Digital house manuals for short-let hosts
Digital house manuals for short-let hosts is a SaaS idea for hosts and co-hosts who run a few short-let properties, priced to test at $9 a month per property. Guests message at midnight asking for the door code, the Wi-Fi password or how the heating works. With it, hosts write one guide per property, and each guest gets a link with check-in steps, Wi-Fi and house rules.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
Guests message at midnight asking for the door code, the Wi-Fi password or how the heating works. Hosts paste the same answers into chats for every booking, and details go out of date.
Why now: Guests expect to check themselves in from their phone, and more hosts use smart locks with codes that change for every stay.
What do they use today?
Most hosts send a welcome message through the listing inbox and leave a printed folder on the kitchen counter. Co-hosts often keep the same details in a notes file or a group chat.
How does it work?
A co-host with several homes writes a guide for each one, with sections for arrival, house rules and checkout, then adds local tips and photos of the awkward boiler. For each booking the guest gets a private link. The door code appears on it only from the arrival day, so a late arrival can let themselves in without sending a single message.
What goes in the first version?
- Guide builder with sections for arrival, Wi-Fi, rules and checkout
- A private guest link for each booking
- Door code shown only from the arrival day
- Local tips and photos of tricky appliances
- Several properties and a co-host under one account
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Hosts and co-hosts who run a few short-let properties
- Price to test
- $9 a month per property
Hosts already count their business in properties, since each has its own door, appliances and rules. A price per property grows only as they add listings, which suits a co-host taking on homes one at a time.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask ten hosts in short-let host groups on Facebook which questions guests send most often.
- 2Turn one host’s welcome message into a guide and send it to guests arriving this week.
- 3Post a sample guide link and ask hosts if they would pay $9 a month per property.
Where to find the first customers
- Short-let host groups on Facebook
- Short-let and holiday-rental subreddits
- Local cleaning and co-hosting businesses that manage listings
What are the risks?
- Listing sites already send basic guest messages, so the guide must clearly do more.
- Hosts with one property may not pay; aim at co-hosts with many.
How to build it on shipanysaas
4 of the parts it needs are already in the kit. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.
- Already in the kit
- Teams and roles
- Billing
- Admin panel
- Emails
- You build
- Guide builder with per-property sections
- Guest links that reveal the door code on arrival day
See the starting prompt
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase. Help me build the first version of Digital house manuals for short-let hosts. Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it. ## The product - What it does: Hosts write one guide per property, and each guest gets a link with check-in steps, Wi-Fi and house rules. - Who pays: Hosts and co-hosts who run a few short-let properties - Their problem: Guests message at midnight asking for the door code, the Wi-Fi password or how the heating works. Hosts paste the same answers into chats for every booking, and details go out of date. - Price to test: $9 a month per property (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. Guide builder with sections for arrival, Wi-Fi, rules and checkout 2. A private guest link for each booking 3. Door code shown only from the arrival day 4. Local tips and photos of tricky appliances 5. Several properties and a co-host under one account ## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it - Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations - Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments - Admin panel: a super-admin panel that needs two-step sign-in - Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer ## New code it needs - Guide builder with per-property sections - Guest links that reveal the door code on arrival day ## How to work 1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK. 2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files. 3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next. ## Rules - Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel. - Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are. Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
Guides for the parts it uses
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