There is a guest we all have in mind when we start building a place.
You know the one.
Good taste. Good shoes. Understands the references. Orders without asking too many strange questions. Comes for the right reasons. Notices the chair. Gets the playlist. This guest also drops the unfamous “this place was missing here” with exactly the right amount of emotion. Takes one beautiful photo, not seventeen, and somehow makes the place look even better than the photographer did.
A dream.
Very useful for Insta.
Sometimes slightly less useful in the bank account.
This letter is a lot about mistakes, and this one was one of them :D.
Building with a very clear image of the kind of person I wanted inside the place. Someone who looked like the world I was trying to create. Someone who would make the place feel right from the outside.
But over time, you learn something a bit not cool.
The guest who looks good inside your concept is not always the guest who sustains the business.
Sometimes the person who pays the bills is more practical, more regular, less romantic, less cool on Instagram, and much more important than the person you imagined when you were designing the place at midnight with too much coffee and too much confidence.
That doesn’t mean you should stop having taste.
Please don’t.
The world has enough places built by Excel with a plant in the corner.
But it does mean founders need to separate desire from demand. The dream guest can inspire the place, but the real guest has to make it work. And the real guest comes with habits, budgets, convenience issues, children, weather, parking, time pressure, and sometimes absolutely no interest in your deeper concept about slow living through objects.
Very rude.
But very useful ahah
So this week, I want to talk about the gap between the guest we want, the guest we attract, and the guest who actually keeps the place alive.
Because building a place is not only about knowing who you want in the room.
It’s also about being honest about who returns, who spends, who talks, who books, who brings others, and who gives the place its real rhythm.
Your dream guest might make the place look good.
But your real guest is the one who tells you if the place works.
Lets go deeper below:
