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When FutureStay co-founders S. Philip Kennard and Jonathan Fabio launched their idea for a web-based software to help property owners manage their rental businesses, it was just meant to be a side project.
They soon found out it wasn’t much of one.

FutureStay, Kennard said, was a minimum viable product at first, one not good enough for someone to run their business on.

“That means handling security deposits, refunds and working in all different currencies,” Kennard said.

But users kept reaching out, saying they couldn’t find certain features. It was then that Kennard and Fabio discovered they were on to something.

“We realized if they had another option, they wouldn’t even email us,” Kennard said.

The need for a product that could maintain listings for a property across multiple platforms — including Airbnb, HomeAway and OneFineStay — became so apparent, Kennard and Fabio left their previous positions to focus on FutureStay full-time.

One of their first moves was to hire Sree Raja, who is now the chief technology officer.

Raja joined the company as lead developer after its initial round of angel investments in 2014 and played a large role in taking the technology from its functionalities as a minimum viable product to the platform it is today.

And he’s not shy about what that meant.

“It involves handling multiple currencies, languages, revamping user experience and making it look nice and, basically, a complete polish and overhaul of every single one of those systems needed to take place,” he said. “When you build an MVP (minimum viable product), you build it to address the 80 percent of frustrations that people have, but when you have a global and expansive product like we have, you have to hit higher numbers like 99 percent.”

The Newark-based company has become a leading “for rental by owner” software as a service solution and serves more than 34,000 vacation rentals in 178 countries.

“(We serve) the $100 billion global vacation rental market, where over 65 percent of properties are owned and managed by non-pros (who are) savvy homeowners generating additional revenue by renting their property to travelers,” Kennard said.

The demand for this service has made a straightforward path to fundraising for the company, which just closed its most recent round with $1.3 million, led by New York angel investors, New York Venture Partners and Newark Venture Partners.

The company is still not profitable. Kennard, however, said that is about to change.

“We’re at the stage now where, in November of last year, we released our first premium feature and released it only to 25 vacation rental properties as a private beta,” he said. “It was so successful that it actually doubled our transaction volume by just releasing it to 25 rentals of the thousands that we have in our system.”

Why is that?

“We were focused, last year, on building a product with a tremendous amount of traction and great ways to activate new users and properties,” Kennard said. “This round and stage in our growth is really about effectively monetizing our users (through premium features).”

And what premium features does FutureStay think its customers will pay a little extra for? In a word: automation.

“We’re focusing on building out that infrastructure so that, when a property signs up for FutureStay, they literally just need to click a button and their property connects everywhere and to the services they need such as key-dropping and cleaning services,” he said. “We call it ‘auto-pilot.’

“So, our goal for this year is to get beyond profitability.”

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