DCC UC Alumni: MyHotel

Return to site

DCC UC Alumni: MyHotel

· noticias,articulos

myHotel is a company that was born as an opportunity to improve the quality of life of guests passing through hotels, says Matías Vial, graduated as an Industrial Civil Engineer with a mention in Information Technology from the PUC. They solved this need through the creation of automated systems that measure the “customer experience” of guests in different instances before, during and post-stay, and even online comments on pages such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Google and Facebook. This set of technological systems meant a growth that in five years is reflected in sales in 23 LATAM countries, presence in the US and Europe over 1,000 hotels as customers and offices in Chile, Mexico and Spain.

Vial confesses that none of this was easy, either in relation to the creation of a company or how to apply a technology “at the right time”. so much so that MyHotel was originally a completely different product in the minds of its founders “We started being a completely different company from what it is today, in fact we were a mobile app, while today we are a multi-platform SaaS cloud. It was our ability to look at our own numbers methodically, constantly listen to the market in their needs, understand the consumer and find opportunities for improvement, which made it possible to iterate until we reach products for which the consumer is willing to pay. If we had not done that and we "fell in love" with our initial idea, I assure you that the company did not pass from year two. In these five years we have seen many companies born, the vast majority of them die. Very few thrive to this day. Yes, there are luck factors in all this, but what is important is the ability to adapt to the market, not the other way around. ”

Among the achievements that have contributed to the growth of myHotel, the award of 2 CORFO funds stands out: a seed capital at the beginning of the project and a “SCALE” for international market expansion, supported by rounds of capital raising with local investors and foreigners, allowing them to expand their productive capacity and number of employees, adapting to the increase in the client portfolio, and providing services at a level that has allowed them to compete on equal terms with large companies in the field.

Today myHotel works with the latest technologies: thousands of scraping robots running 24/7, a high availability platform with a separate infrastructure in high-level layers focused on flexibility and speed, outsourced Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence services, a 'Sentiment Analysis' engine in real time, all necessary elements to respond not only to the needs of a global client portfolio and competition from markets with more experience and culture in the field. "All this has really been a roller coaster, but everything you learn and achieve with good foundations and a methodical approach is incredible." Vial points out.

About his academic training at the School of Engineering, Matías highlights how the quality and diversity of content in his training were key to the success of the company. “The School of Engineering teaches you many things regarding computer science, and in great depth. I say that there are many because I have a comparison of schools in the US and Europe that do not teach even half, and at a much lower level of difficulty. But the approach is a bit different: in the PUC they teach you ‘to learn’, whatever, something that you later specialize in what you like and surely those tools are going to be a very high level worker. For example, I left the university knowing 2 or 3 programming languages, knowing little about companies such as AWS or Google Cloud, very little infrastructure, concepts such as PaaS (platform as a service) or IaC (infrastructure as code). But given the high academic training of the School I was able to learn all that on the fly while working and we had to worry about the company surviving. "

Vial and his team are already preparing for a new challenge in the medium term: opening up to more industries. Until today, everything they have done is focused on the Hospitality, but now they are looking to be able to replicate what they have already managed to do but in other industries, thus becoming one of the few international Chilean SaaS B2B companies with multi-market presence.