Show notes
This Episode is Sponsored by StayFi Your ultimate tool for Vacation Rental WiFi marketing allowing you to collect guest emails automatically via custom captive WiFi login splash pages. Drive repeat direct bookings and convert your OTA bookings to book direct for their next visit. Visit https://stayfi.com/vrsuccess/ and use code VRSUCCESS for 50% off 3 months of StayFi service. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ This summer Andrew Kitchell opened up Wheelhouse and invited his customers to build on top of it. Not engineers. Customers. Property managers, revenue managers, and a fair number of people who had never built anything in their lives. Over four days, 120 people from six continents worked together, and 40 of them finished with a working prototype. The top prize of $5,000 went to a full-time property manager who had never told anyone he was interested in building software. Heather has spent her own summer building, so she came to this conversation with the question she keeps turning over: if someone with no coding background can build a working app, does that mean every property manager should? Andrew has a clear answer, and it has nothing to do with the tools. His view is that the barrier is no longer technology or design or user experience. It is permission. Giving yourself permission to stop doing what you normally do and decide that today is a build day. Along the way they get into what a hackathon actually is, why Wheelhouse now describes itself as a growth company rather than a pricing company, how MCPs let you ask questions of your portfolio in plain language, and where building your own tools earns its keep against where it becomes an expensive hobby. About Andrew Kitchell Andrew Kitchell has been in and around the short-term rental space for around fifteen years, starting as an Airbnb host in San Francisco while the platform itself was being built a few blocks away. He joined an eight-person urban rental company that was updating its prices by hand twice a week, spent a weekend hacking the Airbnb API to automate it, and four weeks later the business had pivoted into Beyond Pricing. He went on to found Wheelhouse and the operating company Lyric, and has run both technology businesses and operating businesses through some hard cycles, including losing Lyric entirely when COVID hit. Wheelhouse today connects to around 800,000 listings and has opened its full platform to anyone who wants to build on it. Key Takeaways The barrier to building your own tools is no longer technical skill. Andrew argues it is permission, the decision to stop doing today what you normally do and treat a few hours as build time. If you can describe a problem clearly, you are much closer to solving it than you think. Property managers describe their operational problems better than almost anyone, and that description is now most of the work. The old software model asked the person who understood the customer to hand that understanding to an engineer and hope it survived the journey. That gap has closed, and the people closest to the problem can now solve it themselves. You do not have to build anything yourself to benefit. Direct booking sites, owner reports, and small internal tools are all cheaper and faster to produce now, whoever builds them. Building is worth the time when it lands in your quieter season and when what you learn carries into the next build. Treat the first few attempts as research and development, not as finished product. MCPs remove the need to understand APIs at all. Connect Wheelhouse to Claude and you can ask questions of your portfolio and execute pricing strategy in ordinary language, which Andrew sums up as a click is a command, is a chat. An open platform produces better outcomes than a single one. After the hackathon there is no longer one Wheelhouse experience, there are forty-one, each built by someone who knew exactly what they needed. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ 📣 The AI Ambassador Program This episode is also brought to you in part by our AI Ambassador Program. If you're curious about using AI in your business - whether it's for guest communication, operations, or even marketing - check out our AI Ambassador Program. It's designed to help you learn, lead, and get hands-on with the tools shaping the future of hospitality. 🌐 Learn more and join us at VacationRentalFormula.com/AI Are you listening to this podcast on the move? Get to the show notes here: https://www.vacationrentalformula.com/podcast/vrs681