Guesty Takes 2% to 5% of Every Reservation It Touches
Amiad Soto did not want to quote a price. What he eventually gave is the clearest published account of how Guesty makes money — and where it sits between homeowner and property manager.
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The most useful minute of this interview is an argument about a price. Amiad Soto did not want to give one, Nathan Latka would not move on without it, and what came out is the clearest published account of how Guesty makes money.
— Nathan, if the point is to get me to quote a price, I would not do it.
Amiad Soto, co-founder and CEO, Guesty, and Nathan Latka
— It’s not a price. I have no idea if it’s a dollar per property or ten thousand per property. So either help us out or we’ll move on.
The answer: Guesty charges 2 to 5 per cent of each reservation, depending on how many products the property manager uses and how large their company is.
Where Guesty sits in the money
Short-term rental has three layers, and Soto walked through all of them because Latka kept resetting the example.
The homeowner pays a property manager to run the property. On long-term rental that is about 10 per cent; on short-term it is around 20 per cent, and some managers charge 35 or more.
The property manager pays Guesty 2 to 5 per cent — of the full reservation value, not of their own commission.
On a $1,000 booking, the manager earns roughly $200 and pays Guesty about $25 out of it — 2.5 per cent of the full $1,000, not of the $200. Pricing scales down as the manager grows.
What the product does
Guesty is the operating system for a short-term rental management company: one dashboard across Airbnb, Booking.com, HomeAway and the manager’s own website, with the channels supplying guests and reservations while Guesty supplies everything needed to run the business behind them.
Soto counted more than twenty tools inside the platform. Latka tested it by naming jobs. Fixing a toilet? Not Guesty — but the maintenance task, created automatically or manually and assigned to a member of the team, is. Mowing the lawn is another task, triggerable monthly or by an event. Billing a guest for damage is a claim, handled through insurance or through the security deposit, which works because Guesty also processes the payment for the reservation itself.
The origin is two students and a rent bill. Soto and his identical twin brother were university students in Tel Aviv, where rent is expensive, and travelled often. “We didn’t want to lose the rent while we were travelling, being the poor students that we were, so we decided to try to rent on Airbnb. Our experience was too cumbersome. We said there should be a tool that does this for you.” The company was founded in December 2013 and went through Y Combinator in the winter 2014 batch.
The customer, and how fast the customer grows
The average Guesty customer managed 50 properties, with the typical band running 50 to 100. The smallest had five; the largest, two thousand. Across all of them the platform held tens of thousands of properties, which Soto put closer to a hundred thousand than fifty.
The pitch to a manager is not only margin but scale, and the claim is a large one:
Almost all of our customers, the average they grow in one year is more than 5x. We will take you on with 15 properties and within a year you’ll be at 70. Or we’ll take you on with 30 properties and a year later you’re at 120.
He qualified it without being asked: growth continues but decays with size, and managers tend to slow around 300 properties, because expanding past that means operating in new cities — an operational skill rather than a software problem, though Soto notes the product already supports multi-city managers.
Half the traffic is organic
Guesty got roughly half its traffic from organic search in 2018, ranking in the top three for terms like property management software for short-term rentals and Airbnb management software, with paid campaigns and outbound making up the rest.
Sales was entirely inside sales at that point, which Soto was in the middle of changing: Tel Aviv headquarters, an office already open in Los Angeles, and six more locations planned for the following year — Atlanta, Barcelona, Paris, Rome and Berlin among those he named. The reason is the customer, not the deal size — many property managers are not tech-savvy, do not shop for software online, and want a person in the room for a demo.
Payback in one to three months
Soto put lifetime value at six to as much as thirty times acquisition cost depending on customer size, with medium and large customers paying back within one to three months. Most of the money, he said, goes into technology rather than acquisition: “if we will be the best of kind, then we’ll win a lot more customers and we will retain them longer.”
There is a short, sharp exchange about what “fully weighted” CAC includes. Soto said Guesty includes trade shows and branding events in the calculation, then observed that many companies put them in a separate bucket because they are not direct lead generators. Latka’s reply is worth keeping for anyone benchmarking against a published CAC: “I’ve never heard a CEO, when I say what’s fully weighted CAC, not include event spend.”
The churn number took four attempts
Asked about churn, Soto first said it was very low, then explained why — once a homeowner can log in and see their own reservations and revenue, the manager cannot take that away — then gave industry ranges rather than his own number. Latka kept narrowing.
The sequence is instructive because the units nearly ruined it: enterprise churn quoted in per-year terms, SMB churn in per-month terms, Guesty described as “in between”, and Latka reading that as 3 to 5 per cent a month. The final answer, after he asked Soto to be direct:
We are between one and two per cent in months.
One to two per cent revenue churn per month, with net dollar retention north of 100 per cent on the back of customers who quintuple their portfolios in the first year. Guesty measures revenue churn rather than logo churn deliberately, on the grounds that logo counts include customers who were the wrong fit and never really paid.
On competition, Soto described a fragmented field of more than 600 tools, almost all of them point solutions — a channel manager, a CRM, a communication tool — against Guesty’s end-to-end platform. “Whenever we get competition objections, we just show them the product.”
Funding, then and since
At the time of this interview Guesty had raised about $24 million: Y Combinator in winter 2014, a $1.6 million seed, a $3 million Series A, and a $19.8 million Series B in April 2018. Soto’s reason for the Series B was capacity rather than survival — product-market fit was established and growing, and the money was for scaling engineering and the sales team.
Almost 200 people worked there. Today the Guesty profile on GetLatka records a very different company: total funding of $409.4 million, including a $170 million Series E in August 2022 and a $130 million Series F in April 2024, and a team of 750.
The revenue line runs $3 million in October 2017, $8 million by the end of 2018, $20 million a year later, $45 million by April 2021, $100 million in September 2023, and an estimated $163.7 million as of October 2024. Guesty remains private and venture-backed; it has not been acquired.
Soto was 31 at the time, married, no children, sleeping six to eight hours, reading Ben Horowitz and following Jeff Bezos. His practical advice was about CRMs — adopt one as early as possible, because it standardises the data before the data gets messy. Guesty went through four: Streak, then Pipedrive, then Close, then Salesforce, “like everyone else at our size”.
Sources — Amiad Soto interviewed by Nathan Latka, recorded 7 November 2018; the video was published on 13 November 2018. Revenue, customer, headcount and funding figures are as stated on the tape or from the Guesty profile on GetLatka, with dates as recorded; the October 2024 revenue figure is carried as an estimate.
