StayHere is usually told as a COVID story. That’s half true. The other half starts with a teenager in Tiflet building websites at night, and with a feeling of shame on a beach in Southeast Asia.
The suitcase years
From 2015 to 2019 I lived out of a suitcase — Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore — running an online business that asked an hour or two of my day: refresh the dashboards, read the numbers, make a decision, go find a fresh coconut. When people asked where I was from, I said Morocco, and too often I could tell it was the first time anyone had told them about it. So I told them: the history, the food, the way we receive people. Come and see.
Then, around 2016, it caught up with me. They were coming — and we had nowhere for them to stay the way I stayed in Asia. A real bed, a real desk, space to work and to have friends over. Airbnb had barely arrived in Morocco. I was ashamed of that. And I don’t like being ashamed of something I can fix, so I decided the fix had to start with me.
In 2017 I bought my first apartment in Rabat, furnished it properly, priced it fairly, and put it on the market as a short-term rental. One became two, two became three. By the time COVID reached Morocco, I was managing seven.
The DM
I married in June 2019 and took my wife on a long honeymoon across Asia. We landed back in Morocco in early February 2020. Forty days later, the borders closed.
Hotels shut down. Nobody wanted to touch hospitality — which is exactly why I did. I like to zig when everyone zags. I started messaging the other short-term rental operators in Rabat, offering to take over their portfolios. One of those messages was an Instagram DM to Mohamed Benzakour.
I went to that meeting to buy his units. Instead I found someone who wasn’t scared either, who saw the same opening I did, and who wanted to scale through the crisis, not wait it out. The acquisition pitch became a partnership. A few weeks later, StayHere existed: three suites of about 40 square metres each in Agdal — small by today’s standard, thirty thousand dollars each from our own pockets, no hotel, no debt, no outside capital.
Guests from the next block
Our first guests were not tourists. They were our neighbours — people from Rabat, sometimes from the next block, worn down by months inside the same walls. The hotels were closed anyway. They came for two or three days for the design, the colours, the terrace; mostly they came to breathe. The other early guests were travellers stranded in Morocco who refused to wait out a pandemic in twenty square metres of hotel room.
Nobody plans a launch like that. But it taught us on day one who this product is really for: anyone who needs a place that behaves like a home and answers like a hotel.
Mina
Our first hire was Mina, our housekeeper. Six years later, she still works with us.
On the days when checkouts piled up and the clock was against her, Benzakour and I cleaned rooms at her side. That habit never really left the company: at StayHere everyone wears different hats, founders first. I know of no faster way to build a culture than to be seen doing the unglamorous work yourself.
Three suites became thirty within a year. Five years later, thirty had become three hundred, across Rabat, Casablanca and Agadir.
What it was actually about
I’ve since learned to say the whole thing in one line, and a journalist printed it this summer: hospitality is not a building — it’s a feeling. The feeling of being expected.
The first people who ever felt it at StayHere lived next door. I try not to forget that.