Episode #209: Andrew Schulz, NoiseAware, “A Lot Of Our Competitive Advantage Is How We Quantify Sound”

Episode #209: Andrew Schulz, NoiseAware, “A Lot Of Our Competitive Advantage Is How We Quantify Sound”

 

Guest: Andrew Schulz is the co-founder and CEO of NoiseAware. NoiseAware has built what is now referred to as “The Smoke Detector for Noise,” a smart sensor equipped with noise monitoring technology to save short-term rental owners and managers from the headaches and excessive noise from unwanted parties and unruly guests.

Date Recorded: 2/20/2020     |     Run-Time: 31:33

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Summary: We discuss the miserable experience that led to the fresh idea behind NoiseAware’s smart sensor and noise-monitoring technology. We get into the product, use case, and the idea that customers can now have hard data on noise levels at their property, empowering them to be proactive if noise is out of hand, or defend against false noise complaints.

We talk about building the company out of Dallas and access to resources the team has had along the way, and we even dive into growth potential for the company as they set sights on international markets.

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Interested in sponsoring an episode? Email Justin at jb@cambriainvestments.com

 Links from the Episode:

• 0:40 – Intro
• 1:44 – Welcome to our guest, Andrew Schulz, and overview of NoiseAware
• 2:19 – Origin of the company
• 3:42 – Going from idea to forming the company and how the founders met
• 5:35 – Manufacturing flow for the product
• 8:02 – How the device works
• 10:50 – Pricing and subscription
• 11:08 – Using the product to counter false complaints
• 12:48 – Adoption and market penetration
• 14:58 – Night mayor
• 15:26 – Privacy concerns
• 16:33 – Outlook for their market and competition
• 18:01 – Main issues to expansion globally
• 19:05 – Lessons learned as entrepreneurs growing the company
• 20:25 – Experience in fundraising for the company
• 21:27 – Before this company, what Andrew was doing
• 23:30 – Etiquette with investors
• 25:27 – Most rewarding experience and customer interactions
• 26:42 – Tragic events in home rentals
• 27:59 – Things Andrew would do differently
• 28:49 – Company size
• 29:11 – Marketing approach
• 30:45 – Learn more – noiseaware.io, Facebook, Instagram

 

Transcript of Episode 209:

Welcome Message: Welcome to “The Meb Faber Show” where the focus is on helping you grow and preserve your wealth. Join us as we discuss the craft of investing and uncover new and profitable ideas all to help you grow wealthier and wiser. Better investing starts here.

Disclaimer: Meb Faber is the co-founder and chief investment officer at Cambria Investment Management. Due to industry regulations, he will not discuss any of Cambria’s funds on this podcast. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Cambria Investment Management or its affiliates. For more information, visit cambriainvestments.com.

Meb: Hey, podcast listeners, we’ve got a killer show for you today. Our guest and his co-founders started their company, NoiseAware, as a result of a short-term rental party disaster. They built what is now referred to as the smoke detector for noise, a smart sensor equipped with noise monitoring technology to save short-term rental owners and managers from the headaches and excessive noise from unwanted parties and unruly guests.

In today’s episode, we discuss the miserable experience that led to the fresh idea behind NoiseAware’s smart sensor and noise monitoring technology. We get into the product, use case and the idea that Airbnb hosts can now have hard data on noise levels at their property, empowering them to be proactive when noises get out of hand or defend against false noise complaints. We talk about building the company out of Dallas and access to resources the team has had along the way and we even dive into growth potential for the company as they set sights on international expansion. Please enjoy this episode with NoiseAware co-founder and CEO, Andrew Schulz. Welcome to the show, Andrew.

Andrew: Hey, Meb. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be on.

Meb: Yeah man, this is gonna be a lot of fun today. You are a co-founder of NoiseAware live from Dallas, Texas. Give us a little quick overview. What’s NoiseAware?

Andrew: Well, we are a privacy safe noise monitoring service for folks who rent out their homes on platforms like Airbnb and booking.com. We jokingly refer to us as the party poopers, if you will, party-pooping in 42 states and soon to be a few countries. So it’s a fun business for sure.

Meb: Give me the origin story. What was the inspiration for starting this idea? Because to me, it seems like something, once you hear about it, most people’s reaction is, that’s odd that doesn’t exist already. What was the genesis?

Andrew: As you can imagine, it started with the problem. My co-founder Dave was actually renting out a condo here in Dallas shortly after he moved here. And as you can imagine being close to a college campus, someone was gonna have a “quiet weekend with the girlfriend” when in fact it was a bachelor party and 12 dudes threw a party all weekend, unbeknownst to him and, you know, his neighbours are pissed, cops get called, you know, the building complains, and he only lives two miles away. Had he had some awareness that the guests were abusing his space, he could have easily gone over there and knocked on the door and said like, “Hey, take it to the bar or just get out.”

But instead, he only found out about it through a cease and desist letter from the building’s lawyer, which ultimately forced him to sell the property. So as you can imagine, it went from bad to worse. And that was, at the time, happening kind of all over the country if not the world with Airbnb’s rise and then those kinds of situations spreading. So NoiseAware started solving this problem. We’re built for hosts by hosts.

Meb: And so talk to me, tell me a little bit about how you guys connected and then how do you go about going from idea to actually implementing a product and building a company around this?

Andrew: We didn’t actually know each other at the time, but we both had space in the same co-working space here in Dallas and we happened to meet at a networking event and he told me this problem he had and it was really intriguing. I think the polite way to say it is, I was in between startups at the time and it was a really intriguing problem and my background is signal processing and computer science. So I thought I would take a swing at it in my free time and see if I could build something that worked for this guy that I just met. And it worked and that gave him a second chance at hosting. And so he started to grow a small portfolio here in Dallas. And of course, every time he added another unit that he managed, I built another sensor on my couch and then we got to the point of, hey, we’re seeing headlines from all over the world of people having the same problem. Like maybe there’s something more here.

And then we realize there’s a fairly large professional side of the market that means we don’t really have to be a B2C company. We could actually sell to professionals and they go to conferences. And so we just showed up at one and just started asking people, “Hey, would you buy a service like what NoiseAware is now?” I think the number was 83% of people said yes. And so that was kind of eye-opening. And then we figured out a way to build 100 and then we found a way to build 1,000, we built 2,000 and 5,000. And then we kind of relaunched the whole company about a little over a year ago taking in everything we had learned over the previous three years into what we’re selling now and what we’re scaling the company with.

Meb: Tell me a little bit about how the actual technology works. Is this something that you guys are building from scratch at a local factory in Texas? Do you outsource this? From someone who has the background you do, just tell me a little bit about how that on-ramp works. I mean is this something you guys are able to build a sensor in the course of like a few months and then how does it go through production? We’d to hear that because it seems so many people I know that are entrepreneurs, they have ideas, but getting it from actual concept to reality is a massive, massive undertaking and hurdle.

Andrew: I think the first piece to start with is a lot of our competitive advantage is how we quantify sound, both that it’s privacy safe down to kind of how the circuits are designed and all the way back up to the servers and how all that’s implemented. But from there, we tried to build something that was fairly simple just because we’re more of an algorithms company than a hardware company. There just wasn’t anything on the market we could put those algorithms on to get us out of that game. But I grew up in Austin, which has its own startup culture, and so moving to Dallas was kind of a shock. But Dallas has been really good to us and it’s had all the resources fairly close at hand to do basically anything we needed to do.

And so it was very easy or relatively easy for us to find a manufacturer here in Dallas. They helped us kind of take what I had soldered together and turn it into something we could productize and do it relatively cheaply and quickly. And so that was what was able to allow us to go from 5 to 100 and then we iterated the circuits a little bit and went to 1,000 and then 2,000 and 5,000 all just here in Dallas all with kind of the resources. Honestly, I met at networking events mostly and then connections, second and third-order connections from there.

And then I was gonna say that was us being as kind of agile as I can imagine you can be with a hardware company. And then we went through the efforts of okay, we need to grow up a little bit, raise some money, and really take everything we’ve learned and build like the exact product that our customers are asking for. And in that process, we actually ended up with a manufacturer based in San Antonio. So we still do all the manufacturing here in Texas, but we did have to look outside of Dallas to find someone that we could really scale with at the price point we were looking for.

Meb: So walk me through how it actually works then. Okay, so someone, I’m an Airbnb host, which I used to be until they banned it in my local town where you can only do it I think for a month or more now, which of course is silly. But say I’m an Airbnb host, I wanna install one. Walk me through kind of how the whole experience works.

Andrew: The indoor sensors plug into an outlet so they have constant power so you never have to worry about batteries and you can always have confidence that it’s on and it’s protecting your property. And you can also screw it into the outlet so you make it tamper-resistant. Generally, most people aren’t trying to defeat it. They’re really just trying to find a way to charge their cell phones. If you just make it have a little bit of resistance, people leave it alone. Generally, they think it’s a Wi-Fi repeater or an air freshener. And then from there it can cover a room that’s about 400 square feet. So your common living room size, which is generally until you get into like five-plus bedroom homes is mostly the only thing you need is just the main common area because that’s where people congregate. Like that’s where people are hanging out, drinking, being loud. It’s really the sound system is, all that kind of stuff.

So you just put one NoiseAware in the living room, you connect it over Wi-Fi, simpler to install than a Nest thermostat, faster to set up than any of the other kind of smart home products. And you’re off to the races. You’ve got something there to give you some sort of real-time awareness of your guests’ behaviour while you’re remote, while you’re away.

Meb: Is it app or text-based and is it saying, hey look…Do you set up alerts where it’s like if this reaches a certain decimal or is it customized where you’re like just gonna get an alert and be like, hey, it’s getting noisy over here?

Andrew: You can have multiple sensors at a property. So if you do have, say, a home with a living room and, say, a game room, you can put one in each and you can control the thresholds on each separately. So maybe the game room is really close to the neighbours and so if you’re loud there, it actually gets to the neighbours at kind of a lower level, so you can set a lower threshold. And you can also set different thresholds for each hour of the day. Generally, at 2 p.m., no one really cares how loud you are, but once you start getting into like the 8 to 10 p.m. range, kind of get a little bit more cautious. And then once it gets to 2 a.m., you kind of wanna know if anything’s going on because at that point your guests can potentially be very disruptive to the neighbours.

And then from there, we can send alerts via text message, email, push notification to you, to your sister down the street, to your friends, like whoever in your group and your network helps you manage that property so that someone knows that this is happening basically in real-time so that someone can intervene.

Meb: And so what is the price point? How does the subscription work?

Andrew: So the indoor sensors are $200, the outdoor sensors are $100 on the website. And then we protect properties, so the subscription is based on how many properties are on our platform, which is $100 a year.

Meb: It seems like such a no-brainer. And look, this is coming from someone who’s been both a host, but also I’ve certainly been on a number of “church trips” that were, like you mentioned, you know, ended up being a bachelor party or a bunch of friends staying at a wedding and it’s such a no-brainer. I would even have probably done it for the opposite use case because we used to have some crotchety neighbours that would complain about us based on noise that was very moderate at like 7 p.m. on the 4th of July or something, and even once complaining about our dogs barking when the dogs weren’t even at the house. So to be able to have like a log and say, “Hey look, pound sand, actually dog wasn’t even in town.” It’s a funny takeaway.

Andrew: It was really eye-opening when we started the company how often the data we were collecting was actually being used to counter false complaints. Like I guess I never experienced the world where people are just waiting to complain about their neighbours over nothing. And there certainly are legitimate events out there, but there’s also, unfortunately, people who just wanna complain and we have a data trail that kind of either validates that concern or doesn’t. And just having that data trail has been incredibly valuable. Just out of curiosity, you said that the town you’re in has basically banned short-term rentals. Where are you based?

Meb: Manhattan Beach, California

Andrew: For sure, that’s…unfortunately, so many neighbours end up having to be the noise monitor and then that bubbles up to city councils. And it’s just unfortunate that their kind of only path to resolution is to ban it altogether rather than put innovative technology like ours in place and some common sense regulations rather than just banning it altogether.

Meb: It’s one of these things just so obvious why every Airbnb owner wouldn’t have this. Talk to me a little bit about the adoption and penetration. I assume the main use case is rental vacation or Airbnb owners and then you mentioned there’s probably a little bit of tertiary of people using it for the opposite. Is there any other areas where you’re seeing this sort of adopted as well or is it like 99% Airbnb users?

Andrew: Well, some advice we got really early on is lack of focus kills startups. So we’ve spent the vast majority of our efforts in the short-term rental space just making sure that we serve those customers as best we can. So 90%, 95% of our customers are in that space and then we’re looking to expand to Europe this year, which is also really exciting. But if you expand ours to what we’ve built, it’s basically the first cost-effective noise-monitoring solution, which we have inbound interest from construction, municipal noise-monitoring, hotels, all that kind of stuff, which is really exciting just for us as we look forward. But right now we’re staying fairly focused on a short-term rental space.

Meb: Yeah, I mean that seems so obvious to me. I mean like if you’re Hyatt, you could have something that you put in the rooms that avoids the whole neighbour having to call the front desk and waste people’s time where it just gives you just kind of a heads-up like, “Dudes, turn down the TV a little bit.” Or I could think about it with bars and restaurants trying to avoid getting cited for noise ordinances. I was literally reading the newspaper this morning about a local bar that is getting shut down or getting hours reduced because of this. And if you’re the owner, that’s a pretty major impact that you could save for 100 bucks. Like why not? It’s such a no-brainer. Fascinating.

Andrew: There’s a use case we haven’t explored too much, which is we’ve done a little bit where you use the threshold to keep the noise just under, right? I think you kind of touched on it with your church trip story. You wanna have fun, but just enough where you don’t upset anyone. And so that’s where the kind of bar in the restaurant idea is really interesting, especially as some of the bigger cities start hiring nightmares. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that.

Meb: No. What’s that?

Andrew: New York City, Washington, D.C., there’s a specific, I don’t know the best way to describe it, but administration just for nightlife and making sure that it doesn’t affect the wider community. These nightmares are focused on making sure that the kind of nightlife side of the city doesn’t affect kind of the 80% of life that’s during the day. So finding that balance between the two of which noise, as you can imagine, is one of the biggest factors.

Meb: Do you get any sort of pushback? Are people concerned? I know with a lot of the Alexa and various voice-enabled assistants that people concerned about privacy. Is that something that you guys get pushback on or concerns?

Andrew: Absolutely. Everyone’s concerned about privacy now, especially with the stories from all of the voice-enabled services, kind of, recording people, sending them overseas. You kind of don’t know what people are doing with that data anymore, and so we are a direct reaction of that and privacy is the biggest design criteria we have in anything we do. Our sensors are designed again down to the circuitry to make sure that there’s no recordings made on the device. There’s nothing streaming to a server. The way we’ve designed the hardware is actually trying to make that as difficult as possible because that’s not where we’re driving our value. NoiseAware basically it’s a thermometer for sound and it creates a value for a moment in time that you know it’s either good or bad, you either know it’s loud or it’s not when you want it to be. We’re not trying to turn people into the product.

Meb: Let’s stay on this topic of technology a little bit more before we move on to some other ideas. What does the evolution look like as you look out into the coming years? Is there anything that you guys are kicking around in your head on the horizon about the tech side? And I’m thinking as far as competitors, I wonder if some point does Alexa or any of these sort of monitors start to, you know, encroach on your turf? What’s your general thoughts there?

Andrew: Well, for us, our big push is to bring our technology to the rest of the world. And in short-term rentals, about 80% of the market is outside of the U.S. So while we’ve had a great place to start, there’s hosts all over the world that we wanna help and we wanna help them support their small business. I imagine competition is coming. I’d be foolish to think otherwise. It strikes me just with the privacy concern that I wouldn’t expect it to come from Alexa or Google Home Assistant just because the privacy concern that travellers have is just really, really high. And you’ve gotta keep in mind that these are basically hotel rooms, so checking in and seeing a device that’s basically recording everything you say, it’s not a great guest experience. There’s certainly some people trying it out and maybe there’s a balance there. But so far, having an Alexa in a room, I haven’t heard a lot of positive responses about.

Meb: And so what is the main kind of gate for you guys on expansion in the rest of the world? Is it something where you have to comply with some rules and regulations? Is it something where it’s actually just more of a constraint as far as headcount and servicing a lot of these? Is it production? What’s the main sort of issues in expanding the rest of the world?

Andrew: Well, just like we take privacy very seriously, we do take certifications and the necessary safety requirements very seriously, which just takes time. There’s a reason they say hardware’s hard. There’s always more to do, but it’s getting those checkboxes done as well as, again, being very thoughtful about how we expand. If we expand too quickly, you can be very disruptive, but we have people waiting for our products basically in every time zone, it’s just making sure that we create a thoughtful plan to make sure that we are still able to provide the same high level of customer service we do here in the U.S. everywhere. It’s really those two combination of factors that’s just making us very thoughtful about how we can take our next steps.

Meb: So we’d love to shift and talk a little bit about just the entrepreneurial side in general and the growth of the company. I mean, look, you guys haven’t been around that long, but have a pretty interesting product-market fit. We’d love to hear a little bit about how you’re thinking about the future of the company and in this short runway you’ve had anything that has been a particularly interesting, challenging hurdle in the building of the company as well.

Andrew: As I mentioned, hardware is hard. There’s just so much extra complexity to having a physical component to your service, but it also provides us a way to have, I think, a better relationship with our customers. We’ve always tried to be as accessible as possible just because we think travel changes people’s lives. It opens you up to new ideas and new experiences and the short-term rental side of that actually brings that into these communities and it creates very meaningful experiences that we wanna support and being that kind of hyper-available to our customers just as they are to their guests has been an amazing experience. It does take a lot more effort, but it’s, I think, one of the most valuable things we did early on.

Meb: I’d love to hear a little bit about the decision to raise some funding. Is that something that you guys bootstrapped it in the beginning and then decided to, hey, look, we wanna scale this, we need to put the foot on the accelerator? How was that experience? Any general takeaways from that?

Andrew: Fundraising has been interesting. Being a company in Dallas, we have raised a little bit of money. Most of it’s just been from local angels and family offices. But again, the Dallas community’s just been fantastic for us and very supportive. And we’ve been able to basically find everything we need just here within arm’s length.

Meb: Any plans to raise any future rounds or is this something that you think can be sustainable on its own?

Andrew: The joke is you’re always fundraising, so certainly we’re no different. Right now everything’s kind of on a pretty solid trajectory, which we’re excited about, but there’s always more we wanna do, which means you have to look down that fundraising path, but we’re always out looking.

Meb: Well, be prepared to get some inquiries. We’ve got a lot of investors on this podcast that are always looking for new, interesting ideas. Tell me a little bit about you prior to starting the company post-GA Tech. What were you, electrical engineer?

Andrew: I was. I was an electrical engineer. My last corporate job, as they say, was building radar systems for the government, which Georgia Tech was a fairly solid signal processing curriculum and then I took that into the corporate world, which I really enjoyed that mixture of programming, hardware design and kind of signal processing. But corporate life is I guess not made for me. And so I took the opportunity to try to be an entrepreneur and that took me through a couple of difficult steps and eventually brought me back to Texas, but to Dallas, and it’s been a very interesting ride.

Meb: When you say difficult steps, is that because you were trying to start other companies or joined on with companies that didn’t make it?

Andrew: So NoiseAware is my third company, second one I’ve done full time, and it definitely…closing down a company teaches you a lot of things very quickly that I think without having gone through that process and knowing what those patterns look like, to be able to correct them very early, it’s been one of the many things that helped us get here. It’s very difficult to go through that process at the time, but it also puts it in kind of the light of…some investors have that philosophy where they don’t invest in first-time founders just because there’s some really hard lessons to learn that are very, very valuable.

Meb: I think that scar tissue is instructive and it’s interesting from someone who’s…I mean I’ve only been investing in private companies for about six years now, but everyone goes into it saying, “I know that most startups fail,” but then, of course, most investors and founders never expect it to be about them. The interesting thing is you see a lot about founder character by how they handle many of the challenges and in many cases the failure. Look, to be honest, there’s plenty of times where there’s just not product-market fit.

And so watching, I’ve actually seen both sides on investments we’ve done where…and sometimes look, it’s hard, you’ve gotta fire people, shut down the company, but people that handle it with grace and a fair amount of etiquette and honesty and decency versus there’s literally been some that just disappeared into the ether and you can never hear from them again somehow. And as an investor, I would 100% invest in people that had been through it and responded with class versus, obviously, a big, fat, red X on the people that didn’t. But I think it’s a lot of character-building for sure.

Andrew: One of the other best pieces of advice we got really early on is we basically sent a monthly update to all of our investors every month for the last four years. And that allows us to have a wealth of knowledge quickly at our fingertips whenever we need it or whenever we have something we haven’t seen before. And the joke on the investor side is usually you kind of only know things are going wrong because you stop getting the updates when, in fact, if you send the updates in those times, usually get helped. And I credit our investors and our advisors with very meaningful impacts to the business just because we had built a relationship and we built that trust up over the years. So piece of advice well-taken and I hope other people listen and take it as well.

Meb: Yeah, this is a point that I actually am pretty opinionated on and I agree with you and I don’t understand, so many companies don’t utilize the resource of their incentivized shareholders or what we would call people that could be evangelists for a company and also help. I mean in many cases you have people that are decades-plus of experience in startups or legal or accounting or know people that would be good on marketing. And having done it on our end, it’s crazy to me, the people that don’t do it, it just boggles the mind, but plenty don’t. A lot of people like keeping the cards really close to their chest, but I think that’s probably a mistake. What’s been sort of the most rewarding experience of this newest venture over the past few years?

Andrew: Well, I have to say the customer stories are pretty fun. The situations that people are able to kind of stop from escalating are sometimes comical.

Meb: Can you give us any anonymous stories?

Andrew: It just amazes me how many uncles and grandparents, high school kids, accounts they get ahold of, they rent these houses for like a post-prom party and think they’re gonna get away with this. And here comes in whoever owns the property. As you can imagine, very upset that there’s now 50 high schoolers in a very nice house just throwing a party in the middle of it. And those kinds of stories usually somebody posts something on Instagram and you kind of see the aftermath of it. Those are kind of funny.

There’s also some the stories of how we’re helping these, what are basically small businesses generate revenue, create positive guest experiences, guest travel experiences are all just fantastic. It’s really exciting to see our piece of helping this industry grow as it continues to grab more traveller market share over hotels.

Meb: And I imagine a defining moment in your company’s history, and maybe it wasn’t, but it certainly was for Airbnb was the tragedy, I believe it was last fall or last summer when there was one of those parties that resulted in a number of deaths. Was that something that I imagine was a pretty big impact on y’all’s company as far as raising awareness of some of these problems that sadly could have been avoided had the right technology been in place?

Andrew: It’s really tragic to see those headlines. I think one of the more widely publicized ones was just outside of Oakland for Halloween. Really tragic event and NoiseAware is not designed to identify gunshots, but when you read the kind of neighbour stories of how everything went down, you see that the party was going on for four or more hours each time and that’s the kind of thing that we are designed to do. We’re an early detection service so that someone can intervene in these kinds of situations by text message or phone call within 15 minutes and if possible, actually have a door knock within an hour so that someone’s able to see what’s going on. We’d like to think we could have some small part in making sure that those happen less often.

Meb: As a person leading the biz, you look back at your tenure, anything you’d go back and rewind? I mean having to make a thousand decisions every day as CEO, anything that stands out as something you might do differently?

Andrew: Oh man, tons. Saying that puts it in perspective for me is your job as a founder and a CEO is make tons of tactical mistakes, but don’t make any strategic ones. So we make mistakes all the time and it’s just one more thing you try that you know doesn’t work and so you’re making the list smaller to find the ones that do work. I also built the first version of the backend of our system and going through the process of upgrading all that, getting rid of the technical debt was a fun experience, but it got us to where we needed to go and we were able to hire people much smarter than myself to take over that piece.

Meb: What’s the company look like today? How many people you got?

Andrew: Yeah, we’ve got 20 employees now. Everything from, as you can imagine, sales, support, account management. We’ve got installation team for some of our larger customers. We have a fantastic marketing team and obviously our product and engineering teams are fantastic.

Meb: I was gonna say on the marketing side, this seems to be like the biggest challenge for somebody like you guys who have an obvious product that it’s almost just like it’s an awareness issue. How do you guys approach marketing? Is it through traditional channels of digital ads? Is it through partnerships? Is it through influencers on Instagram? How do you guys go about it?

Andrew: As the company that created the category, we’ve tried everything and we keep trying everything just because we’re still early in both the kind of short-term rental movement, but also this phase of education that this is actually a problem that technology can solve and it’s not something that the hosts always have to be worried. There’s a solution to tell the neighbours so that they need to have confidence that the host next door is taking their concerns seriously. So we honestly just spend a lot of time educating people on just the best practices for being a host of which NoiseAware is one of them.

And then that kind of rising tide lifts all boats kind of situation where everyone’s doing better, the neighbour is happy, the host is happy, the guests are having a good time within the right boundaries. The community doesn’t have to worry about our short-term rentals rampaging in our communities. Like all of that’s handled, everyone can focus on the benefits that hosting has to the community, the benefits that these kinds of very local, hyper-local guest experiences have rather than the potential, kind of, negative effects which are, luckily, from our data, very low in occurrence.

Meb: Where’s the best place for people to find more information on you guys and what you’re up to?

Andrew: Well, the best place to find us is noiseaware.io. Also, check out our Facebook page and our Instagram. We also have a live chat. If you actually just wanna talk to us, just show up and say hi.

Meb: Awesome. Andrew, it’s been so much fun. Thanks for joining us today.

Andrew: Thanks so much for your time. I really enjoyed it.

Meb: Podcast listeners, we’ll post show notes to today’s conversation at mebfaber.com/podcast. If you love the show, if you hate it, shoot us feedback@themebfabershow.com. We love to read the reviews. Please review us on iTunes and subscribe the show anywhere good podcasts are found. My current favourite is Breaker. Thanks for listening, friends, and good investing.