You co-founded Minut in 2013. What were you doing before that?
Before that, I worked at Apple, in the exploratory design group. It was a small team that dealt with bringing in technology that could be used across many of the platforms. We worked with a wide range of products that I cannot say too much about. It was my first real job; I was brought over to California by Apple and lived there for seven or eight years. When I set out to found Minut, I lost my visa, which is how I ended up back in Europe.

” I had a few friends who had tried their luck with startups and been pretty successful, which was inspiring.”

Why did you decide to create your own startup?
I caught the startup bug living in San Francisco. Everyone there has a startup idea and there is so much energy around startups. After seven years at Apple, I was thinking about what’s next. I was young; I had come over to California at as a twenty-one year old. I couldn’t be excited about another big corporate job and I had a few friends who had tried their luck with startups and been pretty successful, which was inspiring.

What led you to the short-term rental market?
I was lucky enough to meet one of the early Airbnb employees, which partly inspired the original idea for Minut. The company faced the following issue: you invite a stranger to your home and obviously have to respect their privacy – but how do you ensure that your home is safe and respected? It was an intellectually-stimulating problem with considerable scope for growth.

What specific problem did you set out to solve with Minut?
The most common problem is that you rent out your home to someone and they invite all of their friends, throw a big party and crash the house, leaving you with a broken home. That is a fear that many people live with and the reality that many neighbours have to put up with. The problem is difficult because you cannot intrude on the privacy of someone who is not breaking the rules – so any sort of camera or surveillance solutions are simply non-starters.

What solution did you develop?
We developed a sensor and system that can monitor for crowds, noise and different signs of events while preserving the tenants’ privacy. It can then contact them and say “hey, these are the rules and it seems like you are a bit out of bounds here”. That, it turns out, solves over 90% of issues. Most guests are good people and just need a nudge to be respectful neighbours and tenants. If that does not solve the problem, we have an escalation mechanism where you can contact the host or, in the most extreme case, have a guard dispatched to the property to deal with the conflict.

Just to make this clear: Minut’s system would alert the tenants first?
Yes – that is crucial. You go in with the expectation that people are good and will respond well to being reminded that you might be on vacation, but it is 11 pm and you are playing music too loud. All of our data supports this – alerting the tenants really does solve the vast majority of issues.

What are some of the horror stories you have encountered?
When we are successful, there is no news story or big event. Minut’s purpose is to come in as early as possible to prevent these things from happening in the first place. Often, just the communication around having this device installed can help solve the issues. Before we existed, there were some bad cases of people getting their homes wrecked or even people being hurt in short-term rentals.

“When we are successful, there is no news story or big event.”

What is the cost associated with the damage done to short-term rental properties, if they get used in the wrong way?
The average insurance claim comes to USD 3000 or 4000 after a party. For a more valuable property, it can be much higher. From a return-on-investment perspective, we charge on average USD 100 per property per year, so we only have to stop one of these events every thirty years to provide cost-benefit to the owner. Installing Minut’s system is a no-brainer.

Who is your product for? Private landlords or professional property managers?
It is for anyone in the short-term rental industry. It is a diverse industry where you have hosts who manage one or two properties, or maybe rent out their own home when they are away. That is part of our business, but professional property managers make up the larger share. I think it makes sense: if you have more properties, these kinds of events are not something abstract that might or might not happen – it is a reality that you deal with every day. More than half of our customers are really big enterprises that, in some cases, manage thousands of properties.

How does Minut’s software detect how many people are at the property?
Our primary IP uses sound recognition. For occupancy counting, we also use the radio signals that mobile devices – such as phones, smart watches or laptops – send out. Minut takes all this data and makes an assessment about the occupancy level based on several of these factors.

What sets you apart from your competitors?
We only have a couple of competitors and they tend to have single-purpose sensors that only measure noise or occupancy. We are really the only player on the market that covers all of these for the property manager.

You have already mentioned privacy. How does your product ensure that tenants’ privacy is respected?
We leverage a technology called edge processing, which essentially means that instead of having the classifier that interprets the sound sitting in the cloud, it is distributed to the devices themselves. This means that no sound ever has to be recorded or sent across the network to be identified. This is our core invention, which is patented in many countries and enables us to really stand out from the competition.

To put it another way: the guests know that the noise can be heard, but they are confident that they are not being eavesdropped on?
Exactly. In Europe, the GDPR states that you cannot collect any personal information without the customers’ consent. We work with this by making sure that we are not picking up anything that can be tied to a specific individual. This is what gives us the unique permission to be in the hospitality arena – we find that balance between people’s expectation of privacy and the owners’ need to protect their business.

What is Minut’s business model? How is its product monetised?
We are a typical Software as a Service company. We charge a monthly fee per property for using the system, with different tiers depending on how much functionality the customer wants. We also provide solutions for very large clients with specific needs, with custom pricing.

What is the potential for scalability for Minut? Has the pandemic affected this?
We have about 30,000 hosts on our platform today – and there are of course millions of hosts worldwide. The market is growing very rapidly. There has been a shift in how people travel. One of the good things that has come out of the pandemic is a greater flexibility in terms of how we choose to work and where we choose to be. That is very good for the short-term rental industry. If you go on vacation and stay longer, working remotely, you do not want to be in a small hotel room. There has been a big shift from a certain type of hospitality accommodation to the short-term rental industry, so the potential today is perhaps 20 million properties.

What other areas could Minut’s product be applied to?
There are many places with the same core problem; a monitoring need where you still have to respect people’s privacy. Our customers already include hotels and student housing. Another area that we believe could be important in the very long term is senior living – enabling senior citizens to live in their own homes for longer by offering a monitoring solution that lets them go about their lives with a higher level of safety.

What feedback have you gotten from customers?
Our customers appreciate the peace of mind. Being a property manager used to be a very stressful job and we have been able to take a lot of that edge off. That is easily worth the price we charge.

What is your priority for Minut for the year ahead?
Our big priority is scaling our commercial organisation. We have the best product on the market and we are doing extraordinarily well in a few markets. I want to make sure that we roll out our product worldwide, as it really is a worldwide problem, and build a commercial organisation that can support that scale.