The Trip That Started It All
It started with a house in Costa Rica.
We had the chance to film a stunning property there, in exchange for a stay — no fee, just a trade. We packed our gear, shot it the way we'd want a place like that to be seen, and left with something the owner was genuinely excited about. But what stuck with us wasn't just the finished video. It was the trade itself. Content for hospitality. Somewhere during that stay, one of us said something like, "could this actually be a business?" Neither of us had an answer yet. We just knew we wanted to find out.
So we tested it — for real, at scale. For the next year, we took it on the road: Portugal, Turkey, Kenya, South Africa, Namibia, Egypt, Italy, Spain. Eight countries, no fixed home base, and by the end of it, more than 61 properties. We got fast at this — reading a space, finding what made it feel like somewhere you'd want to be, cutting something that actually made a stranger stop scrolling and think about booking. Hotels and Airbnb hosts brought us in for one reason: help us get more bookings. And by every conversation we had, it felt like we were doing exactly that.
Here's the problem. "Felt like" was the best we could offer.
Property after property would tell us, anecdotally, "we saw more inquiries after your post went live." We believed them — we believed in the work. But belief isn't data. We had no way to trace an actual booking back to an actual piece of content. We couldn't say which video drove revenue and which one just got likes, or what to change next time to do better. We were making genuinely good content and flying blind on whether — and how — it was working.
That gap started to bother us more than it should have. We're not just content people. We wanted to know, not just feel, whether something was working. Anecdotes don't scale a business — not ours, and not our clients'.
So we started building something to close that gap: a system to actually capture the demand our content was creating and carry it forward, all the way to a booking, instead of losing it somewhere between a saved post and a confirmed reservation. That system is what eventually became the Direct Booking Engine — the core of what Stay Frame Studios does today. At its heart, it's still the same question we asked ourselves in Costa Rica: is this actually working, and how do we know?
We're Jared and Lauren, and that's the short version of how Stay Frame Studios started — with a house we didn't own, a year we couldn't have planned better if we'd tried, and a problem we got tired of not being able to answer.
This blog is where we'll keep working that question out loud — what we're building, what we're testing, what we're learning about the space between a great piece of content and a guest who actually shows up. If you run a property, or you're just curious how any of this works, we're glad you're here. We've got more to tell you.