Sync BNB

Alexander Garavitis was managing his own vacation rental property across multiple booking channels when the frustration hit hard. Every time he received a booking on one channel, he had to log into all the others and manually close those dates to prevent double bookings. He searched for existing software solutions but found them either prohibitively expensive (targeting large management companies) or poorly built. Rather than accept this as his personal problem, Alexander decided to validate whether others faced the same pain. He ran a survey of 1200 vacation rental owners and managers worldwide and discovered the problem was endemic—a clear market gap waiting to be filled.

Alexander wasn't a developer himself anymore (he'd written code "back in the day" but hadn't touched it in years). He needed a technical co-founder and got lucky when his friend Petros, a lead developer for a large Dutch online bank, heard the pitch and decided to move back from the Netherlands to build it. "Fuck it, I'm coming back, let's do this together," Petros said. They split the equity 60-40 but "run it like it's 50-50." In 2017, they raised $200,000 in notes before launching the full product. By January 2018, just 11 months after the source interview, Sync BNB was live.

They funded customer acquisition through paid ads on Google AdWords and Facebook. Their most effective creative was a Facebook ad with the headline "RUN, Airbnb host"—simple, curious, and click-worthy. By the time of the interview, they'd optimized their CAC to around $60 per customer, which translated to a 3-month payback period on a $15/month subscription. With 1200 rentals under management across 400 owners, they'd reached $15K in monthly revenue.

Their core product focus was working: they had achieved product-market fit with rental owners who urgently needed multi-channel sync. However, churn was a reality at 8% monthly—mostly driven by seasonality (properties renting only in summer or winter). They hadn't introduced upsells yet, staying disciplined about perfecting the core product before expanding the revenue model. The unit economics were clean: $60 CAC, $15 MRR per rental, ~3-month payback. Their paid-ads channel was proving repeatable, though they remained disciplined about marketing spend relative to their $15K monthly revenue.

With $580K raised ($200K in the first round, another $380K in a follow-up note), they'd grown to a 9-person team based in Athens, Greece. Their monthly burn was $30K, leaving them with roughly 10+ months of runway. They were aiming to grow to $50K MRR before raising a Series A—hopefully at a 10X revenue multiple, in the $1-1.5M range. Alexander cited the European Equifund program (€300M across 8 funds) as a tailwind for Greek startups, marking an opportune time to be building in Athens rather than chasing Silicon Valley.