Thibault Masson on the Evolution of Product Marketing in the Vacation Rental Sector

Hello, everyone listening and watching. I’m so happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

Sure. First and foremost, I’m a big fan of vacation rentals, so the industry we’re in. I mean, 20 years ago, my ex and I, I have an ex, we’re still good friends, we bought, by accident, a vacation rental, so a second home, if you will. That was our first home. At the time, we could not afford an apartment in Paris where we were living. It was too expensive. On a French island in the Caribbean, it sounds fancy, but we discovered that the banks would give you a loan to buy a house to rent it out. That was before Airbnb was out there. We were like, What? We could rent out the house and that would pay back the loan we’re taking from the local bank. That sounds crazy. But actually, it happened, again, because the banks on the island knew about this business model. It was very usual for the island. How we got started, I’m like, I like this. I got an industry and then we started having two houses in the Caribbean, one in Bali as well because it’s counterseason, long story. Then I started writing and blogging about it. At some point, I attended a conference because, in the vacation industry, you have a lot of conferences for big companies that have hundreds of properties.

I was speaking at the conference, and in the room, there was somebody from booking.com out there. They were like, It was seven years ago, and they were like, We have to compete with Airbnb because people think we only do hotels, we’re only good with hotels. We need people to join us at the headquarters. That’s how I joined the headquarters of booking.com and helped them tweak their product, and their strategy towards more vacation rentals. That’s how I discovered product marketing, which is basically how you come up with the right features for a segment and once it’s developed, how do you get them to market? How do you get more adoption? Or how do you get more of the market to even know that you are relevant for a segment? That’s what I did. Then I left Booking.com and I started blogging again on a blog I had, which is called Rentals Scale-up. It was still there, which turned into a media where we do We’re still out there where we talk about basically the industry, what Airbnb is up to, we share market data, we talk about new technologies. At some point, I started talking with PriceLabs.

I was using PriceLabs for my properties to price them, to make sure I had the right price for every night. We’re not missing out on any demand. They’re like, Why don’t we join forces? Two years ago, but almost two years ago, PriceLabs acquired Rentalscale up and me. That’s how I became the head of product marketing at PriceLabs. At first, there was just me, and now there are five of us. That’s what we do.

Yeah. First, revenue management software is like, what is it? I don’t know. If I talk to my brothers, they’re like, I have no clue What are you talking about? It’s like revenue management software. But if I say, Hey, imagine you have an Airbnb, you have a second home, you need to price it. You need to decide on the prices for tonight, but so for the whole year, maybe next year. How do you decide on this? How do you make sure that your prices are not too low, not too high? Also, how do you make sure that between two existing stays, you want to create a discount to make sure you don’t have a space at some point, but maybe you don’t want to attract for just one night? All these rules around pricing, and length of stay, you need to automate it because especially for me, for example, I had properties in the Caribbean and lived in Europe at some point or in Asia, Indonesia. There’s no way I can see what’s happening in the market. What this software is going to do, We scrape data, basically, first. Are there Airbnb, Bookings.com, Verbal? We see what’s happening on their website. It gives a good idea of the patterns. For each market in the world, we can see, okay, that’s a market where, for example, that’s the seasonality, that’s where high season, low season is, or the booking window, which means people book more for next three, four days, I can see this, or they book March in advance because maybe, again, it’s an island somewhere, people have to plan, book a flight. All these patterns we have. It’s AI-powered, if you will, where we assemble a lot of data, we see booking patterns, and from there, for your listing, we know your listing is a two-bedroom, for example, in a certain location, we can recommend the prices. Of course, you can also create setups to customize it. When I say this, you can see one or two challenges, which is like, first we have to explain this in simple words. Content is very important. If we’re writing content, video content, or going to events, for small hosts, a big host, or talking through influencers. There’s a lot of education, for example, about Airbnb Making money on the Airbnb.

There are a lot of YouTube videos about this. We have to talk with these people to make sure they understand what we do. The challenge for us is explanation. The second challenge for us is it’s a matter of trust because there are a lot of tools around, but in the case of our tool, we have to have a huge impact on your revenues. Maybe you make a big investment, you buy a second home, or maybe it’s your family home with your brother and sister, we’re going to keep this house in the family. The only way to get some guests from time to time. If you’re the one making this bet, you’ve put a weight on your shoulders because your whole family is looking at you, you better not have this revenue coming in and not lose the house. There are a lot of human story is also behind to understand. We have a lot of trust because basically, we’re going to automate the pricing. Of course, people can control this. It’s not a black box, but still. It means we have to convey trust. That’s why the way for us to do this is for people to experience it for, for example, 30 days for free.

That’s what we want to drive. We want to attract people to test drivers for free for 30 days so they can see for themselves the pricing. The moment you connect with us and your Airbnb account, for example, we can immediately give you pricing recommendations and push them to Airbnb. You can see it. It’s not like you have to wait long. We can immediately calculate things for you, but we have to get you there. These are the challenges, explanations, education, and experience.

It’s a great question, In the sense that we have several personas and segments. I’m going to start with segments. The segment is very easy to understand. Imagine we have a lot of people who have one or two properties, so they are individuals. It’s, again, as I said, they invest in a second home with their own home, family home, and they want to keep it. For them, and they want to keep it, let’s say, and they need a lot of revenues almost most of the year. We’re not going after someone ready out their place for two weeks because it doesn’t make sense for them to use us. We are subscription-based, SaaS, as you said. We want people who are going to be there month after month. If you’re going to do this for two weeks a year, it does not make sense. Also, you can learn a bit about the tool. It’s self-serve, of course, but you can have to learn the tool to see even more benefits. Again, it doesn’t make sense for us to go after these people who would short-term leave us very fast. We go after people who have made a big decision, and who have a place.

We also have another persona or segment of people, for example, who have 5-10. Sometimes, five properties can still be owners, but they are serial investors. They saw they could make money and boom, boom, boom, they invested. These people want more data because, for example, they just want automation. Also, they want market data. Where can I invest next? What’s a good market? Should it be a two, or three-bedroom? They’re expecting this from us. Then we have another segment which is property managers. So meant by this is, for example, in my house in the Caribbean, at first, I was not handling the bookings and the marketing. There was a local agent who was doing this for me and dozens of other owners. That’s a property manager. These people can handle 20 to thousands of properties. They can be very big. These people, basically, also expect from us all the things. They want automation, they want market data. But also what they want, they want to save time. What I mean is that, for example, they want us to enable them to group listings, in the same market, or maybe all the two bedrooms together.

Maybe they want to apply the same setting, the same price settings over some groups of properties. Also what they want, they want in this a whole list of properties to immediately see which ones these actions. They want some alerts or rankings. They say, Hey, these, they’re underperforming. The market is going well. This one is not getting any bookings. You should probably do something, adjust your prices, or do something like this. That’s really what we see here. You have the individual, you have the investors, and the property managers. If they’re small or big, it’s even different.

Yeah. If I go back to this segment, that was such a great question first. Listen, the small individuals, what we want, we want them to find us and stay self-served. What I mean by that is that a tool is easy enough. All they need is to connect us to their Airbnb account. We have an official AirBnB integration. We are a partner with AirBnB, so it’s easy. Just connect both. Immediately, they can start seeing price recommendations That’s taking into account the market as well as their performance, how they’re listing, how their property is doing. For them, indeed, SEO is very important. We have to find the words they’re looking for and we have to be found on these topics. They’re not going to be typing at first revenue management software. They may not even know it exists as a category. They may not call it this, but SEO is going to be important as well as, for example, paid marketing. For property managers, it’s also true. But here, you’re going to have even more need for trust signals. One of the trust signals, for example, for these people is on top of the SEO and paid marketing, which is That’s also true, we need to be seen as thought leaders.

They are businesses, and they want to work with the leading businesses. For, example, we publish articles about the industry, or that’s why Rental Scale-up, which is an industry news website, was acquired by PriceLabs because we talk about the industry. That’s a good association as well. Another use of content for thought leadership. What we do, is we speak at conferences around, It can be me, It could be a lot of people. We try to speak. Just last month, we spoke in the US, in France, in South Africa, in Australia. We are really around the world because we want to go to big conferences to share insights about the industry because we have so much data, we can talk about the trends. We have the data. Then if people trust us, they say, Okay, these people, they look like they understand my market, so I can choose them maybe and trust them a bit more. Here the channel for them would be, we have sales account managers in a way who will take care of this bigger account. But all this work together again. If at a big conference, we talk and we’re seen, it can trickle down to small users who can see how we are also leaders.

People talk about us at big conferences. It looks like we’re doing a good job.

If you’re in Europe and the US, for example, it’s $19 a month for one listing. The more listings you add, the cheaper per listing. If you’re in the rest of the world, we have an even cheaper plan because we want to adapt to our customers.

Sure. Rental Scale was a media, right? That was two of us writing content and hosting an online every-month conference where we talk online event where we talked about the industry, we invited people, showing their best practices, for example. The transition has been very interesting in the sense that price as the brief is like, we acquire you because you’re a voice in the industry. Your value, what we’re paying for is the voice. If we, PriceLabs, start just pushing PriceLabs, PriceLabs, PriceLabs into the website, into the newsletter, that’s going to completely kill that voice and kill the value paid for. It was very interesting at first. I was the one who was saying, Oh, we probably need to put more PriceLabs ads on the Rentals Club website. PriceLabs was like, no, that’s not what we’re We want to keep that voice. Of course, what we did was an approach of making sure, for example, that our logo is Rental Scalup, Powered by PriceLabs, or everything we do. We didn’t need to go after any sponsor for our online series anymore, that thing. Our sponsor is PriceLabs. Also, I’m pretty visible on social media, and on LinkedIn.

I got quite some followers because I’ve been talking about the industry for a while. Of course, naturally, also talk about PriceLabs there. That was the bet here, not to change the line too much, not to push too much PriceLabs. But making sure people understand that we are part of PriceLabs, but that we’re independent. That was a very interesting approach here. What’s been good for Rethoscape as well is that, from time to time, we expose the PriceLabs newsletter of users, which is a lot of people, prospects, and users. We expose them to articles. It means we’ve been able to multiply the number of subscribers by a lot. Things were together because these insights make sense to us, to them, sorry. In return, they subscribe more to us. It’s been very positive for both.

It’s Something interesting, we also talk about PriceLabs competitors sometimes. One of them has a great market report with great data. I’m going to talk about this because I think it’s useful for an industry. Maybe the first thing I’m going to send out on the PriceLabs newsletter, that’s not the question, but for rental scale-up, I’m going to talk about it. I think it’s interesting and share my thoughts about it. Okay, that’s what I see. Because in the end, you will still trust the voice. Can I read the data? Can I see the trends? Regardless of what the source is. It’s been very important for us because it’s a small world in the end to stay friendly with people who now happen to be competitors, who have always been a lot of them are friends. I knew before joining PriceLabs. Again, that’s interesting because that’s how you also, for us, stay a leader in the industry, that you don’t have this challenger attitude where you’re bad with people, you say bad things about competitors. That’s not the attitude. If you’re a true leader, you can’t afford to be talking about others because you know what?

In the end, your product is strong enough to be compared with the others and you’re waiting.

It’s a good question. I will answer differently. What’s interesting, like, is that Airbnb has a dynamic pricing solution of its own. What I mean is that if you list your property on Airbnb maybe it has a tool that gives you some pricing. In a way, one of the biggest competitors to PriceLabs is people not taking initiative, just staying with Airbnb’s pricing tool, which, of course, is the two of this pricing The goal of this pricing tool is to make more money for Airbnb. It’s not to optimize the revenue of the host. It’s to find the right balance in the marketplace between a host and guests. It’s a great tool, but the goal is not aligned purely with the interest of the host. That makes sense. At the marketplace, a lot of keywords we want to rank on may have to do with Airbnb, for example. Is Airbnb a competitor directly No, they don’t create independent standing revenue management software. But people do look for keywords like Airbnb pricing in paid, in free. What do people mean by Airbnb pricing? But Airbnb is such a strong word that a lot of people don’t say, Oh, I’ve booked a short-term rental.

They say I’ve booked an Airbnb. Or they don’t say, I’m going to rent out my house to make money. They say I’m going to Airbnb my place to make money. When people start typing Airbnb pricing, we’re not sure what they are looking for, maybe looking for a solution on how to price your Airbnb or this thing. What’s been interesting to us is not just betting on obvious competitors’ names, but thinking, How are people thinking? What they’re looking for? Again, both on SEO and paid, having this approach, people are talking about the industry. I started by explaining that revenue management software is very complicated as a word. My brothers will not be typing this in Google. They’ll be typing all the keywords, and this is where we have to show up.

Wow. First, thank you for the good on the growth. There’s a team I’m just a product marketing person here. We have a whole content team in the house. And Disha, she’s the head of content marketing, for example. We have a good team here. I think what’s special about us, is a few things. First, it’s in-house. When you join PriceLabs, it’s always very interesting because regardless of your end role, whether are you a product marketer, content person, a data scientist, or a developer, everyone has to do one month of training as a customer support person. What’s the idea here is that the expectations are that if you’re going to be working at PriceLabs, you have to understand our product, and what we do. Does that make sense, right? Also, you have to understand our users. As I said, it can be small, it can be big. As I said, also, it may also be complicated for them to even understand what we do. It’s not that the tool is complicated. It’s just like the whole, you have to think about data numbers, and we show graphs, In each, reading graphs is okay, but for some, it’s tricky.

It’s tricky to read graphs, and we show a lot of data in graphs. We expect the SEO team to also do this. What it means, again, is that by doing this first, when they write about the product, they understand what they’re doing, so it’s less work for everybody reviewing behind if need be. Also, it means that when they talk to users, they can see, read, can talk with them as well, as see the words being used by actual users. As I said, people say more like, I booked an Airbnb, where I have been in my place. This is where you’re like, For SEO, it’s like AirBnB, not as a brand, but AirBnB as a thing, as a short-term rental synonym is important. That’s why we do this. It didn’t stop after one month. It’s still supposed to help with customer support, I guess, regardless of who you are, and to keep this close to the users because otherwise, you may lose. Again, It’s very tricky because, for example, it’s very technical. You write about technical not in terms of words, but in terms of technology, in terms of technical, revenue management.

Maybe there are some specific words such as orphan night. That’s an industry term. It means you have two bookings, and in between you have a hole, as there are no booked nights there. It’s called Orphan Night, which I find a bit sensitive as a word, but that’s what it’s called by the industry. You have to understand what it is. Then say this in the way I think I explained. It’s like there’s a hole between two bookings, and probably you want to fill it up to make money. Maybe you’re welcome seven days, seven days. Maybe you want to open up to five or six nights in between if you have a hole. But you have to be able, if you don’t understand this, the copy for SEO, you will also struggle to do this because the goal for SEO, for us, again, is to attract people and get them to start using us. We have to do a good job showing you we capture your traffic, but we also explain to you to give you value and say, Oh, these people look interesting. I would say smart, but let’s not say smart.

Look interesting. I should try them. That’s what we want to do.

Like a lot of SaaS companies, I’m guessing is to say that’s the goal, but the way we do it could be different.

It’s a great, great, great thing. When I started working at PriceLabs, I also took over the newsletter. We have a monthly newsletter at PriceLabs. I sent out a survey, and the newsletter was mostly about product updates. We take the company, and we see we’re very proud of the product updates, so we push for the latest newsletter. But then we ask people, What do you want to read? And updates were only number three. The first thing you want to hear about is best practices. Does that make sense? If I’m a user, I want, say, Number two is training. I’m a user, I’m like, Just help me get more value from your tool. And one of the ways is to tell me how other people do it. And by the way, it’s great if I see other people having pain because I feel less lonely. Having this in mind, we started thinking, no, we write customer testimonials a lot of them. I’m thinking it’s for lead gen, but, at some point, do you need 40, or 50, customer stories like this? Or should stop at some point and say, What we really need as well also is best practices.

Thinking about customer story, but more geared toward, let’s pick a pain, how to do something, and how the customer explains how they solve it. Here basically we have a grid where we say, Okay, we talk about the segments. Are we covering all the segments? Another point I didn’t mention for SEO, what helped us as well grow is that we are available, the software is available in five languages now, starting last year. We added four languages and we said we’re adding the marketing as well. We started also writing in four more languages, which of course is increasing the breadth of our SEO. But it’s the same thing for testimonials. Some people want to hear about their country. Make sure we have segments and geographies covered. When you want best practices, they can relate to the examples we have. That’s what’s important for us. Another part of content I didn’t talk about is we go a lot to the events, I said. We do a lot of presentations. Again, they’re not demons. They’re clearly like US market trends. What’s happening now, what do we see for the things? Or it could be even AI and pricing and the industry.

Because it’s an AI tool, but we never said it before. Before this last year, AI was a bit scary for people. It was scary. Nobody was like, AI. Since ChatGPT, people have been like, Oh, AI tools are useful. We’re like, You know what? Great. You’ve been using PriceLabs. Good news, you’ve been using AI for years. You just don’t know it, but PriceLabs is a narrow AI. It’s a form of AI. Anyway, this content presentation is very important to us. To speak at conferences, You have to submit, and you have to be selected. You can’t just pay your way through it. It’s also a lot of effort in content marketing. Then when we do this great presentation, you want to repurpose them. We do webinars using them with our clients, or we do articles again using these presentations. We try to repurpose a lot because, again, this thought leadership, can be transmitted live in a webinar through written content and different forms, and we share on our newsletter, for example, or social media.

It’s a great question. Sometimes we wonder ourselves, to be honest. Sometimes we wonder, is there an attribution thing here we don’t see? We don’t see and we just wonder sometimes. What could be happening as well is that, again, we sponsor podcasts by influencers, YouTube shows by influencers, talking to masses of small hosts. We go to conferences. Our name is out there and hopefully what we hope then is that people will start typing PriceLabs. That’s what we hope. As I said, the issue we have is that the product category, revenue management software, is It’s not something you just type like this. Usually, you hear from us before you hear about the category, which is a pain, right? Sometimes in a lot of countries, when we enter, We are the ones who are educated, but this thing exists. Yes, you have software that can automate these things. This is true, we have two big competitors and they’re also doing a great job educating the markets. But in the end, that’s where we sold as well with them. That could be one of the reasons for this.

Pr in what way?

Yeah, it’s a good one. We do this in two ways. For example, in the industry, the biggest travel news website. I’m talking about travelers but about travel companies. It’s called something that AirBnB employees or Booking.com employees would read or I’m employees would read. It’s called Skift. Last week, for example, Skift published an article using completely price-labs data, naming us, linking to us, of course, backlink, and about the solar eclipse. In the US, there’s going to be a big solar eclipse. On the path of the solar eclipse that’s going to cover the US. We can see that occupancy, the number of bookings has increased by three. It’s amazing. We have all the data for all the cities, so we could give them a map. We drew a map of the US, we took a map of the US, sorry. Then we drew the path of the Eclipse. Then for key markets we had, we put the data. I did a quick report for Skift and gave it to them. For us, it’s very important because, in this way, it’s PR, but We also do press releases from time to time.

The price release that works, it’s not really about us. The one that works is when we share market data. When we entered France last year, for example, when we launched a French version, instead of saying, Yeah, we’re in French, which nobody cares about really. Oh, great, you’re in French. Who cares? We’re like, Okay, that’s the market data we have for France for this summer. That’s what we seyaddaada, yadda. And by the way, of course, it’s by us, PriceLabs. And we’re happy to announce we are also available in French. So that makes sense. That’s for PR. And again, working with the press. For the press, we try to be things. What we do, for example, we have a free tool on our website called STR Index that anybody can use for free. The press, for example, and you could have trends for every country in the world. You can see how things are going, what is in the past, and what is in the future, we have data for the future because we know we want to be seen as a resource. Then they quote us and backlink to us by being useful.

Sometimes we run out of time. We have to have somebody say, Have you written back to all these news websites, explain to us what we have, and have you taken the time to show them a quick demo of the tool, how it works, and the value for them? It’s time. You have these great strategies, but if you have nobody then acting on them, going back to the news website, say, We have these resources, remember? They forget about it. It’s not like you can build and forget. You need somebody to do this. Sometimes some people, what they do, they hire a PR agency to do it. For the moment, we do it internally. That’s more our way of doing things, but it’s someone who needs to do it. That’s time and money.

That’s a great question. We’re all remote. The whole company is remote. We rarely meet. We do meet at conferences. So It’s funny. Sometimes we go to conferences, a lot of industry events, and we’re so happy because also we meet our clients, very happy. We also meet each other. Oh, have you been? How are the kids? It’s interesting. But once or twice a year, we do meet. Everybody comes together. Last year, I co-organized a hackathon for the whole company. The hackathon for the company is not just tech stuff. Here, for example, one of the outcomes of the hackathon is that we have a lot of market data, for example. They said You can use this market data to see what the trends are in the US, in France, in India, and different markets. What we did during the hackathon, was we said, How about we tap into ChatGPT or one of the GPTs, and we just say, take the market data from the market and then create an article out of it? The other trends we see in the US, blah, blah, blah, by using things.

You can imagine you can even refresh it every month. So suddenly every month, you can have an article about the market. We did this for the hackathon. I can’t say it was successful. I can’t say what we’ve done since when, but it’s something we’re doing. Even in our product, we also basically In our product, we have content in the sense that we realize that just showing tables and graphs for some people is tricky. Some people need to read stuff. Tapping into GPT as well to be able to it depends on who you are, but to be able to interpret the data into words, it’s something we’re using. You can imagine, why not? I can’t say too much, but that’s also something we could be doing to write content and automate content creation by tapping into insights. But obviously, you still need people to read stuff because it has to make sense. Again, if you’re just basically turning a table of contents into an article, you’re going to be lacking a value because you need somebody to tell you that’s where it happens and that’s what it means.

You still need somebody to interpret this. But it does automate and save time.

I think it’s Like any industry, it’s important to be close to your segments, to understand how you’re segmenting, and to understand the personas that could be in the segment or cross-segment. It’s true that if you are a host yourself, it’s easier because you can understand a lot of the pain. Of course, you should never think that your own experience is the truth. But your own experience can help you open up your mind to happy people, and things because you have to write about the short-term industry. If you’ve not been a host yourself, you’re missing out. You’re missing out because you’re missing out on factors, for example, the fear people have of damage. People will come to my house and break stuff. Maybe that’s family things. Maybe that’s more invested in my savings to the second home. I’m afraid. That’s the biggest reason people stop hosting is damage. If you do this thing in whatever, how you’re marketing, copy, talking about risks, you’re going to miss out on this. The other thing to consider as well is you have to keep up with what the big players are doing. We are vendors in the industry, but we talk about Airbnb or Booking.com verbally.

It’s very important to understand what they’re doing because a lot of people are hosts are getting bookings from these platforms or guests are booking on these platforms. If you don’t understand how they work, what they do. Again, in the way you’re marketing, the way you’re writing content, you’re missing out because people are like, Yeah, you’re writing about Airbnb? That’s not the way it works. If you do this, it’s really bad for your brand because it can look like you don’t even understand the big players. That’s what I would say. It’s really important to… But that’s true, I think, for any industry, know what you’re talking about. Sometimes it’s easier for the consumer industry. If you sell milk, you drink milk, it’s easier to get it. But here we suddenly ask you to produce milk as a host, it’s a different thing. That’s what makes it interesting. The last I want to say about the industry, it’s a very cool industry. A lot of time, you have a lot of people who are maybe expats who started living in a different country, said, Oh, what can we do? It used to be some people became taxis.

That was the thing to do. We’re Uber drivers, right? A lot of people say, You know what? I’m going to be a host on AirBnB, and I’m going to help other people host their place. Maybe I can’t afford to buy your house, but I can do this hosting thing for the owners. We’ve seen this as a path for entrepreneurship for a lot of people, especially expats. Then when you go to these industry events. You talk with people who have had so many different lives. It makes it very cool. It’s a very cool industry with very cool, open-minded people.

Wow, let’s do it. Okay.

Probably prioritize my team’s needs of a mind sometimes.

I think. Okay. It’s going to sound very cliché, but the possibilities of AI for businesses. Because it’s there. It’s the future. There are a lot of solutions currently. People don’t know that, but it’s enabling small companies to start competing with big ones by using the tools that they have. These big risks could only pay. There are small ones that can do. I think all of us SaaS companies can have lots to do here to enable and power small entrepreneurs. Very excited about this.

Diplomate. I always wanted to travel and live abroad. I’m not a diplomat. I did the styles for that the first year, and I looked at the people around me. I’m like, Do I want to work for the government? I don’t think so. But still, I’m abroad and traveling, so I’m almost there.

Sorry, what did you like?

The last search on Google, that’s a good one. Very funny remembered. Yes, I attended yesterday evening a panel in my city on AI, and I was looking for the word of a speaker, the word, the name of a speaker, to know more about what they did in the past. So I googled somebody.

Thank you so much for having me. If people want to contact me, just go to LinkedIn and find me out, and I’m very happy to connect. Great.