Even the holiday of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights did not stop Pallavi Gupta, co-founder of Espresso Labs to join us for an interview in her traditional wear. She told us about her product, her recent f***ups as well as Espresso Labs cooperation with ELEVATE so far.
There will be f***ups, there will be roadblocks – but there will also be accomplishments
Espresso Labs – Voice Applications for enterprises
A relaxing day at the hotel, what more could you ask for? How about a voice-controlled personal assistant in your room? This is what Espresso Labs can do for you.
Vijay Nandwani, Shubhang Arora and Pallavi went out to provide convenience to customers as well as to ease coordination efforts for hotels. For that purpose they founded Espresso Labs, targeting higher-rank hotels and providing voice applications for their guestrooms.
By customizing Google Home as well as Amazon’s Alexa they enable customers to simply voice service requests while the hotel staff is notified momentarily. Thus, cutting out a lot of time and effort needed to request and book certain services.
Elevating the business
After putting in 7 months of work prior to the program they joined ELEVATE Batch 3 in October and promptly saw results. The 1st session was all about validating your MVP, so that’s what they did:
Together with their coaches, Bernhard and Tanya, they built a demo video with Google home that helped hotels with upselling their services. The feedback received after sharing the video with the Espresso Lab community was astounding – it even led to a conversion!
Hyatt Regency – one of the highest reputed hotels in Dheli and the national capital region decided to become a pilot tester. They wanted to have the device installed in 10 of their premier suites, which would be a breakthrough with any startup. But, as it goes, it also lays the ground for their recent f***up story.
The Google struggle
The Espresso Labs team agreed to deliver 10 Google Home devices ready and going within two weeks to the Hyatt Regency. Standard procedure – preparing and providing 10 devices within two weeks would pose no hassle for the young entrepreneurs.
Hadn’t Google interfered with the plans.
Google home only provides an application for doing bookings and reservations in early access so far, with strictly limited access. Espresso Labs was not among the lucky bunch, Google denied their application.
Solution: Switching over to Amazon’s echo, which meant acquiring ten of those, as renting the devices to the hotel was part of the deal. After then, things were sailing smooth.
That’s how things are in startups, they go south – you as co-founders have to find a solution for it.
Espresso Labs conquers Europe
Since already before coming to Austria Pallavi and her team have been in contact in Viennese hotels – exploring the hierarchy, building relationships and testing the market. Our hotels might become a lot more convenient in the near future – Espresso Labs is a team that is keen on finding their way into the European market.
