Becoming My Own User

Surprise! My fiance and I are investing in a property and are getting it ready for an Airbnb. It's something we've been thinking about for a long time, but were waiting on the right time in the market before pulling the trigger.

It's ironic because my "full time job" is literally designing a platform that alleviates the pain and suffering that interior designers experience when they "spec" homes for clients. Also, as side note, I put full time job in air quotes because since saying 'entrepreneur' as my job still makes me cringe. It is nothing less than a full time job.

Anywho, it's an extremely convenient event for me. It's like I transform into my target market as a real user of the product. I can test my own assumptions in real time about my user's needs. I can experience the friction of any feature I create to solve the problems that users encounter. I can originate novel approaches to accomplishing the mini "tasks" of the spec sheet process.

The Origin Story

I realize I jumped into the exciting thing that's happening before sharing the backstory - I left my job in 2025 to invest in self-teaching myself how to program and build full stack applications. I was already working in tech at Meta (though in a program/product role, mostly non technical). I have experience coding, but it's been a good 5 years. Plus, there was this whole extra LLM-layer that, when learned, would be my edge/superpower in software development, but it would also inevitably take me a few months to get a hang of things, try and fail, re-learn some first principles about software architecture, database tools, and a whole gamut of things that most likely changed on a tactical level from what I was used to when I was doing projects during my undergrad at ASU

After a good 6 months of what I'll call my own software dev / vibe coding "boot camp", I felt proficient about my skills, knew I wanted to put them to the test with a REAL application that I could REALLY see working in the real world. My initial projects I did by myself help me test the validity of some of my "shower thought" type ideas I've held in my head for years, but I still didn't have the idea that I knew 1) solved a real problem, and 2) could service a relatively niche or specialized industry.

Just in a matter of weeks after realizing this, I met a girl playing tennis. She's an Architect by trade, but also offers interior design services depending on the client. Her early projects were primarily Interior Design ones anyway, to help her network and broaden her reach for new (and higher margin!) clients. When I told her about my "dilemma" - I have the skills to build an app, I just need the right idea to really execute them to the fullest potential for the world. She nearly hit the ceiling jumping out of her chair with excitement, because she knew exactly what needed to be built for her industry: A spec sheeting software tool that's affordable, doesn't totally suck, and that actually does what it says it can do.What a miracle encounter, right?

What's a spec sheet?

If you're not a designer, then you might be wondering what a spec sheet was. Our first task was to give me a full download of what this means, the process Interior Designers go through to produce one, why they're important in the industry, etc. (Oh, and later, why existing software on the market just doesn't cut it.)

A specification sheet (or "spec sheet") is a detailed document that catalogs every item specified for a residential or commercial remodeling/build project. This includes everything - the furniture, fixtures, finishes, fabrics, lighting, hardware, down to the last accessory. They're normally crafted in spreadsheets with each line including the product name, manufacturer, vendor, dimensions, finish/color, quantity, lead time, pricing (cost and retail), and ordering information like SKU numbers.

Think of it as the master inventory and purchasing guide for everything that will go into a space. It's a "definition of done" from a procurement standpoint. My original goal, after all, was to find problems people are already paying to solve with money, time, or frustration. It ended up being the perfect vision on her part - she invented the idea out of her own experiences, has the network to validate the idea with subject matter experts, and when it comes to building and delivering the product, would become integral in the Sales, Marketing, and UI/UX end of the business. After all, the best SaaS products emerge from deep understanding of a specific pain point. Talking to potential users before writing code. Watching them work and asking good questions to absorb as much context as possible. Fast-forward to today: We have a business plan, a website (link), and a prototype under development that we're iterating on.

The Airbnb Thesis

This idea to buy an Airbnb / short-term rental was a completely independent idea with nothing at all to do with this interior design software project. My fiance works in residential real estate finance, so the sort of analysis and market knowledge you need to effectively plan, assess, and execute on an Airbnb rental is hard wired into his brain at this point. My fiance and I also know the neighborhood that we'd be buying in like the back of our hands. One of our prime past times since moving into our neighborhood around 2020 was perusing all of home remodels and teardown - rebuilds around us. We live in a neighborhood that was planned development back in the 50-60's that don't have any HOA's, so every original home has roughly the same layout and specs, but no restrictions on making it brand new to the owner's liking. The lack of HOA's, and it's proximity to Old Town Scottsdale, also make these homes prime for short term rentals. I'd estimate that for every 5 homes, at least 2 of them are Airbnb's.

That doesn't mean that Airbnb's around here are a quick and easy buck. In fact, they've only become "more" risky in the last 5 years - due to the housing market, interest rates rising, uncertainty leading to lower presumed consumer spending. But it's far from "unprofitable". The barrier to entry is higher, and the consequences are magnified, but only IF you don't know the rules, regulations, and the key decisions that could cripple you in the process. "Such is life" - or should I say, "Such is Business".

That said, we needed to move fast to find something turn-key, priced for a consistent margin, and close enough to our home to make management easier. This took all of 6 home tours over a span of a week, and we found the perfect candidate. My job? Handle ALL of the furniture. Which means handling ALL of the "spec-ing" like I am a designer for my own project.

New Considerations, New Opportunities

So, we're off - continuing the journey of developing the BEST spec-ing software for interior designers. Now, we're armed with this coincidence, the opportunity to "hack" the process by becoming my own user-base. This is no replacement for persistent end user research. I'm capable of validating Product Market Fit from a user perspective, but I lack the identity, experience, and deep understanding of the interior designers' "standard operating model".

After all, we're intending to market the product to full time interior designers and interior-design adjacent operators (real estate agents, architects who may own their business and need to perform these same tasks themselves) - not neccessarily consumers.....yet. It was on the whiteboard of ideas early on, but felt that the spec sheet / project management angle was a better focus.

Perhaps the key difference I'll need to keep in mind here is that, while I am designing for a bigger picture project, I can't quite put myself in the shoes of a "repeat" customer or subscriber. I'm still a one time user.

Reasons I'm Excited to Be My Own User

This is a good segue into mine and my business partner's mental list of "success factors" for the product. These are the "non-negotiables" - that is, until we address these factors with full conviction and with abundant evidence - we're not ready to launch:

Product-Market Fit: Can we solve pain points that are frequent, measurable, and costly enough that the subscription to our service feels like obvious value?
- Duh! Everyone knows PMF! But as stated above, I can only address some of this.
Recurring Value Delivery: Our product must deliver value regularly -whether that's saving time, generating revenue, reducing risk, providing insightful data, or reaching/relating to their clients better.
- Thankfully, this Airbnb furnishing experience is the closest I'll get to experiencing value delivery "first hand".
Low Friction Onboarding: The faster users reach their "aha moment," the better our conversion and retention. This is critical since our product will have to be a self service one, given we're focused on low cost high value delivery.
- I'm the most excited to put myself in the user's perspective via this Airbnb experience. Here's why -
  - From personal experience as a user, the onboarding quality of a product will make or break my decision to continue using a product. Friction immediately after download sucks, and my assessment of a product is usually made in the first 30 seconds of using it.....maybe even less. At the same time, I shouldn't have to spend 8 weeks onboarding to something that's supposed to provide value in terms of time saved. (No joke - one of the few existing offerings for interior design project management states proudly on their website that their users can onboard in "under 8 weeks"......)
  - From personal experience as a developer, this tends to be the hardest thing to visualize ahead of development. And prototyping the perfect experience with software can be hard, too, since it locks you into the constraints of the particular prototype workflow and closes me off from the imagined alternatives.

For the remaining success factors listed below, the Airbnb experience likely won't provide as much value to me as the ones listed above. But, I've left it here in the spirit of providing a full list:

Retention and Expansion: Net revenue retention above 100% is kinda the "north star" for any profitable SaaS business. It's a fancy way of saying that, over time. existing customers spend more, buy additional seats, or increase their usage.
Favorable Unit Economics: Our customer acquisition cost (CAC) needs to be recoverable within a reasonable timeframe (rule of thumb tends to be <12 months). And, our lifetime value (LTV) should be at least 3x our CAC.
Scalable Infrastructure: We need a reliable, secure system that will indefinitely scale, without service interruption. For us, we'll need staffed operational support, a tight billing/invoicing process, and compliance assessments (as applicable) that will grow with us without costs exploding. From a technology stack perspective, we'll need the production system designed in a way that'll make the authors of Designing Data Intensive Applications so so proud.
Strong Distribution: If a tree falls in a forrest, and there's no one around, did it make a sound? (or however the adage goes.....). Obviously, we hope the product can sell itself through word of mouth before we justify scaling sales and marketing, but even then, we need people that know our product exists first!

Conclusion

This concludes my first write up on the project! This is the first time I've described the product, the process, the business initiation in earnest detail. Personally I'm a bit sad that I don't "have more time" outside of building the actual product to write about everything ELSE I'm going through - re-learning software development on my own, starting a business (now multiple!), diving into a new domain head first and building the foundation of the product from the ground-up.

But this experience - testing my current beta "in production" with the critical lens of an end user, will be worthwhile to continue documenting. The artistic experience is a fundamentally universal human experience - and I view our process of building this product as exactly that - an artistic experience.

Stay tuned for more! :)