We Didn’t Set Out to Build Another Product. We Set Out to Fix a Feeling.

There’s a moment that keeps replaying in my head.

It’s early evening. The office is quieting down. A sales manager is finally packing up for the day when an RFP lands in the inbox. A good one. High value. Tight timeline.

They know the math.

Respond late, and the deal is probably gone. Respond now, and the evening disappears.

That tradeoff felt wrong. And the longer we spent around hotel sales teams, the more we realized it wasn’t an isolated moment. It was the job.

This is the story of how HippoRev came to be. Not as a product roadmap. But as a response to something that felt fundamentally broken.

The Pattern We Couldn’t Ignore

For years, we worked closely with sales teams across industries. We watched what helped them connect better. We built tools that made communication clearer, more personal, more human.

And yet, in conversation after conversation, the same frustration kept surfacing.

“I love selling. I hate everything around it.”

Hotel group sales teams were not short on effort, skill, or intent. They were drowning in process.

Inquiries arriving from everywhere. Details missing. Endless back and forth. Proposals that took hours to assemble. Follow ups that depended on memory, not signals.

The most striking part was this. None of it felt like real sales work.

It felt like people compensating for systems that were never designed for how hospitality actually works.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, a set of questions started to surface.

Why does every RFP, no matter how similar, have to be rebuilt from scratch?

Why does a sales manager need to manually call or email planners just to collect information that should have been obvious, structured, or already known?

Why does so much of a salesperson’s time go into chasing missing details instead of advancing real conversations?

None of these questions were about real effort or commitment. 

The Wrong Fixes

At first, we tried to solve pieces of the problem.

Better visibility here. Faster creation there. Smarter reminders. More dashboards.

But every improvement felt like adding a layer on top of a shaky foundation.

Teams were already overloaded. Giving them another tool just gave them another place to check.

We realized something uncomfortable. We were optimizing the wrong thing.

The real issue was not insight. It was execution.

Hotels did not need to know what to do next. They needed the work to actually get done.

Asking the Hard Question

Late in the process, we asked ourselves a question that changed everything.

What if software did not just assist sales teams, but actually took responsibility for the work that slows them down?

Not suggesting. Not nudging. Not reminding.

Executing.

Capturing every inquiry. Qualifying intent early. Completing missing details. Building proposals. Tracking engagement. Triggering follow ups at the right moment.

And crucially, doing it in a way that still kept humans in control.

That question became the spine of HippoRev.

Why Hotels, Specifically

We chose to start with hotel group sales for a simple reason. The pain was visible, measurable, and urgent.

Group business is complex by nature. Multiple stakeholders. Detailed requirements. Tight timelines. High expectations.

And yet, most systems treated it like generic B2B sales.

They tried to solve individual problems—room blocks, event space constraints, planner preferences—in isolation. But group sales isn’t a series of disconnected tasks. It’s a tightly woven workflow where delay at any step breaks the whole. 

Speed mattered more than most teams realized. Not speed for its own sake, but speed as a proxy for care, competence, and confidence.

When planners wait days for a response, they do not assume the hotel is busy. They assume it is disorganized.

Building Agents, Not Tools

Once we committed to the idea of execution-first software, everything changed.

We stopped asking what features to add.

We started asking what work should never require a human in the first place.

That led us to agents. Not chatbots. Not workflows. Purpose-built agents designed to own specific parts of the revenue process.

An agent that never misses an inquiry, no matter where it comes from.

An agent that sees what information is missing and goes and gets it.

An agent that understands pricing context and surfaces real options, not guesses.

An agent that watches how planners engage and knows when it is time to act.

Individually, each solves a familiar problem. Together, they remove entire categories of work from a salesperson’s day.

The Moments That Told Us We Were Close

There were many false starts along the way.

Agents that worked in isolation but failed together. Automations that were fast but brittle. Early demos that maybe impressed technically but didn’t change how teams felt emotionally.

The breakthrough moments were not technical. They were human.

A sales manager telling us they stopped checking six systems every morning.

A director realizing no RFP had slipped through in weeks.

Someone saying they reviewed a proposal after dinner instead of building it during dinner.

Those were the signals we cared about.

What Launching Actually Means to Us

Launching HippoRev is not about declaring victory. It is about opening the door.

It’s about moving from what needs to get done—capturing inquiries, qualifying leads, chasing details, building proposals, tracking engagement, triggering follow-ups—to when those things actually get done, automatically, instantly, and without slipping through the cracks.

We know this is a beginning. There is more to refine, more to learn, more to build.

But we believe deeply in the direction.

Software should remove drudgery, not add to it.

AI should execute work, not create more decisions.

Sales teams should spend their time building relationships, not fighting systems.

What Comes Next

We are starting with hotel group sales because the need is clear and the impact is immediate.

But the idea behind HippoRev goes beyond hospitality.

Everywhere we look, talented people are trapped doing work that software should have handled years ago.

Our goal is to change that, one workflow at a time, without losing the human side of selling.

If you are a hotel sales leader reading this, thank you for trusting us early. Your feedback shaped this more than you know.

If you are just discovering HippoRev, welcome. We are building this in the open, and we plan to keep listening.

This is not about replacing people.

It is about giving them their craft back.

And this is only the first step.

‍

You can book time with us here:

👉 Book a one-on-one walkthrough.