nickpersico

Close | REMOTE | Various roles

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/

Close.com | Account Executive | REMOTE, Based in ET/CT | https://jobs.lever.co/close.io/d1589be7-d253-46db-9a56-55ea9...

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.

More context: https://twitter.com/NickPersico/status/823227078455808000

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.

This should've been their landing page all along.

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.

- Write reports / blog posts on data discoveries.

Network:

- StartupBus North America 2014 Winners

- Techstars Austin S14

Learn More / Apply: http://smarthost.workable.com/jobs/52578

Contact: [email protected] [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].

TS Austin 2014

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.

Thanks! (I'm a co-founder)

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.

This article is awful. Paid PR indeed. Cold calling is still the most effective way in terms of cost and effort to convert prospects to customers.

It just takes practice, willingness to get better, and a positive attitude while doing it.

That is a great idea. Thanks!

This article does not mention much about how they hit $912 million in sales. However, the title made me furiously click on the article. So they've done their job.

close.io

The only major difference between the Web app and the native app is built-in calling. There's currently no calling in the Web version.

As someone who is extremely indecisive and laid back on little decisions like "where do you want to eat" or "what do you want to do today", I love this idea.

Just pick for me, and I'll go do it. It's fun!

This is really well done, but it relies too heavily on the users providing good content (clean, high res images).