Steven Barbarich Case: Transitioning from Inventions to Vacation Rental Platforms

It’s quite obvious that customers want good quality products. Apart from that, customers want a company that is willing to listen to their concerns. But if you will look at the Steven Barabrich case, you will realize that even business owners learn from their mistakes.

So who is Steve Barbarich and what happened? If you’re going to make a quick search about Steve Barbarich, don’t be surprised if you’re going to see mixed reviews about the guy. Some reviews are praising him for his vacation rental property platform while older reviews are negative.

Inventor Turned Entrepreneur

Steve Barbarich was an inventor before he became an entrepreneur. It was a transition that wasn’t exactly smooth for Barbarich. At first, he studied how patents work. This way, he knew exactly how to make the most out of his inventions. The only problem is that it isn’t exactly simple. When he started his company, the lack of funds brought problems.

Barbarich started with a small capital and a small team. In the end, he was handling too many roles in his startup to the point that it compromised the quality of the products that they were selling during the first year. This resulted in bad reviews from his customers. Some even claimed that he is a scammer.
Now, to recover, he had to apologize to his market. He issued a public apology via his website. Also, he hired someone who tried to figure out how to improve his product. A consultant discovered that there were flaws in the design. It was left unnoticed by the novice engineers causing the company to lose a lot of money.

Exploring Other Markets

But the Steve Barbarich case isn’t something that had a bad ending. Despite the bad experiences that he had in his first venture, he still decided to put up a new business. The vacation rental platform was different compared to his first venture wherein his team had to develop products. For the vacation rental platform, he simply needed to convince hosts to put up their property.

To become a household name, he had to choose which city to begin with. That is a wise decision on his part considering how Airbnb is still the leading vacation rental platform today. What he did was that he offered something more to the hosts. He offered free cleaning and even free assessment of the properties in San Diego, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This way, hosts had the chance to know if the property has potential and what has to be done to make sure that everything is going to work.

There were instances when he even have to say no to some homeowners simply because he needed to be honest with them that the property isn’t going to work as a vacation rental. This honesty made him the right guy for the job.

Nowadays, a lot of people go to Vacation Homes 365. He also promoted the platform well on social media, which allowed visitors to check the website. He offered discounts for first-time users. On top of that, he constantly improved the overall user experience on the app and the website.