CheckInn: The story so far
The story of a small pet project from ideation to execution, and the power of teamwork
At CheckInn, we enable hotel staff to seamlessly communicate and create requests within departments (Like Front-Desk asking Maintenance to clean a VIP room urgently, or Maintenance reporting a leak in the back corridor)
Hotels in Muscat are the latest addition to the list of hotels who are preferring CheckInn over many other similar market offerings.
I felt it was time for a small write-up of the CheckInn journey.
This is a story of how a small idea went from ideation to execution (and more importantly, sales) in less than 6 months’ time.
The Backstory
March 2017. In my spare time, I had customized front-end and back-end frameworks that could be used for implementing ideas quickly.
A mailer was sent out to a select few, and one reply started off a great adventure. Chinmay replied to the mail almost immediately. His job required a lot of traveling, and had this great idea of easing a guest’s pain of ordering things when checked-in to a hotel. He knew that was a pain point as he was constantly facing it while in his business trips.
I started working on the platform and web, and a while later, Basit started with the Android app.
We built “CheckInn” – an app that allows a checked-in guest to request items using their smartphone.
Hotels showed a lot of interest initially, but when it came to closing sales, it just was not converting. This was near Aug ’17, I think.
Enter Sharang, the charismatic ex-hotelier. Sharang was introduced by a mutual friend. At CheckInn, he saw what we could not – he suggested we pivot to a hotel-operations platform and not a guest-focused one. He knew the pain faced behind the scenes of a hotel. The pivot took me just about a week and a half to code, and we now had a new product – Vesta. And Basit forked the mobile app for hotel staff. Soon, Chinmay and Sharang were on the field, selling. Nov 2017. Sales picked up. We saw upwards of 50% conversion rate.
Hotels loved our offering. It was so simple and clean.
We are kudoed by big names in the hotel industry for the speed, stability and ease of use.
Request creation was a tedious task in the archaic hotel systems. We have heard stories of how operators used to write down the requests on a piece of paper, and later transfer it to the system as it was time-consuming to enter myriads of fields. We have seen staff entering data into command-line based softwares! We simplified the entire operation with CheckInn. Now everyone just had to use a simple app on their own mobile phones. We have had multiple people coming and telling us “you have made our lives easier”.
Operators created requests on the fly, and the concerned department(s) were alerted of the requests in real-time. The entire hotel staff and management now had a clear idea of what’s going on when it came to daily operations. We were kudoed personally in staff briefings and morning meetings.
The (Personal) Experience
Chinmay, Sharang, Basit and Simran played their parts extremely well. Sharang and Chinmay got in the deals and contracts, Simran did sales and training, and Basit took over mobile apps completely. And I focused on the ‘Product’ from end-to-end.
We usually spend 3-4 days initially at a hotel, for deployment and staff training. Our hotel visits and deployments were hectic in the mornings, and chilled-out post evenings.
We have always enjoyed the warmth of the hospitality industry and all the perks associated with it.
A gallery of some CI highlights:
The Back(end)story
Being the geek that I am, I could not resist to omit this section. This section needs a separate technical blog post. However, the gist is:
We moved to a managed Amazon AWS Cloud when the load was doubling each month. All pull-mechanisms were changed to real-time push.
We made use of light-weight REST APIs, replicated RDBMS, load balancers and Workers.
And now, we have a highly scalable platform catering to Hotel operations globally 24×7.
I was the guy who handled architecture, platform, webapp, UI/UX design, APIs, deployments and the Product. Single-handedly.
It was a massive task. And it was a delight.
The Plug
4 and 5 star hotels across the world use CheckInn & Vesta for day-to-day operations management.
If you know anyone running or managing hotels, do introduce.
We offer a whooping 50% commission on sales (and 10% for any leads that convert), and there are stories of our sales agents making over INR 70k+ in a single deal.
Do check us out at checkinn.co. And yes, if you need some kickass ideas implemented, let’s talk about that too :)
Bye Bye Bruno
Chapter 1: Year One We had adopted a stray cat who had wandered in, way back in 2002....