Idea to Product in 3 Weeks

HostAI's cofounder Punn met our team at a hackathon, where he used our backend to build his projects for that day. He noted that it was particularly easy to spin apps up, prototype features, and reorganize the codebase quickly if the project specifications changed. From that day forward, whenever he'd need persistence or intermediate storage, he would look to Convex. Before HostAI, Punn built out a few side projects successfully with Convex, where he learned useful workflows and best practices.

Punn then met his cofounder, Cole, at a Real Estate conference, who had Airbnb rentals that required too much management work. Punn and his cofounder started hacking away at a project to improve the Real Estate management experience by leveraging AI chat models for responding to guests. After validating the use case with some initial users, Punn continued the pattern of using Convex for his backend, and started hacking on the project. While developing HostAI, he noted that Convex enabled him to leave his schema flexible. With a lot of archaic data models in the real estate industry, reconciling modern and older models required constantly adding columns and changing types. The MVP was fully delivered within 3 weeks of starting the project.

After developing the MVP, there was still a lot of outstanding work optimizing the user experience and application performance. Punn made particularly good use of Convex’s scheduler to manage asynchronous processes. Before using Convex’s scheduler, he would spin up Amazon SQS and have to do manual queue management, leading to queue congestion if not optimized. With the small team size, minimal overhead in managing infrastructure was essential to focus on the core goal: developing the product for customers. He moved all LLM calls, automated messages, and automated workflows to the Convex scheduler, leveraging Convex Actions to move external API calls out of the transaction path.

The HostAI team has continued to build out complex features on Convex, adding VOIP support directly in their application to allow for direct phone calls. Along with a native task/workflow management system, upsells for guests, and updates to the core messaging tool, they were able to effectively prototype, implement, test, and deploy these features directly on Convex.