We were lucky to catch up with Tyson Schrader recently and have shared our conversation below.

Tyson, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

My partner, Gonja Demirkazan, and I were at a cross-roads in our careers, our location, and our lives. The pandemic was a perfect storm of challenge and opportunity for us. We knew we needed a change, and we used the extra time at home to research our next phase. The two years of the pandemic were fraught with big moves between states, employers, and lifestyles. We finally settled on our dream home – Conesus Lake.

Conesus Lake House is the tree that spring from a seed planted on our many road trips through Eastern and Southern United States. We learned what made us happy on these trips – what made us feel safe and at home in any context. We grew tired of the hotel experience, bored of parking woes, numb to mediocre dining. We liked the proximity of the city and its nightlife but yearned for a quieter, more rustic environment to come home to. Figuring there were people out there just like us, we invested in a perfect house that just so happened to include a separate private suite overlooking the lake – just 30 minutes from Rochester and Canandaigua.

Before we even listed the suite on peer-to-peer rental sites, we established a brand and a website. I have a background in marketing and project management; my partner provides the financial and artistic expertise. We built a blog using WordPress and began publishing reflections, photo essays, recipes, and food reviews. Our content came naturally: the best parts of our travels were Internet worthy, now having garnered over 350,000 collective views across the site and our socials since launching in late 2022. Moreover, the passive marketing conducted with our Facebook profile allowed us to learn more about the culture and the community around us. We asked ourselves, what messaging do we want to send to the Geneseo, Lakeville, and Livonia communities? How could we demonstrate the value we bring to this beautiful lake and moreover, the value this region brings to the world at large?

Once we established our channels and our brand, it was time to prepare the suite for listing. A few rounds of furniture building, deep cleaning, and re-decorating later, we staged a few photographs and posted to VRBO and AirBnB. Conesus Lake House was live. The marketing work that took place ahead of time paid off, too—not more than 3 days after launch, we made our first booking. And the rest, they say, is history. Our goal is to bring more awareness of Conesus Lake to the travel community, not just in New York. We believe this area is poised to become a world-class tourist destination. We continue to post to the blog and our socials and to explore the Finger Lakes and upstate New York regularly. We report on what we see, taste, and experience. These trips inspire us, and we think they inspire readers to consider the region for their next vacation getaway.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My partner and I have a specific aesthetic and approach to experiencing the world through travel, food, and community. Conesus Lake House is meant to capture this aesthetic through its branding, storytelling, design, and content. Visitors of the Conesus Lake House blog can immediately decide if we’re the right hosts for them — and we think despite our specific vibe, we still retain mass appeal for any traveler passing through Conesus Lake.

I’ve worked in a variety of industries and have lived in drastically different cities and locations. My partner brings an international background to the table, too. We like high-class fashion, design, activities, and dining in a way that’s not elitist, but welcoming. We’re as comfortable strolling through the country fair as we are imbibing craft cocktails at a speak-easy in Manhattan. We like things to be clean, nice, comfortable, safe, and interesting all at the same time.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Toward the end of the pandemic, the first move we made to reach our next life phase did not result in Conesus Lake. On the contrary, our first move was to an apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. The one month we spent in this apartment was the catalyst for everything that led to our moving to Conesus Lake and starting Conesus Lake House.

I had been working remotely for a company on Long Island since late 2021, with the expectation that eventually remote work would convert to hybrid work, and I would need to be closer. My partner and I had been banking on a location in upstate NY — not anywhere near LI, of course, but close enough that I could pop down to the city for a few days at a time if need be. Remember: the point was to reach our next phase, no matter what it took to get there.

When this upstate NY connection fell through, we were devastated. I had to scramble to find a place for my little family to live closer to work, as the threats of “Return to the Office” were delivered with higher frequency and volume. We tried looking in Upper East Side; we even tried to buy a condo in Maspeth. We commuted to and from the New York City metropolitan area more times in the span of three months than we had done in our entire lives.

When we finally secured an apartment in Kew Gardens, we loaded our lives up into our car and made the trek. We had conducted all the business of viewing, signing, and arranging arrivals remotely. We were told we were moving into a newly-renovated studio apartment. What we found was anything but, and probably the worst place we had ever had to call “home.” We could not find our unit on our floor at first, because the badly burned and damaged piece of plywood hanging on a door frame could have fooled anyone into thinking it was a utility closet. No, this was the door to our home! Once inside, we immediately noticed the smell and the lack of renovation that was promised. Some new appliances, but no improved walls or floors or bathroom fixtures. Just sad, tenement-style rooms leftover from the 1930s. It didn’t help that the superintendent didn’t bother to greet us or to direct us in person. Just a few texts saying “good luck with parking.” We even noticed him watching us as we unloaded the car in the middle of the street, as we would later learn to recognize him. And it further did not help that we were accosted by another tenant of the building and his pit bull, who followed us around the neighboring blocks of Kew Gardens as we desperately searched for some slice of home or comfort. This was the final straw. This was the anti-thesis of Conesus Lake House!

Long story short, my partner insisted we contact the rental company and break the lease. We documented the problems and compared them to the promises made. We immediately looked for other job opportunities and committed ourselves to staying fully remote from that point forward. The world had proven it could function with a large majority of the workforce online — there was no reason, in our minds, to survive a global pandemic and go back to the way things were. We were resilient in the face of fraud, false promises, and underwhelming expectations. When we left Kew Gardens, we vowed to find a safe place to call home. This place would be the birth of our business and ultimately our freedom as entrepreneurs. A place we could feel safe to raise a family. In the summer of 2022, we found Conesus Lake House and grabbed it. Our passion for life can be seen in our passion for our business: we created a safe, clean, modern apartment that we can share with people like us.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I built a dummy Facebook account with a placeholder name: “Conesus Lake House.” I knew my business would have something to do with our house, and it was on Conesus Lake. Brilliant, right? I wanted to study the community groups in my area before making any marketing moves. These groups were saturated with AirBnB and VRBO listings, private websites, and real estate agent profiles. I got a sense of the price range of rentals on the Lake. I learned who had water access and who didn’t, and how this differentiation of features influenced their messaging.

When my partner and I started exploring the area, people would ask us about water access. Do you have water rights? Do you have a dock? Do you have a boat? Conesus Lake is highly residential and private, with a few exceptions in terms of public docks and swimmable “beaches.” What I gleaned from all this was, I needed to represent Conesus Lake House not so much as a beach house, but as a summer nature escape with full lake views and modern amenities. The wooded road is teeming with boaters, swimmers, ATV riders, and other tourists from April through October — this was the electricity I wanted to capture. The suite is not a cottage with a dock, fair enough. But it’s a real house in a lakeside forest with a foundation and solid walls, central heating and A/C, free Wi-Fi, parking, and a key-pad entryway. What more could a traveler seeking privacy, solitude, and escape want? So I approached social media as, Conesus Lake House is not just an AirBnB, but an experience with a greater context. Not 5 minutes down the road, you can enjoy fine dining and wine right on the Lake at one of Lakeville’s many restaurants. You can hike the Genesee Valley Trail or take selfies in front of Letchworth Park’s many canyons. You can park your boat on the street for free and launch it from the state boat launch anytime you want. My brand is about the location and intrinsic values of the rental space itself — all the comforts of home in your vacation lake house.

So the name Conesus Lake House stuck, and since I didn’t see anyone else using those exact words in their business, I ran with it. The WordPress website and blog came next, followed by additional support on socials such as Instagram, TikTok, and reddit. My partner and I share the responsibility of posting to socials as well as some of the blogposts on conesuslake.house. The strategy was admittedly off-the-cuff at first– posting to many different Facebook groups, or experimenting with a different subreddit, until we landed at the current strategy of posting the website to a different regional sales group at least once every day. The photo- and video-based socials — reddit, Instagram, and TikTok — follow a similar pattern of daily to weekly posts, sometimes aligning with the content of a recent blog post, sometimes coming completely out of left field. Either way, the important strategy is daily engagement. This has resulted in dozens of followers, over 1,000 unique visitors of the rental website alone, a 25% click-rate combined on VRBO and AirBnB, and our first bookings within a month of launching.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.conesuslake.house
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conesuslakehouse/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Conesus-Lake-House/100086192852550
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@conesuslakehouse

Image Credits
All photos by Conesus Lake House.