Avery: Hey y’all, welcome back to another episode of the short-term show. Today we have Marc Hostovsky from Minoan.

Marc: Thanks for having me.

Avery: Probably get that all the time; it was like the dad joke of the century. Anyway, Marc, how’s it going?

Marc: It’s good! How are you doing?

Avery: I’m doing awesome, can’t complain. Happy you’re here; it’s nice to meet you one-on-one instead of in a room full of a thousand people.

Marc: Yeah, finally, it’s nice to chat.

Avery: So, Marc, why don’t we start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up in this space? Then we’ll move on to learning more about Minoan.

Marc: Sure. I actually started in retail and then stumbled into the short-term rental space. My background’s in retail—I was an early employee at a company called Jet.com, which was an e-commerce platform. That business was acquired by Walmart, and I spent a few years learning the ins and outs of retail, both in the e-commerce side and the store side.

Avery: Interesting, and what did you notice there?

Marc: One thing you notice is that buyers make these huge, multi-hundred-million-dollar inventory bets, figuring out what products to bring into stores or online. They’re getting samples to see and feel the products, but customers get a diluted experience. We often interact with products that are put in cardboard boxes on shelves or through screens, and that always bothered me about retail. I felt like customers weren’t really getting to use the product.

Avery: That makes sense.

Marc: Yeah, it was always this very kind of diluted product experience. My wife and I were staying at a short-term rental in Upstate New York, and we had an experience—first of all, the mattress was so comfortable. We were like, “Where is this from?” I had to crawl into the shower to take a picture of the showerhead because my wife wanted it when we redo our bathrooms. The Grohe shower system was fantastic. It felt like we were in a nice home, and we just loved using all this stuff. I was comparing this experience to my day job, thinking, “Wait a minute, all these brands that are in this short-term rental space, they spend billions to try and create meaningful moments with customers, and the best way they think to do that is through Instagram, Facebook, or Google.”

Avery: Totally, makes sense.

Marc: But what we experienced there was so rich and valuable. We thought, “Wait a minute, if you’re a mattress company, soap and shampoo brand, or electronics, you should want to be in homes where people can actually use your product.” That’s what inspired us to start Minoan, and that’s what we’ve done—taken this mentality and brought it into our business.