Stay Pilot
The operational layer for short-term rental properties. Founder, CEO and Product Lead.
Client
Stay Pilot (my own)Role
Founder, CEO & Product LeadTimeline
2025 - PresentLive
staypilot.appTL;DR
Hosts do not lack information, they lack systems. Stay Pilot is a B2B SaaS platform that runs the operations inside a short-term let: guest answers, cleaning, maintenance, priced per property. I ran the discovery, built the strategy and the product, set the pricing off real willingness-to-pay data. Live July 2026 with five paying pilot hosts: the same people I interviewed, who asked to go first.
The problem
The information a guest needs almost always exists. It is just buried, in a PDF, an Airbnb listing nobody reads, or the host head. So the host repeats themselves at the worst moments, and everything that keeps a property running lives in one person memory. Fine for one property. A hard ceiling the moment you want a second. I ran discovery interviews with five UK hosts across Airbnb, B&B and glamping, then checked it against 169 host discussions across 32 sources. Five people and the wider market told the same story.
Pricing against the real pain
Everyone building in this space points at the guest-facing guide. The money was not there. When I tested pricing, hosts kept pointing at the unglamorous operational stuff: cleaning, maintenance, the workflows that let them step away from the property. A host shutting their business to take a holiday is the clearest revenue ceiling I could find, and nobody was building for it. That put Stay Pilot in a 25 to 35 pounds per property per month band that hosts reached for unprompted. It is why I built cleaning, maintenance and inventory into the core product rather than treating them as add-ons.
Where it is now
What I built
Stay Pilot is the operational layer connecting booking platforms to the physical hospitality experience. It ties together guests, cleaners and hosts, handles six languages, and is built to scale across multiple properties. The model is B2B SaaS, priced per property: 29.99 per month standard, 24.99 at 5+ properties, 14.99 for the first 30 founder accounts. Revenue grows with property adoption, not booking volume, which means recurring, predictable ARR that does not ride the seasonality of the rentals themselves. Susan Missaglia runs technology. I run the company, the product and the commercial side.
Where is it now
Live July 2026 with five pilot hosts. Highland start-up grant secured. We tested it properly: 28 people, UK and US, 14 on the old design and 14 on the new. The old one came back generic and busy. The new one came back Fun, Curious, Energetic, Friendly. This was also when we brought the app to life with micro-interactions and animations, the small moments that make something feel considered rather than functional. That's the difference between an app you use and one you actually like opening. The bet paid off. The new look made us stand out instead of blending into the category, it pulled in millions of downloads, and it earned recognition from Apple for the visuals, which is about the clearest outside signal you can get that the work landed. to a tastefully discerning audience.
The five pilots are the people I interviewed during discovery, who asked to be first when I described what I was building. That is the validation I care about most.
