Build in Public: The Journey to 1,000 users: Boostly Connect

All right, welcome back. This is part of a mini series that I'm putting together on this channel where we build in public. And what are we building in public? Well, we're building Connect. This is me documenting the series because I thought it'd be awesome to be able to show you all from the ground up how we did it, because 10 years ago, I didn't really truly document how we built Billsley up. And I would love to look back on this in 10 years. Time to go. Oh, this is how Connect evolved in such a short space of time. And it has evolved. It has truly evolved very, very quickly. And I'm going to show you the new dashboard. So, since the turn of the year, since my last update, we have massively been utilizing these AI tools that are available to us. So Claude and Claude Code and Claude Cowork, using the latest Opus model, which is part of Claude and Anthropic. And it has really helped level us up, every single member of our dev team. Now, for example, that Boost Lee has got a Claude Pro plan, and one of them said to me, it's like we've got five junior devs working for us, which is phenomenal. Which has meant that we can really speed this up. So what we have done probably since the last update, we've sort of rebuilt it again. There's reasons why, and I can walk you through why, but we want to make sure that this is future proof and with everything that is going on with the world of technology at this present moment in time, if we'd have shipped what we have built, we'd just have to go back and rebuild it again very soon. And we're in a fortunate position that we're in no rush to launch and ship this. But at the same time, I want to get it done because I know that there's a whole world of people that we can't help at the present, and this will just ramp it up. So for a quick reminder, what is Connect? Well, at Boostly, our core brand product and our core offering has always been the Boostly Bookings Booster, which is a website. You've also got a CRM, you've also got training, you've got tutorial videos, you've got group coaching calls. Okay? So I always describe it as the tools, the tactics, the training, but importantly, the confidence to go and increase your bookings and direct bookings at that. With Connect, it's a new sister product to all of that that we're building in because our website offering that we have at the moment is Great. You know, it works on a singular level, but I want to help do this on a multiple level. How can we impact hundreds of thousands, not just thousands of hosts around the world? How can we help them get more bookings? And we are in such a perfect time to do this with this world of artificial intelligence, with it absolutely transforming the business world. For example, one of the big things at the moment is a I search. So I don't know if you've noticed it with your guests or with your customers that you have coming in, your homeowners etc, but we've noticed it with clients that are coming into Boostly when they fill in a calendar link to book a call with us. One of the questions is how did you hear about us? And I'd say two in every 10 calls at the moment are mentioning, I saw you on Chat GPT, I typed in on Chat GPT, I typed in on Google, I typed in Gemini, I typed in on Grok, I typed in on Clock or whatever, I typed in AI and you came up which is AI SEO. And I'm like, wow, this is happening more and more. And I've started to see in Facebook groups and LinkedIn posts and tweets where other hospitality owners and property managers are saying, people are coming to me because we're ranked very high in AI search, otherwise known as geo or whatever it can be potentially known as. So this is why Connect is going to be here. Because in my opinion, and I'm thinking four or five years in the future, I'm not thinking four or five months in the future, I believe that the companies that are going to win when it comes to direct bookings is going to be the ones where their information is spread in as many places as possible, all around the Internet. Hundreds of thousands of mentions instead of just tens of mentions. This is what Connect is going to have the power to do and this is where we're at. And if you want to like an absolute go back on the basics, just literally go back to my other couple of videos on this channel. The journey to 1000 building in public for Connect. So let me share my screen. So this is Connect and this is the new dashboard that we have and it's a lot different to what it was. Now what we're able to do is thanks to the new tools that we've got available to us is we've really been able to spruce up our dashboard. Now we've been working with some beta testers. So we had 30 beta testers. We've now said goodbye to everybody bar eight. So we've kept eight of our most engaged beta testers and we've taken on board their feedback and they've helped build out our dashboard. So right now we are integrating into this one dashboard account, into this one connect. We're integrating and we're pulling in data from two sources. Okay, so I've got two dummy accounts that are set up below us and they're pulling in data from Guesty and one from Hostaway. So you can see the Hostaway logo here in Guesty. Now in the next couple of days we're going to turn on our hospitable owner as and hostfully integrations in here, which will be awesome. So it'll be five and then as soon as we've got those five in, we'll be able to add another five in and another five in and another five in thanks to, like I said, Claude Code and Claude Cowork. What would have taken us four or five weeks to add an integration can take four or five days, which is massively speeding us up. But as you can see here, I've got two integrations. So let's just say that I'm a host and my good buddy who lives in the same town or city as me has also got, you know, 20 properties and that we want to work together. We want to be able to work together where we can recommend each other, pass bookings to each other with a referral rate or whatever that may be. Just vibes, right? So I've brought this into here. It's synced in all of the properties, all of our occupancy, all of our revenue, our average daily rate, our revpar, it's got everything in here from check ins, it looks like a pms. Now for any of my PMS buddies, my biz besties that are watching this, don't worry, Boostly does not want to become a PMS in any way, shape or form. I'm a big believer, not biting the hand that feeds us, but we want this dashboard to be looking epic, right, so the, the host can come in and see this dash. Now, for those that have missed the other episodes, you'll know that when Boostly's got 27 integrations, which is great at the present moment in time, it just goes into a WordPress plugin. You can't see any of this data. Right, We've now built the gap from the WordPress website to your PMS with this Connect dashboard. So, okay, so this is what it's going to be when it launches and the Reason why it's called Connect is because we're going to connect the industry, which is very cool. So we've got five PMS integrations, we've also got access to Host co. So we're going to have all of Host Code's amazing services coming into here soon. And we've got other vendors and biz besties that are coming to me saying, mark, I want to get, I want to get in on this, which is cool. So it's, we're going to be connecting the data, having it all come into here so a host can have an overview. So again, you can have just your details in here or, or what you can have is you can have a couple of you in here, you can have loads of you in here, you can have 10. We're speaking right now with somebody who does a coaching program and on their coaching program they've got hundreds of hosts and they would love this dashboard because they can see who of their students are doing well, who needs help, et cetera. So that's another use case, which is pretty cool. Now this is the first part, so you've got all the data coming into here. There's going to be a little AI tool that can give you summaries of what's going on and all that cool stuff, you know, to help you plan and run your business. Like a. An AI chief of staff, as I like to call them. But also as well, this is going to be the cool bit. In here we're going to have our connections, so you're going to be able to unlock API keys and all boostly customers will get this with an API key. And even if you're not a boostly customer, you'll be able to get a dashboard and have an API key to send it places. Now, the tools that we're creating, number one, we're going to have a WordPress plugin. Just because it's our wheelhouse, we know how it works, we've already created them. So you can send this Data to a WordPress plugin. You can easily spin up a front page of a website on any WordPress site. Takes you minutes to do so with AI or using templates from whoever, and then you'll be able to sync this data over. Now, boostly customers obviously will get that, but what you can do is you can create more than one plugin, download more than one plugin and you can create more than one API key. So you can have an API key, you can have five of them and it can go to five different websites. So what you can do with this, if you really wanted to, is you could create five direct booking websites on WordPress in the space of an hour. All of this data, these properties and information, etcetera, that will go through to whatever website you want and you can choose which property goes to which website. So let's just say in Liverpool you've got four properties. Send these four properties to Liverpool. Let's just say you've got four in Manchester and you want to create a Manchester little listing site, a direct booking site you can do. And this is where we're going to evolve. Because to truly win on AI SEO, you've got to be mentioned favorably around the Internet loads and loads of times. And if we can create with this hundreds of thousands of websites and we've got all of our members that are part of Boostly connect into here and we're sending their information off to all these places, then it just means that we're going to get visible by much more people. And again, the tools that are available now means that you can put a website together really simply, or you can pay us and we'll put it together for you, which is very exciting. Now, we're not just going to stop at WordPress, we'll also have to Go High Level app that we have built. So if we look in our Go High Level, this is the Boostly's agency account. Okay. I'm going to go into the demo account that we've set up for this. You will notice if it's still there because we are building it right now, it will say property listings. So what does that mean? Is that with the app that we've built, all of the properties that are currently in this dashboard have been synced into here. So now what you can do on Go High Level, they've got phenomenal funnels, they've got landing pages, they've got X and Y and Z that you can create in literally minutes. And you can just pull in your property details and pop it on a site. So again, let's just say that on a landing page, you want to promote the FIFA World cup that is coming to come into your city in 2026. Right? And let's just say you're in Boston. You don't want to have a page on your direct booking website about an event that's going to come and go, but you can easily create a landing page that is specific, specifically designed and created to talk to soccer fans that are coming to your city in a short space of time. And if you only got five properties or 10 properties or zero properties in Boston. But you know somebody that's got a collective of people have got hundreds, you can go to them and say, hey, let me help you market this. I can spin up a website, I'll, I'll get people to it and if a booking comes in from it, you can give us a commission, 5%, 10%, whatever, whatever you want to arrange. But you'll be able to do this with Connect and the excuse is I don't know what to do, I don't know how to do it just goes. Because this is all going to be automated and useful for you also as well, with the Connect plugin and the Connect app, all of your guest reservation details, any data that you collect, whether it's from Stay fi, from your pms, from Google Forms, however, you're collecting data because of this connection tool. It will go from your PMS guesty, host away etc into Connect and automatically sync in to go high level. So gone are the days that you'll have to export import. Figure it out because it will just live sync in and then you can drop it into your workflows, your email automations, etc. Etc. Etc. And all of your opportunities that will be created as well on the back of it so you can have opportunities. So if you're going after a homeowners, you can have all their data in here. If you've got corporate guests or whatever guests in here, you can drop it into here and you can have a full sales system set up within minutes, which is very exciting. And we're not just going to stop at go high level. The plan is to do webflow, the plan is to do WIX and Squarespace etc, etc. Etc. Now another cool thing as well in this is that you'll be able to pull in all of your real time reviews, you'll be able to see your calendar, you'll be able to see the prices. As much information that we can pull in from your PMS as possible will come into here and you can send it off places. So this is the beginning again. It's very exciting. We've got our eight beta testers that are doing the next stages. Hopefully in the next six weeks this will be live to the public. The next steps for us does is we're going to launch it to our beta testers, we're going to add in all of our boostly customers so a thousand customers into here once we've got their PMSS engaged. We're in the process of doing that now and then once we've done that and we're happy, then we're going to go go live. We are just amending the final bits, which is going to be the pricing. So ignore all of this because this isn't going to be what it is. But we're going to have four plans. The starter one is actually going to be free, zero cost. You can have one integration and that'll be free. And then what we're going to do is we're going to scale it up depending on how much usage you need. So just to give you an example, every time that we work with a pms, they have these things called API tokens. And again, I don't know the ins and outs of this, but basically the more times that we have to speak to the pms, the more times this API needs a call. So a call, where it goes from A to B, we get charged and we're thinking, well, how do we correctly price this? Now, I don't want to do it per listing, I don't want to do it per user, I don't want to do it per whatever, I want to do it per usage. And you know, I can see this is how the models are going with Claude and OpenAI and perplexity and Manner. So I thought, well, let's just mimic that. It'll start off at free, then we'll have like a price that scales up and keeps it fair. So if you're just one or two properties, you want to be able to have these cool API integrations. All the benefits of it. You, you haven't got the funds for a boosted website, which is 4 or $5,000. You've got a WordPress website, but it's not converting. But you want our booking engine that does convert, then it'll be like, I don't know, let's just say $67 a month and definitely my 7 year old has helped sway that. And then it'll just scale up from there. Depends on how much usage you need from this. So if you're a baller and you've got 400 listings and you want a piece of this, then obviously you need to be paying baller rates because the amount of calls 400 listings will have for this and if you're creating all these websites, it'll mean that you've got more API calls. So this is the thing that I have to sort internally with with my team, which is pretty cool. We just have to sort out just little bits, little bits. The testing is going to be the huge bit. How do our testers get on with it? They're literally cracking on with it now. And hopefully the next time that I come, I'll be able to show you the journey to 1000. How many were at how many that we need to go? This is obviously being recorded on. What day is it today? Thursday 10th February. No, Tuesday 10th February. Not Thursday. It's been a long, long week, long month long 2026. And I'm excited to show you the next steps. If you want to join the wait lists, if you want to be up to date with what's going on, just drop a wait list in the comments or send me an email market.co.uk and just say wait and I'll get you on it. For now, that's the update. Building Public Connect coming soon.