The Plum Guide

The Plum Guide is building a marketplace of the world’s best holiday homes. We are the Michelin Guide of the sharing economy. Our ambition is to revolutionise the travel market at large.

Founded 2015
51-200 employees
  • Hotels, Restaurants, Leisure, Travel, & Hospitality
  • Headquarters address
    2nd Floor, Telephone House, 69-77 Paul St, Shoreditch, London EC2A 4NW
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    About Us

    The Plum Guide is building an online marketplace of the world’s best holiday homes. You can think of us as the Michelin Guide of the sharing economy.

    We are taking a systematic and obsessive approach to testing every single home on the planet, and accepting only the top 1%. We do so by putting every home through The Plum Test: a gruelling hospitality exam, which uses a mix of algorithms and physical visits by hospitality experts.

    Customers love it because we remove the hit and miss nature of Airbnb, HomeAway, and the like. Hosts love it because we recognise their craftsmanship with a badge that drives incremental bookings. Our ambition is to revolutionise the travel market and sharing economy at large.

    Our Journey

    The co-founders started the business in late 2015. We build our platform from scratch in 3 months and launched in February 2016. Fast forward to now, we went from 4 co-founders to a team of 25 and with average sales growth of
    30% month on month, breaking the £3m mark on bookings. Beyond that we are looking to grow to £800m GBV in the
    next 4 years. This involves Plum having homes in multiple mega cities.

    Our seed funding closed October 2016 from an all-star cast including Local Globe (TransferWise, Songkick, and Citymapper), Alex Chesterman (Founder of Zoopla), William Reeve (Founder of Love Film), Alex Saint and Troy Collins (Founders of Secret Escapes), Jason Goodman (Founder of Albion).

    We closed our Series A round of funding (£5.7m) in November 2017 with Octopus Ventures and BGF Ventures, and now are setting our sights on taking Plum global. The first city we are opening is Paris.

    Technology

    In our view, most digital products work well or look good. It seems like never both and it’s our ambition to change that. We are building a business that brings world-leading technical excellence alongside incredible visual creatives and brand builders to be globally successful.

    The nature of our business throws up really interesting technical challenges on a daily basis. As we grow and scale our platform around the world, those challenges become even more complex and interesting.

    We need people who are excited by this prospect. We need people who get a kick out of solving hard problems across the stack from cloud, database, middleware, server, client to browser.

    We are looking for all-round outstanding characters.

    Interview Process

    1. Short phone screen (30 mins)
    2. Technical Interview (90 min) Includes code review and problem-solving.
    3. Cross Functional Interview (90 min) Includes meeting with the wider tech team, Founders

    This is our typical interview process, but is subject to change where necessary.

    Tech stack

    C#, .NET, MVC, Core 2.0, Web API, EF, Cloud infrastructure, AWS, Azure, SQL, NoSql, Redis, Elastic, JavaScript, React, Grunt, Webpack, Bitbucket, Git, Jira, Slack
    The Plum Guide - Company Photo
    The Plum Guide - Company Photo