EP. 04 - Grokbot for the Whole Team, Agents That Buy Stuff, and the End of OTA Search?

JJ: This week we've got Nadeem

Trevor: You

JJ: joining us. Nadeem, give us a quick intro.

Nadim: What's up? Yo, everyone, I'm so stoked to be here. My name is Nadim Tenous. I'm a co-founder and CTO of Traverse Hospitality. Traverse is, we're a vacation rental manager in Colorado. we manage over 200 homes. been doing it for like 11 years now. Started as a side hustle and then went full time a few years back. It's been super fun. I love being in the space. And I love being part of this group and you know, which is like very AI forward. Stoked to talk about that.

JJ: Yeah, we're happy to have you. so last week We're talking about personal AI agents and and how everybody's using them. I don't want to spend the whole episode talking about that again. However, I rolled out grok bot last week on our sales team and built a team grokbot that our sales team can use. And I know some of you guys are also using grok as part of your team process. So Nadem, why don't you talk about how it's been rolling that out to your team and how it's been teaching your team, both like technical and non-technical team members on how to use it.

Nadim: Yeah, totally. yeah, so I guess I'll talk about I've been like using AI tools since like really at the beginning of this year. So I guess now it's been eleven months. And I started with, you know, GBT in the beginning, then Claude, and then learning Claude Code, which has been like super fun. And I think that's when you kind of get more technical with all this stuff. And then Grok comes out, and I think what I really love about it is the way that it's like agentic. And very simple in its UI UX. And I was like when I started playing with that, I was like, this is how it should have been this whole time, right?

It's

Trevor: Mm-hmm.

Nadim: like this is the tool that now everyone can use and interact with. And it doesn't overcomplicate what you

Trevor: Hmm.

Nadim: know model am I using? Like, why do I have to be in cowork and co and cloud code and in a chat? And those things have to be separate. And so What we started doing was training our team on it because we found how much value it's bringing to everyone every day. I was just literally just showing I my team like how I now just respond to emails and I don't have to do any like background research on stuff that I need to like dig through my entire drive folder for, you know, and just kind of like connecting very basic things, your email, your s your Slack channel, your drive folders.

what else do we connect? like HubSpot. Like it's great for all like I'm sure this is what you're doing, JJ, with your sales guys, is like connecting HubSpot and then you just have like context of all the conversation. You can dig through contracts, you can have it remind you and have it all be like centralized in a neater way. with my team, what I had them do is just download Grok and I had them try kind of think about what are the different bots that you want? Or rather, and the way to think about it for me is like, what's the team that I want to interact with?

And so, you know, as co-founder, like I think about it differently. Like I have like my CTO, which is like my technical bot. I have like my CMO, whenever I do like marketing stuff, I have hit that bot, them. I have them do like

Trevor: You

Nadim: pull Google Analytics reports and things like that, or branding things. And then I have like my COO, which is like everything operational, my general counsel for any like legal stuff. and I think it's important

Trevor: Mm.

Nadim: to actually like separate your team in bots

Trevor: Hmm.

Nadim: because you want to give them very specific skills. And anyone who's listening to this and you're like, wait, this is way over my head. It's so complicated. Trust me, it's not because Grok simplifies it so much. And what you can do is you have your main like bot and you'll see it it's the first thing you do when you interact. And you just tell it, hey, create me like my team. And here's what I want my team to do. And create instructions for that bot so that it sticks to its lane and does it that very specific task. Just start there. And then the second question I had for my team was what's the biggest problem That you're trying to solve day to day, or what takes up a ton of your time?

What are you trying to figure out? is it like you take a bunch of spreadsheets and you have to send reports once a month to the HOA to report resort fees? You know what I mean? is it responding to like vendors, you know, or combing through contracts and consolidating them? Whatever it is, think about write down what is it is that you're doing every day that takes up your time. And then think who can I assign that to in my bot team? And then start playing around with it and just have it do it. And because it's all connected, then you'll see like how amazing of a of a time saver it is.

So that's in

Trevor: Yeah.

Nadim: a nutshell what I've been doing with my team.

Trevor: Yeah, that I feel like you literally, I could not have explained that whole thing better myself. Like that was an extremely good rundown of Grokbot and how to utilize it in your business. think we had an interesting journey with that because just like you, like Claude code was our first big thing and then Claude code slash Codex. And I still like most of the work I do is through, through Claude code and, and Codex, but, I think. we, as soon as I got on board and Hayden got on board, was like, on our team has to use cloud code. Like that's like a non-negotiable.

Everyone has to do it. But I think, you know, there's a lot of more complications with that of like walking around with your, laptop open or like connecting your hotspots as you're driving. So it keeps working and things like that. Now I've set up, you know, like my local machine at home to combat that and whatnot. But I think, how intuitive Grokbot is, is so much stickier for your team to actually. want to continue using. and I think the multi-agent orchestration, like you're talking about is huge and dividing up those skills because I think it can get really overwhelming trying to just dump everything into one, but having it split out into different bots, right?

I have one that purely watches stripe and anytime we get a dispute, it goes and files a dispute for, or a, or anytime we get a chargeback, it goes and files a dispute for that chargeback. And it owns that fully, but then I just interact with my main COO Grokbot and it does all that for me. So over the past week or so I've actually, I've moved most of my agent stuff I'd say to Grokbot. I'm barely even using, I haven't opened Muse in two weeks. Instinct, I'll still use it it's nice with group chat, but if there was an iMessage, if my Grokbot had a phone number and I could message it on my phone, I don't think I'd use instinct anymore.

I would just use Grokbot and have it. everything in one place.

JJ: I think another huge unlock that I learned with Grokbot this week is the team Grokbot. And what I did with that was I basically trained it. I told it which MCPs I wanted as part of it. And then I said, I'm going to send this to somebody who's very non-technical. So when they join, you have to talk to them and teach them. the steps that they need to do. And it went through

Trevor: Mm-hmm.

JJ: and it said, okay, first connect your Google Drive. Okay, great. Now just log in. We we're using an a custom MCP. Just log in using that. He didn't have to go set up the MCP or anything like that. It just prompted him to log in. And then he asked me what I should do next. how do I use this? And I say, ask Rock what it can do for you. And then it just listed out the

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: things like, I can update and this is specific to sales. So it said I could update you know, a contact. I could send an email on your behalf. I can do research on which leads to contact next, like things like that. And I think that's the biggest thing is really dumbing it down, especially for non-technical team members, to where it's not overwhelming of trying to set all of these things up and it just kind of takes them step by step. So I really love that about the team grockbot is that I, as the admin, could tell it exactly what to do once you invite a new team member to it.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, w my sales guy is

Trevor: I'm ge-

Nadim: JJ, I thought you were gonna say I thought you meant using chat rooms within your bots and have them interact with each other as like a team. Cause

Trevor: huh.

Nadim: that was my big unlock was like, my God, I can set up like a board member team whatever, like a

Trevor: Yeah...

Nadim: team meeting.

JJ: I haven't I haven't done that yet. But this is this is the shared bot where

Nadim: It's it's wild.

Jack Zoppa: A council council of the parts.

JJ: you can you can train it to where all of your team members have that bot that you already trained and they have that version of it. So that way you can tell it which MCPs to use, which like what knowledge to share, that kind of stuff.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, we have

Nadim: Cool.

Jack Zoppa: my sales guy No. My sales guy has a

Trevor: Do you need a different sub for that?

JJ: Nope, it's on the it's on the regular business sub.

Jack Zoppa: on our shared GrockBot I have I have one that I made that so all of our leads for sales, homeowner sales go into a Slack channel. and it like has the outcome of every event. You know, everything's UTM tracked, really detailed and it's like here's a landing page it came from, whatever. So we this week we have a team bot now that every single lead that comes in, the team bot comes behind it and it does like pretty like I show this to Michael, like pretty extensive research on these leads. I've tried stuff like this before, but it's never been this good to where like, yeah, the person will drop the address or whatever, it'll like the GrockBot'll drop their Airbnb profiles, it'll tell what their reviews are.

If it ha if they had any big review changes, it'll find like County records, everything. it's pretty sick. And then the it'll also see like 'cause we run a significant amount of like different landing pages, right? And it'll be like, this was the creative that they clicked on meta. So like they're probably a self-manager, and like here's the kind of the direction you could take this. it's pretty incredible. Like, yeah, the team bots like pretty sick because you can they can operate in Slack too. and so they can Yeah, we ha we have one that does just software development and scoping for tickets, right?

And it's like pretty incredible to be able to use it for that.

JJ: Groc's really good at person research too. I was actually messing with it this morning. There's a condo building, and we're trying to get in as the on-site manager for the condo building. And so I had it do research on who is the HOA manager, what unit do they own, what's their contact information, all of that stuff. And it had no issues whatsoever looking up all of that and then not only doing that, but also preparing a guide on what do you think that we can offer that the current manager is not offering, right? Like what's our in. And it so it did went through all of the reviews of that condo building as a whole and reviewed their rates and all of that stuff.

And it's like, okay, actually they have really good reviews, so don't knock them on reviews and service because you like that's not gonna be a pain point. However, they're fully booked in high season and they have no bookings in the off season. So like maybe you can get in with like the revenue management play. So just having that where I said, Hey, I want to manage this condo, tell me what to do, and it just finds all of that information and who to talk to is is a huge unlock.

Trevor: Yeah, it's also really good on a more personal use buying things. like instinct would not log into Amazon. It like wouldn't work and

Jack Zoppa: Mm-hmm.

Trevor: mine's logged into my Amazon. It has made orders for me. I will ask it to go order stuff. It ordered my entire Linux car on Newegg for me and tracks it and created its own email, which I don't think we've talked about that yet. Create, create your own email for your Grock bot and have it put its email on a bunch of stuff. So it's just getting stuff automatically and tracking it. huge on block.

JJ: What are you using for the email?

Trevor: They, Grokbot has its own built in email. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, it's like mail.grokbot.whatever. yeah, same thing for

JJ: gotcha. Okay.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah. We have one for our coding bot. Doc Yeah. You make his own accounts.

Nadim: okay.

JJ: Mm-hmm.

Trevor: our code. It is connected to Sentry. gets everything. It has its own, you know, linear. Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: It has its own linear its own linear

Nadim: Have you had it make phone calls for you yet?

Jack Zoppa: account and it has its own superbase. I I have my Muse.

Trevor: I haven't, but I tried using Muse for that and it didn't work. I don't know if I like didn't have access.

Jack Zoppa: I got I got I got early access to it. I had I was trying to fix my internet and I was having it do it and then I was on a meeting and I got a phone call on my phone from Meta and I was like, What is this? So I answered it and it was like, Hey, I'm your muse. I'm talking to like an ATT rep right now. Here's what I've told them, here's what they need from you. I was like, What

Trevor: That's crazy.

Michael: That's awesome.

Nadim: Whoa.

JJ: Wow, that's actually huge because our guest

Michael: Yeah.

JJ: services team is calling Spectrum all the time for internet issues. So

Jack Zoppa: True.

JJ: that I wonder if that could work on the guest side of things, right? in conduit, guest reports a internet issue, fires a webhook over to Grok to call spectrum,

Trevor: yeah.

JJ: get it fixed. I love that.

Trevor: 100%. Speaking of conduit, you could

Nadim: Great use of time.

Trevor: also, instead of doing the like codex or

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: cloud code recurring learning thing, just have a crockpot be like, your one and only job is to get our automation rate to 99%. Watch every message that

Jack Zoppa: I have a bot for that.

Trevor: comes in and improve constantly until we're at that point, build a skill, build a tool, whatever you got to do.

Jack Zoppa: Alright, Trevor, after last week or two weeks ago, I think it was last week, you dropped the skill. It's on our site, on the all book site. If you want it, go get it. but I took it off of our website. I have a grokbot built. It does that plus analyzes all of the guest experience team's Slack interactions with AI, and then it makes recommendations and like builds the agents in the background to optimize them. It's just a grokbot that does it. It's pretty sick.

Trevor: Yeah, yeah. It's crazy.

Nadim: I had a really fun maintenance use for it. I came home and my fridge door was like broken. And I'm like, this is totally something that someone on the maintenance team could use. And you know how like it like auto latches when you like you close it. So the spring was broken and I just took a photo of it, of like the spring that was broken, and I took a photo of the fridge model and serial number and everything, and literally just instructed Grok to like figure out what's the best path forward to get this fixed. And then essentially in less than five minutes, it like sent me, it was like, the manufacturer's out of this product.

Here's the top three places to buy it. Here's what I recommend. You it was like, don't send someone to come fix it. You could do it yourself. It's just two screws that you undo. Here's the product. Do you want me to buy it for you? I was like, Yes. I was like, this is my first time testing

Trevor: Yeah.

Nadim: out, actually using it to buy shit for me, using my personal information. And I was like, I'm gonna just lean in. So I was like, Yeah. And then it was like, is this the right email? Is this the right address? And then it was like, here's a secure link to put in your credit card. So I put it in. And that process, like A to Z was maybe seven minutes. Whereas if I did that myself, it would have taken like at like an hour. Cause you know, I'm gonna be like super anal about like the products and researching and figuring it out. And that was just like, wow, like from a maintenance point of view, your team can be just so effective.

and it saved

Trevor: Mm-hmm.

Nadim: me a lot of time. and it was. I w originally I was expecting it to arrive in a week and it showed up the next day.

JJ: Nice. Trevor,

Trevor: damn.

JJ: you mentioned Amazon. I so I had my Grokba on Amazon for a while and then it got kicked off. When w so is it back? I haven't tested it in a coup maybe two weeks.

Trevor: Mine works well. mean, literally yesterday I was setting up this new Mac studio that I have and I was like, there's

Jack Zoppa: Flex.

Trevor: some stuff I needed to

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: like switch, switch screens. like in order for that to be my like main agent hub or like one of them, especially if you're using it for like, for computer use,

Jack Zoppa: Flex one of his ancient hubs. That's crazy. I've got five clusters in my house.

JJ: Ha ha ha. Mm-hmm.

Trevor: it has to think that the screen's on. So you have to buy a, like a, it's almost like a fake HDMI thing that you plug in and it tricks Mac OS into thinking that there is a screen connected

Michael: Explain.

Trevor: to it. But then I also wanted to be able to actually use the screen on my monitor over here or what I typically do because I use my MacBook for everything is I'll just plug in HDMI. So I was like, or find me all the stuff I need to like get that always on. But then also I want to have a clicker that I could just click. and switch between screens like when I'm plugged in with my MacBook. If I need to switch over and actually use the Mac Studio screen, I want to be able to do that and vice versa. It found everything, built the cart, did it all.

I literally just clicked pay. It has all my information. I've...

Jack Zoppa: Well they just shipped the new Grok shopping, right? Michael was just telling me about this, where I believe they have a new UI inside of Grok Ba for shopping, right, Michael?

Michael: Yeah, it's it's really slick. It's like the one that pops up for an email card of like, here's the draft, send. And it it was and it had

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what does it for Amazon too. Yeah.

Michael: the really. So it had the straight like Apple Pay just built in, which was super slick.

Trevor: Yeah, it breaks everything down.

Michael: I just had a hard time. I'm always such a I always try to make sure that like shipping, like I don't know. It's just I've noticed with my Muse or GrockBot agents. They wanna buy stuff off random sites directly and then you're paying for shipping and it's like

Jack Zoppa: Mm-hmm.

Michael: two weeks later. I'm like, Can you use my Walmart Plus or Amazon Prime or something like that? So if you can get around that, that's great.

JJ: Yeah, I feel that's just all training too. Cause I I just used Muse. Kind of Nadeem, same same to your point. I was like, let's just send it and see. Like I'll give it my information and and let it do shopping for me. So I am putting lights in the shelves behind me. And I've been putting it off because I was like, I have to research how many watts a strip light has and like the driver if it can support that many feet of lights and I was like, I don't want to do all this math and then all the research for it. So I just told I measured and told Muse, which by the way, measuring, I also just took a tape measure and then put it on voice mode and was like 53 inches, 65 inches, measured everything out and then it

Trevor: That's awesome.

JJ: it totaled it all. but then it I had it do the order and Michael, same thing. The first one came back like three random websites of stuff I've never heard of for these light electronics. And I was like, okay, let's not do that. Let's Let's use a known company, a trusted

Nadim: Trusted.

JJ: trusted website

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: and order it from the same place if you can. And so it put it all in one place. So I think it's just like training

Michael: Okay, f fun

Trevor: That's it.

JJ: it to do that.

Michael: fun spin

Trevor: Yeah.

Michael: on that. Do you think guests would feel the same way about their vacation rental popped up of here, I found this random website called Beachside VR, and they've got this great place that's rated super highly on their own site, but it's not through, you know,

JJ: Feel like it's

Michael: the same way we're complaining about it not being on Amazon Prime, like it's not on Airbnb. Do you see that as like

JJ: Yeah. I think it's like building trust on your own site to prove that you're

Nadim: Yeah.

JJ: legit, throwing trust icons on there and having the reviews and stuff like that.

Michael: Okay, if the are the icons for humans to read, or what happens if eventually it pops up as a card in your grokbot of like

Jack Zoppa: It's the all

JJ: True. Yeah. And you're like, I wanna book it on Airbnb, I don't wanna book it as

Jack Zoppa: booked verified

Trevor: that'll be happening. Yeah.

JJ: feature side

Michael: Yeah, I just want to double click my Apple Pay and it checks out and it already did

Trevor: I think, yeah, well.

Michael: all the research. It knows what preferences we have. We need a pack and play big enough to shove our baby in, like a closet.

JJ: That's a great yeah, that's a great point.

Trevor: this is a much bigger conversation of

JJ: how do you build that trust?

Trevor: is it the death of OTAs and what does that look like if you're using personal agents to do everything and what will, is your personal agent on your side or is it on the companies that you're buying from side? And is it actually finding the best value or just the thing that it's being told to go find and whatnot? So that's a really good point. I think, I mean, that is, I think the only thing that really matters at the end of the day. when everything marketing won't be the same and you know, like Google ads and whatnot, like marketing as we know it, I think will be very different.

So when you're thinking about your personal agent shopping for you, it is like what has the best reviews, but then are those reviews trusted? And Airbnb is a trusted platform for reviews, you know? So yeah, I don't know. That's tough. I don't know if how that's going

Nadim: Or

Trevor: to play into it.

Nadim: or are all of these LLMs, or essentially the companies that own them, gonna be the new like traffic controllers, right? And so what

Jack Zoppa: Mm.

Nadim: I mean by that is search was the traffic control for how you got to websites. Now it's gonna be LLMs and bots that that take you there. So is the new Google advertising essentially pay to play? Where Airbnb is gonna pay OpenAI and is gonna pay Grok. to be the trusted certified platform that it recommends and sends people to. And it's essentially just become search all over again, but in a different way. Or is it going to be free market? And I and I wonder if like, you know, the real money isn't necessarily in the in the monthly subscriptions, but I think there's going to be some type of corporate element in here where the LLMs need to make more money.

And that might be one way to do it.

Trevor: Yeah, I think, I don't know, us humans just tend to lean towards whatever the best experience is despite all that stuff, right? Like there's other browsers and things you could use that don't have Google ads and all these things that are like annoying, but we all still use Google anyways, you know, like, or meta, like we're, know, if you're not paying for something, then you're the product kind of thing. So, which

Nadim: Yeah.

Trevor: that's the whole thing with muse being free, right? It's like, okay, well, there's a reason for that and they're going to be making money some way. They're not just. doing it for charity. yeah.

Nadim: Yeah. But Google also just missed earnings, right? So they're essentially like their Gemini is sabotaging their search ad revenue and

Trevor: Mmm.

Nadim: they missed and their stock like you know, had a big

Trevor: Mhm.

Nadim: drop pretty big drop this week or last week.

Trevor: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, they're in a tough spot, Google's. I'm very curious how all that's gonna shake out. Although I think they're one interesting thing about Google is like their cloud business is so big. Like they're like they're effectively making so much more money. I think it's like thirty billion a year in revenue on cloud compute from like, you know, primarily anthropic open AI, who are like and they own like fifteen percent of Anthropic as well. So it's interesting 'cause Google's gonna win. one way or another and search might not exist, but they're gonna like a huge player.

Trevor: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And there's ads on, on chat, GPT right now, but there it's not, I wouldn't say it's like optimized or like to the level. I don't know who's the first player to like, I guess muse probably like meta is going to be rolling that out more deeply. mean,

JJ: It wouldn't surprise me if it in especially if it was more targeted, right? So for me, going back to the Muse instance of I'm looking for rope lights and like LED lights and that kind of stuff. If somebody was running an ad for that to be like higher recommended and it still fits what I'm looking for, I see that being a play. But tie tying it back to the vacation rental space, I kind of have an interesting thought as well. Is it's surprising to me that most of the big OTA aggregators are not pushing their MCPs directly with these as partnerships yet.

Like I just saw an article today that booking dot com only has one percent of their bookings coming through the big LLMs right now. And it's like they have plenty of inventory. Why is booking dot com not the go to anytime somebody says, I wanna book a hotel on Chat GPT, why doesn't it pop up with a booking dot com integration? it it's like

Trevor: Hmm.

Jack Zoppa: So you're talking about direct MCPs for these platforms for guests specifically. I think

JJ: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: like you even think about a flip side, like why can't we have an amazing direct MCP for hosts?

JJ: What do you mean by that?

Jack Zoppa: a Airbnb integration MCP for host to be able to interact with the host platform easier. and to be like program

Trevor: yeah.

Jack Zoppa: yeah, programmatically

JJ: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: do things. I Airbnb is like awful. their p their host platform's just horrendous. I've been on record too

Michael: Thank goodness we're

Trevor: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: many times hating on them, so at this point whatever. But it it's like you have to

JJ: There goes another sponsor. Thanks, Jack.

Jack Zoppa: log in to like do everything and it's like this is ridiculous.

Trevor: Yeah,

Michael: Thank you

Trevor: I think, well, Hayden went to the host summit this year because I wasn't able to go and they, think, like, they're claiming their main focus or one of their main focuses is like expanding their API and making things more accessible. I mean, I'm at the point where like, I don't use software unless I was an MCP. Like I rebuilt Slab because because beachside slab account wasn't the paid version and it didn't have MCP access. So was like, all right, I'm just going to rebuild this myself and add an MCP to it. And it took me 30 minutes. Like I would rather do that than go manually do something.

It's just completely ridiculous at this point. I, or like Manitowl, you have to have the paid version, like some premium version to use their MCP. And it's like, they're like gatekeeping that kind of stuff is crazy to me. But yeah, but then we're all, we're slaves to Airbnb. we have to do what they're doing, but it doesn't do them any good to make things more difficult for hosts. I don't really get that. I think maybe it's for them. It's just like when they're looking at their resources and how they need to allocate that to like grow the business and focus.

It's like they know we're going to do it anyways and that we're not going to go anywhere. So they don't really have to prioritize us and build out those features, but

JJ: Yeah. It's is it gonna drive more revenue? That that's the question.

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: no, probably not. So they're gonna focus on things that are gonna drive revenue and adding host tools is probably

Trevor: Yeah, I will say though, our rep here in Portland, I meet up with her all the time. She lives here too. And so like she used to get, they used to have this like Google sheet that they would send us with everything broken down with like the, opportunities reports, what they called it. I'm sure you guys know what I'm talking about, but,

Jack Zoppa: Mm-hmm.

Trevor: now they have a really nice dashboard and their team is working and their product team is working on making that accessible to us too. So I think. It's not going to be maybe natively through the platform itself, but they're going to create a separate login and dashboard that Pro Host can log into and use to do this kind of stuff. And from what she showed me, it actually looks really nice. So I think that that will continue going in that direction because that's also such a small percentage of their people. Like they don't have to change their entire platform to be accessible in that way.

But like, if it could be rolled out by their reps on a per customer basis. then they can maybe move a little bit faster of like on development side of things building it out. Cause then any bugs or things like that that come up, aren't that big of a deal. so yeah, I don't know. I'm interested to see what happens.

Nadim: Are you guys I'm curious if you guys are getting direct bookings from bots or from agents?

JJ: We are getting

Trevor: Yeah, we get some.

JJ: a pretty good amount of traffic from Chat GPT and the other

Michael: Yeah.

JJ: the other major L L Ms.

Jack Zoppa: I'm in the process of trying to kinda hack my remarkable, like hacky in into my remarkable paper pro. trying to so I'm not tortuging really bad with to-do lists. like traditionally I don't have one, which agents are great for me because they can remind me to do things, right? But I do need to like have some specific things to do. So my thought here is I have my whole setup here. I'm gonna mount this big remarkable paper pro to the side of my desk. That's just an always on version of to-do lists. And then if I can get into it, I'll have every granola action item for me be processed through LLM and then driven directly onto that tablet.

That's like literal like always on, like this is your current open loop. system here. It's outside of my computer. Cause like obviously I've built all this stuff before, but it's like I just I won't use it. I have so much going on. Like

Trevor: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: I'm just not going to consistently refer back to it. But if it's just like sitting there, always there, then I can kind of click with my finger through everything. that's gonna be the project that I'll have live by next week and I'll I'll I'll demo. Yeah. Yeah.

JJ: Sweet. Well you'll have to I was gonna say you'll have to show it on the pod, turn your camera over and and show show it mounted

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: on the wall. That sounds like a pretty cool idea. I've gone through so many different apps for that and I've always just ended back up on Apple Notes of just a running note on Apple Notes. the most simple basic thing,

Trevor: Yeah. I've heard that from so many people.

JJ: yeah, I don't know. That's all that's the only thing that works for me.

Trevor: Yeah, I've heard that from

JJ: I saw an interesting service this last week that was NFC tap to check out or check in things on the door. So basically it's like an NFC tap thing. And if you get there before the check-in, you can tap it and buy an early check-in, or you can tap it on your way out and it'll ask you for a review and like notify the host that you're out. But I just wanted to talk to you guys. I know Trevor, I feel like you mentioned doing some NFC stuff at one point, but is anybody doing anything with this? 'Cause I think it's awesome technology, but I just don't really know how to implement it necessarily.

Trevor: Yeah. Anything like that, I think is hard because, it requires non-existing hardware or like something that you have to add and do. So, and kind of, feel that way about the, I've been rolling out those, the like TVOS stuff that we've built and I've got it pretty dialed in now. So it's like super easy to just download it onto the Google TV dongle and then just plug it in at the property connected to wifi and you're good to go. It can receive updates. we track it on our end. can log into YouTube TV, do all those things. but even that I'm like, man, like, you know, Google and Android TV is really easy to hack into and do your thing.

But then it's like, am I going to create a different version for Samsung and LG and like go through and each version and type has all these different things. And is Claude willing to do it that day or not do it? Or do you to use code? Like, I don't know. So I think when it comes to like adding something like that, I think it's really interesting and cool, but I feel the same way about StayFi. Not to

Nadim: Yeah.

JJ: Which is which is gonna be in

Trevor: knock off another sponsor.

JJ: which is gonna be in some trouble with the with the Airbnb changes, but

Jack Zoppa: Here here goes sponsorship number two eliminated.

Trevor: Another sponsorship of the day

Nadim: Mm.

Michael: my gosh.

Trevor: gone.

Jack Zoppa: No

Trevor: Yeah, it's like what you want me to spend all this money on this hardware It's like

Jack Zoppa: more options.

Trevor: what do I actually get out of that? I don't know There's other ways you can get your guests emails that doesn't require doing that. It's also annoying It's a horrible experience who wants to put in their email to use Wi-Fi to place their paying money for like I don't know I I know Michael rolled those out everywhere and he kind of has deep regrets about that, but

Jack Zoppa: So I just I just get their SSN instead, right? you can do it's so much easier. It's like hey,

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: Ha ha ha.

Michael: Ha ha

Jack Zoppa: just enter your S N and you get the Wi Fi code. you can do so much more with that.

Trevor: Yeah, the doorknob has

JJ: Yeah.

Trevor: a little prick

Nadim: By the way

Trevor: that takes their blood sample.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nadim: I think there's a workaround for this. My understanding, I forgot who told me this. And I don't know if it was one of you guys, but I think if your owner contracts require you to use that technology, then you can use that as evidence to say, Hey, I'm contractually obligated to collect their email and phone number.

Trevor: Yeah.

Nadim: so you cannot like prevent me from doing that because I have to I have a duty to my client to do that.

JJ: That's a really good point. We've been talking about what we

Michael: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: We could get we could get a good high level

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: were gonna do about all of these Airbnb changes. So that's a good point.

Trevor: That makes sense, but also

Michael: I think it's I think it's smart to put it

Trevor: it's a bad guest experience.

Michael: no no no I agree. I think I'm just gonna I think the contracts are what we're gonna use as the vehicle to help protect ourselves and our homeowners for

Trevor: Yeah.

Michael: that. we might throw in the Wi-Fi or email thing just to have it, but I don't think that would be like the primary thing. It's like more of like waivers. I mean that's a massive I mean that's like 95% profit margin revenue.

JJ: damage waivers, rental agreements, th those two are huge for us. Getting the guest contact information

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: in general, right?

Michael: Yeah, maybe something more vague like that. this is required for safety and security. I've seen a lot of people on LinkedIn that are pretty passionate about this stuff and

Trevor: right, we don't even have their phone numbers, right? Like that for Airbnb.

JJ: Yeah, they changed they changed to a masked phone

Michael: Yeah.

JJ: number for all large hosts is what they're calling it. I think it's anybody who's connected to a PMS.

Trevor: Yeah, which I think they're smartly starting to roll things out with large hosts. then once it's dialed in, then expanded beyond that.

Michael: It's really smart. We're way stickier than an individual host and yeah.

Trevor: Yeah, yeah. And it makes sense. mean, it doesn't really change much for them. it doesn't, I would, I, if I was running Airbnb, I'd probably do the exact same thing, yeah. No, yeah.

JJ: Right. You keep the guest sticky. it we don't like it, but at the same time now we can't remarket to the guests and Airbnb can remarket

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: to them.

Trevor: Yeah. And, I've

Jack Zoppa: Where

Trevor: always said, every B adds a ton of value as it is. like, you know, you pay your commission 15, 15 and a half percent, whatever it is, and you have air cover. Like there's a lot of things that come along with that that are actually highly valuable. So.

Nadim: JJ, you made me think of a good prompt, which is what I'm curious to hear from everyone, like what project has been on the back burner for you that you'd kind of been like pushing, pushing and then now has been it's just like so much easier to do. So you're like, finally I'm just gonna tackle that one thing.

JJ: Geez, I feel like for us, we've had a ton just because it's so much easier to build custom tech now than it was six months ago. one of

Trevor: Mm-hmm.

JJ: the things is KPIs. We've talked for years and years about like, we want every department to have their own KPIs and we want to be able to hold departments accountable and give bonuses off of these KPIs and we always have these grand ideas of it and then we never actually implement because it's really hard. To come up

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: and track those KPIs. And now we're actually doing it. We've been able to put all of our data in one place and then create KPIs based on you know, you're doing review score plus revenue plus like profit margin, all these different things that normally would have been like, okay, we have three different spreadsheets of different places that this data is coming from, and now it's all in one place, and you can easily make a dashboard to

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: to manage all of that stuff. So that that's a big one that we've just implemented in the past couple of weeks.

Trevor: I

Nadim: And you built your own database to store all of that information in? Yeah.

JJ: Yeah. So all the all the data is going into Superbase and then that's you know being able to compare across the different tables with all of that. And Michael actually can talk a lot more on like the data cleanliness aspect of it as well. So like kind of standardizing all of that data so that it makes sense across the different platforms.

Michael: Yeah, I think one part that's hard with it is it was in the beginning you're a couple of years ago you're using Zapier link different tools together, but it was just drawing strings or lines between individual tools. And maybe you had a little bit of manipulation or something happening in between. But it's hard to exactly convey the value. I think Trevor might be even better at this, but once you pull it all into one spot, guest E, Conduit, SweetOps, Stafi, like whatever guest information, price labs, wheelhouse, your agents are now like that much more powerful across all of it in your own database, and then go back and like write to each one individually, rather than you kind of like transcribing everything in between each one individually.

it's just

Trevor: Yeah.

Michael: really, really powerful. Step one is get everything in one spot and with AI and Cloud Code and Codex and even your GrocBot, like once you've got it all in one spot, it's really powerful.

Trevor: Yeah, all the, all this data is relational. So it's like connecting those relations between different aspects and whatnot. then making, decisions and whatnot off of that, having a second brain. I mean, speaking of that, I'd say this was on the back burner for a long time and we had always like known it was possible and now it is, and we're, doing it, but building out our own pricing system. we,

Jack Zoppa: This the launch of three, two, one

Trevor: But not night

Jack Zoppa: what's

Trevor: worth night worth AI, shameless

Jack Zoppa: We need music behind that or something.

Trevor: plug. Yeah. So we, we've been running ours for two months now. We're officially off all pricing software. It's, it's just our tool. we're up 20 % year over year on same store. So it's been pretty effective and we got, we got Renjoy cooking. So I've seen.

Michael: it's cooking. I'm I'm ready to talk about this for the next hour. the the power

Trevor: heh, heh, heh.

Michael: can you explain a couple things? I think pricing tools, they're probably the first tool people use when they jump in, even as a co-host, right? you might have

Trevor: Yeah.

Michael: been on Smart BNB Hospitable really early on. You're it's the one thing you plug in. You might even just plug it straight into Airbnb if you're just an individual host. And then it's the one tool you keep.

Trevor: Yeah, dynamic pricing's the number one thing.

Michael: Pretty much forever. but there's a few major things that are not put into that algorithm. Reviews. Like not just your overall review score, but what if your last two reviews were three stars, one star? Like good luck getting a next booking because people just scroll down scroll through the photos, scroll down to reviews and hit book. They don't read all your house rules. They don't read about all that other stuff. And then search ranking. Super

Trevor: Yep.

Michael: hard to figure out. Like, do I need to drop price or am I already on the first page? Like

Trevor: Yeah.

Michael: What? And those are the two things you guys are like I mean you've probably tackled a lot more than that, but those are the two that really stood out to me that like this is how you crack the nut to do to be better at pricing, push rev par, more for the homeowners, just like a win-win all around.

Trevor: yeah, I think those two, and then also what's huge is, is comp based pricing. And I think what a lot of people do is it's a race to the bottom last minute and they're going so low, but they're going lower than they need to be. And I think it depends on your market and the situation, but I think a lot of times, lowering your price is not going to create demand for that reservation. The demand just doesn't exist. And then you're lowering your price for no reason. Whereas like, If they would have booked, they would have booked at that higher price anyways.

And then it's just needlessly going below the lowest price place. Right? I don't think that there's an issue being the lowest price place, especially last minute. know me and JJ talked about this, this past week. but you should only be like 5 % below. You don't need to be 20, 30, 40 % below for no reason. Yeah.

JJ: That yeah, I th I think that's the key. Yeah. I think that's the key is knowing like, okay, you gotta price it low for last minute because it's not gonna get booked otherwise, but you don't have to yeah, exactly. You don't have to price it forty percent lower. You could price it

Trevor: How low do have to go? And you don't know this unless you, yeah.

JJ: ten percent lower.

Trevor: So we're, we're doing it in a really unique way where we don't buy any data. It's all market-based and comp-based and, you know, it's, we're learning a ton doing Renjoy's market right now. And then looking at beach side to building that out and hopefully soon we can try that out. want to get Jack going once he's officially on guesty and try that out too. But the hope for us is that. because it's so market specific and it's dynamic to your market and the costs that you're building. And we're going to create comps automatically, but then it's like, it's the, it's, it could even be like the owner relations person that you have, who's like going in and manipulating things like, let's put this minimum price because that's, that is the connection point between your owners and what's being priced.

so yeah, I'm pretty excited about it. think, I think it'll be big.

Jack Zoppa: Thought thoughts on MCP for Nightworth being able to, you know, effectively like you just mentioned owner relations. I'm like, man, if my owner relations people could talk to Claude and like pull all of this out or like, you know, run routines against against it to be able to say, Hey, before owner calls, do this, kind of stuff.

Trevor: Available on day one. Yeah, any access or thing that would make your life easier will be available to you.

JJ: I was gonna say, Trevor just talked about how bullish he was on MCP, so I'm sure he's any software he's building has an MCP.

Trevor: Yeah, yeah. I, yeah. Hey! I... I...

Nadim: Ha ha.

Jack Zoppa: I just I just I wanted to give him a softball. I wanted to give him a softball.

Michael: He he he built an MCP for a free tool JJ sent to him just because he didn't want to click around. I think his own product might have one.

Nadim: My question

Trevor: What's up?

Nadim: for you is how do you maintain all of these things that you build?

Trevor: well, okay. Actually speaking of grokbot that helps out a lot. So I have different grokbots for different projects. And then for example, our main operation system. I've done so much. mean that I've spent months and months and months building that out. And now it's like in a really good spot. There's a couple of people on the team that I let manipulate things on there and build stuff out too. And like, I have a really, we have like a team, repo instruction. like they can't. Change certain things and do certain stuff like their car literally won't let them.

So that's been helpful. But then as far as bugs and requests and whatnot, I've created very easy ways in the products and the tools that the team are using to report bugs and issues. So there's literally a report a problem section on every single tool that we have, even on Slack. If you do a bug emoji, that'll send a full report with everything. When you click report a problem and type it in, it screenshots the page. and ask them some questions and whatnot. It'll send that in. And then I have a grok bot receive that and then it will go through and then it'll spin off a T three code thread and like use cloud code or whatever to go solve and fix that problem and then deploy and merge it.

So I've been able to be very hands off as far as like when I'm creating it, I'm very hands on. I'm not someone who believes in like one shotting stuff. I one shot it slab because that was like too easy to do. But when it's like our team's really using stuff and there's a lot of complexity and I like building good things. I want things to work really well. And I'm not just building to build. want it to like change our business for the better. I'm very involved at that point, but I think once it's at a point where it's like, okay, I don't know if I can really improve upon this too much, then let that go and let the Grop bot manage it.

And then I've had ideas, like I talked to Luke, at Verma about this of like, managing feature requests as well, where the team can basically put a feature request and then a grok bot or an agent will interview that team member and try to get to the bottom. Like, what are they actually trying to achieve? Like what do they actually need here? Or what is this feature doing? Does this already exist and they don't know about it and coming to a more like fundamental understanding of what they're trying to do before just like slinging it and building it out, which is what I would do.

Like if the team says. I want to be able to do this. Can you add this button here? Then I'd be like, well, that actually is dumb to put that button there. Maybe I'll put it over here and do this thing because this already exists, or maybe I'll merge these two things and you know what I mean? I can just think through it a little bit more. So I think that's my like phase two plan of that is like, it fixes itself when there's bugs and issues and whatnot, but then improving it, like, I create a grok bot that can, has our goal in mind of what we're trying to achieve.

then when there's a feature request, can. navigate that with the team to figure out how we actually want to move forward and build out a new feature.

Jack Zoppa: I think this bridges into interesting conversation that I I kinda had earlier today a little bit, but around the idea like Trevor basically runs a property management company more like a software like company. I I feel like a lot of us are are leaning into doing that a little bit. even like my general manager running Haven is like very much leaned into executing things this way. I feel it's a really big shift for someone that's been running a PM for the last ten years to be like, okay, now like Trevor's talking about he does everything.

He runs this I literally like six months ago, Trevor was running this company through like four terminals on his computer. And it's like someone would watch like his day to day and be like, what is happening? How is he doing the

Trevor: Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: work? I don't know. I think there's like this really long tail, especially on like vacation rental industry. I think I got asked this on another pod recently. It was like, it is gonna take so long for the entire industry to adopt AI in gener just base

Trevor: Dude,

Jack Zoppa: AI.

Trevor: I mean, when JJ and I did that panel at VRMA we asked the crowd how many people are using AI and I think less than half are using it at all, let alone for guest communication.

Jack Zoppa: Just in general, yeah.

Trevor: So it's remarkable to me. I mean, there's only 10 million users on Cloud Code and Codex. that's such a small, small, small percentage of the world.

JJ: Well and you know, Trevor, you bring up an interesting point and something that we were talking about before the pod is like I think sometimes you forget that like maybe you know more than you think. And like same thing for the listeners,

Trevor: Mm.

JJ: that it seems like, these other people are so far ahead of me and I can't figure out AI and I it I'm never gonna learn all of this stuff. But like that that might not actually be the case and it's not necessarily

Trevor: Yeah.

JJ: that hard to learn.

Trevor: Yeah, I think there's a common meme quote that people say on Twitter where it's like, you can just do things. Like you can just do things. And AI is like the biggest, like fuel for that is if you have an idea or you want to do something like download cloud code and just tell it in plain English, what you want to do. Like don't hold that back. Say exactly what you want to do and how you want to achieve it.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: I think creativity and agency is definitely the biggest leverage now. I I I built a Apple HomeKit C-L-I

Trevor: Yeah, you can just do things. Yeah.

Michael: You don't you don't need to know how anymore.

JJ: Mm-hmm.

Michael: You just need to like it then becomes kinda limiting. You realize how uncreative you are when you can't

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Michael: find certain things to do.

Trevor: Yeah. Same. mean, I feel the same way about coding. there is, there's no moat and I'm as good of a coder. I firmly believe this. I would love for an engineer to come on and like challenge me on this, but like talking to my engineer friends at conduit and other companies, like I'm shipping the same quality stuff that they are, you know, like sure. There's maybe some level of like, I've learned how to do this and I write, ask the right questions. I think is really important and be able to like question your model or have a good setup. or the right skills or whatnot, but they're all using the same thing.

not, so little people review their code.

JJ: Yeah, nobody's writing code anymore.

Trevor: Yeah, no one writes code. No one barely reviews it. They have a different agent review it, you know?

JJ: And I think this is a lot of software companies don't necessarily want their users to know that as well. Because that that's the moat right now is that you don't want you don't want to build your own stuff because you're gonna have to support it and it's hard and but to

Trevor: Skill issue.

JJ: your point, Trevor, it's like the models now are writing the same quality code that anybody at any software company is writing. Like everybody else is also using Opus five point five. So

Michael: You

Trevor: Yeah.

Michael: it is it is it still the derogatory, Trevor, you're just a vibe coder. You're not like a real

Jack Zoppa: Yeah.

Trevor: Hi, everyone's a Vibe Coder. I am a Vibe

Michael: coder. I know.

Jack Zoppa: I think I

Trevor: Coder.

Jack Zoppa: think it would be cool to do two things. one, bring on a manager who's not using AI a ton and like on the show, like implement GrocBot or implement like one thing integrated into

Trevor: Yeah. Yeah.

Jack Zoppa: their Slack or something like that that actually starts making a really big difference would be pretty cool. And then do we pull a conduit engineer and then have Trevor and that engineer go head to head live on the show as well. Another idea there.

Trevor: We... Yeah. Let's get pun on the

Michael: Let's

Trevor: show.

Michael: go. Let's go, pun.

Jack Zoppa: Yeah, yeah, that's a call out.

Trevor: I'm talking to pun later today, so I'll bring it up to him. I'm sure.

Jack Zoppa: Alright, this this clip's

Nadim: It's funny because I can't

Jack Zoppa: gonna get put on LinkedIn.

Nadim: help but think of how every real estate investor, their advice when you ask them what's your biggest advice? They're like, just buy make your first investment, because in your first

Trevor: Yep.

Nadim: investment you learn the whole process, right? And I feel like the theme is the same here. It's like download your first, tool, whether it's Grok,

Trevor: Mm-hmm.

Nadim: Claude, chat, whatever, just download it and start using it. And then you'll and then like you said, talk to it as if it's a person. Tell it to teach you how to do stuff. how do I do

Trevor: Yeah.

Nadim: this? And then it'll just do it.

Trevor: Yeah, it's hyper intuitive. Don't pay for a course. Don't do anything like that. Just download it and use it and

Nadim: Yeah.

Trevor: push. If you think, it won't be able to do this, do it anyways and see if it can. That's like the biggest thing. Every time I've never ever, ever, have not been able to achieve something that I want to do using cloud code or codex ever. So, yeah.

JJ: Mic drop. Awesome. Well what

Jack Zoppa: True.

Trevor: All right, boys.

JJ: what do you guys have next week? what are you looking forward to working on? Start with Michael.

Michael: Ooh, come back to me.

JJ: Start with Trevor.

Trevor: You start with me. yeah, I think, getting Renjoy and maybe beachside and, and, Haven cooking on pricing and getting that going and getting, know, working out the kinks on our end of like onboarding and making it a little bit more, easy to go. think that's my everyone priority right now. And then side thing, I want to get those TVs rolled out. Cause I think that's going to be really cool.

JJ: Nice.

Michael: Yeah.

Nadim: right now I'm cleaning up a lot of reporting. So I think similar to what you're talking about, JJ, is like I finally have it set up. So I have like my monthly marketing report, monthly like, you know, revenue report. this last year was like a massive accounting cleanup that we did and getting all of our processes like in place and our data in place. And so now I'm just kind of like cleaning up like how I What's the data that I really want and what's important to me, the KPIs, and how do I want that information fed? So I'm just cleaning going through and cleaning it up.

JJ: Nice. Jack, what do got?

Jack Zoppa: we got I finished last week's project which was building out property onboarding. some tweaks there, but I've got a couple other companies I'm working with in our at state to build out their custom properties, which I think is kinda cool that you can really customize this stuff per county, city, state if I onboard property. So it's a really big thing I'm working on. Well and hacking my remarkable. It'll be live on the show next week.

JJ: Love it. All right, Michael, back to you.

Michael: Yeah, I feel like I've said this a couple of times now, but I'm excited to pull in more stuff into our owners portal. And the biggest feature of that is gonna be Trevor's MCP. I think being

Trevor: Yeah.

Michael: able to show owners, hey, not just like property care and stuff like that, but like for the ones that do care, like where are you pacing, what's your comp set like? you think you're not making enough money? Like we're actually doing and like we're in the top fifteenth percentile for your like bedroom count, like switching managers. Isn't gonna help and it'll probably hurt you. So really trying to prove the value because revenue management can be very mystical, even if you know what

Trevor: Mmm.

Michael: you're doing, and then trying to dumb that down. Maybe that's kind of rude. Simplify that down into

Trevor: Be rude.

Michael: the owner's

JJ: Mm-hmm.

Michael: layman terms, especially for the ones that have more lifestyle assets versus like an investment property.

JJ: Yeah, I think showing showing that comp set is huge. So we've had multiple owner calls like that where after the call they're like, I didn't even realize. I just thought I could make more money. But now that you showed me the data, like it makes so much more sense.

Michael: Just increase the minimum price. It's like, okay, that's gonna be great.

Trevor: Yeah, and get rid of all, tank your reservations and make

JJ: Yeah.

Trevor: zero dollars. Yeah.

JJ: Well, Trevor, you've inspired me. I'm gonna fork your dumb slab and build out on top of that. So that's my dump slab dot com. It's free and open source. Thank Trevor.

Trevor: Dumbslab.com if anyone wants to go check it out. Dumbslab.com. I hope I don't get like a seasoned assist from Slab, but

JJ: I was gonna say Slab's just gonna sue us now.

Trevor: it's free. I don't make money off of it. I think I have like a pro feature because there's like a certain amount of data that would actually start costing me money, but you can just fork in, post it yourself if you want. So full MCP integrations, it's way better than Slab. So get off Slab and

JJ: Love it.

Trevor: Notion, get on Dumbslab.

JJ: Awesome. Well, great chatting with you guys. We'll see you next week.

Trevor: All right.

Michael: Bye bye.

Nadim: Yeah.