Latest / Reframe First / Sarah Stahl, VP of Marketing at LAKE | Creators Are the Future of Travel Marketing

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Sarah Stahl, VP of Marketing at LAKE | Creators Are the Future of Travel Marketing · Reframe First

• Oleksij Rak: And hey guys, welcome to another episode of Reframe First. I am Alexey, I'm of the podcast. Let me welcome our today's guest, ⁓ Sarah Stoll, VP of Marketing at Lake.com. So hi, Sarah, great having you here. Sarah Stahl: Hey! So good to be here with you today. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, awesome. is a line of vacation and rental platform for lakefront properties. rentals, ⁓ bookings by local guides and so on. Could you tell more about what lake.com is ⁓ ⁓ you're doing at Lake, what your role is? Sarah Stahl: Yeah. Yeah, so Lake.com was built out of the heart of the founders to want to allow families to get out and experience God's nature in rural towns. so Lake.com is an OTA and we now have 70,000 properties within our marketplace. Oleksij Rak: . Sarah Stahl: And the company is fairly new. It's about three years old. So still in that startup phase. And what they've recently grown pretty significantly. So in about from October of 2025, they had about 3000 properties in their marketplace. And then now February, we've got about 70,000. So the biggest jump happened when the owner who's also the developer Oleksij Rak: you Sarah Stahl: you know, has a heavy hand in the development of the software system that runs Lake's algorithm. And he noticed that property managers ⁓ don't to, they don't want to connect to another ⁓ source. want to be able to connect within their PMS system so that they could easily connect, have no double booking issues. So when he realized that, he spent about 18 months. Oleksij Rak: Okay. Sarah Stahl: making connection points between the property management systems and then starting in October, November, December started connecting to all the major PMSs. And so the now on the platform are pretty significant and they're located in Lakefront, ⁓ Lake adjacent or Lakeview that ⁓ are in places you've probably never even heard of before, but are well, well within a drive time. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. I very like kind of, browsed through Lake and it feels like somebody loves it, know? ⁓ it like, it's all around waterfront and stuff like that. ⁓ Sarah Stahl: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the, product development is always a thing we're working on. And so that's one of the things we're working on next is being able to tell the user how far the property is from the water, right? So like, can I walk here? Can I on my and see it? Can I ride my there? And then if there's a drive, how far is the drive? Oleksij Rak: yeah, yeah, that's awesome. ⁓ checked the analytics and your posts on like that comment. It looks like you're growing like crazy. ⁓ ⁓ might like more than 600. ⁓ yeah. ⁓ Sarah Stahl: You're talking about Google Analytics? Google, yeah. And of the cool pieces about that is there was a research report done at the end of the year and Lake.com is actually showing up 47 % of the time in LLMs for traveler searches, which is actually outranking some of the bigger OTAs that we compete with. So what's happening from a ⁓ markup ⁓ SEO standpoint to play nice with the LLMs? Oleksij Rak: Well. Sarah Stahl: owner is ⁓ much light years ahead of everybody and it's starting to show up in our analytics. Oleksij Rak: What are doing to achieve Yeah, from my experience, market is quite tough. ⁓ usually, I'm ⁓ from travel ⁓ from industry, people are losing traffic. you're gaining And grown like six or seven times over the last year. ⁓ Sarah Stahl: tell all our secrets. ⁓ Yeah. Yes, yes. Yes. So the best advice I could give without giving away any secrets look into schema and really making sure that that is done to the letter of the T. And that's not something that most people can do alone. There's companies that help with that. If anyone wants to know a company, I know a couple of great ones that I could put you in touch with. But Sceva markup is important and then it has to pair well with the content that's written on the page. Oleksij Rak: how do we produce the content? Because if reached 70,000 properties in two years, it's a lot. ⁓ Is it manually selected or is it... Sarah Stahl: That... It's not manual. So a lot of our pages are pre-built on Excel spreadsheets and then put into templates built off a template. So whenever we change something like we have, we have a certain amount of lake pages, right? So like for every lake in the country, there's a page. For every national park, there's a page. For every state park, there's a page. So anytime we want to, those are all based off of similar templates. And anytime we want to make an update, we have to make it inside a spreadsheet. Yeah, so we don't do a lot of manual updates on our heavier lift pages that are showing up higher in LLM search, we do do a lot of manual ⁓ like the page, right? Or like ⁓ the page, that kind of thing, because we're trying to make sure we're telling a really good story. Oleksij Rak: awesome. Also, I'm also trying to sell some package deals or is it about property rental? Because you have some both rentals and similar stuff. Sarah Stahl: Mm-hmm. ⁓ so we're haven't gotten into the marketplace for amenities. If that's what you're talking about, like add on amenities, we haven't gotten into that marketplace yet. We're trying to get our platform solid for the host because and foremost, we care about the host and that they get the visibility they need to make substantial bookings. and then we care about the, the guest ⁓ and, ⁓ how, Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Sarah Stahl: they're being able to easily source, find, book a stay that they feel like they can trust and they're comfortable with. So that's still a piece that we're trying to solidify first we branch out into that. The only extra thing we sell is to host. So we have a standard 10 % fee for each booking that happens ⁓ the booking or you could pay a set price per year. And that covers everything. ⁓ remove the 10 % fee. Oleksij Rak: Awesome. What demographics? What are usual demographics? ⁓ it all pre-recording were actually talking with you about ⁓ thin high margin? ⁓ What of... ⁓ Is mass booking is it something like niche, unique and... ⁓ Sarah Stahl: Mm-hmm. Hmm. So our dim. Very, very niche and unique. our book, our demographic tend to be the female head of household type of woman who's trying to create a memorable experience for her family. Folks ⁓ we to make it, you know, we try to make it clear that we care about the Lord first and foremost and honoring him and helping families get out in nature. And so people really like that, that we have a stance in the marketplace that we honor God. And so we're starting to find people are just more drawn to the owner's story and a part of that. And so what tends happen in the booking process is these ⁓ these ⁓ of household women, they're booking for four or five days out. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Sarah Stahl: they're booking about six months in advance. So bookings are pretty substantial. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, if you're going to the lake to relax, you're not probably going for one night. Sarah Stahl: you're not going for a couple of days. No, you're going for a while. And a lot of the houses associated on Lake, they're very large, right? They sleep 10 to 20 people. The average Lake health size that we have sleeps about 10 people on our property or on our platform. And so these are like larger family groups coming together for family reunion or some kind of family celebration. That makes up a lot of our guests. Oleksij Rak: That's interesting. since Lake was born post-COVID, from what I understand by the age of the lake.com, but still, do you see any shifts in trends of Who comes? ⁓ the they come, does it ⁓ affect niche? Because ⁓ niche quite unique ⁓ because going there to relax for family for whatever, for a couple of days or for ⁓ weeks time. Sarah Stahl: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: But still, do you like experience any shift in like visitor trends? Sarah Stahl: ⁓ Not so much. So because the majority of the platform was being built post COVID, we are just starting to get that data in now. Oleksij Rak: Okay, okay. And. Sarah Stahl: So that data is just starting to come in. So yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see kind of what happens there. Oleksij Rak: And maybe like, trends at all do you see in the industry? Where is the industry moving? Because post-COVID has changed. ⁓ Sarah Stahl: Trends? Yeah. So of the VP of marketing, I could talk heavily on marketing. So marketing trends that I've seen shift, a big one is the of creators ⁓ in So in fact, we're actually developing ⁓ a creator program that I've developed ⁓ with in the past because I've just seen so much great outcome. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Sarah Stahl: with them because people don't know what to trust. mean, you could talk about, we could talk about travel, but you know, if we're looking at the consumer marketplace as a whole, people trust a creator 80 % more of the time than they trust what a brand is saying about themselves because people don't know what to trust, right? That's just kind of the world that we're in right now. And so, you know, when you look at how touch points it requires to go from like, Oleksij Rak: you Sarah Stahl: cold finding out about a brand to actually making a Transaction with the brand whether that's a booking and travel or purchasing something in e-commerce It takes about 20 touch points to build that trust for someone to say I Trust this brand enough to make a purchase decision with them. Well, once you throw a creator into that mix that touch point reduces to about seven because the creator has already ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Yes. you Sarah Stahl: taking care of the others. They've already built their relationship. We were talking a little offline about Gen X. ⁓ Gen X, they actually are using social media less because they're trying to experience their life naturally. They wanna experience their life more naturally because they grew up with devices and now they're kind of like, I wanna play games with my friends. I wanna take a walk outside. So when Gen X shows up on social media sites like Instagram and TikTok, they're actually checking in with the creators that they follow. So they're like, what is so-and-so up to today? And they just like watching their life unfold, their story unfold. So all those touch points that it takes a brand to earn over time, especially with Gen X, the creator's already doing that for you. And so when you partner with a creator, Oleksij Rak: you I'm especially excited to be you today. So, when you heard about the great, amazing, amazing, amazing project that you're I it's amazing. I it's really amazing. I it's really see the great, amazing, amazing project that I mean, it's see the great, project Sarah Stahl: all of a sudden the folks, the GenX who are checking in with that creator, they hear about Lake.com and their Lake.com experience and the vacation that they booked and the time that they had. All of a sudden their followers go follow Lake.com and look at booking with them because now they trust them because someone that they've built a relationship with, even if it's one way, sometimes a lot of times with the creator, you got a one way relationship. Oleksij Rak: and and the community and the and the relationship. And as I said, I'm parent and I live in the U.S. and the industry. have a family people that I know that I that I So there's no transition between doing this and not doing this. And it's not a transition between doing this and Sarah Stahl: And so that's highly, highly overlooked in the industry ⁓ because I think we're coming out of, there's a big transition between generations who are currently sitting in roles there's a traditional way of doing things. And while there's some really solid traditional things that even I do that are necessary in marketing, we have to look at like, well, who are we partnering with? Who has the attention and are we partnering with them? and creators have the attention. And so we spent a lot of time at Lake.com getting to know our hosts ⁓ pairing them with creators for the purpose ⁓ ensuring that our creators earn the trust of our future guests. Oleksij Rak: But the creators have to be influencers for the GenX to trust them. how do you deal with a lot of fake content generated with AI? A lot of fake content generated with AI. ⁓ I was chatting with somebody from DMCs and they're like... ⁓ Sarah Stahl: A lot of what? Hello. Oleksij Rak: telling me like people are coming with a picture on their phone like we want to go here. They say like do not have that location. ⁓ is a cave restaurant here, we want to visit the cave restaurant. They're like okay there is a cave but there is no restaurant ⁓ know. ⁓ Sarah Stahl: you Interesting. I actually haven't run into that. I've ⁓ that particular that's an interesting problem because basically a create you're saying a creator created an experience that doesn't even exist. That's crazy. My experience with that ⁓ is I had a creator reach out wanting to partner with us and she was developing her AI avatar. So all of her content was like in locations that she'd gone to, but she recreated all of her content through her AI avatars eyes. And I said no. I was like, no, no, I understand that that's happening. I understand that. I mean, there's, there's like big AI creators that people follow, right? They tend to be female. And they tend to look perfect. And so that's the issue that I have with marketing is if we go back to the core issue that customers don't trust, they don't trust the brands, they don't trust what they're seeing, not going to put out anything that would cause them to make something, them trusted less. But an interesting, I'm going to keep my eye on that one, creating experience that doesn't exist. Wow. Oleksij Rak: quite easy nowadays with G &AI tools. ⁓ the end, you create a bright picture which is inspirational. So you inspire the traveler, the traveler comes over. ⁓ he trusts the content. And do feel like... How are creators feeling about AI nowadays? Because it's kind of a threat to their existence. Or is it not? ⁓ What's perception? Sarah Stahl: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's interesting one. You know, I haven't heard it come up one time. I'm going to start asking that question because now I'm curious. the reason why creators keep getting hired is because they're real. They get hired because they've built trust and brands want to borrow the trust that they have built. And they didn't build that trust anything fake. They built that trust by showing what their day to day looks like. Good, bad, ugly, indifferent. They just show up and they share what their day is like. And that's actually why I think that creators are the future of how marketing is done, especially in travel. because people, actually think we're in an AI bubble. Like we actually keep going through these AI bubbles. This is, think like the seventh one or something since the sixties. And I that, you know, if we go back to trust and I like to at the psychology of how ⁓ culture functions. And I know that overarching culture doesn't trust. they're going to look for more real. And so I haven't seen an issue with ⁓ creators being concerned with AI content coming for them. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Okay. see. That's an interesting topic to touch. With regards, from what I'm seeing here and recently, everyone is into interesting, talking about depersonalization in travel, and you need to get personal with the user, provide unique experiences. That's on the end of... Sarah Stahl: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: more expensive traffic segment, right? If it comes down to ⁓ travel being commodity and like mass so it's about the margin. Where is and are you working on personal, any kind of personalization for the user? Sarah Stahl: Yes. Yes. Totally. First of all, I'll say this. think it's the idea of like ultra personalization. I don't know if I agree with that because it's like you can only get so personal with someone because they're only going to share so much data with you and you can only be personal as the data that they share. Right. So some people are very private. You only end up with a name, number, email. Oleksij Rak: Okay. Sarah Stahl: you know, their IP address, that kind of thing. And so really how much personalization can go on if that makes up the bulk of the data that you're getting. So one of the things that like to that we just tried at Lake that we're currently testing is we didn't know, we didn't know, right, the difference between email, name, IP address, and like what, who is this traveler and what do they want? So we created a ⁓ split test pop-up, the test two different pop-ups. And the idea was that you self-identify to us, I don't know if you've seen MailChimp's new pop-up features, but they actually have kind of like, you can scroll through to do a couple different actions before you provide your name and email. And so the first thing that we did is say, hey, let's plan your next trip, where do you wanna go? And we gave them five. you want to go to the southeast, to the Gulf? Do you want to go to the Midwest? Do you want to go to the Pacific West Coast? Do you want to go to Canada? Do you want to go to Europe? Where do you want to go? So they first, ⁓ I want to go to ⁓ Then another page pops up and says, great, what are you traveling for? And we've asked them another five questions to put them in buckets. Are you traveling for family? Are you traveling for pet first? Are you traveling for, and then just a random adventure. Oleksij Rak: . Sarah Stahl: ⁓ You know, so by the time we get their information, they are pre-tagged and pre-bucketed based off of all of those segments, right? So now when somebody fills that out and they get a follow-up email from us, it's specifically to, okay, thank you, Andrea, for letting us know that you want to go to the Pacific Northwest and you want pet-friendly stays. Oleksij Rak: you Sarah Stahl: So now we're only serving her up Pacific Northwest pet friendly stays. And so I think we over complicate the personalization. It's really simple, know, just needing to know the best place to start is if you don't know where travelers want to go or what they're traveling for, just start there. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Sarah Stahl: and then you use your marketing to kind of get to know them better over time. Oleksij Rak: Sometimes they don't know where they want to go. That's quite enough. Sarah Stahl: Well, we have an option. We have an option for you. It says surprise me. And so that's where you would go. You. so. Oleksij Rak: that's a great one. they come over to the forum, like, where do you want to go and when? And they're like, I don't know. ⁓ Sarah Stahl: Where they went to go. Yeah. Yeah. That's why we added the surprise meat because we know there's people like you out there. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, awesome. What else do you see in terms of market trends or traveler behavior? Where it's moving? Oh, specifically, even specifically, what do you the market is not seeing? Sarah Stahl: ⁓ I think that a trend for rural destinations, finding places that are like ⁓ popular places, right? ⁓ that are like the Lake Como or like the Big Bear Lake or like the Lake Tahoe, but without the crowds and without the hefty price tag, because we kind of talked about this a little bit, ⁓ before we started recording. about how the world, all together, we're experiencing a bit of economic meltdown. So we're all struggling financially in different areas. We don't have the same money that we had before to travel, but we still want to travel. We still want to escape our lives. We still need to reset from our day to day. We need a break from burnout at work. And so how do we do that? Well, we find these rural places that are, in my opinion, they're even more beautiful because there's less people, there's less buildings, there's more nature. And so folks are looking for that. Like, can I go to what was once considered second or third tier destination is now looking really appealing because they're able to still experience something delightful that they weren't anticipating to experience without the price tag. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, absolutely. That's what I heard from the emcees that I was chatting with. That's their job evolve that because it's sustainability of local environment, local communities and stuff. But it's also ⁓ providing travelers less crowded and cheaper option to ⁓ experience something to what they want. Sarah Stahl: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And it's a good time for it, I think, because that's what the travelers also want. So there's like this really neat pairing happening. I what a lot of people in the industry overlook is where travelers are discovering places to stay. And it's a lot of times Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest. So that is the first place that they're finding places to stay before they ever go to your website. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah. Sarah Stahl: So, know, and they're in a lot of times they're finding it through a creator. A creator sharing something really neat like, hey, this is how I got from Milan to Lake Como for less than $250, right? And then they're real does viral and everybody wants to do that because it satisfies the let's do something outside of the box, but let's also do it on a budget. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, I agree. And are you building something specifically to address that idea that shift into alternative mode duplicate destinations? Sarah Stahl: Am I building something what? I missed that, Oleksij Rak: like providing this feature of going to similar distance to Lake Como. Sarah Stahl: Yes, yes. So I was actually at a conference, it was the Host Away Conference in Miami in 2024. ⁓ was an Airbnb rep on the stage ⁓ they asked, what travel trends do you see coming? And she destination dupes. And so I like jumped on that. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Sarah Stahl: I was like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna focus on that. And do you know, I still haven't seen it come out as a trend yet. So I feel like it's coming. We still haven't like hit the trend factor, but she definitely was ahead of her time. So she mentioned this at 2024. So everything that I do in marketing is around telling stories about around destination dupes, right? So three lakes that are just as clean as Lake Tahoe that you never heard of before, right? Like that's a hook in a storyline. So, ⁓ there's three lakes that are just as clean and less crowded as Lake Tahoe. I want to know what those three lakes are. So that's a form of destination duke or like, you know, to your point about the experience that was generated by AI, like you can visit a... cave and eat in a cave. There are places in California you can eat in a cave, right? And so to create a destination, do, but I've done something where we have, ⁓ like the top cave, one of the top cave destinations in the country. We have more caves, some reason in our county than almost anybody in the country. I know you can't eat in one, but I took the story and ran with it. And I was like, you can go to a cave and then go have a great dining experience all in the same day. And so you tell that story. we're in, you know, ⁓ middle of nowhere Alabama. And being able to like turn your rural destination into just an appealing place ⁓ as a destination is the deep story that you want to figure out how to tell. Oleksij Rak: that's really like awesome transfer with regards to you mentioned like the inspirational point like, well, like it's not even inspirational. about information where customer goes. He goes to Instagram, to TikTok and then... and similar platforms. ⁓ sounds like a kind of shift of generational behavior because ⁓ newer generations, expect you to follow them on... They the platform to follow them on ⁓ all social media platforms rather than to your website to get inspired. working with ⁓ creators... Sarah Stahl: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: I try to do anything in that direction, to be present everywhere. And that's also an option to diversify from Google, you know. Sarah Stahl: Yeah, yes. So that is the goal. But I never like to tell people like, go out and on day one, try to be present everywhere, right? Because the content creation process really needs to be scrutinized and built out of a strategy, right? And so if you're going to scrutinize and build out of a strategy, you're not going to be able to pop up on all platforms at once. And so what I like to do is I like to get really good on one platform. And once I'm like, okay, I feel good. Like we've got the cadence down. have a healthy growth. Let's keep this strategy going here and then let's move over to this platform now. So I really like to tackle ⁓ platform at a time. And depending on how big your team is or how much support you have, you could kind of get through those platforms a little bit quicker. But you know, focusing on one and getting really good because you have to understand the nuances of that platform, right? So the, the, the TikTok video that you post, know, directly to TikTok and then turn around and post that same video ⁓ ⁓ does a couple of ⁓ negative for your brand. One, you will not get the same performance because the platforms have different cultures. So you have to like, ⁓ Oleksij Rak: So. So. Sarah Stahl: format your content for the culture of the platform. But you have to know what the culture of the platform is first. And so that's why I like to like sit on a platform for a while and really get to know it. And then secondly, to your point, you know, let's say someone does go to your website and they scroll ⁓ the way to the bottom and they click, click, click, click on each of your social profiles. If they see that all your content is the same as they're like, cause you've now posted to every platform, every time you post, a lot of people will do that too, it actually feels very fake to them. And it feels fake and lazy because they just don't trust the content if it's like, well, just ⁓ shared across all platforms. So my suggestion would be if you're looking to start somewhere, start with ⁓ Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Sarah Stahl: and then move your way to Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Facebook, kind of thing. YouTube, yeah. Oleksij Rak: YouTube And start with video or start with images Sarah Stahl: It depends on the platform. So if I would say Instagram carousels actually are doing really, really well right now at this point in time. And then more like quick reels, like reels that are between four and 10 seconds are doing really good with a very specific message. And then like Facebook and LinkedIn, they actually do better with just an image and text. One image and text, know, especially LinkedIn's new algorithm update, it's reading everything. So it actually can't read a video. So your videos don't perform well as well there. And then Pinterest is, ⁓ know, same thing, text with high resolution photos that tell a very strong story. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, interesting. And is that that stopped working for you in like last year or two years of time? Like probably in terms of marketing, which channels don't work and ⁓ what broke? ⁓ Sarah Stahl: X X are we calling it X Twitter what I like I Don't know what to think about X to be completely honest with you. I've actually been on X since 2007 oh my gosh, so that's almost 20 years and it's always been a You know fire hydrant of information because they don't have an algorithm which could be Oleksij Rak: Thanks. ⁓ Sarah Stahl: you good or bad, depending on how you're looking at it. But to me, it's just like too much noise and it's really hard to break through. So I'm actually exploring. I'm sorry, the name just jumped my mind. It's where you go to talk with people. That bad. ⁓ And showing up high on all AI searches. No, it's showing up high on all the AI searches. Oleksij Rak: Is it close? Google Gemini. Sarah Stahl: No, no, no, no, no, it's a platform. It's a community platform. It's like a forum based platform. Why can't, no, no, I can't think of the name right now, but I just talked to Reddit, Reddit. Yes, so I'm actually experimenting with Reddit I talked to their sales rep and I'm like, help me understand how the platform works. And platform is very unforgiving. Oleksij Rak: Twitch? Twitch? ⁓ no, which, ⁓ Reddit, Yeah, it's a... Sarah Stahl: If you show up there and you act like a brand, you're actually getting booted out by the users before you even posted anything. So, know, I asked her, was like, well, because we're looking at advertising on Reddit and we're like, well, what does a successful ad look like? And then how do we ⁓ the ad to open into a conversation with folks? And so the Reddit team is kind of like helping us navigate understanding how the and how the community works because even though we want to advertise there, we don't want it to feel or sound like an ad because we don't want to get booted out of the platform. So that's probably a new change. It's like... Oleksij Rak: Okay. Sarah Stahl: I don't think there's very many platforms in the past where we had to really care too much about how the community functions before posting content. Reddit, have to understand how the community functions before you post any content. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, and all of a sudden, like two years ago, Reddit became like Travel Club Travelers, like community platform number one. So whatever you search in travel, Reddit is the first response from people. Sarah Stahl: Yeah, and so I'm like really I'm like nervous and interested to know like hey can Us as a travel brand show up here in an authentic way without getting ⁓ apart ⁓ Oleksij Rak: That was interesting shift since Google started training their GME9 models on Reddit sconce. Sarah Stahl: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: is number one everywhere in Google's responses. Yeah. Sarah Stahl: It's interesting. And you know what? It's natural conversation between humans. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, it is. It's great source of human content. If you could change one thing, like in like.com, with snap of your finger, some whatever, processes, approaches, automate something, what would it be? What do you think? I don't know. In like.com, in whatever. Sarah Stahl: Mm-hmm. marketing and travel marketing at lake.gov I don't know, still building. We're still building. Yeah, we're still building at lake.com. So that's a tough one. We're in like a really fun like build out process and we haven't really seen anything break yet because we're still building. But if I were to talk about the travel marketing space and I could snap my fingers and Oleksij Rak: See you all soon. Bye. Sarah Stahl: make the industry instantly rise up, it would be to work with creators and to remove all stock photos from all marketing from the job industry. Because that is just like, I wish people could understand that that's killing your trust more than anything else. Oleksij Rak: You mean killing your trust at Google's trust or at visitors trust? Travel. Sarah Stahl: Traveler Trust, Traveler Trust, yeah, by using heavy stock photos or photos with no people and telling no story. that's, it's just killing Traveler Trust. Oleksij Rak: And where would you get this amount of content? You have like 70,000 properties. That's quite a lot. Sarah Stahl: Wow, the cool thing is we have a very great community of hosts and actually working with them right now. So when you sign up for to be a host on lake.com, part of the sign up process is that you are agreeing to allow lake.com to use your photos or videos that you share on our platform. We're able to use them in our marketing. So that's a thing because a lot of hosts have, you know, taken Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Sarah Stahl: incredible care of their properties and they have beautiful assets for us to use that we're working on the back end right now organizing it all and figuring out how we're going to use them to tell the story and put our hosts first. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. But you mentioned that like you acquiring the host via like some property management system, PMS, but you're already communicating directly with them or how does it work? ⁓ Sarah Stahl: Yes, yeah, we have relationships with some of the top PMSs in the industry. Yeah, the PMSs, yeah. And then from there, right, so like that's how the host discovery process is happening for us from a property And then once the host joins, we actually have our own marketing that goes out to host. So we communicate to host like, Oleksij Rak: the PA master system, yeah. ⁓ Sarah Stahl: how to get the most out of the platform. And then we send product updates to the host. So then we start to generate a relationship directly with them. And in that process, like we just send out an email last week that said, hey, we're developing this creator pilot program. Do you want to be a part of it? And we had eight hosts sign up, right? So we work on that direct relationship with them to learn and discover like, Hey, do you have other content that we can use? ⁓ And we're starting to collect that now. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, content is a key. But still, 70,000 properties. Can you automate all that process? Or did you already automate all that process? Because, know, 70,000. Sarah Stahl: ⁓ No, no. if I could, okay, so if I can click my fingers, you know, it's not my fingers for leg, it would be to organize all the content for me, for properties. It is, it sure is. Yeah. Oleksij Rak: That's probably quite a lot of manual work. ⁓ How big of the content team, if it's not a secret, that's working on two people? That's a good one. Sarah Stahl: people. Yeah, yeah, that's that's where we're starting. Of course, we're hoping to grow the team bigger, but got to start getting some proof of concepts out there. Yeah. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, awesome. And maybe the question is, what are you building right now? Where do you see the future ⁓ Sarah Stahl: This is going to be boring. This isn't futuristic stuff. Oleksij Rak: Still you believe in something, in some market trends, you're trying to evolve the product. Sarah Stahl: Yes. Yes, so I'm currently working to build out a strong marketing dashboard because I have specific KPIs related to my role that I need to be able to prove took place, right? And a lot of times at marketing, we use some pretty generic outcomes to prove what worked. And I don't like using generic outcomes. I like having a very clear ⁓ Oleksij Rak: ⁓ okay. Sarah Stahl: line of sight on what happened from discoverability to booking and what channels are responsible for that. So I'm right now to build that out. We're trying to get everything into our CRM system so that we can have line of sight between that and Lipper Studio so that we have a very clear understanding of what is actually working with our marketing and what is not. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, sounds very familiar. Look at your studio, Sarah Stahl: Yeah, see, I told you it's boring. It's not. It's not. But these are the these are the boring parts of marketing that often get overlooked that make it really difficult to say what's worked later down the road. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, but it brings you clarity and transparency into your information and you can make decisions and act based on data, not based on wild data. Awesome. Awesome. And what is So you mentioned the founder is quite technical guy. Ok, founder is quite technical guy. So what's the future of volume? ⁓ Sarah Stahl: Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Yes, very. Um, that's a good question. Maybe you have the founder on. I think he'd be able to talk more directly to that specifically because I haven't figured all of that out. But from, from what I, from what I've learned working with them, they care about building in public. He cares very much about building in public. So you could follow him on LinkedIn. He talks a lot about his building in public process. Oleksij Rak: Haha. Yet. Sarah Stahl: and then solving for guest and host issues. So as guest and host issues come up, he's constantly building for that as well. Oleksij Rak: That's it. I should follow him for sure. Sarah Stahl: Yeah, happy to introduce you to. Oleksij Rak: That was a great conversation. I really appreciate you coming here and being open. Is there anything you would like to add on top of what we discussed? Sarah Stahl: Not necessarily. I think it would be great if folks wanted to connect with me on LinkedIn because I talk about this quite a bit and I love hearing other people's perspectives. I love seeing what other people are working on in the industry as well and just learning and growing together. Oleksij Rak: sure, ⁓ sure. Okay, Sarah, like best luck in what you're doing ⁓ and in like bringing Cordu into marketing nowadays with Dashboard and stuff and in your new role and like thanks for coming over. Yeah, yeah, awesome. Thank you. Bye. Sarah Stahl: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Thank you. It was great to be here with you. Oleksij Rak: Okay, I...