talsey began by selling qr-code marketing to venues inside hotels. customers kept leaving, and we needed a version of the business they would keep paying for.

before building the concierge, we interviewed hotel operators directly to learn what they were missing. one answer came back fast. guests wouldn't download an app, so we dropped the app and gave each property its own number guests could text.

we took what customers were telling us, took a hard look at our own economics, and repositioned: the same technology, sold as ai concierge software to the hotels themselves. the venue relationships we already had became the new customer base.

my side was operations. i built the post-sale onboarding crm in clickup, plus the training that replaced ad hoc to-do lists, and trained every new hire. i worked with hotel staff to turn their needs into configured deployments, then automated substantially all of that manual configuration with claude and hermes.

when the owner, manager and staff at jade jungle resort in belize each wanted their guest intake form built a different way, i built three versions side by side with the trade-offs of each. they picked the best parts of every version, and we shipped one combined form.

customer attrition dropped 78 percent. we grew across boutique hotels and independently owned hotels under best western, choice, hilton and marriott flags, and raised $500k across a pre-seed and a seed.

we also learned to say no. when a property management vertical came up, i ran the unit economics: every single-property deal needed its own setup with both the management company and the homeowner, so the setup cost ran above what a contract was worth. we didn't build it, and stayed focused on hotels.