If you have ever wondered why direct bookings feel so hard to crack, Matt Sharp has the answer and it starts with a lesson from the newspaper industry. Matt and Austin sit down with Matt Sharp, co-founder of Bookings Cloud, a performance marketing platform built specifically for short-term rental and vacation rental managers who are tired of paying Airbnb and VRBO to rent access to their own guests.

Matt spent nearly 20 years as a senior executive at Advance, one of the largest media companies in the country, overseeing the Alabama Media Group and Michigan markets while also co-founding automotive tech businesses Zero Sum and Cloud Theory. He watched first-hand what happens when a platform like Google or Facebook gets between a business and its customers and strips away the direct relationship. He saw the same pattern forming in the STR ind ...