The COVID-19 crisis has required founders to make tough decisions, fast. Lots haven’t been able to pull it off, with their businesses still struggling or even heading into bankruptcy. Others have combined resiliency with flexibility, their companies emerging stronger than ever.
Hospitable.com’s Pierre-Camille Hamana is clearly in the latter group.
But not because it’s been easy. As the leader of a company providing a SaaS for short-term property rentals, 2020’s global lockdowns were a vital threat.
“We feared everything would crash. We lost 50% of our revenue in 3 months, and negotiated with everyone to avoid any cash flow problems. But we also discovered that our business is very resilient — it was 3 months down, 3 or 4 months getting back up, and we were back on track.”
That recovery was hard-earned, however.
“Our B2B customers disappeared. Property management companies went bankrupt, they lost all their property owners since the assets were empty. But the property owners still owned the properties and wanted to maximize their revenues. We realized we had to become a B2C SaaS.”
With their new target customers being individuals already holding rental property investments, Pierre-Camille immediately saw that community capital could become powerful fuel for the company’s flywheel.
“We keep building features they love, they save more time and money using our tool. Why wouldn’t they want to invest? It’s win-win, giving them more upside as investors and giving us a vibrant community pushing us forward.”
After all, given their promise to make sure hosts take care of their guests even while they sleep, why wouldn’t the Hospitable.com team want the power Fairmint provides of raising money while they sleep?
Since the company’s now tapping into community capital, one new part of Hospitable.com’s product roadmap is to offer an “Invest Now” button as part of the standard customer onboarding process. As the company’s SaaS product and equity are both available for purchase, it only makes sense to unite them in a simple, straightforward user experience.
“Getting everything ready to use Fairmint was incredibly simple. We were a European company, so we just had to create a US LLC and a US C-Corp, nowadays that’s easy. The general terms of the Rolling SAFE were really easy to put in place as well. After that, Fairmint’s SaaS makes everything run super smoothly, both for us and for our investors.”
With the offering only begun a few months ago, the company’s Rolling SAFE is just getting started. But Pierre-Camille has already seen some very favorable signs from early investors.
“People are super thankful to have access to the deal. Before, it just wasn’t available to them. Now they go through a few steps with Fairmint, they see the materials, they invest. And then they go talk about it on LinkedIn or Twitter.”
Pierre-Camille expects that traction to have additional returns with professional investors. Since community capital is additive to raising venture capital funds, raising with the community gives a founder a very strong argument: ‘Not only are we increasing our customer numbers, we have customers who love us so much that they’ve also invested.’
Community capital is all about taking growing traction to the next level. And for Pierre-Camille, that’s why the community capital path matches the goals of a coming generation of founders and companies.
“The Rolling SAFE and Fairmint perfectly match the community-built businesses that are going to be taking over in the coming years. I’m very looking forward to the Harvard Business Review article in 2030 analyzing the returns in Rolling SAFE investments compared to blue chip investments.”
