My first SaaS product

Two years ago, I built an AI-powered customer support tool for short-term rental companies, cold-emailed hundreds of potential customers, and got interest from multiple prospects. Then I quit. Here's the story of my first SaaS attempt and what I learned from walking away too early.

The Idea

2 years ago I was looking into AI, which was a new thing for me back then. I had been watching YouTube business gurus talking about the new AAA business model (AI Automation Agency).

One of their use cases was to set up an AI Agent for businesses that handles common requests from users, clients, etc.

And I thought - why not do it self-service? So businesses can sign up, configure it, and just start using, without any agencies in between. But it would be hard to do it for everyone from the start, so it’s probably better to niche down.

That’s when I came up with the idea for a startup - AI Guest Support Agent for Short-Term Rental. And clients would have a Web Platform, where they can:

This seemed to be a great idea, without serious competition, so I jumped into the development of MVP.

Building the MVP

In 2 weeks I made the first version of the app - web platform with some analytics, where users can see communication history, upload/edit apartments and their information, and handle unanswered questions (mark them as covered/in-progress/not-coverable).

And a backend endpoint, where by providing apartment id and question, you will get a really good answer from AI. For demonstration, I connected that to a Telegram bot, so I can share it with other people.

This helped me understand that it is possible to do, and not that hard.

But I don’t have anyone in this industry, so I decided to find first clients, ask them what they really need, and build it.

Finding My First Customers

With my MVP ready, it was time to find real customers. I did some calculations on how much it could cost based on the number of apartments and guests, made a presentation showing the product, its benefits and how it can save you time and money, and was ready to show it to someone.

I decided to go to Airbnb, and just send messages to different apartments, asking if they would be interested. I sent about 10 messages, got some replies, but only one guy was interested - owner of the company that manages Short-Term Rental Apartments for other people.

We started chatting on WhatsApp, and eventually jumped on a video call.

My First Sales Call

I was super nervous - 18 year old guy, trying to sell a not fully ready product to probably a millionaire from LA. But it went better than expected, he was really interested because he had about 50 apartments under management, and was looking into hiring one more support person (he already had 3 guys that were doing this full time).

He gave really good industry insights, and we agreed to keep the contact.

Conclusions after the call:

So I had two things on my ToDo list:

Scaling My Outreach

I knew I needed to reach more potential customers.

I found a Google Maps scraper in Go, updated it a bit to match my needs, and started scraping all websites, emails and phone numbers of such companies in California (I thought they have the most money).

I got several hundred companies, bought an email domain and signed up on cold email outreach platform.

I learned how to write good cold emails, wrote several variants and started sending them, 30 emails per day.

Early Traction

I sent in total about a hundred emails, was following up on them, got some hate messages, and 4 people interested.

We jumped on a call with one cool guy, he also was interested and gave some insights, but he needed the bot to be on renting platforms too, not WhatsApp.

The Technical Roadblock

This feedback made me pause the outreach and start looking into the options to connect the chat to renting platforms.

It was impossible to connect to these platforms directly - Airbnb API was invite only, other platforms didn’t have it or it didn’t support chatting.

Short-term rental companies use a separate software that helps them manage bookings on several platforms, keeps calendars in sync, has one chatbox for all platforms, etc. I started exploring if it’s possible to connect to them.

It turns out there are dozens of such platforms, and everyone uses different ones. There are 3 platforms that have good API, with messages endpoints, and sometimes even webhooks for incoming messages.

But these platforms are not very popular, and my potential clients use the ones without any messaging API.

This shrank my target audience by a lot. My guess was that only 5% of Short-Term Rental companies use the platforms that I was able to work with.

The End of the Journey

It was super difficult for them to move to other platforms, so there was no way for me to work with already interested clients.

So I just decided to quit.

Looking Back

Now, 2 years later, I think I shouldn’t have quit. I could have made a Chrome extension to make their work faster, or came up with some crazy way to automate it even with ineligible platforms. This entire journey taught me that giving up too early is often the biggest mistake you can make as an entrepreneur.

While I was focused on the technical roadblock of API limitations, I overlooked simpler solutions like browser automation or even starting with the 5% of companies I could serve immediately. The experience wasn’t a failure though - I learned to conduct sales calls, write effective cold emails, and build a functional product and validate it with real customers in just two months.

Today, I try to approach obstacles differently. Instead of seeing a closed door as the end of the road, I look for windows, side entrances, or ways to build my own door. Sometimes the path forward isn’t through the obvious solution - it’s around it.

BTW, the website is still available at https://lyperio-landing.vercel.app/, feel free to check it out.