Andre is awesome, and today I just want to give him a public shout out on my personal blog. I met Andre Martin (Tweet him @AndreMartin) back during the budding days of the Hong Kong startup community formation. We both were hanging out at BootHK coworking in Wanchai.
We got to know each other more over time, have tried to work on web projects together but not had the chance yet. He does a lot with Amazon AWS backend and did some modifications to my Amazon S3 account for podcast uploading (still have to get that in my workflow to be honest, but thanks man!) He also edited my latest book, and 3rd one – China Startup. He is a very detail oriented dude and tore my work apart and even made a character map to help readers!
Andre has a passion to build communities, to help connect people, especially newcomers to Hong Kong. Now he has listed the “Privately Public” space on Airbnb and you can check it out on Airbnb. The guests have all had an amazing experience, as I can only imagine Andre being the best Airbnb host on the planet. I have stayed at some places around the world on Airbnb, and while they are nice – Andre goes well out of his way to host the visitors.
He has had a lot of ups and downs in business and personal development – as we all have – but I see him getting onto something now. I hope even if one person here rents his Airbnb I will have done him a great help. But besides that, I hope to motivate Andre to keep on pushing to go for his dreams and not settle.
Andre hasn’t been settling, that is for sure – and his persistence is starting to come together. So if you want to help boost him up a bit, and are visiting Hong Kong anyway- check out his place. I have also done live and offline video recordings there, meetups, as well as a bachelor party! This dude is the “make it happen guy”!
A piece here for Andre – dude, keep it up. I hope this inspires you and motivates you to work harder and keep on pursuing your dreams. What is the long term goal? To expand to more office space and have more people to host? Like a bed, breakfast, and recreation center? If you tell me your goals, I can try to help you in my own online channels like my podcast and youtube videos. If anything, I am going to check in more often on your Airbnb listing and see that it is getting more and more bookings – to motivate you even more.
Maybe another side hustle for you Andre is to be a “local” (tour guide) on www.samthelocal.com. They’re a cool startup in Hong Kong and I think you’d be a great guide on the platform. Could even use that to cross promote you space, as well as promote your airbnb guests to use the local tour guide service.
I wish everyone can go for their dreams, and I hope Andre is on the right track to achieving his goals. I would be so happy to see him running an empire of “bed and breakfast” + recreation centers in Hong Kong. Letting both locals and visitors have a place to call home, and do their business and meetups.