Munich Startup: What does your startup do? What problem do you solve?
Hoscom: Our startup Hoscom, which stands for Hospitality Communication, develops a cloud-based internal information and communication platform for employees in hotels.
During his long career in luxury hotels, our co-founder Robin Renschler noticed that internal communication within a team, but especially between departments, is the key to an unforgettable guest experience. However, he also realized that this is precisely where hoteliers around the world are failing. Unfortunately, behind the scenes, the hotel industry still operates like it did in the 1990s. They simultaneously use emails, telephones, printouts, whiteboards, flyers and posters, handover books, WhatsApp groups, briefings, etc. to communicate daily changes, VIP arrivals, repairs, guest complaints, and requests. Emails and telephones are the most frequently used methods, but usually only shift supervisors and managers have access to these two media. Added to this are the numerous incompatible silo solutions within the individual departments.
With Hoscom, we want to close this information gap between departments, employees, and guests, integrate necessary tools, and flexibly link the existing system landscape. Our goal is to simplify the daily work of hotel employees and thereby increase the quality of the hotel.
Hoscom aims to solve everyday problems in hotel operations
Munich Startup: But that's been around for a long time!
Hoscom: That's what you might think. When digital solutions are used, they usually involve either non-industry-specific communication solutions or hotel-specific, siloed solutions for a single department. However, these don't solve the problem; they are part of it. Hoscom is the first holistic communication platform, which combines the two components “communication” and “hotel tools” on one platform.
Munich Startup: What is your founding story?
Hoscom: Our idea generator and CEO, Robin Renschler, comes from the hotel industry. After completing his "International Hotel Management" degree, he worked for renowned luxury hotels such as Kempinski and Rocco Forte in Dubai, Malta, Russia, and Germany. At each hotel stop, he encountered the same customer problems mentioned above. This meant that he always had to laboriously take care of everything else, but the most important thing always fell by the wayside: the guests.
He then began building Hoscom out of his own problems. Due to the unexpected coronavirus crisis, the hotel industry suddenly came to a complete standstill overnight, and he was able to use the short-time working hours to advance the product. It quickly became clear: Hoscom needed a software developer to be successful. This is how Magnus Liedtke, the current co-founder and CTO, joined the founding team.
We used to play soccer together at school and then lost touch a bit. During that time, Magnus completed his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and then worked as a software developer for six years. We've been working together on Hoscom for a year now: We were part of the Venturevilla seed accelerator, celebrated various successes in startup competitions, founded Hospitality Communication GmbH in February of this year, and are now about to implement our self-developed MVP with our pilot customers.
Co-founder wanted
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Hoscom: First, the current, or rather outdated, system landscape in hotels. It is extremely costly and time-consuming to create interfaces with "old" key players in order to integrate them into new systems. Added to this is often the outdated mentality of today's hotel management that implementing new software is extremely complicated and would take months. Fortunately, however, the Open API philosophy is gradually gaining traction in the hotel industry. Sooner or later, hotel software will no longer be a hurdle, but an indispensable asset – we at Hoscom are firmly convinced of this!
We're still working on one challenge, or rather, one piece of the puzzle. We would like to complement our founding team, with many years of experience in the hotel and IT industries, with a sales and/or branding co-founder. We particularly value interpersonal skills—the "chemistry"—and the necessary entrepreneurial mindset. Experience in the hotel industry or software sales is, of course, helpful, but not essential.
“The anticipation for live events in Munich is huge”
Munich Startup: Where would you like to be in one year, where in five years?
Hoscom: We'll launch Hoscom with our pilot customers this summer, expand our customer portfolio, and complete our financing round by the end of the year. This means that within a year, we'll have implemented Hoscom in hotels in the DACH region and built a team around us. Only with this team will we be able to establish a well-known brand in the international hotel industry in five years and realize our vision of "being the center of the hospitality industry."
Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup location so far?
Hoscom: The Munich startup ecosystem has a lot to offer, with LMU, TU, CDTM, Werk1, Founders Institute, and Baystartup – especially for the software industry. We particularly utilize Baystartup's offerings. Because we launched our startup Hoscom in the middle of the pandemic, very few events took place in person, so we're really looking forward to live events in Munich.
Munich Startup: Outsource or do it yourself?
Hoscom: Good question. A mix of both. It's extremely important to us to develop the MVP ourselves, as this allows us to be completely independent of third parties, control everything, and respond more quickly to customer feedback. However, we plan to expand our product portfolio with our IT partner brayn.io, leveraging years of expertise and making rapid progress. In the medium to long term, we want to build our own programming team and develop in-house.
