This summer Andrew Kitchell opened up Wheelhouse and invited his customers to build on top of it. Not engineers. Customers. Property managers, revenue managers, and a fair number of people who had never built anything in their lives. Over four days, 120 people from six continents worked together, and 40 of them finished with a working prototype. The top prize of $5,000 went to a full-time property manager who had never told anyone he was interested in building software.

Heather has spent her own summer building, so she came to this conversation with the question she keeps turning over: if someone with no coding background can build a working app, does that mean every property manager should? Andrew has a clear answer, and it has nothing to do with the tools. His view is that the barrier is no longer technology or design or user experience. It is permission. Giving yourself permission to stop doing what you normally do and decide that today is a build day.

Along the way they get into what a hackathon actually is, why Wheelhouse now describes itself as a growth company rather than a pricing company, how MCPs let you ask questions of your portfolio in plain language, and where building your own tools earns its keep against where it becomes an expensive hobby.

About Andrew Kitchell

Andrew Kitchell has been in and around the short-term rental space for around fifteen years, starting as an Airbnb host in San Francisco while the platform itself was being built a few blocks away. He joined an eight-person urban rental company that was updating its prices by hand twice a week, spent a weekend hacking the Airbnb API to automate it, and four weeks later the business had pivoted into Beyond Pricing. He went on to found Wheelhouse and the operating company Lyric, and has run both technology businesses and operating businesses through some hard cycles, including losing Lyric entirely when COVID hit. Wheelhouse today connects to around 800,000 listings and has opened its full platform to anyone who wants to build on it.

Key Takeaways

• The barrier to building your own tools is no longer technical skill. Andrew argues it is permission, the decision to stop doing today what you normally do and treat a few hours as build time.
• If you can describe a problem clearly, you are much closer to solving it than you think. Property managers describe their operational problems better than almost anyone, and that description is now most of the work.
• The old software model asked the person who understood the customer to hand that understanding to an engineer and hope it survived the journey. That gap has closed, and the people closest to the problem can now solve it themselves.
• You do not have to build anything yourself to benefit. Direct booking sites, owner reports, and small internal tools are all cheaper and faster to produce now, whoever builds them.
• Building is worth the time when it lands in your quieter season and when what you learn carries into the next build. Treat the first few attempts as research and development, not as finished product.
• MCPs remove the need to understand APIs at all. Connect Wheelhouse to Claude and you can ask questions of your portfolio and execute pricing strategy in ordinary language, which Andrew sums up as a click is a command, is a chat.
• An open platform produces better outcomes than a single one. After the hackathon there is no longer one Wheelhouse experience, there are forty-one, each built by someone who knew exactly what they needed.

Resources and Links Mentioned

• Wheelhouse: usewheelhouse.com
• Andrew on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andrewkitchell
• Email Andrew directly: andrew@usewheelhouse.com. He replies quickly to anyone who is building something.
• Wheelhouse MCP, which connects your portfolio data to Claude so you can ask questions and execute strategy in plain language.
• Build platforms mentioned in the conversation: Lovable, Vercel, Claude, Claude Code, and Codex.
• Hackathon judges named in the episode: Steve Schwab (Casago), Amy Hinote (VRM Intel and DARM), and Richard Vaughton.
• Jonathan of Atlantic Vacations, the full-time property manager who won the overall prize.
• ToolWYZE, Heather’s collection of apps for property managers running five to fifty properties, launching at Scale Fest in Barcelona in October. Beta testers are wanted before the end of September: heather@vacationrentalformula.com
• This episode is sponsored by StayFi. Use the code VRSUCCESS for 50% off three months of service at stayfi.com

Connect with Andrew Kitchell

Andrew is genuinely open to hearing from people who are building things, and he said on the record that he will get back to you quickly. If you have started something, or you are stuck partway through, that is exactly the conversation he wants.

• Website: usewheelhouse.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/andrewkitchell
• Email: andrew@usewheelhouse.com