so focused on closing these hotels and explaining them. And we talk about the revenue boost, which I'm going to, to ask you about. I mean, like, imagine if your hotel never has to miss a call, but also the ability to upsell people and make it easier for guests to constantly get in touch when they want to buy things is going to make them buy stuff more. But also it's about the hotel providing a better experience because no, I mean, I know sometimes I won't even bother calling the hotel like when I'm there, like, I'm not even going to bother with this. I'll just, I'll just go walk to a restaurant or something because I don't want to deal with being on hold. And so that's a huge thing. Taking a step back though, before I ask about like the metrics and what we're seeing on the product side, you raised a couple million dollars for this. I know you have some traction, but I want to hear it for the audience like, what was it? How was it raising funding? This was your first startup as a CEO and founder. What was it like raising that seed round and what did you learn? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we, you know, rates pre-seed over, you know, progressively over the last two years. I mean, being honest, founder raising is not easy, right? Like people can say, you know, I spend this much time like two months and we have very little traction and we get there. And that's a lot of case. And I'm sure some people can do it. But, you know, average startups take like three to six months to raise their rates around. And also startups, the founders, they're pitching never raise their own, right? And for us, it's kind of an iteration of war vision was and where the traction where hypothesis is and to like, here, here's some validation in terms of traction, in terms of AOR, right? And, you know, our pitch and our pitch deck and narratives in general has changed over the year, over the past two years. And, you know, as a CEO and as the person talking to the investors, you always kind of learn like, you know, what they're saying, what they're not saying, right? Like sometimes they reject you and saying, oh, it's too early or you don't have enough traction or like, this industry is hard to get into. You got to take it with the grain of salts, right? And, you know, really getting that funding, especially getting a lead is about finding the investor that has a right thesis that really believes in the team. Now, you're especially with the early stage startup, you're pitching the team more than the product, the vision, right? Because if you're a very solid player, like A players, right? And on the team, the founders, they know that like, if they gave you the money and your idea, it doesn't work, you can still pivot to something, you'll figure something out, right? So like, really showing your tenacity and your track records in the past and also just how to portray yourself as this really founders that don't give up, right? That's a very important part. Bedunk, they're betting on the jockey, not on the horse. You might switch the horse, but your jockey is going to make sure the race gets won one way or the other. I love that. And I would be remiss if I didn't tell our origin story here because I know you're a gambling man. I met Jonathan at these poker nights that have been going on in SF and he was like, yeah, we don't need marketing. We've got 10 million, the pipeline. Sorry to throw your number out there. And I looked at the website and I was like, oh, this could be a lot better. If you're telling me you're the best in the market, then we need to do some marketing here. And I go in to pitch the company and the founders and I'm talking to them and they're like, okay, yeah, we're going to go raise a couple of million more and we'll talk to you. I'm like, I'm never going to hear from these guys like you just said, it takes six months to do that. Two weeks later, calls me back, hey, we got the money. Let's let's talk. We need to grow. And you know, the time is really of the essence with a company like this because the market knows they need it and we want to save customers from a bad experience with AI, which we're seeing very high open rates. Our ads are getting unbelievable click-through rate. Not everybody books in meeting because some properties are already burnt on bad experiences with shitty AI out there. So I think that's one of our major marketing challenges. But from a fundraising perspective, how do you a lot like the start up, the podcast is called funded now. What, so what is your breakdown? You know, you guys are a relatively small engineering team. Where does that, where's that money going? Yeah, yeah. I mean, mostly engineering to be honest, until we, you know, bring on, you bring on board. For us, like the early stages is really about, you know, building a good product. A lot of my time is, you know, doing a lot of prompt engineering. I call myself a half engineer, right? Like, I came from engineering background, but my CTO is a wizard tech wizard. So it's more on him and other engineers. So we have a small team and we have a BD person, my co-founder. And we spend a lot of time in customer discovery and going to conferences. So really careful and like, about, you know, spending in general, especially if you're a small startup and not trying to go, like, two main directions at once and doing very, very small experiments that probably will fail. But also just like, it's better to go one direction blindly for six months. Then like, hey, like, I'm going to run this because for our men, and if it doesn't work in a month, we try another one, right? Yeah. So, so, so, so those are like where main source of funding goes to. Oh, yeah, I got it. You know, my team at Growth Experts tell me I don't do a good enough job on this show of explaining what I do. And you just segue me into perfectly the whole reason we work together is to keep those marketing experiments running at a rapid rate. Like, you know, I just talked to you on Slack right before this. We got a thousand clicks on a, on a LinkedIn ad at a dollar click, which nobody listening to this will ever achieve. You're not going to get a thousand clicks for a thousand dollars on LinkedIn targeted to only CEOs in the hospitality space. But I consider that a failed experiment still, like you mentioned, because we didn't get any conversions out of it. And that's why we're pivoting to lead ads. So they don't have to go the website. But I say all that to say, that's the point of working with a fractional CMO. We're executing. We have three interns who brought on at QConsiairs. This is not by the way meant to be a sales thing, but just you segueed me in perfectly launching all kinds of marketing. We're gonna talk about it. But, you know, fail, fail, fail figure out, figure out, work better, work better, cheaply so that once you figure out exactly what works, then we can just pour as much gasoline on that fire as we want. And the goal is to figure out digital channels that work better than a conference. You know, Jonathan was mentioned and he's going to conferences a lot. It's not really sustainable for the company. There's only like once a quarter, the whole company has to go. They're wildly expensive. And so you try to find digital channels that can replicate those face-to-face opportunities, especially in an old school industry, like hotels. We say hospitality, but when we do targeting for ads and stuff, it's really hotel people because hospitality can mean restaurants and anything else where they have guests coming in. And QConsiairs is really focused on hotels, resorts and stuff like that. So what were you doing marketing-wise before I joined with the company? Nothing. We had a website up. We had a LinkedIn page. A.io website, by the way. So if you guys, if you're listening to this and you want to check out the current website, it's with QConsiairs.com. One of the first things I do when I work with a company is especially when there's three cool founders like this. So shout out to Alex and Huka also for her going to listen to this. You guys are really like the Holy Trinity. And I think it's the cool that you mentioned that you have coding ability, you're an engineer, you can speak that, but you're not only that. Like, imagine if we had Alex trying to do, who's the CTO trying to do sales and speaking on staging. He's actually really good. He's really good. I'm sure he is. And now that he's, when he hears this, he's going to bitch at me for saying that, but it's very rare to be able to do both of those things. And I think that's amazing. And for anybody that doesn't know Jonathan, this dude's in his 20 still, by the way, just for throwing that out there. So, you know, you have, you do have all of the workings of a really big company CEO, even at a young age. He's also a DJ, by the way. When's the next show in San Francisco? I've never been invited. Yeah, I'm taking a break. Good. Starting a new round soon. So just wanted to fully focus, right? Because it's the right answer. It was a trick question, actually. That's the right answer because shit is about to hit the fan from a marketing point of view. And yeah, you're going to be really busy. And so that's great. Funding I don't care about. That's between you and God. But I care about the amount of these and clicks and traffic we're getting to the website. We can throw a party when we exit. You can DJ that party. Yeah. But okay, well, that's great. We talked about the funding. I mean, what do you see as marketing challenges for the company going forward? It's like just wondering. Yeah. I think part of it is like really a geo and that's like one of the most important things now. A lot of people really go for a chat, you be team now, cloud, Gemini, to ask for questions. I ask a lot of recommendations on my personal stuff or just like a question in general. Although, now I use Google a lot because I will some answers and it'll come up with Gemini notes, right? And then you can try with it right away. But it's really important that if you search hotel AI, AI in general, you show up on a top like 5 or 10. So that's kind of like a blockbox for now. Nobody has really, really figured out. And I think that's where the industry is. trending in general. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see and do experiments in that for. I think, you know, overall, Andrew, your expertise is in the traditional marketing for the past 50 years, right? Has been great. And I think we're all like entering a new era of marketing in general. And I think it's a fun challenge. Absolutely. Like a pain that has to solve, right? It's more like, okay, we're going to try this thing. And if it works, then we've got to keep trying it, right? 100% like there's no playbook. Downside. There's no downside. Yeah. Yeah. And shout out to Ron, who's an intern on the Qcon's, he has team who's been leading working on the GEO stuff with me. You know, it's funny to anybody that listens, knows what GEO is, generative engine optimization. So what John athan was talking about is, you know, the goal as a robust mature, comprehensive marketing team later on is to show up when people are searching for what your business is offering. Those are the best leads. Those are the highest intent. And you don't want to have to rely on outreach on the sales sales sales sales sales sales those sales cycles are longer. They're not as convinced. They were just doing their own thing on the internet when you reached out as opposed to someone searching for AI for hotels. You know, I always laugh with Ron, this kid that's been leading this with me at the company that he's never going to get to see the benefit of the work he did at the company because it takes, you know, 30, 60, 90 days, but we are already starting to get ranking for all that stuff. And it is a massive effort. Actually, by the time this podcast comes out, my book will be out. I wrote a book about this not plugging it though. But I think he's typing something right now. Just so you guys know he's he's getting some work down while he's on the show. Yeah, no, I agree with you that there is really no downside. And one of the most exciting things with marketing is if you can figure out something before every other marketer knows about it, it's a massive boom. And so we're testing a bunch of different stuff. We did Jonathan just did some interviews in the targeted media in the travel industry. Can you talk to a little bit about how that's been going for you? Yeah, yeah, just address the typing thing. I was actually just search like voice app. If I resolved improved, I think a little bit. Yeah, I mean, like you said, like it takes me time. Yeah, yeah, like before you answer, let me let me explain that. So the way it works is the inner sub pages and blog pages are the first things you're going to come up for. So the home page like you're searching for voice AI. That's going to take a while. But if you search a prompt. Like a long search like what you would ask AI like, hey, what are the top voice AI technologies for hotels. Then that should come up because Ron and I created blog articles for that. So if you throw in top or best, those rank within 30 days to 60 at the max. Other than that, that's why we've been working on a lot of link building. So this PR stuff that we're doing that really targeted link building stuff. Even coming on this podcast. The main impetus was so that you can link to growth experts from QC. And get some social content links out there. These are the ways we validate a company to start ranking. And it's going to happen quickly after we get a lot of these links. But if you if you do a larger longer search, you should see one of our blog articles get to the first page. Like go ahead and do it right now. We can do it live. If you want. Do do it live. Yeah, I was at an event a month ago. And you know, talking to a VC. And I'm like, go ahead search on your phone right now. Who's the top fractional CMO for startups in San Francisco? And he was like, all right. And he does it and he asked it was chat GPT. So shout out to everybody who's already moved off to Clawed. But a month ago, we were still on chat GPT. Yeah, I was I came chat GPT recommended me as number three. So it was some other guy. I'm not going to name some other lady. I'm not going to name. And then I was number three. But even that is a it's wildly impressive to people that you can come up. And it's and it's it's not necessarily gameable. You have to be authentically be the best. And that's our whole ethos as a company that we're no longer emailing a hotel EA saying, by the way, did you know there's voice AI technology out there? They know this stuff exists. Everybody's been telling the matter. It's a question of, are they going to try and build something internally, which is impossible? Are have they already used something and they hate it and they want to switch off? Or are they still weighing over their options? Because we're the best and you should absolutely get throw us in the throw our hat in the mix. And so if you're listening to this and you're in a like a competitive space where there's already been a couple first movers, stop trying to educate customers that this solution exists and really recognize where your product fits in the in the landscape. And if you're the best in the market, use that language. I mean, you probably not, but but we are. And so that was, you know, first week I landed. And I wish we had time. I don't know, maybe if you want to get your phone out, it might be cool to show a demo. Like if you hear we've been talking for a while with our social media in turn about making clips with Jonathan. Like a because we'll throw really difficult questions at the AI. Like last week he was on the phone and he's like, Well, I'm depressed. And I want to cancel my hotel stay. And we called this, you know, it's a hotel in Hawaii or whatever. And our AI is like, Oh, that's really bad. You should not be talking to me about that. You should call this help line. Here's the blah blah, phone number for a suicide prevention, etc, etc. So the AI, I mean, a regular employee would never do that. So literally could be the difference of life and death. You know, and so can I put you on the spot? Can we call the AI real quick? Got your phone on you. Never been done in the history of my podcast. We're going to make a phone call just because everybody on here is like, Okay, yeah, he's a marketer. He's of course, he's going to say they're the best AI. But you cannot lie. The difference between fake it till you make it in marketing is if you have a strong confidence that you're going to get to somewhere really soon, you can start talking about it as if it's already happened to manifest it to convince to pull in early employees to get people to ride with you. But you can't make up shit. You can't lie. How many total phone calls have we done now as a company? As a true. Yeah. So you can't go around and say millions of phone calls, but you know, hundreds of thousands there, it makes sense. So that's the difference between fake it to make it make it like we're all right. You got your phone ready? Yeah, yeah. Let's see like how it works with headphones. Sure. Maybe I'll work. Maybe it won't, but let's see. Which property we calling? We're calling a whistler line. Hey, calling whistler. I'm what's your name? Yeah, it's Jonathan. Hey, Jonathan. What's got you thinking about whistler? Skeetrip? Stop yourself? A little getaway? Yeah, I think about planning like a spring ski trip with my buddies. Yeah, spring break up here is unreal. So when you take spring breaks with your buddies, I just want to make sure I'm tracking. Are you thinking ski focused? Like late season, laughs in the crowd or more just hanging in the village parties? That kind of vibe? No, we're all skiers. And I think it would be four of us. We're thinking about maybe coming like April 1st to 9th if you have recommendations. That's a great call. Early April and Village vibes. So I've got four of you coming in April 1st and heading out April 9th. And you guys want to go to ski, but also hang out and have a good time after that sound, right? Yeah. Hopefully for a group of buddies, I'd steer you toward a suite with a kitchen and space. See the extra revenue boost? Let me pull up what's available for those days and see what looks good. It's enough. That is amazing. I mean, I didn't even know. And I've seen hundreds of calls who trained it to say sick for Whistler. That's so bad as it's so cool. It's actually like a, you know, a dental line that we're showing that Whistler is. No, I mean, I mean, like a very, very excited. We have other like live plans too, but yeah, yeah, just want to show something that we built. Yeah, and I think anybody listening, you had no, I mean like you even knowing that that's AI you can't tell. It's literally like sick. Oh, that's awesome. Like, you know, and so that's the future we're stepping into. And if you're one of those people listening to this and you're like, I don't want to deal with AI, it's all about the customer experience. You're getting some, you're getting a person on the other end that knows every single thing about the property. They can help you twice as fast, if not 100 times faster. If you couldn't, if you didn't pay attention, rewind it a minute or two. And recognize that it answered the phone right away. It wasn't like, thanks for calling this long thing. Please, be priced on a brief hold. So your life is going to become way easier. You're going to have a concierge that can do anything for you and tell you anything really quickly. And so it's a, it's a win for all parties by the way. I love that it recommended a suite. Those upsells are what we're trying to explain to customers. Like a regular employee that didn't get to sleep early last night and is fighting with her partner on the way to work is not going to care because they're not getting paid a commission for that for upselling that they're not going to care about recommending the suite to the four bros that are coming April 1st. But April 1st suite is probably available because the end of the season. So I was a cajiniest move. And so yeah, can you walk through like what kind of average boost to revenue customers are seeing with this? Yeah. So one of our hotel in Puerto Rico, we actually did around like 500 K in booking revenue for them for the last three month. The conversion rate around like 16 to 20%, which is higher than, you know, human call center rate. you know, we're 24/7 really making impact there. And you know, imagine they hire less people and really we upsell the suites and the rates as well. And for a hotel in Cernscisco, we, you know, award a hiring like two staff positions, 90K each and saving them like hundreds of thousands of-- - In lost revenue and costs. So what does this product cost? I mean, I know the answer, but I want everybody else to know how, because pricing is one of the most difficult things. You know, you've got this amazing product that saves them 200 in hiring, makes them hundreds of thousands in revenue. How are you charging for this? - You know, we have like a broom for month model for different modules of the agents. I don't want to disclose our pricing model, you know, just to get there. There's some kind of better shifts there. And you know, for a jelly call center operations where like more on the, you know, flat fee for agents plus usage based depends on their minutes. It really is about like, you know, showing the clients ROI before we really show, you know, what our pricing is because our average were more expensive than-- - Yeah. - But we're offering like, like a lot of services, right? - I'm doing it. - Our team is 24/7. And it's really about how much we're making, we're saving the clients more than how much does it cost, right? We want to turn the cost entering to revenue driving. - Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, 10 years ago, I'll never forget a guy in LA, a marketer was like, you should start working with B2B startups. And I was like, fuck that. I'll never go B2B. I'm all B2C. And now if a B2C startup reaches out to me, I'm very reluctant to even take a meeting because B2B, if you can make a seller product that makes two, three, five X revenue, then it does cost them. It's an easy decision. And I think that's what we've got here. If you're a hotel person and you're listening to this, it's a no-brainer. And I think, you know, we would probably beat out anybody else's AI. And that's really what we should even be saying too. Like, I don't care if you have an existing AI that you use and put us on 50% of your calls and we'll make more money for you. And so, awesome. Well, Jonathan, it was super exciting to have you on the show. Thank you for making the time. I know this isn't really your target demographic, but I really appreciate it. - No, I appreciate it, Andrew. - All right, thank you so much, awesome. - That has been another episode of The Funded, Now What Podcast, with your host, Andrew Lee Miller, brought to you by Growth Experts. If you liked this episode, please subscribe. And if you really liked it, please share with other founders and entrepreneurs. Thanks, and we'll see you in the next episode. (upbeat music) - This podcast has heard along the Marketing Podcast Network for more great marketing podcasts, visit marketingpodcasts.net.