Role
Founding Product Designer
Collaboration
CEO,
CTO
4 Engineers
2 Designers (Second designer joined Jan 2026)
Duration
May 2024 - Current
Scale
4,500+ properties
1M+ guest Interactions annually
What if short-term rentals could create the same guest experience as legacy hotel chains the moment guests turn on the TV?
Hotels have used TVs to create curated guest experiences for years. But that required expensive hardware and legacy software built for large operators. Short-term rental hosts had the same TV in every unit and no way to use it.
WelcomeScreen: A guest experience platform that gives short-term rental hosts control over what guests see on TV and mobile, managed from a single desktop portal.
A proven market demand in the Facebook short-term rental community.
Before any formal research began, a single Facebook post in a short-term rental group revealed something no one had built yet.
The question was never whether people wanted this. The research that followed was about what it needed to deliver, for hosts managing multiple properties and for guests arriving with no context and no instructions.
What hosts asked for, and what guests could actually feel
I started with hosts. Two-sided product, so I optimized for the buyer first, and asked all of them the same hypothetical.
Recurring Host Needs
60+ property operators · cold calls, DMs and email
If something like this existed in your property, what would you want it to do?
Provide personalization at scale
Creating a branded experience
A channel to promote their offerings
Fewer repetitive questions
Two of these four put host content directly in front of a guest. Personalization and promotion both depend on a guest noticing while branding and repeat questions are operational, so we went to the guest side to focus on that.
Guest Perspective
40+ friends, families, strangers · In person interview
When was the last time a stay felt special at a hotel or Airbnb and why?
Do you often ask recommendations or take recommendations from hotel concierge or promotions?
What made a stay feel special
A small gesture the manager didn’t have to make
Concierge recommendations
Guests remembered effort someone chose to make. Hosts needed it to work across every property. That gap shaped most of the decisions that followed.
The core design challenges behind WelcomeScreen
With the user needs and perspective understood, we looked at the key constraints in building the product. There were structural constraints that shaped how we could deliver on what we'd learned. While there were several challenges in creating WelcomeScreen, three core design challenges stood out.
Challenge 01:
Solution
Tradeoff:
Challenge 02:
Solution
I design for the largest operators first, then let that scale down. Property cards collapse into lists as volume grows, and PMS syncing works the same at 1 property or 500.
Tradeoff:
A small operator inherits a system built for scale, so the experience leans more utilitarian than a tool made for a single property would.
Challenge 03:
Wide range of end consumer
Solution
A glanceable, accessible interface with large targets, plain language, familiar patterns, clear hierarchy, and no setup for the guest.
Tradeoff:
We keep the guest side deliberately simple, holding back more complex features so every guest understands it on sight.
How the system moves content from Property Management Systems to screens
Before designing a single screen, the CTO and I mapped how content would move through the system. We disagreed on a few things and landed on this.
01
PMS creates the properties
Connecting the PMS pulls in the full portfolio: units, addresses, and reservations. Nothing is entered by hand.
02
Host adds their content
03
Host saves and publishes
Edits auto-save as a draft. Nothing reaches the guest side until the host publishes.
04
Guest opens the TV or mobile
Each surface fetches on open and builds the screen from the reservation plus whatever the host last published.
The PMS was the setup path from the start. It already knows every unit, address, and booking, which is why onboarding 500 properties costs about what onboarding one does.
Where we disagreed
Manual setup for hosts without a PMS
Our CEO and CTO wanted to support hosts without a PMS at launch. I pushed back, since no reservation data means no guest names and no automatic setup. We shipped PMS-only.
Later, hosts without a PMS wanted the product anyway, and we found other routes to the data. I'd assumed it wouldn't be worth much without reservation data. I was wrong.
Auto-save
Our CTO wanted an explicit publish step for a cleaner data model. I argued hosts would lose work if we only saved on publish. We do both: edits auto-save as a draft, and nothing reaches the guest until the host publishes.
/Onboarding
Creating the same onboarding experience regardless of property size
Once a host enters an API key, the PMS supplies everything WelcomeScreen needs to set a property up. That meant a host could see their whole portfolio in the product within a minute of connecting, before typing anything.
01.
Select properties
Hosts often want WelcomeScreen on specific properties only, so the import starts with filtering what comes over from the PMS.
02.
Confirm what transfers
Showing exactly which data moves across, so nothing arrives unexpected.
03.
Import runs
A short loading state that names what's being matched rather than showing a bar alone.
04.
Pair a screen
Hosts land on the property list ready to pair. Anything incomplete is flagged rather than blocking, since one missing wifi password shouldn't hold up the other 95.
Property listing section with grid vs list forma
Hosts land here with the portfolio already built. Screens get paired one at a time as devices go in, which keeps setup and installation independent of each other.
/Designing the TV experience
The first screen a guest sees, and the decisions behind it
A guest arrives with no account, no instructions, and about ten seconds of patience. A host wants their brand on screen, their own words, their recommendations, across every property they own. Those two things pull against each other, and this screen is where they had to be reconciled.
01.
Host logo
Fixed to the top left on every screen, so the host's brand is always present and never has to be placed.
02.
Name from the reservation
Automated so a host can greet every guest by name without writing anything, at any portfolio size.
03.
Personalized message
Written once and applied across hundreds of properties, or edited for a single stay when the occasion calls for it.
04.
Focus arrives already set
Glow and 1.05 scale. The first action is focused as soon as the screen loads, so a guest doesn't have to look for where to start.
05.
Blur and gradient
Hosts choose the photo, so contrast can't be left to it. The blur keeps text legible on any image.
06.
Safe zone
A 5% inset on every edge. Panels crop the outer border, so nothing sits outside it.
Built for whatever language the host writes in
Our first international customer operated in Australia and asked about temperature units. We hadn't considered it, so we added it as an option.
Full localization never became a priority. Most of our customers were in English-speaking countries, and doing it properly meant taking on layout work we couldn't justify. The guest side also leaned on common patterns and icons, so the core functionality worked regardless of the language someone spoke.
Property managers kept control of what displayed. Units default from the property address and can be overridden, and content appears in whatever language they write in, so a host operating in Korea wrote in Korean and that's what guests saw.
Designing for a device in someone's hand
There's no cursor on TV. Focus is always somewhere, only ever on one thing, and a guest moves it one element at a time in four directions. Every action had to sit on an obvious path from wherever they already were.
Every element the host added is one more thing a guest has to move past with four arrow keys. The more control hosts get, the longer the path to what a guest actually came for.
Left and right move across the top navigation.
Down enters the list, and focus moves one item at a time.
back Returns focus to the current tab rather than leaving the app, so a guest can't exit by accident.
/Incorporating AI features
We added AI to the two things no host could keep up with manually.
Competitors were adding AI, so we looked for where it would actually matter rather than adding it for its own sake. Two places qualified: work that was location dependent and repetitive enough that no host could keep up with it manually. Recommendations and guest questions both fit.
AI generated recommendations at scale
Hosts managing multiple properties don't have time to manually research local recommendations for each one. With one click, the system generates property-specific suggestions based on the property's location. Hosts review, curate, and publish. Guests see the result on TV and mobile.
AI Concierge
The AI Concierge lives inside the mobile guidebook. Guests ask questions about the property and get answers pulled from the host's own content, so nothing is invented. We've since added local area awareness and photo recognition.
Both features are opt-in, and roughly 35% of properties have used them since launch.
Building the design system for a multi-surface product.
The design system was built knowing it had to work across three surfaces from day one. A large portion of it was shaped in collaboration with our CTO, and the direction we agreed on early was to keep the foundation as simple as possible, because we both knew it would evolve.
01 Primitive
Holds the value
Referenced only. Never applied directly to anything.
02 Semantic
Carries the intent
Named by use case, so an engineer knows what it's for.
03 Component
Scoped to one place
Exists only where a real constraint forces divergence.
The property card shows this in practice, built entirely from semantic and component tokens, with optional elements controlled through toggles rather than separate builds.
Each component exposes only what needs to vary. The Card component uses toggles to show or hide optional content, like an image or action buttons, rather than building separate versions for every combination.
Trusted by property managers across the globe
Reached
4,500+
Properties live
Trusted by
850+
Property Operators
Coverage
35+
Countries
Scale
1M+
Guest interactions annually
Surfaces Designed
Desktop
TV app
Mobile
Features owned
Desktop host portal
Interactive TV layout
Mobile guidebook
AI recommendations
Host storefront set up
Analytics dashboard (shipped, pulled)
AI concierge
The operator's presence, in a building they aren't in
WelcomeScreen went from nothing to 4,500 properties and over a million guests a year, in eighteen months. The reference point was the hotel TV, but a hotel has a front desk and a rental has nobody in the building. What we built was the operator's presence in a place they aren't.
What we pulled back