A friend of mine dropped out of university and went to live the "ski-bum" lifestyle in France. His mum wasn't happy with this and eventually took to writing letters to him addressed "Joe and his stupid friends, Chamonix". They all arrived without issues.

This was in the early 90's. I wonder how effective this would be now with more automated systems in use.

I have a friend in Chamonix I could try this with!

Sold a small SaaS product 2 years ago, which was marketed as an "AI" product.

Extract from the "model":

                $yearsBetween = $comparisonItems->created_at->diffInYears(Carbon::now());
                if ($yearsBetween <=1) {
                    $multiplier = 1.08;
                } else if ($yearsBetween <= 2) {
                    $multiplier = 1.12;
                } else if ($yearsBetween <= 3) {
                    $multiplier = 1.15;
                } else if ($yearsBetween <= 4) {
                    $multiplier = 1.22;
                } else if ($yearsBetween <= 5) {
                    $multiplier = 1.37;
                } else {
                    $multiplier = 1.41;
                }

Those multipliers were just from a bit of human-playing-around-with-the-data.

The thing is, customers were happy with the result and, as far as I know, still are. Internally it was always called the random number generator.

How was morale internally? Did the whole thing feel disingenuous? Were people cynical about it?

Only a small team of three but I can’t say it ever felt like a bad thing. If anything, proud that we didn’t need to train a model to get a decent result and could concentrate on the rest of the product experience instead.

If customers weren’t happy or the results they were getting were wildly out (they weren’t) then might’ve been different.

In our minds the customers are buying a product to produce a result. If that’s from an ai model or a bunch of ifs it shouldn’t matter.

Fun fact, I only recently discovered that "renumeration" is an incorrect spelling used by many. It is actually "remuneration". I'd been spelling this incorrectly for decades

The same for "nucular" instead of "nuclear". The first time I heard "nucular" was G.W. Bush on TV. I thought he was an idiot because a president of a nuclear power ought to know how to pronounce a word that important. I found it more odd that many people pronounced it that way and thought they were either mocking G.W. Bush, or emulating him. I was young and intolerant and thought they were idiots, too. When I had heard it one time too many, I figured there can't be that many idiots and looked up "nucular". I found out that "nucular" has forced itself into the dictionary precisely because too many people pronounced it that way and I was livid.

I eventually toned down my zeal because languages and people are dynamic and ever evolving and reflecting on Montaigne's Essais, written in late 1500s French, lead me to more understanding.

PS: I still consider that using "nucular" is insane.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucular

Apparently not. Crazy right

Not heard of airtable before, thanks!

Drop me an email with some details - lets chat!

I've been in this industry (SaaS for agents) for 6+ years. I may even have customer #1 for you (was asked only last week).

Great - just sent you an email now ;)

For selling outside of the MAS, Paddle is pretty good: https://www.paddle.com/developers

They have a quick to implement SDK that will take care of licensing, payments, etc. Depending on how you want to price your app the 5% + 50c deal could also work out well.

On the website, they say:

  - Automatic Updates
    Publish updates to your app or game instantly in just 3 clicks.

However, I wasn't able to find any documentation about that feature, same for Crash Reporting. I've written an email, but by any chance you know anything about this?

I worked on the licensing and IAP SDK's so not 100% about these features. It's a holiday in the UK today so I'm guessing it won't be an instant answer as usual.

I'll ask the question also, if those portions aren't ready yet I'm sure they'll be in the works though.

They'll ship native support for the Sparkle framework soon, that's why they mention "automatic updates" on the website.

This looks actually pretty amazing and might be worth a shot.

https://www.lettingcheck.com - This started life as a 'profit share arrangement'. I know, you always hear this is a bad idea but it actually turned out quite well for us.

We were approached to provide a quote, which turned out to be too expensive for them. We liked the idea so offered to do this for a 3 way split (two developers) with the understanding he would take care of sales (his background was sales and marketing). The situation changed after this but that's another story.

He originally came up with the idea from his parents who owned a couple of franchise letting agents and used to do this process with paper, pen and a digital camera.

I would have considered a purchase but they lost a sale from me by making it frustrating on mobile.

There are still too many sites that don't make hover actions function as two tap links for mobile users.

As someone who (1) runs a SaaS product for UK letting agents and (2) has hunted for a rented property in the last 12 months I think you've done a nice job but as some others have pointed out I can't see why someone who is looking for a property (rent or for sale) would use this over RM/Zoopla.

These aren't necessarily all applicable/useful to you but some observations/niggles I've had, taking in to account my first two points above, are:

- RM charges extortionate fees (I'm not sure about Zoopla) to agents. They're not happy about it, but feel they have no alternative (there's a reason for that - chicken and egg). This is from numerous comments made by my customers.

- By relying on an API from a major property portal I would be worried - How will you have better data than them? If your USP is UX/ease of use then do you think they would let you get that far before they change their T&C's?

- Because RM/Zoopla are expensive there are still a huge amount of properties not advertised on these portals. From my own experience, I wanted to go with a private landlord rather than an agent… I had to personally visit a huge number of properties that didn't fit my requirements (there was no way to tell in advance because they only advertised on classified sites/local paper) - there's an opportunity here - make it is for private landlords to easily list their properties AND make sure those listings are of good quality (interior photos not just exterior, etc)

- Talking of quality ... Ensure all of your listings are accurate, plenty of photos, floor plans, council tax band, etc. Just forget about low quality listings.

- OR, opposite of that, concentrate on properties that aren't adequately advertised elsewhere… does RM/Zoopla have a property with one low quality photo and a one sentence description? Go out of your way to get that extra information and focus on promoting those properties. When everyone else is looking at RM/Zoopla/etc and seeing the same properties you'll have a different inventory set to the rest with more detail.

- DONT be like everyone else and focus on the entire housing market in the UK (a few other commenters have said the same). Focus on rented, or for sale, or quality listings, unique listings… focus on something you can do better than the rest.

- There have been many competitors to RM/Zoopla. Most of them fail because, in my opinion, they can't solve the chicken and egg problem (either no visitors or poor quality property data) and end up launching an RM/Zoopla clone with a different UI.

None of this is to say it can't be done or you're doing it the wrong way… it can be and I'd love to see someone succeed, but it won't be done just on UI/UX.