What I like about Zeus Living and how would I improve it.
What is it?
Zeus offers fully-furnished housing units on a monthly basis. Its mission is to build a new light-living experience for residents and homeowners.
Zeus offers fully-furnished housings that come with house manual, 24/7 customer service, and amenities. They currently operate in four cities — San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Seattle.
Why do I love it?
- It serves the niche market perfectly.
I want to share my frustration with finding temporary housing when I was relocating to a different city.
I have recently relocated to the SF Bay Area. I needed to look for temporary housing for about a month or two before committing to a one-year contract.
I first looked into Airbnb for a 30-day stay, but the price was ridiculously expensive. A friend of mine recommended me Zeus and I started looking at different housings in Zeus. All the housings could be rented for a minimum 30+ days stay and they were all in excellent conditions. All the units are curated by expert interior designers.
It has been one month and a half since I started living in one of the Zeus units and I love it so far. The house is exactly the same as the pictures on the website. All the amenities were new and the room was very clean. And the pricing is reasonable for a fully-furnished unit in the SF Bay Area.
Zeus has a great product-market fit and I am very satisfied as a customer. I will use Zeus when I am finding a temporary place next time and will definitely recommend it to others.
2. Guaranteed Quality
Since all the units are controlled by Zeus, there is a house manual you can refer to for all the information related to housing (trash day, passcode, wifi password…etc.). You do not have this experience in Airbnb as each owner provides different services on their own. At Zeus, everywhere you go, you can expect to have similar quality of services such as 24/7 customer support, stable WiFi, and curated furniture.
How would I improve Zeus?
- House manuals are not up-to-date.
Some of the information on the house manual was not up-to-date such as the day of trash day. I heard from a neighbor that the trash day changed recently. This type of information could change pretty frequently and would be nice if the manual is updated accordingly. Since there are many units and the number of units are expanding rapidly, it would be extremely difficult and expensive for Zeus to keep all the house manuals up-to-date.
Asking users to provide feedback on any change in the house manual would be a solution to this problem. After all, current residents at Zeus can provide the most accurate and up-to-date information about the house. Having a reward system such as granting Zeus credit that could be used later could motivate users to provide feedback more frequently. Zeus credit will also help build a lasting relationship by enabling more returning users to the platform.
2. E-commerce platform to purchase curated furniture/ amenities for current/former residents of Zeus
While staying at Zeus, I really liked the amenities and curated furniture. They were beautiful and I was curious where I could purchase these items. I wanted to get more information about these items.
I believe there is a market opportunity there. Providing e-commerce platform for current/former residents of Zeus where users could purchase furniture/ amenities could be appealing to a certain segment of users.
From the supply side of furniture and amenity company, this could be used as a means of marketing method. As more users will be interested in a certain furniture/ amenity and the potential increase in sales through the e-commerce platform, Zeus might be able to purchase furniture/ amenities at a very low price.
To test if there is an actual user need of this feature, I will first send out emails to a subset of former/current Zeus residents with the list of amenities and furniture provided in their Zeus home. Looking at the open rate or response rate of these emails could be a metric to determine how interested users are going to be in purchasing furniture/ amenity at Zeus. If there are a lot of users who would be interested in potentially purchasing these products from Zeus, there is a hidden market opportunity.
Summary
Overall, I had a very pleasant experience with Zeus. There is a great product-market fit as it serves a niche market of people wanting a temporary place. I hope they would continue to expand their userbase through various means. Having a B2B contract with companies where the long-term business trip is common could be a stable source of revenue for Zeus as well. Now Zeus only seems to serve individual customers.
I can see many different ways Zeus could scale its product and company. I had a very pleasant experience with Zeus and will definitely use Zeus again when the needs for temporary housing arise next time.