This isn’t your typical software sales job. As a sales team that sells our own sales software (say that 5 times fast), your experience in using and selling Close every day has a tremendous impact on the company and our customers. It’s a responsibility we take very seriously. We’re a ~40 person distributed team, profitable, and building a product our customers love.
We’re looking to add an Account Executive to help us build the most efficient inbound sales funnel in SaaS.
I work in this space (Smart Host - market intelligence for vacation rentals) and this is a common practice. Owners and managers keep their calendars open because they treat a channel like HomeAway/VRBO as a lead source.
So if you inquire on a property that's booked, they will attempt to place you in a similar place within their inventory.
Only ~30% of bookings that happen on HomeAway are actually processed through their payment system. Airbnb handles the payments, so the calendar availability is typically more accurate on Airbnb.
Smart Host | http://www.smarthost.me | Brooklyn, NY | Onsite | Full-Time | Data Scientist (Lead)
We’re looking for a brilliant data scientist who codes to found our data team.
Smart Host helps property managers and landlords make more money through data analytics, from predicting prices to recommending comp sets to benchmarking ad budgets. Our first product is a dynamic pricing engine that brings hotel-style pricing to the vacation rental industry. As our data scientist, you’ll develop a nascent data model and pricing algorithm into a world class product.
Responsibilities:
- Build and validate a data model for comparing residential rentals, using statistical analysis, machine learning, and crowdsourced data.
- Create a pricing algorithm that utilizes hotel yield management theory to maximize revenue for vacation rental hosts.
- Gather and process external data by connecting to APIs and scraping websites.
- Write code to integrate new algorithms and data models into our production system, written in Python.
Contact: nick@smarthost.me [I'm posting this as a co-founder running sales. My co-founder and CEO, Evan Hammer, will be reviewing your application and scheduling an interview].
Techstars Austin was an invaluable experience for our team. It seems like the founders did not factor the opportunity for personal growth when they made their decision. Some may argue that the company's growth comes first, but sometimes that can only happen when the founders are growing too.
We were the youngest company in our class. We actually used the Techstars investment as a means to incorporate and set everything up. Another factor is that all of us were first time founders. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure all 11 companies in our class had first time founders.
The Austin program was broken into three phases:
Month 1 - Mentor Meetings: For the first four weeks we had dozens of meetings with the program's mentors. The mentors were a healthy mix of past Techstars founders, angels, VCs, and biz dev partners. It was exhausting at the time (5-6/day, 4 days/week), but definitely worth it. We used the meetings as pitch practice, and iterated how we described our business along the way. I also learned a lot about my co-founders in those meetings. Seeing them describe our business to other people was very revealing about how they felt about things. Super valuable.
Month 2 - Development: The second month was all about taking the first month of endless feedback and getting to work on advancing our business. We used the second month to build our MVP, speak with potential customers, and build partnerships. The Techstars staff was hands off, but were a big help whenever we asked for it. We accomplished a lot in our second month.
Month 3 - Fundraising/Demo Day: The Techstars staff started to get more hands on in the last month to help us with our Demo Day pitch and fundraising plans. There was more structure, but we had the absolute freedom to do what we wanted. It was a bit distracting from our business the last few weeks, but the experience of Demo Day was amazing and completely worth it.
I highly recommend Techstars for any company with first time founders. We were able to go from polished idea to MVP within three months, and achieve a high level of personal growth at the same time. It's also worth mentioning that I now have 50+ amazing new friends that went through the same experience I did.
There is definitely a "buy, sell, hold" aspect to what we're working towards. For example, can we tell you the right time to book at the best possible price? There are so many factors (photos, copy, reviews, etc) that need to be optimized before you can get the best price.
Yep. Also, I understand what other people are saying about already having aliases, I do too. But, as a visual list of servers I can ssh into it is a nice reminder. Plus there are some files that I edit only from time to time (php.ini, apache config, etc). I made shortcuts that throw those files into my editor. Call me an amateur, but when I have to edit some of those my first question is usually, where the hell is that file again? Anyway, I find this tool useful.
CRM + sales automation for >5k startups and SMBs. We're a small team of ~70, profitable, and have been in the market for 10 years.
Learn more and apply: https://www.close.com/careers
Engineering blog: https://making.close.com/