Mark Simpson launches Boostly Connect, a tool that syncs property listings and bookings from PMS systems like Guesty and Hostaway to WordPress sites for direct bookings. The alpha demo shows a dashboard pulling live data, with plans to add more PMS integrations and CMS support as they chase 1,000 users.
Questions this video answers
130 beta testers.
40 beta testers joined the Zoom call.
40 listings.
48 bookings.
$61,000 (booking revenue).
Chapters
Okay, this is. Episode 1 of the Road to 1000 of Boostly Connect users. My name is Mark Simmson, founder of Boostly. This is a brand new series that I'm launching today. Celebrating or on the mission to get to 1000 users for our brand new product launch, which is Connect. For those of you that have never heard of me before, first time coming across this channel. We created boostly 10 years ago now for the goal was to help hosts who are in the short term rental sphere, the medium term rental sphere, get more bookings without having to rely on Airbnb, booking.com, expedia, VRBO, you name it, OTA. So basically build a business on your own land and we've been doing so via training. And then we brought in websites, then we brought in CRMs, which is emails, social media, etc. And now we've come to this. With the rise of AI, it has massively accelerated what we can do as a company and the team that we have behind the scenes. And we have created this product called Connect. The goal of this is to connect the short term rental sphere. Because now what we can do with this is where hosts and management companies, even travel, content creators or anybody, website designers, revenue managers, you name it, you can come together and you can create your own direct booking hub, which then turns into creating mini OTAs, mini listing sites, etc. So this is Connect. And today I launched the demo of the demo, the alpha to the beta, whatever you want to call it to our beta testers. We have got 130 beta testers and a WhatsApp group ready to go. 40 of them joined me on a zoom call just now and I showcased them the demo. They are a week away from getting access to all of this and I just want to show you what I showed them. This is episode one. I'm going to be uploading these sporadically throughout the time that we launch Connect. Connect is still not live right now. If you go to boostlyconnect.com you'll just come to here. But very soon I'm going to let you know how you can sign up. So this is the demo of the demo. So don't, don't judge me on this, but this is where we're at. So the whole thing about Connect is that this central hub will be where all of your bookings, all of your reservations, all of your contact information, all of your guest data, all of your booking data will sit. And the cool thing about this is that on your dashboard you can have more than One PMS account at a time. So for example, we've got guesty and we've got host away in here for our demo. This is just a demo account. And as you can see here, on our demo account we have got more than one guesty account on here, we've got more than one hostaway account on here. So when I look at the dashboard, we've got 40 listings, there are 48 bookings totaling $61,000 worth of revenue, booking revenue. We can split it down between which pms, how many pms, which pms, et cetera, you've got your unique visitors stats and this dashboard over time, over this series that I'm going to show you will get better and better and better. Now the cool thing about this is if I go into account profile, you will see that we've got our name in here, et cetera, and we've got the API token. So once you've got the dashboard and this is connected directly into your PMS or the PMS of the people of your choice, where can we send this next? And this is where we connect it. So Boostly has been working on WordPress websites forever. And you know, we are limited in how much we can grow and scale this because we do website design. We can realistically only take on five to 10 new customers every week because we publish and we launch five to 10 websites a week. If I was to sign up 200 new clients today, my projects team would kill me because they cannot fit in 200 new projects into their heavy workload. But with Connect, you don't even need to have a Boostly website for this to work. And to prove this, I've just gone and bought a empty WordPress account, right? There is nothing on there. I've gone into plugins, I've gone to uploads and I've added the Connect plugin. Okay, so we give you the zip file, you upload it into your WordPress dashboard and this will pop up. Now when you've got this, you click on integrations, it will ask for an API key. So all that you would do is you would come into your dashboard, grab the API key, paste it in here, click sync and then any information that is in your dashboard. So these dummy listings here will then sync into this website. And if I go to the listings tab, all of this information is synced in here. So when we look at it on a front end page, pictures have come from the pms. The wording, the pricing, everything has come in to this PMS and they can Even go and book now and they can go and check out if they wish. So all that I would do now as the owner of this website is I would go on two pages, I would go onto themes and I would create a really nice looking site. But all I have to do is create the front end of this site. It is my prediction by the end of this year, if not the end of 2026, WordPress, Elementor, any of these film builders will have AI built in that you could just type a little prompt just to say, create me a website that looks like this and then the front end of the site will be done in minutes. It is going to damage the web design industry massively. But the one thing this AI won't be able to do is the backend connection to your PMS because they haven't got the docs, they haven't got the access and as far as I'm aware, that's not going to change anytime soon. So this is future proof in Boostly, but it can also do so much more. So the first place this will go is WordPress. Now we have got 40 listings right here, which is awesome. Now what happens if 10 of these listings were in Manchester, United Kingdom? 10 of them were in London, 10 of them were in Scarborough. All right, and let's just say the other 10 were in Edinburgh. I could make four different WordPress websites in literally four minutes and have 10 come into here, which is London, 10 on another WordPress site, which would be Manchester, 10 that would be Scarborough and 10 that be Edinburgh. And I can create mini local online travel agents. These can be my PMS account or I could go to a buddy and I could go and grab their details and sync them into here so that we could have more data. Okay. And then if I sell a property, get a property booked for my buddy, I'll go, hey, that's a thousand pound booking. How about you just give me a little cheeky 100 pound or 50 pound, 500, whatever you want to do. And you want to work out referral fee and he could do the same. So instead of you having to try and do it yourself, you're working together, you're coming together, you're connecting, you're connecting your listings and doing all the cool stuff. That's number one. That's what Connect is on level number one. But level number two is that we are going to take this dashboard and we can send it to loads of places. So we're going to go to wix, to Squarespace, we want to go to go high level so that we can sync in all of your property data into there, all of your listing detail into there, all of your booking data into there. And on this dashboard it'll be fully customizable. So you can do okay, how many bookings are coming in, what dates, which areas, which locations, and you'll be able to integrate this as well with other providers in the industry. So we're looking to build out our integrations dashboard. At the moment we've just got Guesty and HostaWay, we've got 25 other PMS partners to add in here and and then we're going to go to Price Labs, we're going to go to Mount Host Co. Why Hangry? All of our buzzies that are out there, I practiced our biz besties we want to get into here. So this is the plan. I've just showcased this to the 40 people in the beta. They're going to get access to this very soon with their own login details that they can go and test this. I'll come back and I'll report back when I've got something awesome to show. But this is the road to a thousand connect users. I want to get a thousand connect users onto this before the end of the year. Follow along for the journey and let me know what you think below.
