Former Hotel Analyst Built AI to Fix the Problem He Lived Every Day | Ziggy Hallgarten E71

If you're still tracking your hotel pipeline in Excel and spending two hours screening each deal, you're working harder than you need to. Ziggy Hallgarten lived with that frustration as an analyst, so he built the solution.

In this episode, you'll get fresh market insights from the ALIS Conference, learn how AI can cut your deal analysis time dramatically, and hear what the entrepreneurial journey looks like when you're solving a problem you experienced yourself.

A Cornell Hotel School graduate who worked in acquisitions at institutional firms before founding Broome.ai shares what he's seeing in the hotel market, why he left to build his own company, and how AI is transforming the way investors analyze deals. Ziggy Hallgarten bootstrapped his startup after watching teams waste hours on manual workflows, teaching himself to build software using AI tools to automate the deal screening process he knew was broken.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• What the mood was really like at this year's ALIS Conference, and which markets are heating up
• How Broome.ai cuts deal screening from 2 hours down to 30 minutes or less by automating data extraction
• Why Ziggy left his family's hotel business to build his own company from scratch
• Free tools you can use to build software prototypes without any coding knowledge
• Where AI will have the biggest impact on hotels: revenue management and operations
• The biggest mistake founders make: trying to solve every problem instead of focusing on one
• Practical ways hotel investors can start leveraging AI in their workflow today

Whether you're an independent operator trying to compete with bigger shops, curious about where hotel investing is headed, or thinking about starting something of your own, this conversation delivers real insights from someone living on both sides of it.

About Ziggy Hallgarten

Ziggy Hallgarten is the Co-Founder and CEO of Broome, a software company building AI agents that automate the complex administrative workflows of Commercial Real Estate transactions. A graduate of Cornell’s Hotel School, he traces his hospitality roots from folding towels as a 10-year-old pool boy to managing acquisitions for institutions like PGIM Real Estate and family offices like Oliver Companies. Frustrated by the inefficiencies of the deal process, Ziggy transitioned from investor to founder in 2025 to build the solutions he needed as an analyst.

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Transcript

Michael Russell 0:00

If you're spending hours manually screening hotel deals, pulling data from PDFs, tracking your pipeline in Excel, losing time on work that could be automated, you're not alone. Ziggy Hallgarten saw the same problem and built broom.ai to fix it. Today, we're talking about what he's learning as he builds this company, what's happening in hotel investing right now, and how AI is changing the game for investors of all sizes. The Hotel Investor Playbook, your guide to building wealth and freedom through hotel and hospitality ownership. On this podcast, we talk story about everything you need to know to make money investing in hotels and in hospitality assets. Today I am joined by Ziggy Hallgarten, founder of Broom.ai, which is an AI-powered platform that automates commercial real estate administrative workflows. Ziggy, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah, man. I love your name, Ziggy. Can you tell me, is that short for something? How did you get the name Ziggy?

Ziggy Hallgarten 1:17

So Ziggy has been my name since birth. It's actually not on my birth certificate, though. My name is actually William on birth certificate. It's been, you know, the only people that have ever called me that are my grandma and grandpa. It was I was named after my grandpa, who was actually a knight in England. And so we had to pass down that name somehow. But my parents always liked Z names, had a Zach cousin and a Zack dog. So the only other real name out there was Ziggy. So been that since birth, been that in school, work really my whole life.

Michael Russell 1:47

I love Ziggy, man. It's way cooler than William. But your grandfather, great grandfather, was a knight.

Ziggy Hallgarten 1:53

Was he like he could have like knighted? He was knighted by the Queen for work in law in England. Yeah. So I was named after him. So I can't, I can't fully get rid of the William name. It's a pretty cool story.

Michael Russell 2:04

Oh, that is pretty neat. Awesome, man. Well, hey, I'm I'm excited to have you on the show. I want to dig into a lot. You've got a lot going on. But you recently were just at the Alice conference. The what is it? It's A-L-I-S. I'm not sure what it stands for, but it's a big hotel investing conference. Can you tell us about that? Like what were some of the main takeaways?

Ziggy Hallgarten 2:22

Yeah. So I was just in LA last week, which is always nice to get out of New York City in January and get 80-degree weather. I've been now four years in a row. And so I typically would go to two hotel conferences a year. I would say the takeaway from this year was relatively muted excitement about kind of the general hotel landscape. But in going to this, you know, for the past eight conferences, I think the vibes have been all over the place. Some people two years ago were saying we're about to have this amazing market. Interest rates are about to lower. Things are going to get really good. Even last year, I think people had a lot of hope that interest rates were going to go down significantly, transaction activity was going to go up. This year, I would say people kind of realized that we were in this new normal, that interest rates probably started the year in a similar place to where they're going to end the year. Lenders at some point are probably going to have to stop kicking the can down the road and force transactions. The broker books were pretty light, is kind of the vibe that I was hearing from acquisition firms out there. I don't think there's a whole lot of stuff on the market. But really, the overall takeaway is we're kind of in this K market right now where the the big shops, the kind of really well-capitalized shops are able to do a lot of work and they're continuing to grow. And then the smaller guys who are going out and raising money deal by deal, it's been more of a downward trajectory for them over the last couple of years. I think overall in 2026, we're probably going to see pretty similar activity. I think some of the big guys are going to continue buying. Just saw that MSD, Michael Dell's shop, just bought two four seasons hotels, massive trades. So it's kind of indicative of the big guys are going to keep buying cool stuff. And I think it's it's going to be continued muted activity for some of the smaller funds and RevPAR and kind of hotel metrics are projected to be relatively flat this year.

Michael Russell 4:12

Yeah. Did they mention any maybe specific markets that are hot right now, any particular places, or even just certain types of assets that are doing really well or people are excited about?

Ziggy Hallgarten 4:21

Yeah, I think the landscape of hospitality over the last four years has been extremely market dependent. In 2021 and 2022, you saw a massive surge in Tampa, Miami, New York did really, really well over the last couple of years. And then on the opposite side of things, it's like San Francisco, which I believe is still probably the lowest performing market relative to 2019, really suffered. I think there's a lot of interest in San Francisco. I'm a little biased. I've been bullish on San Francisco hospitality since probably 2022, probably a little too early. Um, and if I had bought some of the properties that I would have liked to, we would have continued to have to put money in and carry. But now we're seeing real institutional investment into San Francisco. Blackstone bought the four seasons, Newborn just bought two massive Hilton properties. You've got good tailwinds there. I think you see a little bit of return to travel from Asia. You've got the Super Bowl obviously happening. We've got World Cup going on. I think San Francisco is getting hot, and I'm hearing that. You know, we're seeing more trades there. I predict that there will be a couple bigger trades in San Francisco this year. And then, I mean, Florida continues to remain hot. I was talking to some people who were more focused on independent hotels, and they were saying they were struggling. I think the brands today have more power than ever. These booking engines are so, so strong. Because of that, brands are able to go and enforce these pretty massive pips. And for a small investor who owns a Hampton Inn in the middle of nowhere, and after seven years, the brand comes in and says you need to spend $30,000 a key. You know, that's that's pretty tough to deal with. And that's, I think, a problem for some of these smaller, less capitalized groups. That was another thing I saw. It's like independent hotels are struggling to get people indoor, but it's getting harder and harder to capitalize these branded properties because the brands are forcing renovations.

Michael Russell 6:10

Yeah. So this Alice conference, I mean, it's one of the biggest hospitality investment conferences in the in the industry. What's the vibe in the room? I mean, is this really a conference that's geared more towards institutional players, or is it worth visiting even if you're just a smaller or an independent operator?

Ziggy Hallgarten 6:27

I think it's it's worth visiting because I mean two things. One, you get just basically every institutional owner or management company out there. So you can at least get FaceTime with a ton of people. I mean, it's back-to-back to back-to-back 30-minute meetings all day. The second reason to go if you're anyone is you don't really have to pay. Most people just congregate and hang out outside the JW there, which is right next to Starbucks. If anyone from Alice is listening, I'm sorry, but I think everyone realizes it. Like you walk outside and you just see hundreds of people in their meetings without badges. So it's a good way, you know, relatively cheap way to go to a conference, get a ton of FaceTime. And then inside the conference, there's there's great events and speakers as well. But I would say, yeah, it's geared more towards institutional investors.

Michael Russell 7:14

Yeah, I mean, it's not cheap, right? I think I was looking at it and it was like, gosh, I thought it was like $3,700. There's different tiers based on how soon you purchase. From your perspective, outside of the networking, you know, what are some of the main things that that one could learn that would really make it worthwhile?

Ziggy Hallgarten 7:32

I think it's entirely networking. I don't think you go to these conferences for anything else unless maybe you're a student trying to learn the language or you're someone trying to break in the industry and just hear what the lingo is. I think the only way to really get value out of these conferences is to know that you're going a month ahead of time, set up as many possible meetings as you can and get those meetings on the books. I mean, I this year went for the first time, not as an investor and as someone pitching and selling my product and talking to our current customers. And, you know, it's very tough to get meetings with people that you haven't pre-scheduled them with. And I would say a pretty strong network. I've been going to this conference for a long time. So it was still valuable to me to not have some meetings and just bump into people and say hello and catch up. But as someone breaking into it, I would say go and message 100 people on LinkedIn and make sure that you're getting 20, 30 meetings over those two days. Otherwise, I don't think it's really worthwhile.

Michael Russell 8:23

Yeah, that's good to know. Speaking of, you know, your kind of way you were trying to get out of it. Let's talk a little bit about what your business is. I I kind of want to put this into context because you've got a history of being involved in hospitality investing. But how does that relate to what you're currently doing now?

Ziggy Hallgarten 8:40

Yeah. So the kind of quick background on myself is went to the Cornell Hotel School. My dad was in the hotel industry, always kind of was around it, ended up going to the hotel school after just visiting a ton of different schools and sitting in on classes and saw a lot of real-world application to the hotel school. You know, you start working in Excel. The first class that you have is building a resume and learning all these Excel shortcuts. And so I saw real applicable nature to these classes versus kind of sitting in an econ class at other schools, and I got really excited about that. Right out of school, I worked in kind of generalist real estate at PGM, not really focused on hotels. It was actually luckily enough during COVID. So if I had gone down some of the hotel internships I was looking at, I probably wouldn't have had a job. Ended up doing generalist debt originations there. And then I actually went and joined my dad's company, Northview, for about a year and a half. And up there I was doing acquisitions and asset management of our portfolio. And that was pretty cool just to kind of be working for a company that I'd been around my whole life. It was actually never really part of the plan, but the Apple just fell into place and we kind of went and I was working there for a bit and then joined a different family office on the hotel investment side. And that's a long-winded say way of saying I was in the commercial real estate investment space, doing kind of Joe stuff, then doing hotels, and started Broom really about a year ago with the goal of bringing AI to commercial real estate. I ended up partnering with two friends, basically went to them early on last year and said, hey, AI is clearly going to change the game. This is what I do all day. This is what my peers do all day. Let's go to the drawing board and just figure out different ways that we can build products that are going to change this industry.

Michael Russell 10:18

Hey guys, people have been hitting me up asking if I have a mastermind or a course. I don't run one right now, but I do know the legit operators in this space. If you're thinking about paid education and you want my honest take on who I'd talk to for your situation, just email me info at hotelinvestorplaybook.com. I read every email and I'm happy to point you in the right direction. Okay, well, let's pause there because I want to get into Broom. I'm excited to talk about it, but you kind of uh interested me. My interest piqued when you brought up your your dad's basically family business. The Northview Hotel Group is no small mom and pop shop. I mean, this is this is a large investment company. I I don't know, there's probably dozens, if not hundreds of people that work in this company. I think you've got the the hotel group has what, 24 hotels? There's probably been, I think the website says $2 billion invested over time. So this isn't like a full stack acquisition, development, asset management, operations, like everything, this business. And it's, you know, it was your dad was the founding principal partner. I'm curious. You know, most people would have just said, all right, let me join this family business, let me go learn from the inside and maybe eventually take on a leadership role. But you didn't. You started your own company. And I I guess I want to understand that pivot. Why did you make that decision?

Ziggy Hallgarten 11:37

Yeah, I think it's it's funny. My dad and I have often said, like, it was literally never spoken about growing up that I would go and work at Northview. It was not even really a thought. And then when I got into the real estate space, I ended up speaking with one of my dad's partners. And he basically was like, Hey, do you ever think that you are going to want to work here? What interests you? Where do you want to be? And I said, Yeah, I would love to work there at some point. Ended up going to work there really kind of out of nowhere, unplanned, as they were getting ready to do a bunch of acquisitions. And then I left there really because I Northview had had really established itself. They had extremely institutional partners. They're a leader in the space. And I honestly wanted to go and do my own thing. And I left Northview actually to go work for a different family office that was also kind of starting to pave its way. And I was I went and joined a family office called Oliver Companies, which was starting its kind of New York GP arm. And I did that kind of, I think, as a first step to be a little more entrepreneurial and to go out and do something and pave my own path. And then it was when I was there that I realized what I really wanted was to go out and start my own company. And I think that was the itch that I had. And AI kind of came along and gave me a good reason to go and do that.

Michael Russell 12:50

Well, let's talk about that itch for entrepreneurship. I know your mom was an entrepreneur. Your dad built this huge hotel empire. I guess I want to know like what was it specifically that you wanted to build that you just couldn't build within that structure. I mean, even before you had the concept for Broom, like why did you want to be an entrepreneur?

Ziggy Hallgarten 13:06

I think, I mean, yeah, the easy answer is both my parents were entrepreneurs. I always kind of had an idea that it was what I wanted to do. But it really came down to me just kind of taking a step back and looking at the people in my life who I respected the most and and kind of who I was the most envious of. And I was lucky enough to at that point, you know, call it November 2024, have a couple friends that had gone out and started their own business, a couple friends that were really happy in their careers. And I just took a step back and said, well, what really drives me? What gets me the most excited in a way? What am I the most envious of? And I really, really just had this desire to go and start my own business, be my own boss, kind of take things into my own hands. When I worked at Pew Gym, which was my first job out of college, very large organization, amazing experience, but it was it was very bureaucratic. And I kind of realized pretty quickly that I didn't think I wanted to work in a large company. And then I went and worked at Northview, which was kind of one step below that. And then the the next company I worked with was also kind of non-institutional. So even another step towards the kind of scrappy entrepreneurialship world. And I loved it. I realized what I really liked was managing people, having conversations. I enjoyed that more than spending time in kind of the nitty-gritty of the model.

Michael Russell 14:19

Yeah, I get that. Well, it's in your DNA. So your mom was an entrepreneur. What did she do? What kind of business did she run?

Ziggy Hallgarten 14:25

So she started a luxury textile business. It's actually called rosemaryhallgarden.com. She actually sold that in the last 18 months after working on it on her own, really for 20 years. She built a business to, I think, 12 or 15 employees somewhere around there. And she is really a leader in in kind of the luxury textile space. So she does rugs, carpets, throws, pillows, outdoor furniture. Yeah, she's she's a beast.

Michael Russell 14:52

Yeah. What was the conversation like with your parents? Were they supportive of you doing your own thing or were they or were they expecting that you just be part of the family business?

Ziggy Hallgarten 15:00

I think they both, when I kind of told them early on, I think it was it was definitely excitement from both of them, you know, a little bit of hesitation, but at no point were they like, you shouldn't do this. I I probably have a tendency to jump into things. And I think they both were like, okay, maybe you don't don't quit your job just yet. You know, don't quit your job after three weeks after starting this idea, maybe wait two, three months. But I've always just kind of jumped into it and and figured it out from there. So I actually basically ended up giving my notice probably three weeks after starting to even think about broom. And so far, so far it's working well.

Michael Russell 15:35

Yeah. Okay. Well, let's talk about this then. So I think there's a huge gap, right? Between I have an idea and I actually have a functioning company with paying customers. And, you know, I personally, I really don't, I mean, I don't have any idea what that gap actually looks like and and how you cross it. And I would really want to dive into this. I want to know what this entrepreneurial journey is like, particularly in the tech industry. So, like, walk us through when how you went from concept to actually building this first version of Brune.

Ziggy Hallgarten 16:05

Yeah. So there was really one unlock for me. I got coffee with a friend from college who was in January of last year, and he introduced me to Figma, which, if you're not familiar, Figma is a design software that you can basically prototype any app. The majority of software that you are looking at today is from massive companies, is probably being prototyped out in Figma. You can basically just draw out like a perfect replica of an app. And this friend of mine told me about Figma, and I it was a huge unlock because I had all these ideas, but I had no way to actually put them onto paper. And I basically just started playing around in Figma and built kind of a mock-up of my idea. And then I took Figma to this other software called Framer, where you can basically take stills that you build in Figma, put them back to back to back, have like a click-through demo basically where you can say, okay, I have this screen. If I clicked here, it would show up as this screen. And I had this idea, but the first idea with Broom was kind of like a diligence automation tool. So take a bunch of files that you have for an acquisition that you're overseeing or a refinance that you're overseeing, go up to this diligence checklist of all the items that someone requests and tell you what you have and what you don't have. And I basically built that more geared towards brokers, but acquisitions team as well, because I saw a broker dealing with this insane process for a deal that we were looking at. And I just thought that this can't be the most efficient way to do this. So I took that mock up, showed it to 20 friends in the industry, and all of them were like, oh, this is so cool. I would use this tomorrow. In hindsight, I learned that everyone's gonna be nice to on the phone and that doesn't mean anything. But for me, that was enough to go to a couple of my friends from Cornell who are engineers and had been building products together and say, Hey, I've we've got I've got real traction here. Is this product something you could actually build? And they basically built out a real working prototype in a weekend and then continued to have calls of people and just said, okay, here's my idea. Would you pay for this? Got a couple of people early using the product. And because AI allows us to just build so quickly these days, I mean, you can you basically have seven coding agents that can help you build stuff. It's easier than ever to build software. We were able to move pretty quickly and get really working prototypes in people's hands and get a very quick feedback loop of is this working? Why is it not working? And kind of move forward from there. But our first idea was completely different than what we're doing now in a way.

Michael Russell 18:31

Yeah. So look, before we dive into the specifics of what Broom does. I mean, what you just said is you so you don't know how to write code, right? You you don't have to know how to write code yourself or necessarily even hire developers or even outsource this. Like there's these kind of out-of-the-box software platforms now that you can just, what is it called? Vibe coding, where you can just talk to it and it'll it'll build you a working template. Is that right? 100%.

Ziggy Hallgarten 18:52

Yeah, you you don't need to be able to write code to build software today. I would say from experience as someone who doesn't know how to code at all, it really helps when you have experts because there are certain things that you need to edit within the code and figure out how to kind of tweak different parts of the product. And I I can't even imagine where I would be without my co-founders who are able to write all this code and decipher this stuff. I don't think I would have been able to build 5% of what Broom is today if I had just been on my own vibe coding. But the opportunity is there. If you're determined enough, you don't need to outsource your development anymore. You can use the lovables, the replets of the world, you can use clawed code and exactly like you said, vibe code away.

Michael Russell 19:37

I see. Okay. Well, so you can get a working template, but ultimately, you know, you rely on the feedback of people in your network and you had that network to reach out to. But ultimately, you got to have a product that is going to solve a problem. What was the problem that you identified it needed to be solved? And how does your software actually solve it?

Ziggy Hallgarten 19:55

Yeah. So the first problem we identified was due diligence sucks and we need to go and automate that. The reason we actually strayed away from that was because we realized that diligence for anyone besides like a very, very institutional broker, I think the best ESTEL brokers, the diligence process for an acquisitions firm is an extremely high-stakes workflow, and they don't want to outsource that workflow to brand new software when they're doing two to three deals a year. So what we realize is we need to find a problem that's more everyday issue, something that is a process that people are going through every day that is painful, that's annoying. We spent really six months in 2025 working with different companies, public REITs, institutional brokers, asset managers, owners, acquisitions firms, lenders, every vertical to really figure out what is the pain point that we can really address. What we have kind of landed on, and we really landed on this, you know, November of December of last year, was the pipeline process and deal management process, specifically for acquisitions teams, is a total mess. And 90% of the industry is still tracking their deal pipeline on Excel. And that just won't be the case in two, three years. And the reason this is problematic is because one, analysts are spending so much time just manually entering information into Excel. And two, that information gets entered into Excel and then it's not really usable. There's no connection between that Excel pipeline to your files. There's no ability to go in and search on that Excel pipeline and say, hey, I know that I looked at seven Hampton Inns this year. What's actually the average expense margin at these properties? How does that compare to this new property that I'm looking at? And there's so much data that these companies are sitting on, but over and over we heard I want to be able to access my data better. I know that I have this gold mine of data that I'm sitting on. How can I go in and actually use that and make important decisions with that? And it was hard to hear that because we heard it over and over again and we didn't, and like then we had to decipher how do we actually build the product around this? At first, we basically just built Chatbot, chat with your files. We did that kind of before Copilot was really good at it. We were outperforming Copilot and Chat GPT, like we were doing benchmarks against them, and we were solving this problem of like being able to go in and find files and conduct analyses on them. But users weren't using the full capability of our product. And the reason that was is because we didn't own a process. There was nothing that they were doing before Broom that directly correlated to a process that Broom made easier. And a big unlock for us was taking a step back and thinking, what's a process that these people have today that needs to change? And that process was tracking pipeline, adding deals to pipeline. And then what we realized is if you add your deals to pipeline in a more automated way and you can have AI that basically sits on top of your pipeline and every file that's associated with it, then you are naturally unlocking that data. And then when you put a chat bot on top of the pipeline and the files, it becomes much more useful. So I know that was a very long-winded way of answering the question, but I think the big unlock for us was figure out a process, like you said, a painful process that exists today and find a way to make that process better instead of introducing a brand new process that doesn't exist, even if it's more efficient.

Michael Russell 23:16

Okay, cool. But I really want you to give me a concrete example. So let's just say I'm looking for a 50-key boutique hotel in, I don't know, Napa Valley. What does Broom do for me that I can't do on my own or with a broker or with some spreadsheets? Like, how is Broom helping me to really refine the data so that I know that I'm moving a deal along in the pipeline or I'm eliminating deals that do not fit my buy box?

Ziggy Hallgarten 23:49

Yeah. So the way Broom works is we target teams that have a crazy amount of deal flow. They're looking at 10 to 30 deals a month and need to be able to get through those more efficiently. And what we do is we connect directly to your files. So if you save down a folder, a new opportunity, and it has 10 files in it, you bring in that folder to Broom. Broom grows through it, it adds all of the information to the pipeline. So it will pull out the broker, the address, the square footage, the keys, any piece of metadata that you want pulled into your pipeline. It will go in and extract that. And then it will go through every single file within that folder and come up with risks, opportunities, questions that you can forward directly off to the broker, a quick analysis of the financial metrics over the last three years, if you want, put into a format that you could copy and paste into your model. And then you have a dashboard for that deal where you directly can access the files. You can see all of the information like address, broker, stuff like that. You track notes directly within that dashboard. And then all of this information, the notes, the files, the pieces of metadata, it's all searchable within our chat. So now that you've looked at this new, let's say, 50 key property in Napa, you just onboarded it to Broom, Broom's agent will go in and say, hey, you have seven other deals in Napa, and RevPar for this one that you're looking at is well below those seven other deals. There's an opportunity to actually spend time on this and maybe push RevPAR. And that can be a huge unlock. It's not something that's not possible today, but that's something that for you to do today would mean you going into seven different folders and probably 20 different files and figuring out, okay, there's a gap here. We should spend time on this. So what we are really focused on is helping the teams that have so much deal flow sift through those deals and really quickly be able to say, okay, I should spend time on this. What we believe is that teams don't want AI to completely do their job for them. They don't want AI to fill out their model and underwrite the deal for them. They need AI that's going to consolidate all of the information that they have into a digestible format so that humans can actually make these decisions. And that's what we do.

Michael Russell 25:56

I think that this is applicable to really anyone. From a pricing perspective, though, are you really gearing this towards more like high-ticket like customers, like institutional grade people? Or, you know, I've heard people refer to the Wall Street crowd and the main street crowd. Like, who is this product for?

Ziggy Hallgarten 26:14

It's really for both. I mean, we today are targeting, I would say, right in the middle, the middle market teams. Our first couple of customers were basically startup funds that started a year ago and are trying to look at everything that they possibly can so they can report to their potential LPs that they are looking at every opportunity. So our pricing depends kind of on the size of the company, but we charge typically per seat per month. Right now we're working with, like I said, two-man shop, and we have, you know, 50, 100,000-person companies that are in our pipeline as well that we're also selling to. Our product's completely customizable. So every agent that goes in and screens these deals, your entire pipeline, it's customized to how you need. I believe that the smaller companies really, really need this because they're the ones who need to get through more deals. And I think the bigger the company is, it becomes a little less about the screening and more about the internal system of record. And so we kind of offer value in both ways.

Michael Russell 27:11

How much time do you think that Broom actually saves someone? I mean, can you quantify that? Like, is this 10% faster, 50% faster? What are we talking about here?

Ziggy Hallgarten 27:18

Yeah. So we're we're in the process of doing a case study with one of our first customers. And they basically told us that before Broom, it took them two hours to get through like a proper screen of a deal. And now it's it's taking about 30 minutes. And that's really just the consolidation of information, putting all the files into a digestible format, converting gross PDFs to Excel so they can copy and paste it into their model, and then having everything in one place so you can go easily search comps. I firmly believe that in the next six to 12 months, we will make it so a two-hour process becomes five minutes. Okay.

Michael Russell 27:55

All right, cool. So we've got an idea of what Broom does. And I I want to pivot back to really more of the reality of building a startup and kind of what that means for you. And you know, I want to talk about how did you actually fund this thing in the beginning? Did you bootstrap this? Like, did you use your own savings? Did you raise seed capital from investors, take out loans? Like, how does this whole thing actually work?

Ziggy Hallgarten 28:15

So we actually haven't raised a dollar to date. We haven't paid ourselves a dollar either over the last eight months. We basically, I went into it and said, I need I have two years of runway from my savings, and I have to be okay with not making a dollar for two years. We are now going out to fundraise, actually, kind of as we speak, and we are looking to raise from industry angels. We're having conversations with VCs, but now that we have kind of our product in the market and it's really working, it's it's more we need to go execute and and build this as fast as we possibly can. But the reality is, yeah, we haven't we haven't made money. Basically, all money that has come in from our customers has come right out. I would say we're basically break-even as a company without paying ourselves. And now we need to make a little money to pay ourselves.

Michael Russell 29:02

Yeah. So what does your team look like right now? Like, are you just scrappy? You've got a couple of people, like, or do you have a team scaled up? Who's working for your company?

Ziggy Hallgarten 29:09

It's myself and my two co-founders. That's it, just the three of us. Part of the reason we're looking to raise money is we have have plans to expand and want to hire some headcount at the end of this year in kind of go to market, go and just get more of the commercial real estate industry. It's a massive industry and we want to own it. Part of our pitch to teams is that you might not need to hire that extra analyst because we can be screening these deals for you. We can be doing a lot of the administrative work, and we're seeing that trend play across every industry. So the last thing that we want to do is overraise, overhire, and be in a position that we don't feel like we're ready for.

Michael Russell 29:47

Yeah. What are you struggling with?

Ziggy Hallgarten 29:49

What's the hardest part right now of running a startup? The hardest part, especially, and I keep harping on this, but especially in the AI world where it's so, in a way, easy to build different features and different tools. Anyone can build everything. We have so many different things on our roadmap that we want to build out. And it's really hard to figure out what to spend the most time on. I think one of the struggles that we had early on was we were trying to do everything for everyone. Like I told you, we were working with companies across different verticals in commercial real estate, and that meant getting pulled in a bunch of different directions. And trying to please everyone means that you end up pleasing nobody. And I think we learned pretty quickly, and and one of my co-founders really harped on this was we need to solve one problem for one ICP ideal customer profile and be really important for them. And then we can expand for their IC, why combinator, one of the best accelerator programs out there, they say make something people want and start as small as you can, build things that don't scale. I think it's really hard at first to do that because you want to please everyone and you want to have all of these options. But the only way that you can really learn is if you go after one really specific niche. And so right now we are really, really focused on acquisitions teams, lenders, really people with in inbound deal flow. The opportunities are endless. I mean, I go back and forth every six hours. I'm like, wait, we should build this feature, wait, we should build that feature. There's so much cool stuff that we can do. I think that's really the hardest thing.

Michael Russell 31:20

Yeah, it creates a lot of noise. You know, if you're just there's all these different shiny balls you want to go chase, and it's like it's difficult sometimes to focus on one thing. I guess well, let me actually ask you this. Are you right now is this product only for specifically focused on hotel investors, or any type of real estate investor could use this product?

Ziggy Hallgarten 31:39

Any real estate investor. Right now, we have customers in self-storage, retail, multi, hotel. Like I said, the it's extremely customizable. We basically just take your existing process and move our product to be like exactly like your current pipeline. So if you have these 15 fields in your pipeline, if you're an industrial team and you need clear height pulled out of every deal, we go ahead and add that in in a way just like you would Excel.

Michael Russell 32:05

Dude, this is really exciting, man. Like the idea of building something here, especially in this day and age with AI being so helpful in many regards. Now, the flip side of that coin though, are you worried that, I don't know, Claude or Google or ChatGPT or whatever, OpenAI, one of these tech companies is just gonna build what you're building and make room obsolete?

Ziggy Hallgarten 32:25

I think, I mean, the short answer is 100%. I think everyone who's building software right now has in the back of their mind that these massive research labs with the smartest people in the world are building out everything. I mean, I listened to a podcast with the Harvey CEO, who's like a big vertical AI company that's dominating the legal space. And he was like, Yeah, we're in a way, we're competing against the labs. We don't think of ourselves as competing against the labs because we are not trying to build a product that they could build. That's why we're trying to be so integrated with a company's internal processes and data and kind of build that internal context. And like I said, instead of going after the task completion that is being progressed by these LLMs, like example, we were talking about building an Excel agent in June, and we started playing around with an agent that could spread financials into your model and do all that through natural language prompting. We intelligently at that point said, let's not do this. The labs are gonna build this out. And if we had spent the last six months doing that, we'd now be kicking ourselves because we would be competing directly with Claude, which just launched a fantastic Excel agent. So we're constantly thinking about what the future of software looks like. I think enterprise software is gonna exist for a long time. I feel very strongly about that. I think for the really small teams, the scrappy guys are gonna go out and build a lot of features and tools themselves. But I do believe that the future of software is about really hyper-efficient UI and kind of proprietary data. And that's that's what our products really focused on.

Michael Russell 33:56

Yeah, that makes sense. As an entrepreneur, it's like feel it must feel like the products are just evolving so quickly all the time. Let me ask you this, though, like in simple terms, if you were to define this to let's say an investor, what is your competitive moat?

Ziggy Hallgarten 34:13

Our competitive moat is that we are able to get context from everything that a team is doing. So they add in their files, they add in their notes, they add in the tasks that they need to do, they add in their models so that we can see how they underwrite. And this is allowing these teams to have instant access to all this information and be able to query files, notes, pieces of information. And over time, the more information that you add in there, then the stronger this database becomes. And if over three years you add in every deal that you've underwritten, then it becomes really valuable to be able to go back and say, hey, what are the seven deals that I looked at that are the most similar to this? Or I know I looked at this deal on the market a year and a half ago. What was wrong with it? Tell me why I passed. And if you're keeping notes there, if you're forwarding important emails to our platform and that context lives there, it becomes really hard to let that go. And it becomes more and more valuable the more context that you put in there. And that's that's really how we think about it.

Michael Russell 35:14

Okay. I want to zoom out and talk about just AI in general. You know, you're in this space, you're constantly absorbing information. Well, I mean, where do you think AI is gonna have the biggest impact in, well, let's use hotel investing because that's our niche. So, where do you think AI is gonna have the biggest impact from I don't know, operations, revenue management, marketing, guest experience? Like where's the low-hanging fruit right now that someone can use AI and where are we headed in the future?

Ziggy Hallgarten 35:39

I think operations, I mean, both operations and revenue management are the two that really stick out to me. I think operations, if you can reduce your labor costs, I mean, labor over the last four years in this kind of stalled market has been a huge issue. We've seen labor expenses jump up 10% in some markets. If you the the way that robotics is developing, if if you can have kind of robotics that can do some of these housekeeping tasks that are taking up a huge amount of payroll, that makes the operation significantly leaner. And then revenue management and revenue management is all about just kind of data aggregation and coming up with trends and data optimization. And that's what AI is perfect at today. So I think there's gonna be some really cool revenue management softwares that come out over the next couple of years that are gonna be game changing. But yeah, I mean, step one, and I don't think we're fully there yet, I've seen some cool like housekeeping vacuums and guest checkout stuff. But I think robotics in the operation of hotels is gonna be, especially like back of house. I think you go and stay at a nice hotel, you don't want to see a robot around, at least not for the next couple of years. But the stuff the guests aren't seeing, there's a lot of labor that goes into these hotels.

Michael Russell 36:52

Yeah, so true. I mean, robotics is separate than AI in my mind. I don't know, I mean, if that's an accurate description, but yeah, who knows? There's gonna be like robots that go in and lift beds up and clean underneath the bed and fold all the sheets and do all that. I mean, that's not that's not unbelievable. You I mean, you'll see that in beyond just hotels, you'll see it in things that industries you you never thought will people would be replaced, but like robots that can repair roofs, you know, they could take the shingles off a roof and re-completely replace it. So, from a CapEx perspective, maybe that's gonna impact hotel investing to a degree. The the part about revenue management, golly, that really hit me hard because so I used, I think I used Chat GPT. I mean, I'm using them all, but I think for this exercise, I used ChatGPT towards the beginning of the year. We're now in February, but I wanted to kind of just get some direction on what this year would look like for me. And so I used a series of prompts to create a ChatGPT business coach. And I wanted to understand, like based on my portfolio and my objectives and my where I'm at in life personally, like where I needed to really focus on and where I was vulnerable, where where my my blind spots were. And it quickly highlighted revenue management. Like that's where right now I need to put it, that's where it suggested I put most of my attention. And I was like, dang, you're right. I'm exposed. I've been using dynamic pricing, but I don't know how it works. I just kind of assume, like, oh yeah, set it and forget it, and yeah, hopefully it works. But who knows if price labs is working? We use another one called price point for our hostels. And this is an area where I think most people are intimidated. Revenue management seems like so data and science and difficult that we just kind of like, uh, we'll take a quick gander at what the competition's doing. And then, you know, kind of set a gut-feeling price. But if you're an independent operator like myself, I think this is where AI is is really going to be valuable. So you hit the nail on the head. In my opinion, are you tempted at all? Like from your perspective, where you're like, is that one of those shiny balls? You're like, golly, we could really build a product out there.

Ziggy Hallgarten 38:56

That was early on. I didn't spend real time on it. My I wouldn't say my expertise is in that as much. Like I would have to do a lot of learning as to the systems they use today. Like revenue management is is complicated in hotels today. Like they have complex models that take in a ton of data, but it is a perfect scenario for AI because if you can build AI that goes and scrapes every single hotel rate for February 19th at all these competitive properties, and you can notice a trend or a gap, and you can pair that with, well, I know that my hotel has bigger opening this night so that we can adjust our rate accordingly. And there's these three events in town. It's like AI is so good at consolidating an insane amount of information. And that's what revenue optimization is. It's going in and taking the events, it's going in and taking your internal booking, it's going in and taking the information that you have on your competitors and coming up with an optimized price. And I bet there are some cool softwares out there. I don't think we were using any. Like I don't think my management company at MLS firm was. And I don't know if they exist yet, but I think it's a huge opportunity. Someone's going to make a lot of money doing that.

Michael Russell 40:07

As an entrepreneur, as a founder of a business, any advice for someone who maybe is working within a larger organization or institution, maybe they feel like a cog on a wheel, but if they wanted to branch out on their own, any any, you know, reflecting now on your own journey, any words of wisdom or things that you would recommend for someone that is thinking about branching off?

Ziggy Hallgarten 40:26

Yeah, I'd say I still feel so early in the journey to even have wisdom. But the the biggest thing I think is you know deep down if it's something that you want to do. And if you have that itch even in the slightest, like the worst thing that will happen is you will learn a crazy amount and be in a better position a year later, two years later, three months later, whatever it is, to go into your next endeavor. So I would say go all in. I think the only way that you can kind of fail in this is if you're one foot in, one foot out. It's really hard to know if you failed because you just weren't giving it enough time if you're not fully bought in. And I kind of had that idea from the start. And I was just like, if I'm gonna do this, I need to quit my job right away and go all in. So I would say just do it. Yeah, so good.

Michael Russell 41:10

Any book or podcast that you would recommend that's influenced how you think about business or entrepreneurship?

Ziggy Hallgarten 41:16

I love the 20 VC podcast with Harry Stebbins. It has a cool story. He basically started this podcast when he was 17, 18, or 19, some crazy young age. And he just started getting really cool guests in the tech space on. And he had such great access to these founders and VCs that he ended up starting a whole fund out of it. And the reason I love him is one, when I got into the tech space, I knew nothing about the lingo. I knew nothing about venture. And I just listened to him, and it really helps to learn how these people talk. And two, he's an incredible interviewer. He'll have Satya Nadell on and he'll ask a probing question about why they didn't hit their earnings. And he doesn't just kind of sit back, he asks really hard questions to some of the smartest people in the world, and it's just fun to listen to.

Michael Russell 41:59

Oh, dude, I love that. Yeah. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna download transcripts from his podcast episode and put it into AI and say, how do I become a better interviewer? I'm I'm gonna do the same. That's great stuff. Cool, man. Well, you listen, I I really enjoyed this conversation. Last question How can our listeners uh stay in touch with you? Or or actually, where should they go if they want to learn more about Broom or connect with you directly?

Ziggy Hallgarten 42:23

Yeah, you can find out about us on broom.ai. So B-R-O-O-M-E.ai. There's a link to my Calendly right there. We can book time and just chat. We help teams through AI planning, strategy. You know, we still kind of serve as AI consultants for a lot of teams. So happy to always just chat through your process. I'm also on LinkedIn, Ziggy Hallgarten started posting about three, four months ago and have loved it. So love, love to chat with people through there as well.

Michael Russell 42:50

I appreciate having you on, man. And I love watching your journey. So I'll continue to follow you on LinkedIn and hopefully maybe see you at one of these conferences coming up. But Ziggy, thanks for being on. And for our listeners, appreciate you guys. This has been another episode of the Hotel Investor Playbook. We'll catch you again next week. Aloha.