Comment by chrislim
11 days ago
I've been working on Wattle (https://wattle.app) for the past six months or so.
It started out in life as a bunch of post-it notes for friends who were watering my plants while I was on holiday, which evolved into a long text message, a Google Doc, a static site, a simple CMS, then Wattle. The more I look around, it seems like there are lots of use cases, so I'm having trouble with my positioning.
"Digital guidebooks for vacation rentals, home swaps, sitters, carers, and more."
The MVP was released last week :)
Funny, when I lent out my house I also covered it in PostIts.
When looking at a SaaS idea I always ask myself, "will this add enough value to compete with generic and free tool X?"
If your app is just pictures and text based (with AI search), I wonder if it adds enough value to compete with just a Google Doc that's also text and pictures (which surely also offers AI search). A Google Doc could also use comments to collect questions.
Visiting your home page, I was actually looking for AR (augmented reality) or plain camera powered features. E.g. point at a window sill and say "how do I open this?". Point at the washer controls and say "how do I do a fast wash? How long will it take?".
This could be especially useful for controls/labels in languages that the guest doesn't understand (easy to mistake bleach for detergent in Spanish for example). Maybe auto translation of all textual content and even pictures could be part of your app as well.
AR is something that I would love to see for myself!
For this particular scenario though, I've found that both hosts and guests responded far better to simplicity: a familiar UX (images/text) with a nice UI. Now that AI has become mainstream, adding this to search was also received well. Funnily enough, most of the past six months was spent culling features and streamlining/abstracting choices. The AI actually started out as multimodal and was reduced to text-only over time.
What I've learned from users is that a guidebook is non-critical until it is. When a guest can't figure out how the microwave works, they don't want to download an app, learn a new behaviour, and so on. They just want an answer as quickly as possible - from the host, or from a simple guidebook.
It's not so different from the host's perspective. Their focus is hosting, not creating the perfect resource. I added templates and "AI onboarding" (i.e. write a prompt / dump existing info as unstructured text) which people seemed to like. Turns out blank canvas syndrome is very real here as well. The AI organises existing info, creates placeholders for what's missing, and adds suggestions of what could be included.
When the guidebook fails to answer a question, it's logged so that the host can update it directly from the UI.
Completely agree with translation - it's on the list!
> they don't want to download an app
From the screenshot/device mocks on your site, I was under the impression that you were making an app for both host and guests to use. There's no 'browser chrome' visible in those pictures.
Could clarify that your app generates a site, or make that apparent from the screenshots.