“People from the non-profit and social services world come in and they see their work can 10x via our technology, and it’s really an industry or a market that’s remained unchanged for 40 years. So to be able to take one minute and make that worth ten minutes for somebody else, who’s genuinely saving lives, is a beautiful thing.”
–Matt Singley, Founder and CEO
“Every day we find a new group of folks that want to use our platform. We started out with domestic violence and human trafficking. We’re doing refugee and asylum work. We’re doing hospital and healthcare work. We’re doing community violence work. We’re working with district attorney’s offices and law enforcement who show up on scene and need somewhere to place folks. Every few months or so, there’s a new sector that pops up. We haven’t even scratched the surface. I think that our initial target customer – 40,000 social service agencies – is a very low estimate of who could ultimately benefit from our service.”
–Paige Allmendinger, CPO
ReloShare & Motivate Founder Spotlight
ReloShare was founded by college friends Matt Singley and John Moats who saw an opportunity to simplify the B2B corporate housing booking process. Matt has a hospitality background as the founder of Pinnacle Furnished Suites, a provider of short-term corporate housing, while John leverages his Enterprise Software background at Oracle to develop innovative tech solutions to support the growing hospitality network. Together they conceived the idea of ReloShare—an aggregate reservation site with real-time inventory and instant booking. The course of their journey changed dramatically when they discovered the scarcity of shelter spaces for domestic violence victims was being exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. They quickly developed a real-time safe housing booking platform, housing over 100 survivors in under 2 months.
An opportunity was born.
With the addition of Paige Allmendinger to the team, who brings a first-hand understanding of the problems faced by their agency customers, they introduced Safe Stays, the first hotel booking website addressing the unique challenges faced by domestic violence agencies.
Today, ReloShare utilizes its confidential instant-booking technology, SafeStays, to power on-demand hotel stays for clients of social services agencies and government entities who require anonymity for an enhanced, safer environment. The technology and marketplace ensure access to critical accommodations for clients and sectors that have long been overlooked.
Motivate led the ReloShare Seed round in 2022. Lauren DeLuca, Founding Partner at Motivate and ReloShare Board Member, sat down with Matt (CEO) and Paige (CPO) to discuss the history of the business, the twists and turns of building technology to fill a dramatically unmet need, and their inspiration and motivation to do such life-changing work. Here is their full conversation.
Lauren DeLuca (Managing Partner, Motivate Ventures):
This is probably the most formal thing we’ve done in like two years since we sat down for coffee at Soho House. It was the first time we met in person, but not the first time we had chatted. We originally passed on the investment over email/phone calls, but we eventually came around. We’ll talk about it. We were smart enough the second time, you know? Yeah, I guess before we get into the background history and all that, maybe you two just share a little bit about your backgrounds and we’ll get into business. But what brings us here today after all these years plugging away?
Matt Singley (Founder, CEO):
Yeah. I’m Matt Singley, CEO of Reloshare. I come from an engineering background. Graduated in 2009 from Bradley University with a mechanical engineering degree. Worked in nuclear power from 2009 to 2015. In 2014, started a corporate housing company on the side called Pinnacle Furnished Suites. Scaled that from 2014 to 2020, at which point it was. What was it? The pandemic. Killed corporate travel, killed business, nearly killed business. That’s when we spun off what became ReloShare.. It was intended to save Pinnacle and kind of created its own world, its own life. And we’ll talk about that some more. But always an entrepreneur with a brief little stint in engineering.
Paige Allmendinger (CPO):
I’m Paige Allmendinger. I’m the Chief Product Officer at ReloShare, and prior to Relochare, was a social worker, working exclusively in government and nonprofit work. I graduated from the University of North Carolina in 2010, and decided to go straight to grad school for social work in Fairfax County, Virginia. While I did social work school, I worked in homelessness and housing. I worked in a shelter that did family homelessness and single homelessness, but I really focused my career at the intersection of housing and intimate partner violence. My experience as a social worker ranged from walk-in clinics, 24 hour hotlines, law enforcement support, emergency housing programs.
My partner got into grad school in France, so gave all that up to do a year of independent consulting and then transitioned to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office as the Deputy Chief of the Victim Services Division. When the pandemic happened in 2020, my job was trying to figure out what resources could exist as there was already a lack of domestic violence housing in San Francisco. That exploration kind of led me to hear where I am with Reloshare.
Lauren DeLuca:
How did ReloShare start and how did you two meet?
Matt Singley:
Our first client was The Network, which is an Illinois based domestic violence organization that operates as a domestic violence hotline. For context, during the pandemic, there was a rise of domestic violence crimes, as people were trapped in close quarters together and shelters had strict social distancing restrictions that led to reduced capacity. In response, The Network announced a one million dollar partnership with Airbnb to use Airbnbs for shelter overflow. That was ultimately the contract that Reloshare ended up with in a livebook corporate housing platform. We were able to use empty inventory for domestic violence victims in a more controlled, safer environment than maybe Airbnb would have been. That program in 2020 was a resounding success. I think we pumped maybe $800,000 into the local corporate housing market, but we had no revenue. It was just all losses.
Paige Allmendinger:
During this time, I was in San Francisco at the DA’s office, trying to figure out additional housing options because our hotels were being used for unhoused populations, so those hotels weren’t an option. I had been in conversations with Airbnb myself because we had a long partnership, as well. We had been discussing using host homes as supplemental housing, but when the Chicago deal fell through, they didn’t want to have that conversation any longer and instead just gave me a lump sum of money and said, here’s money, figure out what to do with it. Which was great, except I didn’t have another option. Our hotels were all full. So there were a number of us that represented different cities across the country that had been having the same conversation with Airbnb. So Airbnb had been having this conversation with Chicago, with DC, with San Francisco, with LA. An organization called the National Alliance for Safe Housing held a convening of all of us. In that meeting, I was discussing how I had money but no way to spend it. A leader of the Network, Amanda Peyron, suggested that I connect with Matt and John. Because of that we were able to spin up basically the same corporate housing platform in San Francisco. We had a really successful pilot using that platform to have survivors in San Francisco.
After a series of life changes shortly after that, I sent Matt an email about the possibility of joining his team and he was open to it!
Lauren DeLuca:
So you went from kind of customer partner to colleague to running product.
Paige Allmendinger:
Yes. Originally, I was going to come in to continue the corporate housing work to see if it could be an ongoing solution.
Lauren DeLuca:
Your whole business in some ways has felt like different offshoots of experimentation that have turned into really unique and successful products.
Matt Singley:
Yeah. It was originally intended to save my first company. It wasn’t supposed to be anything other than that. We kind of fibbed a bit when we said we had an actual product. When Airbnb wanted to engage in a pilot with us we were like, oh okay, I guess we need to build a product now. We completed that in a two week cycle. We built this thing and it worked. That’s when the light bulb started going off that this physical asset business is great, but it’s not scalable. There’s not a marketplace in corporate housing. It was never intended to be hotels.
So you’re right, it was just surveying the landscape, seeing what was out there, and then jumping on opportunities that kind of had a cross section of helping people and making money. It’s the greatest cross section of work life that you could kind of imagine.
Lauren DeLuca:
You have given us some great background and context to our origin story, but let’s define the actual business at this point. How do you talk about the business today and for what populations are you solving for?
Matt Singley:
In late 2020, we were still doing the corporate housing booking for agencies that were serving domestic violence survivors. However, in early 2021, as the world started coming back, corporate housing became expensive again. On the flip side, hotels were still reeling from the pandemic. They were eager to find solutions to aid their bottom line. Looking at the market signals, we ended up pivoting from a corporate housing platform to a hotel booking platform. Our first hotel partner was Extended Stay America. The timing was truly perfect. I don’t think that without the pandemic this would have ever happened.
Lauren DeLuca:
It is interesting that the pandemic didn’t create this problem but almost accentuated it.
Matt Singley:
I think the problem was known, but the solutions weren’t there. The pandemic created an opportunity for Extended Stay America and ultimately most other major brands to consider what became our alias program. ReloShare is the only company in the world today that offers alias check-ins. Meaning that for safety reasons, our customers can use fake names and check in without IDs. That’s really the differentiator with our platform. The pandemic created an opportunity for the hotel companies to consider this service that they never would have before.
Lauren DeLuca:
It was totally non-compliant.
Matt Singley:
Definitely. Stepping back into 2021, Extended Stay America came on. Choice Hotels came on shortly after. Those two launches fixed our supply problem at scale. Where before with our corporate housing platform, we were doing regional rollouts because the space is so fragmented. Now, with the hotel industry being more mature, we were able to bring on partners across the country all at once.
Jumping to the present day, our main product is Safe Stays by Reloshare, which is the hotel booking platform for social services agencies, government entities, anybody where anonymity can create an enhanced, safer environment.
Paige Allmendinger:
Another thing I’ll say on top of it from an agency perspective is that this was happening piecemeal across the country. Social service agencies had been using hotels as supplements to shelter for as long as I’ve been a social worker, and I’m sure longer before that. But what wasn’t in place were these like negotiated streamline processes. I think that’s what we’ve really brought into the system, because what happened before is you would have one relationship with one hotel general manager. That general manager leaves, suddenly your relationship with the hotel is gone. From a hotel perspective, from our partners, they liked having one simple process that they could roll out to all of their hotels. It was simple.
From an agency perspective, they were handing them a group of hotels that wanted their business so we could actually do better matchmaking in that sense. There was only kismet in that relationship.
Lauren DeLuca:
Man, I love the story. You’re really solving an incredible problem and a very timely and acute one in that individual’s life.
Matt Singley:
Yeah, another big piece of what our system allows too. With the old process, you’re right, the agency employee has a credit card, which, by the way, has a $200 limit on it. They show up to a hotel at 2am and are only booking one night because their credit card won’t allow for longer stays than that. They go home and pay it off the next day. So a big piece of what we do is we front all that money and we invoice it on a monthly basis. It allows agencies to spend more time helping people rather than dealing with administrative work.
They don’t have to audit from four different places and argue with hotels to pay off their credit cards. We have streamlined all that, which increases the efficiency of the agencies that use ReloShare. It is almost like we are adding employees with no dollars to their network of service providers.
Lauren DeLuca:
And to that point, though, the agency also has this reporting duty back to their public or their private donors. So you give that ability to match all of the dollars spent. There’s a payments piece of this, just from a compliance and donor relations point of view, this is incredibly powerful stuff.
Paige Allmendinger:
Yeah. I think a lot of what we’ve done on our end too, is not just the consolidated invoicing and the billing that we do on the forefront, but we really tailored the way that we deliver those to our clients to make sure that they fit their funding. Grant funding is very complicated. There’s a lot of nuance in what you have to have on each individual receipt, essentially, to get it reimbursed. We spend a lot of time making sure that our processes match the funding restrictions that our agencies have. We’re not just saving them time on the front end where they’re not spending 3 hours driving around looking for a hotel, but we’re really saving them time and energy across the board. So it’s, their finance team feels it, their leadership team feels it. Ultimately the people being placed, the guests, the survivors who had something horrific happen to them, don’t have to wait 6 hours to find somewhere safe and lay down. It really can happen much faster.
Lauren DeLuca:
You’re even helping your agency clients secure the grants through which they can ultimately pay for their end clients.
Paige Allmendinger:
The feedback from our agencies that use our service, it’s never that there’s a lack of a need. They always have a need for hotel stays. They always have folks that need emergency housing. What they lack sometimes is the funding to actually pay for it. A lot of what we end up doing is helping finding funding sources that can pay for these hotel stays for our agencies, whether that’s grant funding sources, whether that’s opening a gift card option for the agency so they can ask their donors to put money in their ReloShare account and then that money can just sit there and they can apply it to invoices in the future. They always have a little bit of a bank of flexible dollars that they can use to spend because what we’ve seen historically is we can tell with our agency’s behavior when they’ve lost funding because we can actually see changes in their booking behavior. We can reach out, intervene, try and find and connect them to additional funding sources because a big frustrating part of their work is that they want to help and they want to use this platform that’s made it easier. But so we find a big role as us actually using our subject matter expertise and finding funding that’s eligible for these days.
Lauren DeLuca:
What stands out is that you invited me to your first all-hands here in Chicago. I pull up a chair, thinking I would be a fly on the wall for this meeting, and immediately you’re like, hey, here’s the team, tell them why you invested. And I told them about how fractured the industry is, the limited competition. I mean, there’s a bunch of reasons. But I shared customer stories that I had when conducting diligence and I saw people in the room tear up. It 100% had nothing to do with me. Right? Nothing to do with my why. But I think it resonated with their own why. You, the folks that we had a chance to spend time with are incredibly motivated, almost heroically so, and mission-driven. There’s an intensity in their “why.”
I’m curious if you feel that in the team today, how do you see that as the team’s growing pretty aggressively, but also how do you maintain that as well?
Paige Allmendinger:
Yeah, I think one thing that we did that was, I think, pretty unique is that for a lot of our initial hires that work directly with our customers, so the folks that are doing our sales work, the folks that are doing our customer services work, most of them, if not all of them, come either from social services themselves or come from the hospitality world. So this is very uniquely applicable to their prior work experience. So many of them worked in shelters or they worked on hotlines, and they’ve seen themselves just what this means to the agencies. And so often we hear new staff tell us we wish this would have existed when I was doing direct services work because this would have made my life so much better.
So I think it’s interesting to have a team come to this work who’s intrinsically motivated to actually make the change that this platform creates for the agencies. I think that the mission of the work still drives them in the same way we’re driven by the company and we want it to grow. But I think ultimately the end user, who were the folks that are getting access to services because of this. I think for all of us, that always sits in the back of our minds is why we’re ultimately doing this work.
Lauren DeLuca:
So many of you were on the other side of the table, right? So you understand the problem sets firsthand.
Matt Singley:
I was just thinking back to your story about when you looked around the room. Part of that too is a changing mindset of the people that come onto the ReloShare team. I mean, they’ve lived this, they’ve walked this walk, they’ve talked this talk. They’ve lived in this world and have been under-resourced the whole time. It’s almost unfathomable to some of these folks to come into this company, you know, have money for pens, have money for a monitor, have people like Motivate walk in and share that same feeling or that same story as they’ve lived. A lot of them, I don’t think I’ve ever had that.
Originally, when we joined, we called it silo-busting. It was like the hospitality silo, the tech silo, and social services silo. It was really the first time that those silos broke apart and joined together into space. It’s just a different twist. And people from Paige’s world come in and they see their work can be 10x via tech, and it’s really an industry or a market that’s remained unchanged for 40 years. So to be able to take a minute and make that worth ten minutes for somebody else is beautiful.
Lauren DeLuca:
And so you’re built around that need for efficiency and speed. You’re seeing faster time to onboard agencies, you’re seeing more and faster transactions. I remember the commentary from the last Board meeting: “We’re seeing more interest showing up faster, being onboarded faster, and more total agency clients.” And the time of the first booking is accelerating as well. To what do we attribute this?
Paige Allmendinger:
Nonprofits and government agencies are inherently skeptical. And so I really continue to have a lot of admiration for the agencies that signed up for Safe Stays when we were nothing. And so I think the first agencies had to figure out things like, how do we implement this? Do we trust this company? And so it was like they would test the waters and see how they thought it would go. And I think we’ve been doing it. So safe stays in June will hit our three year mark when we launch our first beta in June. So it’s been a very fast growing three years. But I think the reputation, it’s such a small community of social service agencies, and that reputation really has carried us. The first few interactions that we had went so positively that over time, but we’re starting to see it’s not just our cold outreach to potential customers, but we’re really seeing our reputation as growing within those sectors. And so when an agency tells their partner agency, “hey, sign up for this, it could save you a bunch of time.” Just that reputation piece alone, that trust in the community, I think, has led to agencies signing up faster. Our team has also done a tremendous amount of work trying to figure out what were the reasons why agencies had that gap in time between when they got an account and when they started using it. Developing toolkits, developing policies and procedures, you know, things that we knew would help speed up the process for the agencies, because often what they’re doing is they have this new tool they have to figure out, how do you train your staff on how to use it? And so there’s been a lot of investment in that kind of building out tools for our agencies once they are onboard so that they can use us more effectively.
Lauren DeLuca:
Just being the “easy button” for these agencies seems like a massive opportunity. Is attrition an issue on the agency side?
Paige Allmendinger:
Not really, to be quite frank. I mean, I think that we, so we’ve done a couple of promotions in the past where we had, like, sign up bonuses, and those brought some agencies in that maybe weren’t the best fit for the product because they signed up for the promotion, less for the service itself. But what we actually find is that when an agency signs up to use us, they’re using us with frequency, they’re using us across their agencies, they’re using us monthly at least. There’s continuity once an agency signs up. I think the bulk of the agencies that sign up in 2021, which, you know, there are a few of them, are still very actively using the platform today and still continue to grow their usage of the platform.
Lauren DeLuca:
I think on the consumer side, it’s just so obvious, right? We have Kayak and Booking.com and Hotel Tonight, all these easy consumer apps, that the moment you use them, you don’t go walk down the street to a neighborhood travel agency, if they even exist anymore. So to me, it makes a lot of sense why when you have one agency, they use it one time, book at once, and then as long as they maintain their access to funding, you have an agency for life.
What I also learned in our diligence is how awesomely big the space is. There are 35,000-40,000 potential agency customers across the US. They are also very tightly knit. There’s a lot of sharing, best practices, a lot of industry conferences, and collective thought leadership. That is why your marketing has mostly been word of mouth, right?.
Matt Singley:
I remember early on, I mean, one out of two people you reached out to was like, this can’t be real. What’s the catch? Just very defensive. I don’t get the feeling that it’s really like that anymore.
Lauren DeLuca:
So when you talk to somebody, there’s at least a familiarity or some awareness with the brand already?
Paige Allmendinger
Yeah. So we, one of our biggest marketing strategies is going to conferences, so going to where these folks are already gathering. And in years past, people would come by and they would, you know, pick up something and kind of wonder who we are this year. So far, every single conference we have gone to, folks have known who we were. They’ve had our communications, they’ve apologized to us for not responding to us. It is a very different dynamic change.
Lauren DeLuca:
We don’t see that often for a company at your stage. It’s usually, well, the other way around. This is a really interesting segue into all the other kinds of cool things going on here. Is there anything sort of experimental or otherwise that we can discuss? We talked a little about some emergency housing in San Diego that you’ve done recently. Anything – other projects and initiatives that you are starting to take on?
Matt Singley:
Yeah, we kind of, especially as the company matures and we start to figure out what ReloShare looks like next year, five years from now, we’re starting to talk about the transactional marketplace, aka Safe Stays, as the flywheel. So the flywheel spins, it’s these transactions throughout the United States, 24 hours a day. But what spins off that flywheel is sort of what we define as enterprise opportunities, bigger, more intentional projects. So some examples of that are hundred room homeless projects we’ve done in a couple of cities throughout the country. So we’ll go in and negotiate with all the hotel brands. We’ll take a whole building down, and then that becomes a very intentional, typically housing or unhoused projects. Those are large enterprise opportunities that are contracted.
Most recently, there was flooding in San Diego. One of the partners we work with reached out and was just like, hey, can you help us with this? This is kind of big. So we threw the platform at this catastrophe, or “cat-event,” as it’s known in hospitality. It was really the first use case that we know of tech being utilized in a cat-event. So ultimately, I think the peak of that was probably 3,000 people booked through the platform over the course of 45 days. It was a situation where they just, it would have been impossible to house that many people that were in need without our platform.
Lauren DeLuca:
You immediately identified the hotel supply available. Right?
Matt Singley
Yeah, I mean, our network existed already. It was just, you know, reaching out and saying, hey, we’re about to have a ton of volume here. You know, negotiate rates, save the county money, and then just kind of pound them all through one at a time, letting people stay, you know, typical response to a cat-event is you take a couple hotels or gyms and you’re setting up cots. This implementation or this kind of strategy allowed people to stay in their school districts, stay near their grocery stores and their families. So we used like 52 hotels or something for this program as opposed to the “normal” way of doing this, of two locations that might not be anywhere close to your family network. So that was a really cool event.
Lauren DeLuca:
Can you talk more about the end-user experience?
Matt Singley:
So we’re a B2B2C marketplace. So we have very little interaction with the actual consumer and that’s intentional. The organizations we work with are on the ground meeting with these people, doing intake forms, doing kind of the on-the-ground work. So in the case of San Diego, there’s an agency that was in charge of all of that and we’re just the backend tool. We simply help agencies be more efficient.
Paige Allmendinger:
Yeah, I think even though we’re not directly interfacing with the guests themselves, I think it still creates a better user experience for them. So what is happening is you’re sitting across from the person who has the account and what you as the end user can do is you could define where you want to be. Where are the hotels that are closest to my kids’ school? I have three kids. I want to make meals. I don’t want to have to eat out all the time. Get me a hotel that has a kitchenette so I can continue to feed my kids how I want to feed them. They’re being displaced. That’s really disruptive. I have a pet. I need to find a pet-friendly hotel. I have, you know, maybe an abnormal pet. We were housing iguanas at one point. We were housing, you know, a wide range of animals.
Matt Singley:
Including a tiny chicken.
Paige Allmendinger:
You know, but there are so many different rules and regulations and amenities available at hotels. And so what our platform can do is allow a conversation to happen between the person who is booking the reservation and the person who’s going to be staying in that hotel for months at a time to make sure it’s the best fit. Ultimately, this wasn’t a domestic violence or human trafficking project where we typically think of our alias program usage. But there are other affected folks, like if your home gets flooded, you don’t have any ID because you lost everything. So there were a number of folks that ended up using our alias booking option, which is only available through our platform. Nowhere else can you book hotel rooms without an ID.
And that was a huge barrier that the county actually had not come up with a solution for prior to us joining that initiative. I think what it looks like it’s a better option for a hotel, it’s a faster booking of a hotel. We did find, and we’ve gotten some feedback that folks actually appreciate the name Safe Stays because in those moments of crisis, whether it’s a disaster or whether it’s domestic violence, they feel comforted by this program that is really trying to highlight the safety that’s provided through the hotel stays for them.
Lauren DeLuca:
What are the operational sort of things you’ve learned along the way in building this business that you’d like to share? Lot of founders would love to know some of the big lessons learned so far.
Matt Singley:
There’s a lot of different ways that things can go wrong or right. It’s generally just keeping your eyes open, figuring out what people complain about, like what sucks about your job, and then figuring out, you know, what’s my background, what’s your background, and how can we apply what we know, what we can do to solve it? I mean, that’s what startups are, right? They’re solving problems. So just keep your eyes open and find those big problems worth solving for our customers.
I mean, the beginning of your question reminded me of the first few months of this rollout where the national brands had agreed to this stuff, but the hotels didn’t really, no one knew this. It was incredibly difficult. There’s probably 50 hotel owners on the West Coast that have my ID and credit card in their text messages. It’d be 2am and I’d be begging people, please, God, let them check in. Here’s all my information. This is my Facebook, this is real. So it was hard every month, but every month got easier as we kind of rolled this out and we got name recognition and repeatability.
Lauren DeLuca:
You were telling stories about maxed-out credit cards, early on. I didn’t understand but this makes a lot of sense. Trying to build validity and credibility that you as a hotel can trust us.
Matt Singley:
We went to our clients and sold this alias thing. The first couple of months were us begging agencies like you can trust us. The hotels are on board. And it was just, I mean, I’m telling you, begging.
You read books and they talk about pointing your hose at the biggest fire, right? Because there are a thousand fires burning. And it’s like, find the fire that gets you tomorrow, put out that fire. And it’s just constant iterations of what gets us tomorrow. And then if you’re lucky, you get enough of a break to think about next month. And we’ve recently been lucky. We relaunched the whole product, got rid of a bunch of old tech, and launched a newer-age booking platform. But I mean, we’ve been chasing our tails every day, every night for years. But you just nose to the grindstone, as they say, keep trudging along and get it figured out.
Paige Allmendinger:
Yeah. And I think the only thing I would add to that is, like, be ready to pivot when you need to be ready to, like, figure out what are the solutions you can do today versus what’s the best solution. So I think a lot of what we have to think about is, what is a solution that gets 80% of the problem solved with a much smaller percentage of effort going towards it. And I think, for me, that was a really hard transition because I’m so used to digging in deep and finding the root cause. But it’s been incredibly important because you never know if that solves all of the problems at the end of the day. And so I think just constantly having your head turning, looking in different directions, and then getting information from different sources. So constantly surrounding ourselves with folks who we can have conversations with, who can give us ideas, who can help us think things out more thoroughly, has been instrumental, as we’ve grown.
Matt Singley:
I think we knowingly made a lot of bad decisions. Decisions we knew if we had another three days, this is not the decision we would make, but it was on purpose, and it got us tomorrow. And getting tomorrow allows you to make the right decision retroactively. Solve for today, put out the biggest fires, and build for next month, not necessarily for five years from now.
Lauren DeLuca:
You talked a little bit about the catastrophe response you spun up very successfully recently. Are there any other things that you might be thinking about, initiatives, directions, other problem sets of technology that you can share today?
Matt Singley:
Yeah. I will introduce this and then hand it off to Paige. I mean, part of this flywheel effect of the platform, as we get insights into today, there are 500 agencies throughout the United States, we figure out what their pain points are beyond just this hotel booking piece.
Lauren DeLuca:
And it’s like 1% of the potential market rate that we’re just scratching?
Matt Singley:
Yeah, just scratching and one of the things that we started to hear or just kind of anecdotally picked up on was, well, Paige knew this, but for me, is how shelters operated. Like you said earlier, it’s all pen and paper, spreadsheets, erasing names, putting them on doors, assigning beds, just like the same way it’s been done since 1950.
Our first client was telling me stories years ago. Every morning they wake up and they call every single shelter in their network that they’re referring people to via the state hotline. Shelter A, two beds at 08:00 a.m. You know, somebody calls at 03:00 p.m. They say, hey, I think we have two beds at Shelter, A. They call, and, oh, those beds aren’t there anymore. So it seemed to us there was a big opportunity in the shelter management space, and that idea has kind of been floating around for three years, but it’s becoming real now, and I’ll let Paige talk about what that is.
Lauren DeLuca:
Shelter supply, is that the way to think about it?
Paige Allmendinger:
We’ve always known Safe Stays was either a supplement to existing shelter programs or they were using it in lieu of a traditional shelter. So some folks didn’t have the time to do a capital campaign, raise a couple million dollars and invest the time it takes to build an actual shelter. So we’ve always worked very closely in alignment with shelter. And so when thinking about searchable technology, it has always shocked me. I’ve been doing housing and homelessness work for almost 15 years. I would have to spend hours of my day calling around to shelters asking the same exact question every single day, nonstop, five times a day. Do you have a bed? Do you have a bed? And it just felt like there was so much time being wasted. And what we’re really trying to do with Safe Stays is give advocates back that time so they can do better services. And so it felt like a really natural expansion to think about, what would it look like to have a shelter search service? What would it look like if agencies could, amongst themselves, share their availability so that they could easily see which of their partner shelters in their community have space without having to waste each other’s time making these phone calls back and forth. So that spun up into a product that we’re gearing up to launch that we call The Grove. The idea is that each shelter is reliant on one another. Every shelter has to work together collectively, just like a grove of trees, they’re reliant on one another. Trying to kind of expand the ability for folks to find adequate shelter space. So we’re really excited about both that opportunity and how it can actually streamline and make using Safe Stays easier. Because instead of spending 6 hours looking for a shelter space, you find that there’s no shelter space available. You can easily go over and book an alias hotel stay for your guest via Safe Stays.
Lauren DeLuca:
In that case, let’s talk about the Grove product and the flywheel effect it creates for your customers?
Matt Singley:
Yeah, and I want to step back for a little bit and talk about this Grove product. To contextualize the impact of this, it’s not only the efficiency of the agencies, it’s not only the efficiency of time and finding beds, but really optimizing utilization factors of existing assets. There’s a very easy case to be made that by better utilizing bed capacity throughout the United States, you can build half a billion dollars in assets without a brick. So if you can take utilization from 80% to 90% at 40,000 shelters across the United States, that’s a lot of free assets. So we’re excited to see at scale, you know, kind of what this can do for sheltering in the United States.
Lauren DeLuca:
That’s fascinating. We don’t really talk about your nuclear engineering time that much, Matt. I always thought you were sort of like a tinkerer. You’re a builder. Is there something in that background that has just played into the success here?
Matt Singley:
I think so.
Lauren DeLuca:
I guess what you do today seems pretty far away from engineering, but I know you are very proud of having done that.
Matt Singley:
Yeah, I mean, the tech, the building part definitely scratches that engineering itch that wasn’t being scratched with just the corporate housing company. So it’s cool to iterate, design, and build. It’s very close to what engineering was, just in a little bit different way. A lot of our emergency response stuff, interestingly, like spinning up shelters very quickly, utilizing buildings that maybe weren’t intended for sheltering. So I do actually get to use a lot of my mechanical, HVAC, electrical, plumbing experience, kind of rapidly designing and building emergency shelters. So that’s been cool. My background just completely randomly is perfect for rapid shelter deployments, as is my hospitality background. I had a construction company for a while and with a real estate and engineering problem-solving background. I didn’t realize it, but I was being kind of molded into this, where I am today.
Lauren Deluca:
Paige, is there something from your DA experience that helps you in this role?
Paige Allmendinger:
I think the time of the DA’s office being embedded in, within the systems, gives you a good vantage point to be able to see what goes well within those systems and what doesn’t go well. I think one place that I find is really unique to what we’re doing is that we’re bringing in folks who have that nonprofit experience, that governmental experience, but who are willing to come and work for a for-profit. And I think that takes a really distinct mind shift. And being able to see, you know, what are the different levers that you could pull within a private company that you can’t pull when you’re a government employee, that you can’t pull when you’re a nonprofit. And so really thinking about serving people as a whole and just figuring out what the best tools are at your fingertips to do that. And I think in San Francisco, I had the benefit of being surrounded by tech companies.
We had very strong partnerships with a lot of the tech companies that were locally housed in San Francisco. I think seeing the innovations that they could bring in, making our lives easier, even things that weren’t designed for social services. Lyft and Uber changed the game for social service agencies because they could order a cab for their client and it could show up and they knew it was going to be and they could track them. It was not designed for that purpose, but it has had a massive impact. And so, thinking about what are other ways that we can invest more specifically in these agencies. Being in San Francisco helped that quite a bit. And then working in a political office, there’s always things that you learn, different types of skills and pivots that you do that I think come with having to learn very quickly and having to make decisions really rapidly.
Lauren DeLuca:
I can’t imagine who, if anyone, is going to actually read all of this. If there was that ideal individual or team on the other end of this, who is she or he? What is their profile? Where can they be helpful and impactful?
Matt Singley:
Well, today we think we’re about 15 employees behind where we should be just for today. We’ve got about 32 on the team. It’s about, it’s basically one year ago, where you came into the meeting. There were probably 14 people on the team back then. So we’re about doubled in a year. And then, we intend on tripling over the course of the next twelve months to about 90 folks.
So for us, I mean, the most, probably the most important near-term move is a Head of People, a dedicated hiring person to help us formalize and expand what has traditionally fallen on me, Paige, and the executive team to hire. We’re beyond that. We need somebody to come in and set up the processes and figure out what this looks like at scale. How do you hire 60 people in the next two months? That’s wild to even think about. We need help there.
Paige Allmendinger:
I’m a little sick right now thinking about it.
Matt Singley
Yeah. So at a structural level, it’s that People position. Besides that, it’s hiring across the board. Sales, marketing, engineering, tech, UI, UX. It’s everything.
Paige Allmendinger
Yeah, I think it’s truly everything. I mean, I think the other piece for me is, and it’s not an immediate thing, but it’s definitely more government relations folks. I think that we’re seeing more and more, it’s just a really time-intensive process, building relationships with government folk. And so whether that’s the procurement process, the vendor process, there’s just so much that goes into it, especially because we’re not just working at one level. We’re not just working with the federal government or state governments. We’re working with counties. We’re working with cities. We’re working with localities. And I think that there’s a lot of nuance that comes with that. And so finding folks who are interested, I think of it as a chess game, you know, working with clients whose processes make it hard for them to become clients, but who want to be.I think that’s where I think a lot about, just because there’s more investment in those relationships, and it’s a very specific skill set that comes with that. But I do think that’s where we’re going to continue to grow, because there’s just massive demand and need for it, and they’re asking us to figure it out so that they can use our service.
Lauren DeLuca:
How do you think about expanding the market you are serving?
Paige Allmendinger:
Every day we find a new group of folks that want to use our platform. We started out with domestic violence and human trafficking. We’re doing refugee and asylum work. We’re doing hospital and healthcare work. We’re doing community violence work. We’re working with district attorney’s offices and law enforcement who show up on scene and need somewhere to place folks. And so I would say every three months, there’s a new sector that pops up. Recently, we learned that school social workers actually have funding to provide housing for families that are experiencing temporary homelessness, which is a sector that we had not considered at all. Thinking about going to schools and offering them this platform. And we’ve seen a dramatic increase in schools that have signed up for accounts. I think anybody who in their work touches the general public and who provides services, which is a large amount of the employment base in this country. We haven’t even scratched the surface. I think that 40,000 agencies is a low estimate at this point of who could ultimately benefit from the service.
Lauren DeLuca:
Amazing. Every time we’ve done market sizing work together, you discover a new rabbit hole to dig into and build another massive product line. It’s not the most precise way to think about it, but you seemingly keep finding a broader customer base or user set that is experiencing a similar problem.
Paige Allmendinger:
And it’s the same service that’s applied to all of them. I don’t think that I have a good sense, and there’s no good data that shows how many folks are paying for short-term housing. And it just cuts across so many different sectors that we know about, and many that we don’t know about yet but are rapidly discovering.
Lauren DeLuca:
Yeah. I don’t think six months ago we had any conversations around the needs of school social workers. Google says there’s 20,318 high schools in the United States. So our target list just went from 40k to 60k. Wow. What about the scope and size of the problem, Paige?
Paige Allmendinger:
Yeah, I think that there is some great research that shows that because we have more open conversations around what’s happening in the home with housing and stability, with domestic violence, that more folks are reaching out. But from hotlines to clinics, they’re telling me there’s a lot more domestic violence screening that’s happening at hospitals. So now there are laws that say if you go to the emergency department, they have to screen you. If your partner goes with you, they have to ask them to step out of the room so they can ask you a series of questions. So we’re having a lot more screening points across the community in different places that we haven’t before, and so folks have a lot more opportunities to disclose. What we haven’t really seen is a massive investment in building the spaces, because once somebody discloses that they need help, if you don’t have a space to put them, you’re not really able to provide the support that they need in that moment. So I think that we’re gonna continue to find folks who are vulnerable, who are being abused, who are being neglected, we’re going to see an increase in need. So not just providing the Safe Stays option, not just providing the Grove, which can help find shelter spaces, but really thinking through where are we seeing demand where there’s not supply? And I think that’s something that we think a lot about, because I imagine as this continues to grow, so we’re going to see shelters be full. So what does that look like for us? What does that look like for the relationships we have with our customers? And what else can we do to ensure that everybody has somewhere safe to go?
Lauren DeLuca:
With that last point, can localities actually be customers? I mean, if you talk about the data you have, which I’m going to guess doesn’t really exist – like the occupancy and activity at each individual shelter, understanding what supply looks like at any given time – you can probably forecast shelter demand for the cities? I’m guessing that it’s pretty informative to the shelter providers and really actually making a firm case, a data driven case, for what’s actually needed.
Paige Allmendinger
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of interesting things that we’ll be able to see, especially with the growth, like how many searches are resulting in no shelter spaces available. Where are those happening? Are we seeing them pivot over to safe stays and find a hotel?
Lauren DeLuca:
What’s predictive of your own solution and where you might end up long term?
Paige Allmendinger:
As in, making investments in larger facilities? Are we seeing just so many folks that are displaced in certain communities and there are no spaces available? So is that data that the city doesn’t have access to? Especially when we think about who is making referrals to shelters. So often there are known entities, but there are so many community members, pastors, folks in faith communities, that they’re the first touch point for a lot of folks, and they don’t have the resources to figure out where their shelter space is available. I think that we’re going to have a type of data and a quality of data, which is the other piece I spent a lot of my career doing data reporting for government sources. So every nonprofit has to send in reports.
It’s not great data because you’re getting kind of a snapshot of information from lots of agencies, but it’s not overlapping. So you could have the same survivor calling tent shelters, they’re each reporting that they had that one person call. They put that in aggregate. It looks like ten people are calling, but it’s one person who’s just calling a bunch of shelters. And so I think we’re going to have a very interesting source of the closest version of truth of what the demand supply actually looks like for emergency housing.
Lauren DeLuca:
I think it’s my last question, but I want to ask about something you touched on a little bit earlier. What motivates each of you?
Matt Singley:
I’ve had companies since I was 13 years old. I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I love building, I love solving problems, and to be frank, I love making money doing it. The cross section of what we found here at ReloShare is just totally unheard of. I’ve had thousands of conversations about this and everyone is just in awe and oftentimes jealous that we’ve found this way to drive value for customers, investors and ourselves, but most importantly, to help so many thousands of people that otherwise would have probably gotten less support in a time of critical need. We’ve been able to amplify the support that they’ve gotten and allowed more people to get help due to the efficiency gains and things. So it’s just, I think in summary, what motivates me is just the amount of lives we are able to touch and in a way that’s investable, scalable, and that’s the beauty of what we do. One of the terms that’s kind of thrown around within our company is “capitalism with a conscience.” That’s, that’s kind of how we view ourselves as using business for good. Without the ability to make money, we wouldn’t get the investors, we wouldn’t be able to scale this, we wouldn’t be able to spread nationally, we wouldn’t be able to be helping tens of thousands of people. So it’s just a really cool cross section of opportunities and principles. Together these things motivate me.
Lauren DeLuca:
That’s a lot to put on a t-shirt, by the way. So we have to narrow that down.
Paige Allmendinger:
We gotta trademark all of that.
Matt Singley:
Actually, yes – TM the whole response.
Paige Allmendinger:
I mean, I think at the core I’m motivated by the same thing that Matt is, which is to solve problems. I just approached it in a different way. I was solving problems through government, through nonprofit, through the social sector, and that still remains true. I think for me, it’s not just the end user for us, for the clients as a guest, but as somebody who worked in this field and was a professional working on behalf of those folks who are every day going to work, doing incredibly difficult stuff, hearing really traumatic things and giving them the tools to actually do their job better so that they can remain in that work. It’s a field where there’s a lot of burnout. It’s a field where there’s not a lot of resources. And so figuring out how can we leverage what we’re doing, how can we build this phenomenal platform and give back time to those folks so that they can do more work, they can do better work, and maybe they can take a vacation every once in a while. And I think that there, for me, it’s just a unique opportunity to see what’s possible. I took this job as a full experiment. I said, I don’t know what it’s going to be. I don’t know how things are going to go. It’s a sector I’ve never worked in. It’s folks I don’t really know that well outside of this project that we ran. And I’ve been nothing but amazed at how phenomenal everyone has been and how we all, despite having very different backgrounds, despite having very different things that motivate us, generally, have all moved in the same direction, have all been able to create something phenomenal and solve problems for a lot of people. So I think that’s ultimately what motivates all of us.
Matt Singley:
Trademark.