(Photo: Mr. Berry)

Back in April 2012, the HuffPo cabal-backed Soho TechLabs launched a social travel site called CasaHop that allowed users to "connect with people worldwide to trade homes for vacations and more." Now, Soho TechLab's CEO Paul Berry told Betabeat that the incubator is shutting down CasaHop in order to focus more on RebelMouse, a tool for building social webpages that has seen explosive growth in recent months.

"CasaHop never gained the traction it needed," Mr. Berry told Betabeat by phone. "The timing was off. Airbnb is really in a winner takes all situation in this area. I hope one day someone is going to break out and make this an enormous idea because I love home exchanges, but too few people feel comfortable with other people staying in their place while they're away."

Mr. Berry said that CasaHop only spent a third of its investment money. It will be returning the remaining two thirds to investors in cash, and the other third will be accounted for in RebelMouse stock. "Only Lerer Ventures and I will get diluted," he added.

Despite this setback, Mr. Berry was eager to emphasize the success of RebelMouse, another Soho TechLabs venture, which aggregates users' social posts onto one main homepage.

"We’re reaching 1.5 million uniques a month, so just six months out it’s this feeling of traction," Mr. Berry said. "With hosts like GoDaddy, .01 percent of people actually like what’s on their domain name and RebelMouse has the opposite percentage. 98 percent of users with RebelMouse-powered domains are thrilled by it." Mr. Berry added that everyone from influential journalists to big companies to small businesses have adopted RebelMouse as their homepage.

"RebelMouse is the chance to build a CMS from everything we’ve learned about what’s happened to social and to build it ancitipating what’s coming and make it so that the people that understand social are the ones that can power the website," Mr. Berry said, adding, "It’s also a very direct reflection of who I am and what I've learned."

Despite all this excitement for RebelMouse, Mr. Berry acknowledged that it is a "bummer" to close CasaHop. "I wish CasaHop was bigger than Airbnb, but I think you have to be able to realize when something’s not working," he admitted.

Wise words.

The very busy Mr. Berry

Soho TechLabs, the new incubator backed by a cabal of ex-HuffPosters, announced yesterday that they're hiring. But until today, the team has remained mysteriously mum about the projects they're backing.

Hilarious tweeter and Soho TechLabs CTO Ben Regenspan let slip over DM yesterday that the "CTO Technical Cofounder" position listed on the Lerer Ventures page is in fact for CasaHop, a social travel site the team is planning to launch within the next month or so. CasaHop is described as a "social home exchange," where you can "connect with people worldwide to trade homes for vacations and more. It's simple -- you stay in their house, they stay in yours."

"When I was thinking about my next move," Soho TechLabs CEO Paul Berry told Betabeat via phone, "it would've been easy to take another job as a CTO at another media company. But this is a much more fun and interesting challenge."

No doubt the team he's put together at Soho TechLabs, which includes HuffPo founders Jonah Peretti and Ken Lerer, and ex-HuffPo president Greg Coleman, is a force to be reckoned with. "We had a tremendous amount of fun building HuffPo together and we learned a lot from building it," Mr. Berry said. "It's an incredible fun time where we get to take a lot of the things we've proven and learned and apply them to different areas."

They've also culled a pool of global talent--from countries including Sri Lanka, Chile, Serbia and the Philippines--to help kickstart projects.

The team sees a unique opportunity in the way things go viral, which is unsurprising considering Mr. Peretti is also the founder of BuzzFeed, a site that arguably made "viral" a household term. "There's such a dramatic example in front of us right now with Draw Something," Mr. Berry told us. " The infrastructure of the web and the way we're all hyperconnected now, stuff like Kony 2012, Draw Something, and Pinterest go live and go viral in a way that literally wasn't possible a year ago. So we're living in that sort of acceleration of history and I couldn't be more excited about the team that we have to pull it off."

The Soho TechLabs team is focused on a very specific set of criteria when it comes to which startups and ideas they want to back. For instance, at least one member--though preferably all--must feel intensely passionate about a project. "We don't want to get into a broad group of stuff that we're not passionate about," said Mr. Berry.

Another notable criterion is a similar, easy to maneuver code structure. "We're looking for things that we feel are very close to each other in terms of underlying code base and social mechanics," he said.

RebelMouse and CasaHop, the two known Soho TechLabs ventures, both have overlying code architecture, making it easy to fix and scale. RebelMouse is a "social platform" that Mr. Berry said he needed "a month max" before he could discuss. CasaHop, on the other hand, is a project he was slightly less coy about.

"We have a very specific way to get into the social travel space," said Mr. Berry. "[CasaHop] is also in the sharing economies space and it's allowed us to have a very specific need there. It's one of these pieces where we think that the people who have been going at social travel so far have had too vague of a notion about it and we have a very specific entrance into something that will become a very specific travel site."

"We're going to be launching the first version of [CasaHop] soon," he promised. "We'll probably have the first version [of CasaHop] in a month or so."

As long as it's not an Airbnb knockoff, we think we can get behind it.