[00:00:57] John: Good morning, Mateo. How are you?

[00:01:00] Mateo: Good, brother, good. How are you?

[00:01:02] John: Had a little bit different cadence with that one. I threw you off. I threw myself off. I’m sorry. I, I’ll work on that.

[00:01:09] Mateo: No new friends, no new tricks, man. Come on.

[00:01:12] John: I know. I know. We’re recording right before the holidays. I want to get some insights from DARM because our our guest today was an attendee at DARM. So I definitely want to get some, high level insights on DARM as well.

[00:01:23] John: But excited to be

[00:01:24] Mateo: conference. Yeah.

[00:01:25] John: Yeah. Yeah. I, we were talking before we recorded, I definitely have a little bit of FOMO. I’m not going to miss next year. I’m disappointed that I didn’t prioritize that show. So I’ll be back. And attacking next year. But let’s get into it. I’m excited.

[00:01:42] John: I’ll let you go ahead and introduce our guest.

[00:01:45] Mateo: We are lucky today, man, to have a friend and a former Rented colleague, Katha alum in, one of the, Great minds of this industry. John, I talk about, being blessed to come into the industry during the time that we came in and to meet the people to meet the people that we’ve met and to build relationships that we’ve met and our guest today is just bringing that around full circle.

[00:02:12] Mateo: I met our guest while I was at Rented through a mutual connection, of course, Cliff, shout out to Cliff and for me. Having him here on today is like full circle because we’ve always stayed connected. And this guy, like he had me at my tennis shoes. I’m a Portland kid.

[00:02:31] Mateo: I’m a sneaker guy. I’m a Nike guy. Like you were not going to see other shoes on my feet. And, I remember the day I was sitting in my office, there was somebody new in the office and I had stepped out and he had mentioned something about my shoes and I was like, okay, all right, this guy, Portland guy, we had a conversation.

[00:02:48] Mateo: Long story short, Nick Mote and I have been keeping in touch ever since. He’s still in Portland, just saw him a couple weeks ago. We went on a great walk, had a great conversation. And. It’s these moments, it’s a pleasure to have these moments and have these people on our show the people that we know who are pioneering in our space, the brains that we respect in our space.

[00:03:08] Mateo: And I think, to give Nick his flowers now, man, and to give him his props he is You know, his thought process in his brain and where he’s going with technology and bringing the full package to the table. It’s one of the most underrated out there. So Nick, welcome to the show. Super excited to have you on and can’t wait to dig into this conversation, brother.

[00:03:28] Mateo: Thanks for getting on with us.

[00:03:30] Nick: Hey, man, I appreciate that intro. That was, that’s great. One thing I love about this space is the people and the people I’ve met and the people I’ve, stayed in touch with and, some of my good friends and my wife and I are friend groups or, from the space and, we work together and, continue to hang out and spend time together.

[00:03:49] Nick: And that’s one thing that I really love about this industry is the people more than anything.

[00:03:55] Mateo: Yeah, man,

[00:03:55] John: that’s why we’re, that’s why we’re all here, right? We all stumble in one way or another, you from Nike and we’ll dig into that, and definitely excited to hear your story. For those of you who are listening, we introduced Nick he’s the the CEO founder of Automate and JetML so we’re excited to get there.

[00:04:13] John: to where he is today. Talk about coming into the space, talk about that transition from I guess I don’t even talk about the transition. Talk about, early on in, in your career and what it means to be, transitioned from then to Rented.

[00:04:28] Nick: Yeah, okay, so maybe I’ll go back a little bit to Explain a little bit more background of how I got in here because it’s been a very long winding path

[00:04:37] John: Please.

[00:04:38] Nick: Yeah, so I Love, computers and tech I always have since you know I was a kid in middle school like always, you know playing around. I didn’t know what that would turn into When I went to school after high school I decided to go to school for business and marketing instead of computer tech and I thought that would be a good idea for some reason and that I would, maybe be able to start my own business one day and know how to, market my stuff.

[00:05:05] Nick: And I was thinking back then that I’m already doing, computer science stuff, in my free time and self learning and stuff. And I knew that I wasn’t going to get out of that and I didn’t need to go to school for it necessarily. And so after school, during the recession it was terrible timing to get out of school with a marketing degree, in my opinion, especially where I was living in eastern Washington state at the time.

[00:05:29] Nick: And took the first marketing job I could get. I was working for a company called Tree Top, which is they’re a national brand. They’re in every Starbucks, every Chipotle have apple juice products. But they also put fruit products in. All kinds of products that you see on the grocery store.

[00:05:48] Nick: They’re all over just one of these names that you don’t know that you’re, consuming fruit products by this company, but yeah. Privileged to work there for almost five years doing marketing helping our sales teams, do a better job And

[00:06:03] John: the help. Sales teams can.

[00:06:05] Mateo: always.

[00:06:06] Nick: yeah, it’s definitely like a sales driven organization for, I was in food service specifically, so I was building out marketing campaigns and also, just controlling, the products that we put out.

[00:06:18] Nick: So cut my teeth in product marketing back then with physical products applesauce pouches and juice boxes and stuff like that.

[00:06:28] John: Is this because of Washington, like all the orchards and stuff up there, is this why that TreeTop is where it is and how it became?

[00:06:35] Nick: totally, yeah. It was founded in the 60s. They actually used to throw away all the old apples. If it wasn’t grocery store quality, they would just throw it away. Just mounds of apples in landfills. And the founder of TreeTop actually. His innovation was using those apples to turn them into apple juice and clarifying it and turning it into the world’s best apple juice back then.

[00:06:56] Nick: And so it was an old company, old school owned by farmers. It was actually a farmer co op. But really interesting, experience that taught me, a lot about just working with people but also, product marketing and stuff. But at the same time, I was going to school and working for these guys.

[00:07:14] Nick: I was always doing some sort of startup on the side, some web app, SaaS company. So I had several that, I had either a co founder I worked with or, started it by myself and had it out there. No, no big successes, but lots of learning. And then I came I really wanted to move to Portland where my family moved at the time.

[00:07:36] Nick: And I came down here and restarted my career from scratch almost. I ended up working at a SEO agency that did search engine optimization. And I was I had 50 clients. That was helping, rank their websites for and I started just automating a lot of the work I was doing with internal tools and then giving those tools to my coworkers that were doing the same work.

[00:08:01] Nick: And so really started automating as much as we could and built these really nice SEO products internally. Like my opinion, they’re very like. Nice user interfaces and stuff. I, I put love into it, even though it was a product that wasn’t being seen and that wasn’t necessarily what I got hired for.

[00:08:21] Nick: But and then around that time, I had got a call from a recruiter from a local company named Vacasa, which I had never heard of, and I was like, this is a scam, totally, I was like, I don’t know who these guys are.

[00:08:36] John: It’s just nobody’s.

[00:08:37] Nick: but like the salary range and stuff that they were talking about, I was like like I’ll go talk to you guys and see who you are.

[00:08:43] Nick: And I had sat down with their Chief Revenue Officer back then Scott Breon, and had just an awesome conversation with them about what they were working on, what I had been working on shared with them some of the projects they had built before and they were showing, showing me what they were working on, and, they were building all of their tools internally at the time, which was a huge feat but they were using PHP, the same language that I was using.

[00:09:11] Nick: And when I was showing him what I was working on, he’s Oh my God. Like you should see, the interfaces that we have you could help us out a lot. And like I said, a really good conversation, and it turned into this job offer that I couldn’t really refuse. They offered me to be their innovation manager at the time, which I don’t know,

[00:09:30] Mateo: cool ass title too.

[00:09:32] Nick: it was so cool.

[00:09:33] Nick: In hindsight, I probably should have went for more of an engineering role if I was gonna keep on that track. But it was a really cool position that they carved out for me to help them solve. Problems that were preventing them from scaling back then. And this was 2015, and so it was pre funding for them, but one of their first m major roles that they were hiring for they had, already had a tech team and they already had the site going and stuff but this

[00:10:05] John: Nick for context for the show, let’s, thinking back that time, we know now the VCASA is, 35, units. How many units approximately in 2015, 2016 did, was VCASA managing at that time?

[00:10:18] Nick: I’m probably gonna get wrong, but I feel like it was like a thousand, somewhere around there It wasn’t nowhere near, where they are now. And one of the problems that they really wanted help with was scaling their revenue management back then. They were going into all these new, states and cities, and wanted to have the best rates when they showed up.

[00:10:41] Nick: And without having You know, and an analyst that had experience in that city. How do we know that we’re putting out good rates and that we’re, getting the seasonality, cause when you would show it to a potential owner, they know their market. And so we had to have rates that, made sense from the get go and performed well.

[00:11:00] Nick: And that kind of got me on this long path into machine learning of. Back then it was just, people were buzzing about it, but it was a little different than it is now. But the promise back then was like, Oh, send your data to us and we’ll, black box model, predict whatever you need.

[00:11:18] Nick: And so experimented with that and came to the conclusion that that’s not possible, like it’s so much harder than that to get. A good, answer. And I, I feel like that’s really where I started learning machine learning back then. And experimenting and experimenting with different algorithms and ways of, taking our datasets that we had and turning it into good rate predictions.

[00:11:44] Nick: And around 2017 came up with an algorithm that I thought, performed really well made a lot of sense when we looked at. Existing markets and new markets it seemed to perform better than what an analyst could do by hand. And so that was this exciting time of hey, let’s productionalize this and get this out there.

[00:12:10] Nick: And that model was, from my understanding, the first 365 day daily pricing model that was out. It was back then called VRBO, didn’t have daily rates yet. They still had like time periods that you had to do rates. And so they adjusted their API to allow us to do 365 day rates back then. That was an inflection point of, Hey, like we, have a machine learning model, like it’s in production, it’s doing something.

[00:12:40] Nick: It’s making, back then millions of dollars worth of decisions. For pricing it was really exciting. And I was like, I want to stay in this space as much as I can. I don’t want to get out of machine learning from here. And several other projects at Vacasa, usually around like data, gathering this data, getting it cleaned at scale, getting these models running and then internal dashboard and stuff for revenue analysts to be able to.

[00:13:06] Nick: leverage these models. And the idea was let the model do all the initial decisions and then have the, analysts come back and clean it up so that we take a lot of the busy work out, but we still have that human in the loop to make sure that. Everything makes sense, the rates that are going out.

[00:13:26] Mateo: So when we’re talking about machine, we’re talking about machine learning and AI, right? How many years before

[00:13:32] Mateo: Commonplace, right? And you had a model that was working, right? And that wasn’t deployed. Was it because it was internal and it was the tools for the internal managers at Picasa that it was just kept enclosed?

[00:13:45] Mateo: Because that seems like that was a big thing. Even with the pricing tools that were out at the time, right? Everyone was trying to figure out where, how, or what was going to be the most effective way to do it. But you guys had a up and running algorithm that was working and nobody really knew about it.

[00:14:01] Mateo: Right? Outside of the people who are directly working with it, but that’s a big thing.

[00:14:05] John: I think, to expand on that, I think that, machine learning has always been here, obviously, right? Not always, when it evolved, it became here, but it wasn’t commonplace. It wasn’t common talked about. No one really talked about, machine learning, but it was been going on in the background for years.

[00:14:20] Nick: Yeah, at Vacasa, I think that was the first machine learning productionalized model that we had going. I think if you look at other industries finance has had machine learning algorithms predicting fraud. You think about email has had spam detection using machine learning models for years.

[00:14:40] Nick: It’s like we’ve had it and we’ve been using it as consumers. You might not have known or thought about too much about your

[00:14:47] John: It just wasn’t sexy back then, right? It’s sexy now to talk about it. And there’s always a, there’s always some sort of at a conference, there’s always, something talking about AI and machine learning now, because it’s the new hip thing. And it’s what dynamic pricing was, even though that was machine learning, but no one really talked about it as that, and it’s evolved.

[00:15:09] Nick: Yeah, I think about it as waves. I think we’ve had, waves of AI and machine learning and the waves keep getting bigger and more intense and the latest waves of chatGBT and stuff are bigger than what the last waves were and we’ve had, what they call AI winters where, AI will be.

[00:15:30] Nick: really popular in pop culture. And then they don’t, it doesn’t deliver on what people think it’s going to. And this is going back decades. And we’ve seen dips where, Oh yeah, it’s not that important because it’s not doing anything useful yet. But I don’t think we’ll see another AI winter.

[00:15:48] Nick: That’s my prediction. I think it’s, I think it’s here. It’s in pop culture, it’s in our culture and it’s being adopted by so many people for all kinds of things. I taught my mom how to use chat GPT, but my mom’s out there using it. So a little bit different. Yeah.

[00:16:05] Mateo: I think it’s because it’s expanded, right? In the areas in which it was traditionally being used, right? Like revenue management, but now it’s in marketing, now it’s in guest communications, I like the wave analogy, it’s the waves are going deeper into the land, right?

[00:16:17] Mateo: And it’s affecting more of the business now, whereas it was it’s moving out of just, oh, this is something that dev guys use to build tools to help run operations better. But now it’s actually ingrained into the hospitality experience. It’s in bots. It’s in, remote questioning. It’s in, every aspect of the business almost now, and continuously growing.

[00:16:37] Mateo: Which is super interesting, because it seems like that period of time it’s not like we’re talking about decades in between when this kind of started, and where we’re at today to whereas, sales teams are using it to engage in content, marketers are using and creating content, right?

[00:16:55] Mateo: For better or for worse, right? But they’re doing that as well. And, now it’s, it has to be a part of your business as a part of your sales cycle, your BD cycle, like every aspect of your business is affected by this machine learning and AI, and not in like the Terminator way that everyone’s afraid, like it’s going to come in and take over, but look how quickly it’s come in and ingrained itself from one aspect of the technology side of this business.

[00:17:20] Mateo: Through every other aspect of how STR is operating and growing. So it’s fascinating. So yeah, so it brought you to Rented, right? And you were working at Rented with the the AI tool on the revenue management side of the business, right?

[00:17:34] Mateo Bradford-Vazquez: hey, John. Let’s talk about one of the most frustrating challenges of hosting. Cleaning. Seriously. Hosting is hard enough. Why does cleaning have to be such a pain?

[00:17:44] John: SDR cleaning is not the same as residential, and you need someone who knows the difference. Plus cleaners have access to your property. You need to find people who are qualified and trustworthy.

[00:17:52] Mateo Bradford-Vazquez: Add to that, you need cleaners who don’t need to be micromanaged. Who has time to text schedules back and forth and try to confirm days and times? Especially when bookings change. And then, dealing with invoices, payments, and tax reporting.

[00:18:05] John: Turno has solved all of these challenges with this cleaning management software. Turno’s Cleaner Marketplace has over 55, 000 vetted short term rental cleaners, and they make finding a local cleaner super easy. You just enter some property and cleaning details, and cleaners start bidding.

[00:18:19] John: You can see things like competitive cleaner prices, business credentials, and reviews before you agree to work together. Plus, Marketplace cleaners are paid automatically once the job is completed. No more manual payment hassles.

[00:18:30] Mateo Bradford-Vazquez: When you sync Turno to your listing calendars, every turnover gets auto scheduled as bookings come in. And if anything changes, your cleaner is notified immediately. Plus, cleaners can see if it’s a same day turnover, so they know right away that time is critical.

[00:18:43] Mateo Bradford-Vazquez: And with tools like Photo Checklist, Inventory Management, Problem Reporting, and the Guest Checkout Review Prompt, Turno gives hosts real time eyes and ears on the ground, right from the cleaner to the host’s app.

[00:18:53] John: No bss. Listeners can get $150 Amazon gift card when they try Turno and its cleaner marketplace. New users can sign up at turno.com/noBS, search for a cleaner in your area, connect with one or more, and then complete a marketplace cleaning. Once you see how easy and simple cleaning management can be, you’ll love how much time and money you save, not to mention no more cleaning headaches. To learn more, go to turno.com/noBS and get started today.

[00:19:16] Nick: After Rented, I actually worked at Nike helping them out. So I had started JetML right afteVacasasa. I was like, Hey, what we just did was really hard and it was hard for some reasons that it shouldn’t be. And one of them was just to get the resources to try to get these models into production, had to go CTO level down to get permission and the resources granted.

[00:19:47] Nick: And Vacasa had, good data scientists at the time that for every project that they wanted to try to productionalize, they would have had to go through that and play almost like politics, to get the resources. And so The vision of JetML was, can we enable data scientists to do this type of work themselves?

[00:20:06] Nick: To be able to productionalize

[00:20:08] Mateo: Mm hmm.

[00:20:08] Nick: own work? Because these are the people that understand the data the best, they understand the models. Why would we not let them go run it and do things? It’d be funny if you had to get permission to use Excel if you’re, in accounting at a company, right?

[00:20:23] Nick: You’re just handcuffing some of your most talented people. And so that was the vision of JetML. And I started that in 2018, and that’s the same year that Google launched a product called Google CoLab, and Amazon launched a product called SageMaker. And if I would have known that these guys were going to come out with a very similar product, and subsidize it for everybody, I, no way I would have done JetML.

[00:20:49] Nick: But back then, I didn’t know. Started bootstrapping this, software product I made it like seven months, and then I ended up getting a call from a recruiter at Nike and they were working on a really interesting problem where they wanted, what they told me was a similar product to JetML internally.

[00:21:07] Nick: So they’re like, Oh, that’s cool. Let’s go see what’s going on. When I got there, they were like, no, we’re actually going to put you on another team. And this team has a priority project where we need to build machine learning models to predict. Shoe drops. So in the shoe industry or the Nike sneaker head culture, they do sneaker drops of their hottest shoes.

[00:21:32] Nick: And so they needed to know how many people were going to show up to wait in these digital lines. And I got placed on this team helping their very talented data science team productionalize these models, early models that they’re writing. Help them wrap it into an internal tool that the planners use so that they could plan how many shoes they wanted to produce usually like nine, 10 months ahead of time.

[00:22:02] Nick: So that, that was a really cool project to be able to work with world class team. A really interesting problem got me into sneakers, wasn’t into sneakers before and really cool experience. on the, the headquarter campus and it was a really neat experience. But I think sometimes I hear like entrepreneurship described as like a disease where like you’re just unhappy unless if you’re doing your own thing.

[00:22:31] Nick: And I feel that. And so I wanted to get back to, building my own things. But around that time, actually Cliff had left Vacasa and went with Rented. I was like, hey, what we built at Vacasa with these rate tools were great. And I think these property managers like out there could really use it.

[00:22:51] Nick: And so ended up partnering with Rented to help build a rate tool internally for him. And then broke ground on it. That’s where I met Mateo, some more great people. And we ended up or they ended up deciding that They’re going to make it business facing. And so that’s where ART came from their revenue management tool.

[00:23:17] Nick: And so helped them get that, built they brought on the new CTO, I ended up wanting to get back to JetML, so I spent more time on JetML after that and then not that long ago, ChatGPT and all these large language models started really coming out and I was like. Hey, this is disrupting like everything, including JetML, which was really good for, I’d say traditional machine learning.

[00:23:45] Nick: But this is now this new era of AI type models that are it’s a new branch, I’d say of AI and machine learning. And I was like, I’m going to just focus on this, go all in. I don’t know what it looks like yet. But let’s start building with it. Let’s. I wanted to try to adopt it in every aspect I could in my business.

[00:24:09] Nick: And I actually experimented with, could we use, this, I had early access to GPT 4, which is OpenAI’s, like their best model. And it was an experiment. Could I use this to build an app? And then the app I built was. Which later became Automate, but a tool that could write property descriptions.

[00:24:33] Nick: And my wife is a copywriter, I met her at Picasa. She’s written hundreds and hundreds of descriptions for properties. And so we were just playing around with it. And I was like, oh wow this can write good property descriptions. And again, it was just like A very organic experiment of, okay can we have the AI help write the full stack application, the front end, the back end, the infrastructure, and then use also itself as the model inside this tool to write these descriptions.

[00:25:09] Nick: And it was a fun experiment. It got, I’d say like 70 percent of the way to writing the app. And then I did the rest of the 30 percent to make it. And I put it out as a free tool actually, because I was like it’d be a cool way to attract maybe some, contract client work in the space.

[00:25:31] Nick: So it could help us get our name out there instead of paying for advertising. We could put out this free tool and, show off that, Hey, we do AI in the space and. And hopefully attract some clients. But then people started using that and, Hey build this out. This is good.

[00:25:48] Nick: So I’ve went back since and have redone quite a bit of it to. Bring it up to, my standard, but yeah. Put this tool out. It’s called Automate. You give it a URL for your Airbnb and we’ll automatically pull your listing in, pull your top 40 reviews and distill that into what makes your property uniquely great, and write you a really good description.

[00:26:17] Nick: Email it to you within a minute. And you can copy and paste it into

[00:26:22] John: So it’s so you’re pulling directly from do you have plans on like bringing in other right now you’re just pulling from Airbnb, right?

[00:26:31] Nick: Yep.

[00:26:31] John: Would you consider, or are you considering bringing in like a VRBO scrape as well and seeing what, melding those together?

[00:26:38] John: Are you looking at amenities and all those different pieces of the puzzle or is it just the reviews and the basic copy that was already there before?

[00:26:47] Nick: Yeah, good question. Right now it does take in all the amenities of the rental. It does include your current description, because I think that is a good way of capturing things that Airbnb is not going to know about your property. And then your question of, are we going to pull from Vrbo and other sources?

[00:27:07] Nick: Yes, that’s in the plan. I’d really like to even pull from Zillow, because I think that’d be a great way of it’s not a vacation rental yet, but it’s a property that we want to turn into a vacation rental. We can use some of that information from Zillow to, to help

[00:27:19] John: And there may or may not be another Breon that’s doing something in that space as well that you can go ahead and connect with.

[00:27:25] Nick: Haha, yeah, and then I think the outputs right now are geared toward how Airbnb has their listing descriptions, but I would, on the roadmap is a plan to add it for the other OTAs so that it’s more optimized for each OTA.

[00:27:46] John: Is this a paid now or is it still a free?

[00:27:49] Nick: So it’s paid now but we will let you have your first description to test the tool for free. When you show up and you give your email address you don’t have to pay for the first one. And so you get a full copy of exactly what the paid tool does. And so it’s just a credit based system that you pay per listing description that you want to generate with the tool.

[00:28:12] John: Do you feel that this is like looking at the time, for me, when I look at machine learning and I look at, AI in general and I use it every day. And I was slow to adopt be because I’m, or older. But I’m there, I’m doing my thing, but the main reason I use it is time.

[00:28:32] John: I can say I can multitask, I can get this done, this is kinda working in the background. Then I go and I put my John touches to it, right? Because I don’t. Anything that is 100 percent spits out to me, it’s doesn’t 100%, but it’s getting better. The more I, using the pro version and the more that I input my own data, I’m seeing it sound more and come across like me.

[00:28:54] John: But with that, what is the average time savings that you’re seeing per listing? For me, that’s the win, right? And, obviously you’re generating like a quality description and, so there’s lots of, and I don’t want to minimize it by saying that’s the only win because there’s so many different wins here.

[00:29:12] John: But for me, that’s the biggest one. It’s time. If I got a new listing, what are your thoughts in that?

[00:29:17] Nick: Yeah. I think what’s cool about the product is. It helps managers instantly get that description where before you might have, a freelance copywriter that you’re sending it out to, and maybe you’re sending like 10 description requests out. I’m waiting to get back. That might be a week or so, so that’s like a bottleneck to onboarding a unit.

[00:29:42] Nick: So being able to quickly turn around and get something on your listing and get that listing up faster, I think that’s a huge win. I think the costs are You know, usually like 10x better for what you would, usually pay, a freelance copywriter to write. But also I think the reality and what my wife and I talk about a lot is there’s people that are writing descriptions that don’t want to write descriptions.

[00:30:10] Nick: Like sometimes it’s the person in the field that’s taking on onboarding the listing. So maybe they are The salesperson that, talk to the homeowner and are bringing on the listing and they are just forced to write a description just to get it up. So I think the tool will help a lot of bad descriptions that would have been written people that don’t write for a living, like I don’t write for a living.

[00:30:36] Nick: I look at its output and I’m like, that’s way better than I would do.

[00:30:40] John: And they’re just going through the motions because it’s part of their job description. It’s Hey, listen you’re taking some photos you’re setting it, you’re going along and you’re setting up this listing. And now this is your new job. You’re also part of the reservations team or whatever.

[00:30:51] John: And you’re, Hey, by the way we’re onboarding this new unit. Make sure you write this description up and going through the motions like And, the data that comes out of that is, we’ve learned through years of looking at this is, what converts and in a world where there’s so much inventory, how do you differentiate your property and your listing from the others that are the same McMansion or the same whatever on your street with the same bedrooms and the same, everything’s the same. A big shining star is a quality description and a quality subject in a, in the title, it makes a ton of sense.

[00:31:31] Mateo: I think it’s interesting, too, though. It broadens your pool of who you can work with, too, right? Because at the end of the day, if I’m an up and coming person that I have ten properties that I’m managing on top of everything else as I’m growing, that’s one less thing I have to worry about. It’s something that I can be, it can be done quickly.

[00:31:47] Mateo: Whether I’m an investor, whether I’m a host, co host, property manager, whatever. You can use this tool to get up and running, and I think the biggest thing is time. And knowledge and know how, right? Like it’s, you’re taking all of those things that, people who are starting in this industry or, wish that they could do better in this industry without having the resources to go out and hire a copywriter if they can’t afford it, or, even knowing.

[00:32:15] Mateo: What to say if they’re going to do it in and of themselves. You could be the best writer in the world, but you’re not. If you’re writing essays for a living and you’re trying to write a property description, unless you know what to put in there, what to put in, what people are looking for, it will be the most beautifully worded, unread.

[00:32:31] Mateo: Property description out there, right? It’s a science to this, right? At the end of the day, and what I’m fascinated is about is, to me, this is a, this is an equalizing tool, right? This is something that anyone can engage with and use at any size or scope for whatever reason you need it to be.

[00:32:48] Mateo: Whether it’s a business owner who wants their time, whether it’s someone that needs the expertise, something in the middle. It’s interesting. I think I’m excited to see how this is adopted and how this is used, but to me it’s an equalizer.

[00:33:01] Nick: Yeah. It seems everyone needs to put these descriptions up. Everyone’s on Airbnb. Everyone’s on VRBO. Most, property managers are so they all have the same problem and they’re problem aware that they know that they need to get a description. And their current solution is, write myself or hire someone else.

[00:33:20] Nick: And so we’re a new solution, to, to that same problem that everyone has. And so I, I’m hoping that people like realize that. Hey, we’re, we made a solution out there and that there, there’s these other solutions to the same problem that everyone has and some of those problems that you have often because you, if you’re onboarding new homes, even if you have churn, some homes leaving and some new homes coming on, like you’re constantly having to bring on these new homes.

[00:33:49] Nick: And so it’s not a problem that they have to solve once they got to keep doing it. And

[00:33:55] John: Yeah. It’s not a one and done thing. It’s an all the time, if any. Any property management company of any girth at all is, onboarding a minimum of five to ten units a month in that, even if, you’re a hundred units, you’re adding five, you’re adding ten you’re losing five there’s a constant ebb and flow of homeowners and properties and units that are changing hands and, and maybe you’ve acquired this homeowner from another company and you need, they might have an okay description, but you want to go ahead and spiff that up and you want to make it different and you want to put your, just if all of your properties have the, you want to have a comparable tone, right?

[00:34:35] John: To, to who you are as a company, as a property manager company. I have a question for you, Nick. Have you gone ahead or are in the works to get like case studies like conversions based on, Hey, previously, we’re seeing an uptake in conversions using using AutoMate, do you have any data behind that yet?

[00:34:56] Nick: Not yet. We’re still pretty early on getting it out there. It’s something that I’d love to, work with a property manager and do some tests with them. I think there’s a opportunity to show that the tool converts better. That’s what, a lot of property managers would love to see of.

[00:35:14] Nick: Yes. AI is better at pulling out all these amenities and making sure that the, it’s represented in a way that. Converts well I think about it as, I think the tool is so super useful just being able to get. A good description out there. And by our definition of, a good description I think that there’s just a couple opportunities I see where a lot of managers have bad descriptions out there already. And when I was at DARM, I saw, people were using it and I saw a description come through that had, ‘ cause we do an analysis in the email that we send too, of here’s what you’re doing good and here’s where you can improve.

[00:35:56] Nick: And, and one of the improvements, suggestions was like, Hey, you have verbatim the same paragraph twice in your description.

[00:36:03] Nick: And I’m like, no way. I’m like, nah, so I like click on the Airbnb link. Sure enough, they got the exact paragraph twice in their description. And so I just think about all these bad descriptions out there and these managers that probably know that they could be improved. Maybe they wrote it once, quickly wrote it.

[00:36:22] Nick: Maybe the amenities have changed since they wrote it two years ago and they know that they need to redo it. And that’s one that really I think exciting parts of it is right now it’s so tedious slash expensive to get the descriptions up that they’ll do it once and they’ll leave it where it’s like, God, this is the best piece of real estate to advertise your property.

[00:36:46] Nick: And if you just. Half ass it and leave it what a missed opportunity. And I think that what’s neat and what I hope we can do with this tool is make it easy for managers to not only rewrite bad descriptions, but to continually Write descriptions throughout the year for their property.

[00:37:06] Nick: What are the events coming to town that we could highlight right now with this booking window?

[00:37:10] John: Based on seasonalities.

[00:37:12] Mateo: Yep, that’s where I was going with it, like the reuse cases for it

[00:37:15] John: Are you looking at, building APIs into to push button instead of, I don’t know how you currently, like it writes it and then I’m, my assumption is it’s a copy paste, but maybe this is a terrible assumption. That into Airbnb, are you looking at building like into either, PMS with certain, large players say, Hey, great, boom, done.

[00:37:34] John: Because the PMS will then push you to the distribution channels or are you, or is it still. Is that on, not on the horizon

[00:37:42] Nick: great question. I think one of the things is, the property managers I think are all very interested in AI, but hesitant to adopt it, and part of it’s just Integrating and how do we have this like expertise in house to be able to leverage this? And so I think one thing that’s really cool about the tool right now is that there is no integration.

[00:38:03] Nick: You, all you need is the URL for the Airbnb, whether you own it or not. So it could, you could also use it to acquire new homeowners. Or, to show potential homeowners but anyone in the company could adopt it. They don’t need to have the keys to the Airbnb, integration to do it. Right now it will email it to whatever email address you put in.

[00:38:26] Nick: So I like that because it lets anyone in the company adopt it and to show, other people in the company what it can do. There is an API right now that powers it. And if any large. Property manager or PMS software wants to, integrate with us. It’s there to do that scale.

[00:38:46] Nick: And then I, on the roadmap of integrating with us integrating with the PMSs or a any other service like Airbnb I think that is down the road on the roadmap. I’m only, I’m the only engineer working on it, so I’ll, I gotta pick my battles for what I’m gonna take on. But definitely something, very possible.

[00:39:08] Nick: At DARM. I was talking to a property manager that was like, have TRACK, integrate that. ’cause if you had it, I would just, I’d use it all day long TRACK. If you’re listening, hit me up. But yeah I think. It’s something that makes a ton of sense to me it can be a tool that, makes it easy for all these property managers to, to do good copy at scale.

[00:39:33] Nick: Going back to my point of, I think the opportunity is to do it multiple times a year to to keep your listing fresh, make sure that it’s, capturing all the current amenities and changes to the listing. And I’m really excited to start adding more like event data. So the managers bring in events that they’re not adding to the tool, but that the tool can surface and say, Hey, do you want to add?

[00:40:00] Nick: This, event that’s in your local area to your description for this time period. I see huge potential in it.

[00:40:07] John: Super smart. How do property managers that, or hosts or whoever that want to go ahead and use your tool, how do they go ahead and use it?

[00:40:15] Nick: Yeah. You can visit us at automatevacations. com. There’s a button for the listing optimizer. And again, you just have to put in your URL for your Airbnb and your email. And that’s how you start within a couple of minutes. You’ll get that description in your inbox. As you add more you can do it through the dashboard as well.

[00:40:37] Nick: So there’s there’s no password. It’s just an email link to get into your dashboard to keep adding more listings or to refresh existing descriptions. And again it will just email whatever email you have in there. Buy credits. So after your first listing, you

[00:40:55] John: First one’s for free.

[00:40:57] Nick: purchase ones

[00:40:57] Nick: for free.

[00:40:59] Mateo: Love

[00:40:59] John: First taste is free.

[00:41:01] Nick: Yeah, it’s no, everyone wants a trial, and I think, especially with AI, everyone is cautious about it and want to make sure that it does what it’s supposed to yeah, or have the first description for free already so that everyone can try it but then if you’re purchasing credits as well, we want to make sure that you like what you got, and so we’ll also guarantee that you like the description that came out of it, and if not, We’ll help you get that new one.

[00:41:29] Nick: Or if we can’t get you a description that you like, like I’ll refund you too. We’re just trying to make it easy to adopt and take out all the risk. So I think it’s like a, I like it, but it’s it’s a no risk kind of proposal, but. The reward could be, really high if we’re helping you get ranked better on the OTAs and helping you convert more guests and then also just saving you on writing this copy.

[00:41:57] Nick: It’s I think

[00:41:59] John: It seems like a no brainer, Nick. There, there’s so much, there’s so much AI out there and there’s so much that, you’re like, ah, do I really need that? Or it’s like, all right, is that really saving me time when I have to go back and do it? And this seems like an absolute no brainer, like along every corner here that you’re looking at, I like to look at things in with the devil’s advocate.

[00:42:19] John: Like really? Do I need? No. No. And when I

[00:42:21] John: try to put that down.

[00:42:22] Mateo: is created equal, either. People are just throwing AI around with automated tools alright people are supposed to just adopt it and be like, oh man, AI’s gonna save it. Oh, thank God. And not realizing that You gotta, how do you interact with it? How do you get the value out of it, right?

[00:42:38] Mateo: And I think with tools like this, it’s like expanding on it in ways that as we’re going to continue to see and we see the trending into other areas of your business. But also, I think we have to get out of this mentality that AI is just going to solve everything by itself, right? It’s how you engage with AI.

[00:42:55] Mateo: It’s how you engage AI in your business. It’s your understanding, like people have to stop taking the responsibility away from themselves and throwing it on the machine learning and the machine tools because it still requires a human dynamic at some point in which your mindset is going to determine how good that tool is for you or your business.

[00:43:14] Mateo: It’s your mindset also that goes in. To how you use these tools. And if you’re using the tools available to actually be a benefit or you’re just throwing a workload on them and saying, Oh, I just don’t want to do whatever comes, how many chat GPT written letters have we looked at and been like, what the hell were you, so

[00:43:34] John: posts. And I’m like, oh, come on.

[00:43:37] Mateo: I think that’s a huge part of it too, and

[00:43:39] Mateo: A A broader discussion for another day, but I think that part is, the AI is one part, but it’s our mentality and how we engage and use it that is going to determine, our experiences with it, really, at the end of the day.

[00:43:53] John: I 100 percent agree. The the amount of Chrome extension, AI Chrome extensions that I’ve added. And I’m like, Oh, this would be great. And I’ll go ahead and try it. I’m like, I don’t know. And then I’ll try it again. I’m like no, this isn’t, this is just more bullshit. And so I, get rid of it.

[00:44:10] John: I 100 percent see this AutoMatevacations. Com as,

[00:44:15] Mateo: Links in the description below.

[00:44:17] John: yeah, absolutely as something fantastic. Nick, tell us before we get out of here today, is there anything you’d like to leave our listening audience with?

[00:44:26] Nick: Yeah. I think we’re all in the hospitality industry and I think the question is, what do we. automate, and what shouldn’t we automate, and how do we keep, good hospitality and I think if we could all just chew on, how do we use this tech to elevate our, the hospitality that we give the guests I think is the challenge that, I’m trying to chew on but I challenge, the listeners to, of we don’t want to automate all the good things out of our industry that we do.

[00:44:59] Nick: But how do we use it to enable people to do a better job? And so I’m hoping that, our future features that we come out with or products live up to that, that help property managers and people in our space. Elevate the guest experience. And so that’s what I’d like to see, in the next couple of years.

[00:45:22] Nick: I think AI and all these tools can help do that. And they could also not help do that. And so I’d really again, challenge the listeners to, to try to lean toward, what’s that path that, helps the guest at the end of the day.

[00:45:38] John: Yeah, great points. Thanks.

[00:45:39] Mateo: on like where these things go moving forward. So looking forward to our next coffee and walk and chat in Portland, man.

[00:45:46] Nick: Yeah, definitely.

[00:45:47] John: Thanks so much for joining us, Nick. This has been great.

[00:45:50] Nick: Yeah. Awesome.