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Video coming soon — PC will record a Loom walking through this chapter. The notes below are what it will cover.
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PC trained as a lawyer and moved to Brussels to work in European law. What actually got him excited during the job hunt wasn't law — it was teaching himself HTML and CSS to build his own personal website, and quickly realizing nobody was going to pay a lawyer for that. He also tried a small legal-tech startup with a friend, using early AI to help law firms — it folded after three months because the technology of the day just wasn't there yet.
Around 2014, he started hosting on Airbnb himself — the "golden era" of hosting, especially in Europe — renting out a private room, and at times the couch too, in his own flat. He hosted hundreds of guests back to back, with one day a month set aside just to have the place to himself.
Hospitable launched in August 2016 — as Smartbnb. At the time there was no public Airbnb API, so the whole product ran on what would now be called a gray-hat integration: logging into a host's own Airbnb account with their credentials to read messages and automate replies.
The first two customers found the product through a Google Alert they'd each set up for "Airbnb messaging automation" — one, based in London, became the very first paying customer. The second was a property management company in Melbourne, Australia with 30 listings, already paying a competitor $5,000/month just for messaging automation — they told PC they'd happily pay $5,000/year instead. That one email reset how PC thought about pricing.
Realizing he'd been leaving real money on the table, PC repriced the same day he got that email. The new number was delightfully arbitrary: his rent was €1,500/month, and he wanted to land 100 customers to cover it — so the price became €15/month for a host's first listing, declining for each additional property. "That would allow me to live richly," as PC put it — rent covered, nothing else required.
By December 2016 the business was making about $754/month — which PC discovered while home for the holidays, to a distinctly unimpressed family reception ("You went to law school for this? You can't even pay your own rent"). The pushback led to real change: within weeks, Hospitable dropped its old annual-only, heavily discounted billing model (which only captured a few months of value for a full year of service) and switched to monthly billing in January 2017.
What followed was a steady, almost textbook monthly ramp: roughly $500 in January, climbing to $1,000, $2,500, $3,300, $5,000, $7,000, $9,000, and finally $13,000/month by August 2017 — twelve months after launch. PC was still doing every job himself: product, support, sales, marketing. By the end of 2017, monthly revenue had reached the high $20,000s, with the customer base having roughly doubled that year.