0:00When I sold Cottage Link rental management in 2022, we were running at 85% direct bookings. That didn't happen by accident. We'd been at it for 20 years, booking direct long before Airbnb was even a concept. For most property managers though, direct booking remains one of the hardest things to build. Guests arrive through the OTAs, they stay, they leave, and you're left with almost nothing you can use to bring them back. This is the gap today's sponsor, Stafi, is designed to close. And I'll be telling you more about them later in the episode. This is the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, keeping you up to date with news, views, information, and resources on this rapidly changing short term rental business. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's not, what's not, what's new, and what will help make your business a success.

1:00Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer, and as ever, I'm super excited to be back with you once again. Here we are. This is it. We've reached the end of the summer with past Labor Day. As a property manager, this was always my favorite time of year. It was when I could not necessarily really sit back and relax, but I had more time on my hands, and I was able to work on projects and things that had been left in a bayance from the start of the summer. This year, because I don't have a property management company anymore, I spent the summer building. So not renovating a cottage, sort of building, but building apps, a whole collection of them, which I'm going to be launching at ScaleFest in Barcelona. And I'll tell you a bit more about that later on. They're made for property managers who need to claw back some time for

2:03the things that matter more to them. And every single one of them came out of my own 20 years of managing properties. And there the tools I always wished existed and never could find. I'm sure there are some of them that are out there as features in some of the bigger platforms. But the ones I've created are for smaller property managers, the ones who can't afford that per property pricing for every platform that they would like to find a feature on. So these tools don't automate anything. They just lighten the load in a number of small ways, just add up to a better working life, which brings me to today's guest. Andrew Kichel is the founder and CEO of Wheelhouse, the revenue management platform, although it's as whole lot more than that as you will find out when you listen to this interview. But this summer, Andrew ran a hackathon and we're going to talk about to start with what a hackathon actually is. But he ran this hackathon where his customers, and there was some complete beginners amongst them, built apps of their own. So I brought him the question, I keep turning over myself. If I can do

3:09this with absolutely zero technical encoding background, then anybody could do this. But should they? So we get into what people built where creating your own tool makes absolute sense and where the next hackathon might go. Here's my conversation with Andrew Kichel. Andrew, I don't know if you recall. Remember meeting you very briefly in Barcelona for a scale conference a couple of years ago. Do you remember that? I might have been starstruck. I don't do that. We've exchanged many notes over the years. I don't totally remember beating you at a conference, but that's not unusual because I was the 100 person hang. Yeah. Did you go to, did you go to Barcelona? I did. Yeah, definitely was. Yeah. I remember you actually had a corner booth as you came through the door. Yes, I remember that I do. Absolutely. We were there. Was it a good meeting? Do we have fun? Yeah. We did. I said there. I said, I really want to get you on the

4:13podcast. That's what made me think about it. Oh my God. I think that's three years ago. Before you said, it sounds that sound. It was. It was made years ago. I've wanted to be on the podcast for a long time. Isn't it funny in some ways? I think one of the reasons for the conversation today is that both of us are quite excited. Slash deep into this AI world. And it's a transition, right? So what a great time to finally hang. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Because you know what? I had a property management company for 20 years and looks me to say that we never did any revenue management. So I wasn't in that world. I get it. I get it. You know, I hadn't. We were in we started this set it and forget it type of thing. And it was always Andrew McConnell used to tell me, you're leaving money on the table. It's like, yeah, I know, but it's okay. Are the owners happy? Everybody was happy. Yes. Yeah. Where I am, my part of the world, it's very

5:15much 10 week season. That's it. I think if I was back in it now, I'd be doing a lot more. But give us a bit of your background. How did you get into this business? Sure. How did you found wheelhouse? I was sure that. And maybe just to hit on exactly what you just shared, Heather. Wheelhouse, our company that we'll talk about today. Maybe we look like a pricing company, an revenue management company from the outside. The reason I had to take no offense to you saying, hey, we do revenue management necessarily is our actual mission is growth. Right? If our, the people we work, we often work at property managers. If their portfolio is growing, that's their success. Right? And if you increase prices, you might get a little bit from the take grade, depending on what your take grade is. But sometimes it's just more important to have happy owners or get new owners into your portfolio. So I think the more interesting aspects of wheelhouse and what we get to tap into now is really looking at the growth cycle of our customers as opposed to just saying, hey, we're at pricing company. That's part of what we did. So I take no offense to that. And I actually think there are very reasonable number of cases where your rule base pricing makes

6:18a ton of sense. Where a low risk strategy makes a ton of sense, where flat pricing makes a ton of sense. If it serves the larger goal of growth. So I, I think we started purely as pricing, and I'll get maybe now into a little bit of the founders story, if you'd like, but I'll just set that precedent that we really think of growth and portfolio growth for people as opposed to did we get the perfect price for one day. That's a fun part of the challenge, but not the ultimate goal. Does that make that makes sense? Perfect sense. Cool. So how did we get into this game? So the longest short of it is I have been in and around a short, environmental space for 14 or 15 years. I started first just by being, I was living in San Francisco. I started as an Airbnb host. I hosted a lot of people. And because of San Francisco, where Airbnb was being built, it also where a lot of stars were being built. And I worked at a couple of tech companies, had some interesting fun experiences. And eventually one of the CEOs of those companies came and hired me to be the CEO

7:21of a new company called Beyond Stays. So many years ago, 2013, 2012, 2013. And anyway, Beyond Stays was saying, let's see if you can apply a brand to the urban environment. Can you have a property manager in an urban environment have standards around this inventory type, homes and apartments and cities that's starting to look really interesting? And I came into that company and that company was a few people about eight people at the time and were manually updating prices by hand twice a week. Why would we do that? We can build a machine that does that. Let's do it. And so sat down over a weekend and my friend and I were the, we hacked the Airbnb API and we started dating our prices on Airbnb. And then we said, wouldn't it be fun if everyone could do this? So we just put it on product time to put it out the door as a whatever just use it. And it turned out there was a lot of demand. So that company beyond stays four weeks later, I pivoted to Beyond Pricing. And we said, we're going to sell off the property management business and we're going to invest in

8:22software. And we're going to build tools for a whole group of people who may or may not want these. So that was beyond pricing. That was my first venture back business in the category. I ended up having a founder breakup so to speak is that was CEO, but wasn't the perfect people to build with for sure. And ended up taking the data science team and restarting wheelhouse. Company around a day and an operating company called Lyric at the same time. And Lyric was an operating business that we scaled quite a bit. We lost that whole business when COVID hit that we were given a lot of money by Airbnb and Starwood and others to try to prove out that urban hospitality experience at scale. And anyway, all to say, I run opcos and tech co's over the many years in the space. I've come to love the people we work with, the problems we try to solve, the misunderstandings about our space. I think we represent the future of hospitality, our space. And I

9:22just love it. So that's why many years later, I'm still very excited to say hello and hang and talk about the next generation, maybe a building tools for these folks. Yeah, I'm building tools has, when you talked about taking a weekend, I think that was probably more than weekend that you took to not build no, even then. And now it takes. Hello, yeah. It was just happened the API. Yeah, but building software back then, it required technology, it required coding knowledge. And a lot of knowledge that the ordinary property manager doesn't have. And now what we have is something really different. And I'm blown away every day by what we have at our fingertips. So I want to start this really by talking about what you did this summer. You opened the doors and you invited people in to build things on top of your platform. Tell me about how that started, why you did it. But I think very first of all, you called it hackathon. And I had a couple of

10:27people who have said to me recently, what is a hackathon? Yeah. What is this thing? So yeah, I would like you to talk. What is a hackathon? And then take me into the idea of holding your own hackathon. Yeah, a hackathon traditionally is where to your point, a bunch of engineers would get together. And over the course of a weekend, or a couple days, they would try to build cool things and they would get a bunch stage at the end of it. And they would show their product off to the world. And the key is that engineering word. It was an engineering thing. And you hit the nail on the head of, wait a second, anyone can build now. And our hackathon was, we had fantastic engineers show up. We had people who are a toe deep in AI show up. And the invite was, hey, let's all build together. The actual only

11:28promise was we're going to get you one step further, maybe two sets further down the path of AI adoption. Should that be of interest to you? So we will have, but it was much more supportive than a normal hackathon. Normal hackathons are your room. You meet a person, you build, whatever, no support you're on your own. This was very much like, hey, we have three sessions a day where you come and we hang out, we talk about problems and we can do breakouts, we can get you past whatever burden, whatever wall you're facing in your AI adoption journey view. So it was almost like a, it was borrowing from the concept of building together. It was, since I've done hackathons in San Francisco for a number of years, it was seeing that building together and not focusing on problems that you usually focus on, but just trying something new was a place that many people gave themselves the freedom to admit what they don't know, invest in learning something new, and get the unlock that comes from building something yourself. So a hackathon has traditionally been

12:29a bunch of people in a room. This was a digital remote hackathon. We got people together from six continents and built together. And the best part of it was on the Friday after a couple days' ability and people saying, this is what I needed to get my unblock and get deep into the fun. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so there came from many continents. How many people turned up? 120. 120. Wow. What surprised you most about, what's four days? What surprised you most about it? So much. My favorite moment and when I knew this was going to be such a fun unlock was we had the kickoff on Tuesday morning and I said, hey, my calendar is basically open the whole week. If anyone wants to get one on one time to build together, let's do it. And about an hour and a half later, someone had grabbed time on my calendar and I got on the call and I'm just going to name my stereotype. It was an older individual with a southern accent and I thought, oh no, I'm going to

13:32be telling this person how to log on to a browser, turn on the computer and this amazing individual Maria and I'm going to name her because we have a lot of fun now. I know her. She's awesome. She said, Andrew, I have two apps ready to go and I want you to tell me I would like some feedback on these things. I'm thinking holy smokes, if you hour is later are building two things and you just want steering on maybe what might be fun with what might the judges like as opposed to getting started. What an obvious aha moment of the world is ready to build. It looked me. Yeah. So it was such a great also just Andrew, you idiot, don't go in with stereotypes of course and from honestly from that moment on, it was this week is going to be a success. And then the next amazing moment, Kesha, one more Heather. Oh yes. Yeah. So we had invited five judges to evaluate this Steve Schwab from Costco. Your group did it. You're a community

14:35one of Steve Amy Hino from Durham, Data and Revenue Management and other things in our industry. And Richard Voughton from anyway, great judges. Five industry judges from all swaths of the industry. And I was really nervous. I committed. I asked all these people to come judge these projects on Friday. But what if no one builds anything at all cool and I've asked all these people to spend three hours with us and it's just a debt. And I woke up Friday morning. Everyone had to submit their projects Thursday night, which meant working at full video, full application. And of the 120 that started 40 got to the point where they had a full working prototype, something they're proud enough of to make a video of submit. So the team and I woke up Friday morning. Demo day was four hours later. To the reality that we had to find the 20 coolest projects. And by the end of reviewing all the videos is like, my goodness, our judges are going to be blown away. So there was this kind of backstage

15:37moment with the judges beforehand. Okay. So you all have been really hackathons in our industry yet. What do you think happened? What are you expecting? And people were expecting the same little visualization. And by about the fifth presentation of all these brave souls who came up digitally, one at a time had three minutes to either play their radio or tell their story and almost all chose to tell their story. Their judges were like, holy smokes. Their world was blown to of like everyone's a builder now. So there were so many magic moments throughout all of that. It was my favorite week of building wheelhouse. It was such an affirmation of try to help others build and that's more fun than almost anything out there. So I don't know. I could we could talk for the rest of the time about this. But what about the real beginners? You mentioned Maria. But she not built anything before Maria definitely built something before. And Maria comes from a very technical background. It turns out so she had she told me great stories about being there when the right click

16:39was created on the mouse, right? So she had a really amazing background. So we ended up having a couple tracks, right? We had five awards. We had just the best overall product. And then we thought we got to have a track for beginners. So if you come in and self identify as a beginner, you can also win an award just if it was more of a hustle and whatever. And there was a best property manager who obviously has a full time job, but also could build something cool and knows the business really well with my non-no technology. And anyway, the winner of the best overall prize was a relative beginner. And it was someone who created a very simple way to think about revenue management, very elegant way to think about revenue management that served his need of making decisions quickly. And again, a reminder that sure technology is really important and you can build amazing things with technology and hardware engineering. And design is really important. And user experience is

17:40really important. And those things are incredibly accessible on open systems now. Yeah, we had all sorts of different beginners. We had plenty of beginners. I think probably a quarter of the crew maybe more was beginners. A relative beginner won the whole thing, $5,000 top prize. And that beginner is probably building a business now. Yes, that is so awesome. What were they building them on? What platforms were they building with? Building with, yeah, we saw the expected codex cloud, cloud code. We saw people just using like TRLM chat and cloud, but not the code version. Other folks were really deep in agentic, me's and open cloud, all these kind of fun things. So it was the breadth of assumed technologies, but maybe we're supposed to your audience. Anyone who can use cloud? Yeah, I'm building in lovable. Oh, amazing. Yeah, so that's right. So there are platforms out there that are geared just for building your own website or building a landing page.

18:42Well, what I'm doing is building small apps that help property managers do things more effectively and free up their time. So it's save for sale, lovable. And then, but I'm now getting deeper into codex because it's yeah, these things are so easy to use when it was, it was only a matter of a few months back when if you wanted to go into cloud code or go into codex, you were into the terminal. And it was stuff that looked like coding. So great. Oh, but now it's just a plain ordinary interface with codex. It's what do you want to build today? Yeah, you just tell it what do you want to build? It's a responsive Google. Yeah, it's wild. And I think the biggest barrier adoption today is not the tooling. It is people giving them themselves permission to stop doing what they're doing today. And to just say today's a build day, yeah, or a build hour. And from there, it is essentially universal that I've seen people set themselves free. So to speak up,

19:44oh my god, I can build product. I can solve this problem. It is so cool. So yeah, it's now not a tech thing or a user experience thing. I think it's really a permission to build a given yourself permission to build. Yeah, well, I started. So I've built somewhere around 15 apps now. Amazing. Different apps. I haven't put any of them really out into the world. I'm doing a launch Barcelona scale fest in October is my launch. Amazing. Where and I'm launching just a bundle of five apps that and these are the apps that I always wanted to have when I was a property manager. Not other than to do with revenue management or pricing, they're all to do with simple things like CRM for own acquisition and how to walk through. This is my favorite one. I this one, the first one I did. I used to walk through new homes. And maybe I'd have two or three new homes to inspect in a day. And I'd walk through and I'd have my iPad and I'd have a checklist and I'd scribble things down and or mark things down. I'd have a chat with the owner. I'd come out, I'd

20:46get in back in the car. I'd go to the next place. Do the same thing. And at each time I was doing inventory as well, I get back to the office and I'd sit there and going, I can't remember which is which. And then you've got to write the listing. And so this app is you just talk through as you're going through the property, you talk it through, you give it your voice. Things like I've just walked through the door and the first thing when you walk through the door is a view outside of the far window in the lounge that you see through. It's the most magnificent view I can just, it's West facing. I can just imagine what it's going to look like at sunset. So it takes your first reactions to things. But if you also have checklist where you do the inventory, you can do safety checks. So a lot of short of it, when you get back in the car, you press a button, it creates an internal report for your team. It creates a report for the owner, which is very different from the internal report that you're going to send the team. And then it'll do the listing as well and do your safety report. So I love it. That was my first one I did it about four months ago.

21:52So that's coming. And now I've got four or five others to go on top of that. But I love that first one. I've got it out in beta that some people are using it every single day. Yeah, it's a, I that it solves a major pain point for the customers. Customers for property for a property manager. Yeah. And it's just I hated driving back to the office and thing I'm going to write this listing. And now it just writes a listing in the voice that you used to talk it through. Yeah. So it captures everything. Yeah. I'm so that there's I don't want this is not about me. This is about some days I think this is the most useful thing I have ever learned. And some days I think I'm just spending a fortune in critics. Yeah. Doing things that a developer could have done in the afternoon. I've been thinking a lot about tools recently. And about the huge stack I ran at Cottage Link

22:52rental management. We had close to 200 cottages. Every guest connected to our Wi-Fi. But we captured none of it. The only contact we ever held was the person who booked. Everyone else in that group, the friends, the family, the ones who might have booked their own stay next year. They walked out of the door as strangers. If I had my time over if I was doing this over again, stay FI would have been in that stack from day one. It's branded Wi-Fi. Feel properties. When guests log on, stay FI collects their details automatically. And that's the whole group, not just the booker. From there it handles the follow up, post date emails, a return offer, a nudge around their travel anniversary. All aim that bringing those guests back through your own website next time. Commission free. I do believe that's a shift worth making. Stop fighting to win the first booking away from the platforms. That's how they found you. Instead focus on winning the second one

23:55because you already got them through the door. Stay FI helps you keep them. So head to stayfI.com. Use the code VRSuccess for 50% off three months of stayfI service. That's VR success and it's in the show notes as well. I think you'll find it really worth your while giving this a go. Can we explore your story little more because it's really cool. There are two parts that I love. Part number one, you started off by articulating the problem that you had. And for those listening, if we had taken what Heather said there and dumped that into loveable or AI, if we'd recorded it and said solve this problem, they'd probably come back with two or three solutions that you could go explore more. So there's the hey, give yourself permission to build. There's knowing that if you could articulate the problem well, AI can support you building of anything. It's really cool as it

24:57clearly has. That's part one. Part two that I love, we will look back at the last 20, 30, 40 years of software development as a greasy dark ages era, a building software very see. And the reason for that is the old paradigm of developing a product was someone who knew the customer and the problem really well would try to write it out and try to have an engineer, a professional coder, try to build that thing and the engineer to ask all these questions about that's easy, that's hard. You might think this is really easy, but it's not and I don't get why this is important. So I'm not going to really invest in the user experience that the person who knew the problem had to convince someone else to spend time solving the problem often when that great builder had spent a lot of time and a lot of care bringing something back to customer or the team would be like, oh, that's not what I want. There was this really difficult loop and you could get engineers maybe to sit with customers, but that's time and money and expensive. And so what you also articulated was

26:02you know the customer and you can now solve the problem and you don't have to play telephone to get a product out the door six months later that may or may not be correct. And that is the old era that we're leaving and the new era is doing what you're doing, which is I have a problem. I'm going to solve it and I'm going to I know the problem so intimately that I'm going to solve it almost never in the handoff you should produce. So that's the magic. Here's the question though, should a property manager who's running 30 properties they've got a full plate already be doing this at all. And I guess it's where does it actually earn its keep and where does it become a very expensive hobby because I was I said I've built 15 it's become quite an expensive hobby. Now I'm going to try and monetize it. But if I was running a property management company I could probably I think I'm answering my own question now because everybody has the downtime. For us in our business it was October November December that was the downtime. That was

27:04the time that we used to pick up and just do things that your projects. So I guess I have just asked my own question. Well, yeah, maybe a way to think about it is as a property manager you're going to benefit whether you're an expert or not. And by that I mean that building a direct booking website used to be really hard. Yeah, now it's really easy. Your cousin, son, daughter, nephew, neat, whatever could build your new direct booking site like that. So you're going to benefit even if you don't learn and use the tools yourself you'll benefit from the ability to tap into much more magical product creation experiences could be your direct site could be a app like you've described could be something else. I think either you you put essentially R&D money into building 15 apps. You're now going to build something better next time because you've learned a lot. So whether it's worth it or not for you I always say if you're learning the skills today and the skills themselves are just getting so much more powerful your position yourself to have the most efficient property

28:08management business out there is not a total like you have to learn this. But it's really fun and it's very empowering and it probably says you have for more business success. So it feels like a good thing that everyone and I always just say I would look for product talent by asking people what's your favorite app and tell me two things that can do better and almost everyone can do that. And that is product design because if you can articulate a problem you're a step away from articulating the solution and everyone uses apps. So I feel like the whole world has all these product designers ready to be unleashed. It's a fun skill is some powering and I would put it in the why not bucket at least it's going to make you better at understanding all the next generation of people you're going to be working with or building with. Yeah it is the way I think about it. Are you still seeing people who still have their heads in the sand about AI? Yes, I can expand on that. I will say I also live in San Francisco. Very few have their head in the sand here. Most are grappling with the

29:10reality of is software valuable. The wheelhouse included. What version of software is valuable? How do we serve people in this new paradigm? So sure there are folks with their head in the sand. I think I had my head in the sand until I was probably a real believer as of November of last year. For that before that I'd been looking at it with skepticism. My team has more of a machine learning background and machine learning is built on very different principles than LLMs. We were looking at the hallucination that LLMs have maybe inherent in their design and wondering if it could ever be applied to the end of the day. We consider ourselves our customers, most important financial part. If you give us the power to price your property and we mess it up and in owner churns that is not an experience we want to have. So in some ways we're both trying to be cutting edge but also a patient adopter of things that truly serve the financial interests of our customers. So we were

30:12skeptical whether the paradigm could work on our core functionality of analyzing data and making predictions from that data. We were not skeptical that it was a product design paradigm shift. So we were just trying to figure out how to put it into our app at first but I think the paradigm we've hit on now is like no open up everything let everyone build whatever they want and we think people will find value in that. So it is now our that was in percent our strategy is to serve the next generation of AI adoption and I think I'm ready to talk about it but I also am so excited about it. I could hold my cards a little close to my chest. So yeah I'll leave you with that. If you want to poke and prod it or what are we actually doing in this AI world? Well I was going to say I talked Richard Vorten quite a lot here and I go back 25 years in this industry and we had a great discussion on the podcast a few weeks ago where Richard said I think I've got one more property management company in me and I said you're totally nuts but I sometimes think do I have

31:14another one in me because I would be going back into it with an entirely different perspective on how things work. I started my company in 2003 so it was spreadsheets and facts machines and checks through the mail so it went through a lot but it would be entirely different now. If I came to you and said okay I'm a new property management company what can we all house do for me? What can I do with wheelhouse? So what would you tell me? I would tell you that anything that our engineers can build for you you can now build yourself and we believe that wheelhouse four and a half years ago published all of our pricing engine research because we thought it was the right thing to do and because we think our job is to tell you how to maximize the value of your asset and it is your job to adjust the risk strategy probably at an owner level and owners risk profiles change I would argue daily and by that I mean if you got three bookings yesterday you're going to

32:18be a little greedy and if you haven't gotten a booking for three weeks you're going to be a little fearful because the greed for your index that people operate and we believe that our job is the best in the world at telling you here's the market price for your asset on this day. Now go communicate that to owners or change it around the risk profile or invite them to give you feedback that allows you to change it and so we are a very I think comfortable in that role of being the data science experts on a price and also empowering you through our own interfaces mostly today to change that change the strategy and tell you when your strategy is wrong but also just give you all the insights and let you go build whatever you want and they're all sorts of interesting things from owner communications to forecasting to underwriting to other things that come from a central understanding to what an asset is worth on a daily basis. I had a conversation with Breezeway about how booking price can infer operational things interesting things that are emerging so I would tell a property manager that our job is to either serve them we have 24 seven support average response time of 70 seconds to a question seven days a week if you ask us a question on Friday we're not

33:22waiting till Monday to get back so we will serve you to the utmost on our core platform and we also let you build whatever the heck you want unimpeded it we don't think it's our lane to do your business so that's what I would tell property manager that is the part about it I absolutely love because that's what I'm coming from can build something you can just build it on top of that fantastic foundation yeah and some people have asked us with the hackathon and with us opening the entire platform is open anything you can do with a click on wheelhouse you can now do with an API call but really for most listeners a chat so a click is a command is a chat so can you give me an example because some people out there not knowing what an API call is or yeah just just totally so in the old days engineers would build to our APIs and they would say hey wheelhouse can you give me information on how my portfolio is performing today but it was they'd have to write code that could speak to our system and the debt of validate that our response was correct and it was hard

34:25with mcp's so think just think Claude the Claude chatbot you can now chat with our system so you don't need to be an engineer if you activate the mcp in wheelhouse you connect wheelhouse at Claude you can ask any question you want of your portfolio and we will respond a super so in wheelhouse you can come in you can filter by show me all the properties that haven't booked for 14 days and that are trailing their neighborhood occupancy by more than 20% and go adjust those prices down by 8% you can do that in wheelhouse you can click through a bunch of things and make that decision or you can chat that you can speak into Claude and say execute my strategy and it will do it so it's I think it's bringing revenue and pricing decisions to everyone wherever they are and I didn't really answer what is an API an application program interface don't worry about it because the mcp or the ability to use these chat interfaces is a really powerful paradigm already

35:32and if you like that you can go build more cool things on our API the reason we did our hackathon around our APIs was wheelhouse is sitting on a massive amount of data and mostly we serve professional operators and we serve them what we do really well is we give you the ability to load a thousand listings at a time 500 days in the future and adjust your strategy and when you think about that that means an individual might have to look through 500,000 cells that don't just have the daily price but might have a ton of information that is really hard and so a lot of people what they built was very was much easier ways he's wheelhouse take all the data and don't show me everything show me the most important and that is something wheelhouse has not done well yet we actually think building that really the way to serve all that data really fast we're okay waiting on the easy button because we think technically it's it's a shift will make later but in reality at the hackathon 120 people came up and built easy buttons for wheelhouse yeah and 40 then we're going to have three days later

36:37to have apps and so there's not one wheelhouse experience anymore they're now 41 wheelhouse experiences and so we think that's just a more powerful paradigm and we want to go to those people who build great things and actually take them to our customers and say go work with John of this team he built a really cool way to use wheelhouse so yeah aren't APIs mean you're not limited to the chat interface our APIs mean anyone can build their own beautiful idea that serves them and if there are a thousand versions of wheelhouse is actually much more powerful than there being one monolithic version and we are wildly more excited about that parent let's talk about the next hackathon yeah which we do I know that Steve is talking to you about this because we want to build it on the network or do something with it on the network but if it goes beyond revenue management so it goes into our own communication and operations and guest messaging and onboarding okay who should be in the room does it belong to wheelhouse then or does it belong to the industry that's a yeah I defend wheelhouse to the death of course I love my team I love our company and I also play the book

37:38very openly because I think that's just the way to be more interesting long term and I would say no we don't want anything if you build on our APIs then you on the build we'll see your traffic if you continue to run your business through your APIs but that's not it anyways our APIs are just access to the yesterday is connected to eight or a thousand listings so if you build on our APIs you could theoretically serve a lot of customers really quickly the tradeoff comes at wheelhouse eventually launches something that looks like your idea are we stealing or there's that kind of gray area that scares us a little bit but we're also like I don't know that's like the tradeoff that people should just be like thoughtful about when is a company and I can't say we're not going to build anything anymore just because people built on our APIs like that's just not the way we play the game if we do the co hackathon which is what I'm really excited about say wheelhouse was connected to breezeway in a really cool way who owns it then this breezeway own it this wheelhouse owners does the customer own it I think all these questions about IP ownership get really philosophical and really interesting I think the way that we will play the game is as openly as possible as collaboratively as possible

38:44I genuinely want other people to win and build great things and have and achieve their destiny so yeah I guess we're having a hackathon that's true we're actually going to do this quite a bit I think our next hackathon will involve other teams this one was let's see if it works it worked now other teams want to do it with us I think is more valuable and more people around the table I think there's a world where we're seeing the next generation of PMS evolve from specialists specialty systems that are stitched together and so who's in the room anyone that believes in an open future where people can build it together is collaborative as opposed to hold to cards that's probably the people who are the most fun yeah I'm excited about a next one and because I think with discussions like this and discussions like the one we're going to have with Steve as well that it's going to take more people like me who are perhaps dabbling in it and

39:45testing things out and thinking that yeah I've actually got this but I actually give them the courage and confidence to go out with it and have it and have what they're building examined by their peers and get the feedback on it but to me it's giving them that courage and that confidence that yeah what you're doing is actually good stuff and shareable I have one more surre I'd like to share yes please do it was having a conversation after the hackathon with the winner of the hackathon who's a full-time property manager Jonathan Atlantic Vacations amazing individual and I've known Jonathan for five years I never knew Jonathan had a serious interced building product and I called him after the hackathon about a week later to congratulate him and just catch up we have the winner was getting a three and a half foot long bronze key and I wanted to know how to deliver it to him and Jonathan when I said I'd actually like to bring it to Verma and I want you

40:47to celebrate you at Verma and hand it over and say look property managers here's one of you who built this amazing thing in one against other technologies and I'd like to be able to do that I think it'd be really and Jonathan said Andrew you just gave me five thousand dollars and I just had the most my he's like my wife's reflection on this week was it was the most focused she'd ever seek so this challenge of presenting your idea after a few days others it is scary but it was also focusing and ultimately freeing and growth is getting through your fears right and so if this particular format got a very high percentage of people through their fears and therefore we'll do it again to get more people through their fears to get to the other side of freedom and Jonathan story to me was again there's like one of those we probably didn't need to pay him any money and I don't need to make any money off of this either for me that moment that someone told me they had a great week and their partner recognized it means the world and I think we're shifting into

41:51a world where AI changes so much of our jobs so much of how we relate to each other so much of how we build together I think more and more about what's the fun world that emerges and it looks like us building together yeah I have a number of clients mostly in this sort of around about 30 to 50 property level and they're at that level when they're still wearing every hat except a few that they're discarding and now my job as a consultant is to help them to discard some of those hats and to move them to whether it's delegation or pushing it off to a third party but the fourth one to me is what can you build what can you build or what can we build together that will take this burden off you that will allow you to go into that next stage of growth and that to me is just the awesome thing I have a client who is we're just coming to the end of our engagement and I did say this to him which seemed to be odd but it reminded me of during COVID I had my grandchildren come

42:51stay with me because both my son and daughter-in-law were first responders so they had to stay in Toronto and do all that stuff I had my grandchildren for six weeks with them not knowing when they were going to see their parents again but I had the pleasure of one of them the three four-year-old I think she was at the time learning to ride a bike and we practiced up and down the road and she went from being quite happy with the little stabilizers to beginning to lift them up a little bit and letting her have a little go without the stabilizers until it tipped over until the day we'd take the stabilizers off and she went and suddenly realized she was on her own and that it was a long time it had been a long time since I'd seen a child. You're in freedom. Yeah that's amazing. And that's what I said to my client I said seeing you go from I just mess about a bit with chat GBT to now building dashboards on Claude and bringing in all his pricing and the stuff he's getting from Intellihost and other

43:55platforms. Yeah. And doing his month end owner reports. Yeah. There are these elegant looking documents that is bringing him more owners because these owners are saying look at what I'm getting each month. And that's amazing. That to me training wheels were off. He's often running. He's off independent and I know he's learning more every day. It doesn't need me anymore. And that's what I see happening over and over again now when people are going to come back to courage and confidence, getting the courage and the confidence to get off and do it because anyone can. Yep. 100%. I've loved this conversation. Really. He's true. He enjoyed it. We will. Are you going to Barcelona again? I'm not as of now. Oh, I know. I should now that I know you're launching there. That's amazing. What what makes you get there? I will say this I'm going to be back in Europe for something fun. Hackathoni in early next year and I've got a bunch of conferences

44:58and a daughter coming in a little bit. So I'm like balancing balancing a few things. Oh, so yeah, I wish I was, but I will not be in person. All right. Miss you. I'll look around that corner and think I know right. Yeah. I remember. Andrew has been an absolute pleasure having you on. Thank you so much for sharing how that hackathon went. Look forward to being a part of the next one. Looking forward to that. That will be really awesome. So if anybody wants to learn more about wheelhouse and what you do, where should they go? How should they find you? Oh, use wheelhouse.com's our website. We post a lot on LinkedIn mostly. And if you like AI stuff and you want to talk, just write me on LinkedIn or email me. I'm Andrew at Use Wheelhouse. And especially if you're building on going to try to get back to you really quickly. Yeah, I'm probably going to do that. Please. I have run up against an issue that is causing me some challenges. Yeah, it's all to do with super bass and over the top of my head. I know a bunch of folks who

46:01can help. Yeah, that would be fantastic. I think we'll be in touch. Please. Thank you so much for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Heather. Thank you, Andrew, so much. That was such a great conversation. I think you probably got the excitement that emanates from both of us when we're talking about apps and AI in general. And I make no excuse and no apology for that. It's sort of the thing that gets me up in the morning these days, like short term rental to use to. But there's one line from Andrew that I keep coming back to. He said the barrier to building isn't the technology anymore. It's permission is giving us self permission to stop doing what you normally do and decide that today is build day. And I think he's right about that. And I think it's the part that a lot of us get stuck on. It's far more than the tools that are out there. But the other thing I resonated with was what he

47:06said about knowing the problem. For as long as software has been built, the person who understood the customer that has had to hand that understanding over to someone else. And I hope that it somehow survived the journey along the way and you got the message across that gaps closed now. Because if you can describe a problem clearly and property managers can describe their problems better than almost anybody, you're much closer to solving it than you think you are. Jonathan, who's a full-time property manager who won the hackathon against people who are out there building software for a living is pretty good evidence of that. Which brings me back to where I started this episode. I mentioned at the top of the show that I spent the summer building and I want to say a little more about that because I've reached the point where I'm genuinely pleased. So I say excited. What's come out of it? There's five apps. In fact, there's 15 of them. But I'm the proudest of these five. They're built for property managers running somewhere between five

48:08and 50 properties and it's for the people who are still wearing most of the hats and who can't justify per property pricing on a large platform just to get that one feature they actually need. Every one of them came out with something I found tedious of frustrating in my own company. None of them is anything clever with your pricing. But these ones take small burdens off your plate and these small burdens just add up. And the collection is called STR tool wise and it launches in October at ScaleFest in Barcelona. So between now and the end of September I'm looking for beta testers. That means actually going out you get the apps you use them properly in your real business with real properties and real owners and then you tell me honestly what works and what doesn't. And if something about them irritates you that's exactly what I want to hear. And that's the whole reason for testing them. So if you'd like to be a part of that email me that head the vacation rental formula dot com and I'll get you set up. I have to have this done by the end of September.

49:12So if you're listening to this as we get into October we've probably done the beta testing. But you still can get in at our early bird pricing when we kick off in Barcelona in October. So I'm going to have a lot more to say about this as we get closer to ScaleFest. But for now I'm simply enjoying the fact that the thing I've been quietly working on all summer is nearly ready for other people to get their hands on. So my thanks to Andrew for a conversation I've been wanting to have for about three years. If you want to reach him, Wheelhouse is at usewheelhouse.com and Andrew is very active on LinkedIn. And he also meant it when he said he'll reply quickly to anyone who's building something. So thank you for listening. I'll see you next week. It's been a pleasure as ever being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the show notes for the episode at vacation rental formula dot com. We'd love to hear from you and I look forward to being with you again next week.