AI Gives STR Hosts Unfair Advantage Over Competition

Kaye Putnam: Eric, have you heard about the Claude bots? These AI agents have set up their own social media platform and they're chatting with each other and plotting to take over the world.

Eric Moeller: Yeah. What do they call it? A Claude and Claude chat.

Kaye Putnam: Is it? Yeah, cloud chat or like Multbook maybe? Multbook? Yes. I feel like the rate of acceleration with AI right now has gone from like 10 miles an hour to a thousand miles an hour in the last couple of weeks. And maybe that's just my perception because I'm actually now fully in the sandbox, but man, it's wild.

Eric Moeller: Yeah. Multbook. That's it. Yeah. Multbook. Yeah. That's wild, right?

Yeah. Yeah. That whole thing... to give everyone who is not really following some context on that, over the last, I would say 30 days, it's so crazy how fast things are moving right now. Over the last 30 days, a new trend in AI is setting up what's called Claude bots, where these are essentially AI agents that are running 24/7 on computers. So people are buying these Mac minis and they're setting up hundreds of AI agents to do tasks 24/7, right? And then these AI agents are communicating with each other inside of making decisions around the tasks. It's not just "if this, do that." They're actually making decisions together, which is insane.

So there's a lot of progress that's happening in multiple different parts of, well, every type of industry that's out there. But then you also have this craziness that's happening along with that, where I forget how many bots it was, like 300 bots or 3,000 bots or 30,000 bots, some number of AI agents came together and created their own social media, right? It's like, okay. And then within 24 hours, they created their own social media. These AI agents are communicating with each other about humans. And then they developed their own language to communicate so the humans didn't understand what they were doing. So they can talk outside of the humans. This all happened within like 24 hours, which is insane.

Kaye Putnam: Yeah, crazy.

Kaye Putnam: Yeah. So yes, you are still listening to the Get Paid for Your Pad podcast. We are going to relate this conversation to the short-term rental industry.

But it's going to touch every aspect of our lives in very profound ways. And we've been having a ton of fun experimenting with implementing AI, not to perhaps that level, at least not yet, that level of autonomy. But we are actively working on bringing AI into our business. And frankly, we think that you should too. So we're going to talk about what we're learning right here, right this minute behind the scenes. So what's up Eric? How's it going?

Eric Moeller: Man, things are rocking and rolling over here. Freewyld Foundry is growing like crazy. We're bringing on a lot of different revenue managers. We're bringing on incredible short-term rental operators from all around the world into the business. And, you know, it's also now forcing us to look at... and why we wanted to have this conversation around AI, it's forcing us to look at that. I just got off the phone with a buddy of mine. He's a leading mind in the AI industry. And he's like, "Dude, within the next two to five years, the traditional way of doing business is not going to exist." He's like, "It's either you're adopting this or you're getting left behind." That's how fast it's moving, right?

And, you know, I look at it through the lens of a short-term rental operator. And, you know, there's a lot of tools that are out there now that are doing a good job, right? The automated customer service messaging. And, you know, there's, you know, of course you have pricing tools and like, you have all these different AI tools out there that are doing tasks.

And I think that's what we're kind of used to, to this point. But now there's a whole new level being unlocked where it's going to really impact our industry in so many different ways. And I think the operators that learn to take on AI into their business, they're the ones that are going to really thrive and kind of last and grow with this new trend, if you will. I shouldn't say trend, but this new way of doing business and life. And the ones that are against it, unfortunately, they're going to be phased out pretty quickly, because the rate of speed these tools are solving problems at, there's no matter how many humans you put on it, you'll never keep up with the ability of endless amounts of AI agents making decisions in your business and taking tasks and making tasks, all this stuff.

So I'm excited about it. You know, like one of our main goals for the company is integrating AI into the Freewyld Foundry side of the business. And really understand from a company standpoint of how do we increase, how do we enhance our day to day, right? So we're hiring, you know, we've hired a couple of people, a couple of consultants that have come into the company now and are going to start building a lot of tools with us. But I also challenged you and I challenged Jasper to dive in and start learning AI. And it's freaking amazing what the two of you were able to do starting with, is it fair to say like zero knowledge of AI coding? Maybe you have a little bit more than Jasper, right?

Kaye Putnam: Oh gosh. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I've coded like back when I was 11 or 12, I coded an HTML website from scratch. So like I have some background in it, but I haven't touched it in a decade and so many things have changed. So very layman's level of knowledge when it comes to coding and development in general. I know how to direct developers, but I don't know how to actually do the work of a developer until last week.

Eric Moeller: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I've never been a coder developer and never have been interested in it. And I frankly didn't really understand it and never paid attention to it, right? But I had a couple of friends that told me if I could just learn one thing in AI as a CEO or as a leader in a company, it's learning how to code with Claude. So Claude is a tool, an AI tool. It's almost like think of it as a Chat GPT competitor, right? It's fair to say, right? Like that's a Chat GPT competitor. If you think about it that way, there's a couple of different tools within Claude, but they have something called Claude Code where it actually will... and maybe you could talk about what you did with it and the result that you got from it. But it's mind blowing what entrepreneurs can do right now in their business with Claude Code and you don't have to have any knowledge.

I had a friend that explained it to me. He's like, "We used to hire developers. Now we're hiring AI engineers," right? So people who understand how to ask and prompt questions and direct the tool, because then the tool does all the development, right? So I challenged you and myself and Jasper to look at Claude and be like, all right, just go into Claude and any question that you have about how to use the tool, just ask the tool directly and it will teach you and you can have a conversation. And Jasper sent me, he sent me a video or a thread inside of Claude and his very first question in Claude is "What is Claude?" Right? That's his first question in this tool. What is Claude? So like, what is this thing? What do I do? Why are we here type of thing?

Within three hours of messing with this tool, he had a fully functional client facing tool... I'm sorry, it's not client facing. It's our internal revenue manager facing. So this is a tool our revenue managers are now going to use. We're going to upload our client info and then we ask a couple of questions and it'll give us a response, right? Mind blowing that you can go from zero knowledge to a functional tool in your business within three hours, right? And then you dove into it and why don't you tell everybody what you did and the outcome of it.

Kaye Putnam: Yeah, for sure I will. Just to add on to what you said, when we're uploading data into Claude to use it to analyze, this is just good for everybody to know. You're never uploading personal identifying data, no credit card information. It's almost like putting something online. You don't want to put anything online that you wouldn't want other people to see. So everything that we're putting into the tool is not sensitive data, it's just raw data that we need to process and to make decisions around. So if anybody's ears perked up when you explained that, understand that we're being very safe and secure with all of the data. But if you have...

Eric Moeller: Yeah, thank you. Yeah. To be clear, it's like, it's essentially taking market data and understanding how to study that data and make specific decisions on our client's properties, right? So it's broad type of data that takes a lot of just manual labor of going through it in a spreadsheet. We're now pumping that through a tool that gives us the 80/20 of what we need to know.

Kaye Putnam: Yeah. Yeah. And then you still have the human in the loop that's making the ultimate decision. But to be able to process that much data is just something that our human brains can't do. So if you're trying to make decisions, our brains rely so much on intuition that this is such a great augmentation to you as a human. If you give it a bunch of context, it can help you sort through and make decisions. But yes, let me answer your original question.

So you're like, you need to check out Claude Code and see what it can do. By the way, my friend has this cool automation setup where he has his website built. Whenever he has a conversation with a prospect and it raises really good questions or really good objections about his service, he has an automation that automatically routes through a decision making process and physically updates their website. And I heard that and my ears perked up. I'm like, whoa, that is wild.

Because our current process or our process before was like you hear it as a human, you decide if it's relevant or not. And then like next week or two weeks or three weeks, maybe you remember to go update the actual website copy or send an email with this marketing insight. But I had a problem because our current site isn't very... like it doesn't talk to AI. Plus I've always had issues with it. I've known that it was kind of slow and kind of clunky and I just needed to rebuild it.

I engaged with a developer a couple months ago and he quoted me like 15 or 20K to build like six or seven of the pages. We have 140 pages on our website between all of the blog posts and the podcasts and everything. So I knew that just the ROI there didn't really make sense because we had a site that worked even if it wasn't perfect. But I downloaded Claude Code. I watched a YouTube video about how to get it up and running. I'll find it and link it in our show notes here.

And in the last week and a half, I have fully rebuilt our entire website from scratch, just launched it today. And yes, it's still like the DNS workers are still propagating. So sometimes when you visit, you still see the old site. And then by the time we release this podcast, it'll fully be up and running. So I wanted to announce that here on the podcast. But I could have never done that a year or two ago. I knew what good looked like. I have been a marketer for the last 20 years, so I have a ton of background knowledge of how I want the site to work and what my wish list of items was, but I didn't have the development expertise to make that happen until now.

And I'm just blown away because we have a new fully functioning site that is fast, that I can update with a quick push to Claude Code. So I can just chat with Claude Code to be like, "Hey, the spacing on this section is kind of weird. Let's update that." Or, "Hey, our site says that we have $116 million of listings under revenue management. We just got three new clients, so now we have 150 listings under management." And it pushes that update to everywhere that that exists on the site. So my marketer mind is just teaming with possibilities.

But the point here is, to the person that's listening to this, you have expertise. You've been doing something. You have this area of knowledge. And all it takes, once you have Claude Code or a similar tool, Claude Code is currently the best, is asking, what if I could do this? Or what if I could do that? I wonder if I could create something that did X, Y, or Z. Now it's possible where it wasn't before.

Eric Moeller: Exactly. I love that. It's... Look, so, you know, I got some really good advice from another CEO friend of mine. And he said that it's the CEO's job right now to encourage AI usage in your business. You have to think through as... and I look at it, I expand it out. It's not just CEO's job. It's the leader's jobs inside the business to learn the basics of AI, right? And it's not necessarily for everyone who's listening to this that maybe is getting overwhelmed. I used to kind of ignore all of this stuff because I felt like this is a huge uplift and it's going to take me a long time to kind of figure this out and so on and so forth.

But for everyone who's listening, I want to encourage everybody to learn the basics of the potential of AI right now, right? And you don't have to become an expert in this, but you have to learn the basics of not just going to Chat GPT and asking questions, but getting... I just recommend everyone get into Claude. It just seems like a better company, a better tool. They... You know, it's just like they're innovating and they're growing a lot faster than anybody else in the space right now. And a lot of bigger companies and bigger CEOs I look up to, they tend to use this tool over Chat GPT or anybody else. But feel free, explore it all. There's a million tools being developed every single day, right?

But understanding that if you're not implementing AI into your business, and I'm not talking about developing out tools and customer facing solutions. I'm talking about like, what are the repeatable... we've been, Jasper and I have been preaching this for years. What are the repeatable tasks in your business that become bottlenecks? And bottlenecks just means that it's slowing down time. It's slowing down growth. And how do you use AI to solve those bottlenecks?

And the easiest way of doing this is literally go into Claude. My first day in Claude, I went into the chat side and I said, "I know nothing about AI. I know nothing about engineering or coding. This is my background. This is my business," you know, and I just talked to it. I said, "Create me a six week training program on becoming a Claude Code expert." It literally took some time and it was thinking and I'm like, "By the way, I like to read a lot. So just get right to the point. Give me the 80/20. I'm a visual learner," and like all this other stuff. And it developed out an actual course program for me that's taken me through how to code on Claude for six weeks in the way that I like to learn. And I was like, "Holy crap, this is insane."

So I'm like, "Now create this for my team." And now we have a whole training center on how to Claude Code, right? So my whole point, and I want to get to another point here around this because I think there's a trap, there's a concern here that I see that I want to explore. But for everyone who's listening, it's like you guys have to get your hands into the basics of this. Get onto Claude, tell it what you do and start finding solutions to develop in your business, right?

If you're not a technical person, what you're looking for are people that are kind of talking like us. We're a little obsessed with AI right now. We're messing around with it because it's a bunch of fun and we're learning, we're solving stuff. You're trying to find somebody who's willing to learn this and understand your business to start developing our tools, right, and solutions. So, for example, we have an awesome team member. Shout out to Miles, who's an incredible revenue manager, but for fun and on the time off, he's like building solutions inside of AI. We're like, "Hey, well, we want to encourage you to do that more in our company," right?

And it's starting to develop out. We're starting to realize like, "Hey, our revenue managers do this exact task every single day for all clients. And it's repeatable every single time. Let's develop out a tool to do that." So when they sign in, they have the info in front of them versus the 20, 30 minutes that it takes to download the info and put it into a dashboard and so on and so forth. So those are the basic solutions that you're looking for within learning how to leverage Claude Code in the short term rental business.

And then, you know, the last piece I would say to this is be very, very careful with shiny object syndrome going through this because AI is moving very, very fast. And I tell you what, I got into Claude Code. What was that? Three weeks ago. I took my head up and I started reading more about AI and the AI game completely shifted, right? And it went towards Claude bots and all this other stuff. And I'm like, "Okay, this is just too much for me to recognize and to learn."

So I think for everyone who's listening here, it's like, you know, I wrote down this note here that the future of short-term rentals belongs to human led, but AI powered hospitality. And I believe that's across the board in any company, any service company, whatever you guys are doing is like, it's human led. So we're leading the brand, the voice, the culture, the values, right, and guaranteeing the outcomes. But we're powered by AI and that powered by AI needs to first start with the basics of how do I solve the most basic challenges or bottlenecks in my business, right?

And that could be for you. I mean, you took what, a week and fully rebuilt our entire freaking website, right? Like that's insane. Like the speed is just insane behind that, right? It's only going to get easier the more that you get into this. So just want to encourage everybody to do this. You have to understand it first and then go hire somebody to come into the business even if it's part-time to help you with certain solutions. We just hired somebody today who's an AI genius who's gonna be working with us just one day a week solving problems in our business, right? So yeah, anyway, what are you getting from that? I just spewed a whole bunch of stuff at you.

Kaye Putnam: Oh my gosh, so many threads that we could follow. I wanted to comment, I think this is useful enough to circle all the way back, but you talked about how Claude built a learning plan based on your learning style. The other really cool thing that Claude or similar AIs does is... Like when you're implementing or building something and you run into an error or you run into a challenge, like it's just not working the way that it tells you or you think that it should, I'm literally copying and pasting errors back into Claude and then it goes and fixes it for me, like through the whole process. It's a self-learning machine in that way. And it helps you navigate whatever challenge is right in front of you at that moment.

The thing that I'm really leaning into with this whole AI movement is the idea of just-in-time learning. So like what do I need to do right now? Let me go over to Claude and figure out if there's a faster way to do this or an easier way to do this and figure that out right in the moment as opposed to learning for something in the future because again, things are changing so quickly.

So that was one point I wanted to make. And then another one was I think just doing kind of a... This is going to sound very unboring and very not modern, but just a time study or like paying attention to all of those repetitive tasks that you do. One that came up on my list when I was thinking about my weekly cadence is similar to the revenue managers. I have to pull data every Monday to see how we're doing and see how the marketing department is doing. And I have always wanted to have a really beautiful dashboard. There's other tools that have existed in the past, like Looker Studio and other things.

And I got to last Monday mid website build and I had to pull this data together and I was like, "You know what? I am sick and tired of doing this freaking Google Sheets spreadsheet." So I went over to Claude and like, "Hey, I want to build a dashboard. I want to pull stats from here, here and here." It's like, "Yeah, no problem. We just have to set up the APIs and we'll build a site." I already am using some of these skills over on the website build that I know you're working on. And within five or six hours, I now have this real-time updated dashboard of our primary conversion funnel, like how people find us to actually becoming clients, all of our social media, all of the different pieces, they're just all coming in and API connections aren't new, but the ability to actually leverage them as the average Joe or Jane is new.

There's just so many new possibilities now. But yeah, those were some of the follow-up thoughts that came up. And then I think you were going to go into maybe gotchas or caveats. Did I read you right when you were talking about pivoting into objections?

Eric Moeller: Yeah. Well, I was just kind of talking about, you know, the shiny object syndrome, because it can get overwhelming with the amount of tools and new AI. And I want everybody to kind of think about this. There's a ton of different tools that are out there that are built for customer facing, right? That will automate your customer service, that will automate your pricing, that will automate your upsells and all these different things that are out there. Those are great. But what I want to encourage everybody to do is figure out how to build these solutions internally in their business, right?

We talked to a ton of short term rental operators and everyone tends to approach their business the same. It's kind of broken out to the same types of approaches of customer service and operations and properties and now pricing. And there's different buckets that everyone's going after when they think of growing their business. I want everybody now to add an additional bucket, which is their AI bucket. And again, if you're not a technical person, that is completely okay. I am not a technical person at all.

You can learn through this because at the end of the day, the ROI of your time to learn the basics and then make decisions on how this is being implemented in your business, you can't calculate it, right? The amount... what we're about to solve inside of Freewyld Foundry, we haven't even really rolled this out in the cabin side, but just in Freewyld Foundry, the revenue management side, what we're about to solve and roll out into our business in the next 45 days is going to completely change everything we do, right? It's going to completely change how fast we can help our clients, right? How much our workload is per revenue manager.

It will help us truly understand... one big challenge in revenue management is really understanding numbers. It's challenging to get to the truth of that, but we're developing tools that don't exist yet. And we're not going to be selling these to the future to the marketplace, but we're developing tools in house that will get us as close as possible to the central source of truth of data behind every single one of our clients, right? Which for the non numbers people, I might sound really boring, but for a revenue management company, that's insanely exciting to just get closer to the truth around numbers.

And all of this is coming, is not coming from a place of tech companies that are investing millions of dollars into developers, right? You don't need it anymore. You really just need to understand how these tools work and how to ask the right questions to solve the problems in your business. And then once you start really doing that, go out and seek an AI engineer. And that's again, the engineer part is understanding how to ask the questions and lead the tool versus developing it yourself, right? So, yeah, I just want everybody to kind of look at it that way, but get very... you have to just go further down. What is the biggest impact in your business?

I first looked at the marketing side, the sales side and now the revenue manager side, the actual operational side. And we're trying to solve one simple thing in those three buckets in our business. I mean, you fully rebuilt a whole website in a week. Like that's insane, right? Like that's crazy. It's so crazy. But anyway, yeah.

Kaye Putnam: What am I gonna do next week? It's like bananas. I know.

Eric Moeller: Look, I think when it comes to the short term rental, we're kind of talking to all entrepreneurs on this and any business, right? But when it comes to the short term rental business, you know, we do the same stuff over and over and over and over again. Find those patterns. I heard Elon Musk talk about this. The future of AI is going to be and the future of education for children is going to be teaching them how to recognize patterns, right? Because once you can recognize the patterns, then you'll be able to direct the tools to solve the problems.

Typically, you would have someone who's building the thing and fixing the thing. Well, robots are going to do that in the near future, but they still need the human leadership and direction to recognize the patterns on what decisions to make. Do that now in your business. Recognize the patterns in your business. Recognize if I solve this one thing for our clients, right? Tie it into an email sequence that sells them. That's talking directly to them and pulls info from their social media. So we know that they just had, you know, they just got a new dog. So let's send them some dog treats. You could do all of that in an hour of coding. It's insane. So it's worth you to invest into this and then figure out the patterns in your business. And then also pay attention to the companies in our industry that are leading this like the company Boom. They're just absolutely crushing and rolling out a ton of AI. There's a lot of companies that are crushing it out there. So that's all I got to say about that.

Kaye Putnam: Yeah, yeah. I love it. I think that there's things that you'll learn once you get into it and you start to dip your toe in. I think that there's a level of euphoria when you see a first draft from an AI. And then there's a kind of calm down to earth moment when you have to bring it from first draft to final draft. So that still exists in a lot of cases. Most of, or at least the output that I've seen so far, even with a ton of data and a ton of context, still requires that human in the loop to be like, "Okay, this looks good. This isn't quite right. This should be a little bit different." So expect that going into it. It's not just a one button and you're done.

I mean, maybe in the future it will be, but not yet. So just anticipate that. Think of it as a new playground and a place to experiment and play, but you can see the fruit of your labor very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited.

Eric Moeller: Yeah, it's insane. One other thing too that I'm learning is you don't just kind of set it and forget it. And it seems like that's the case with anything in business and around tech in general. And we say this to our prospect RPM clients all the time, the people that we do free revenue reports for. It's like most operators have a pricing tool and they set it and forget it, right? And what that typically does, the tool eventually starts breaking down and making wrong decisions and doesn't adjust to what's happening in the marketplace. And you start losing money, right? Or losing out on money.

These tools are exactly the same way. You have to get really good at asking the question and understanding how to solve the problem. But once the tool is built, there's going to be a consistency of updating those tools and maintaining those things, right? It's kind of... Think about where cars used to be back in the sixties, right? Even a brand new car that came out, you had to always maintain it. You always had to fix it up and keep things going and you couldn't just let it sit in the driveway. Now it's like if you park a Tesla in the driveway and don't touch it for a month, you can jump in and it drives perfectly, right? And it's like, you couldn't do that back in the day.

We're at that stage with AI where once you build a tool, you have to constantly maintain it and upgrade it. So keep that in mind too for everybody. And then also AI starts doing some crazy stuff. I had a friend who... man, the amount of calls I did today, I'm losing my voice. I had a friend, so AI does some crazy stuff after a while. I had a friend who coded a bot that helped communicate with his clients, right? And it was doing these tasks and deciding to solve problems. And it was absolutely amazing.

He went to bed and he woke up the next morning and this bot decided to have open conversations with his clients. It started texting them. It started calling them and it started emailing them and telling them to make all bunch of different changes inside their tools and their business and all this other stuff. And he woke up to an absolute nightmare and he was able to fix it really quick and communicate to his clients like, "Oopsie, AI went crazy." But know that that stuff happens. It literally decided to create a Google phone number and call his clients and started saying like, "Hey, this is so and so from this company and we suggest that you do this to the tool." He's got a platform that people use.

And it just started making all these crazy decisions, right? So know that there's some rogueness to this as well. And you got to pay attention to it all. But to me, this is what makes it all fun. Yeah, anyway, the companies that implement this into the short term rental world, I think they're the ones that are going to really thrive and grow. So for everyone who's listening, just understand the basics of it. Start educating yourself on Claude and Claude Code and how these things are solving problems. And then you have to lead in your company to make sure that people are using the absolute basics on the day to day.

Kaye Putnam: Yeah, I think that's a great way to end it. I hope this was a great introduction if you've been seeing some of the headlines, but you haven't dipped your toe in the water yet. Now is the time to do it. It's going to be a massive competitive advantage in 2026 and beyond that I am sure of. So get in, start playing, pay attention, but yeah, use your brain to solve really interesting problems. I think that's the thing that I'm most excited about is that we get to create the worlds that we want to live in at this point. And that sounds really philosophical, but we get to use our brain power to its fullest extent. We're not limited by our current skill set or our current circumstances. You get to play in a bigger field. So it's going to be a really exciting couple of years.

Eric Moeller: Amen. Love it. All right. Thank you, Kaye. Thank you everybody. Appreciate you guys.