Proptech

In 2023 we were hired to sell into an industry with no directory.

Dubai's short-term rental business is thousands of apartments run by dozens of operators, most of them privately held, few of them with a marketing department and none of them in a database anybody sells. There is no association to join and no conference where they all appear.

Finding them is a research problem before it is a sales problem, and the research looks nothing like enterprise prospecting. It looks like reading listings.

What we did

Four months in Dubai, entirely inside the holiday-homes and hotel-apartments sector. 28 meetings booked, 20 confirmed held, 27 operators introduced.

Deluxe Holiday Homes, Dream Inn, Keys Please, Unlock Dubai, PrimeStay, Waves, TVH, Elanza, Peace Homes, Green Future, Zapbed, BNB Me and B My Guest. Hotel apartment operators alongside them: First Central Hotel Suites, Signature 1, Suha Hospitality, Emirates Stars, Al Manzel, Gulf Oasis, Marina Hotel Apartments.

An industry where the founder answers the phone

The compensation for a sector with no directory is that its decision makers are reachable. There is no procurement department at a holiday-homes operator with two hundred keys. There is a founder, a head of operations, and a revenue manager if the company is large enough to have one, and all three take calls.

That changes the arithmetic. A vertical of thirty companies where you reach the owner every time is a better target list than a vertical of three thousand where you reach a shared inbox. Seven meetings in ten actually happened, which for an industry running at seasonal capacity is a good number.

The research method transferred, too. When there is no list to buy, the list is built from the market's own public surface: who is advertising which buildings, who is managing which towers, who has grown from twenty units to two hundred in a year. Growth is visible in this industry from the outside, and the operators who have just doubled are the ones whose spreadsheets have stopped working.

What it shows

No list is not the same as no market. Where an industry is invisible to data vendors, build the list from what its members publish about themselves, and target the ones showing evidence of growth. Fragmented sectors have a compensating virtue: you get the owner on the phone.