Hey everyone, wanted to share the background behind Lobbi and why we're building this product and this company.
My background has been in software as a founder and as an employee, with a couple of exits under my belt. In 2023, I bought a hotel in Tallahassee, Florida. It was an old Sleep Inn, and we turned it into an independent brand called BOB Hotels. We went from one of the worst properties as a Sleep Inn to ranked number one on TripAdvisor in a year and a half since opening.
While doing that, we started doing a lot of automations and being more efficient in running the property. We saw that a lot of the software that was available for managing was not what we wanted, and we were having issues dealing with the expectations we had of the vendors. That's how the idea for Lobbi was born.
We're starting with the assumptions and realities that costs are going higher, hiring is becoming more difficult, and independent hotels need to find a way to be competitive against the franchise products out there. We're building out a suite of products that we're using internally and now want to release it to the public so they can use it.
In 2023, we bought one of Tallahassee's worst-rated hotels, an old Sleep Inn. It took us six months to do a full renovation, and we opened it as BOB Hotels Tallahassee. A year later, we were the number one hotel in Tallahassee rated on TripAdvisor.
During that process, I saw how inefficient and disorganized the offerings were for managing the hotel. With my background in building tech companies, I knew there was a better way to manage. And so we started building products to automate and sync up how we managed BOB, and that's where lobbi was born.
The Spend Companion is the first product we're launching publicly. We want to create a trust layer on the spend that hotels have to do across every vendor that they're shopping through.
You can install the Chrome extension, making it super easy for your whole team to browse all the existing vendors you're already using. You don't change your behavior in any way, and we identify better deals for you.
We'll be launching more features and more products in the coming weeks. We understand the pain that independent hotel owners go through, and we want to make sure that we can now start saving them time and money, allowing them to focus on what's important: the hotel guests.