--- title: Project planning - clearbnb - Part 1 slug: project-planning-clearbnb-part-1 published_at: 2021-09-27 23:31:06 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:55 +0000 summary: description: This is the first of a series of episodes where we'll build a platform for short term vacation rentals called clearbnb. #rails #rubyonrails tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, clearbnb, notion, planning] views: 4583 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/project-planning-clearbnb-part-1 youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_IYMv5m46w youtube_id: z_IYMv5m46w embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/z_IYMv5m46w thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/z_IYMv5m46w/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Project planning - clearbnb - Part 1 *Published: September 27, 2021* *Views: 4583* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_IYMv5m46w) [![Project planning - clearbnb - Part 1](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/z_IYMv5m46w/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_IYMv5m46w) ## Description This is the first of a series of episodes where we'll build a platform for short term vacation rentals called clearbnb. #rails #rubyonrails ## Transcript hey what's up welcome back you're watching the first episode in a series where together we'll build out a brand new short-term rental marketplace so this is going to be a place where guests can browse a bunch of different listings and hosts can list their spaces for rent and the the intention here is number one to experiment with lots of different rails technologies and play around with different apis number two is to build a marketplace where folks could list their properties on the marketplace and number three is to sort of like figure out ways that we can combat some of the issues that folks have with existing short-term rental marketplaces like verbo and airbnb and booking.com so we're just going to kind of like start from scratch build our own marketplace and another thing that i wanted to take away from this was just sharing how i think about all of the different steps for building a project end to end so i've actually done like zero planning for this at all and i wanted to kind of walk through how i might do that so i have a notion dock up all it has is a title here short term uh rent uh rental marketplace and so one of the ways that i can sort of think through building out a marketplace like this is thinking through all of the nouns that are in the system so we have users we have listings those are going to have when someone books a listing we might have a booking or a reservation we're also going to have some two-way messaging system so we might have like a message we might have a message maybe there's like a thread or something i'm not quite sure and then inside of users we're going to have two types of users we're going to have guests and we're going to have hosts so that'll that'll provide an interesting problem that we'll have to find a solution to we're going to have listings and these listings might be composed of a bunch of different stuff about the listing we're definitely going to have listing photos maybe we also have listing videos i just saw a brand new yc ycyc company from 2021 and they're called playhouse and it's basically like tick tock for zillow kind of it's like a mixture of these videos with music in the background showing off a listing when i went on there and checked it out it was pretty interesting but all of the listings were like super super expensive like in the many millions but what's cool about that is they all had videos so that i think might be an interesting sort of spin on the existing short term rental marketplace systems so yeah so step one i'm going to go through and sort of list out all of the different resources being the nouns in the system and then this is kind of like already getting into like design a little bit and instead of going too far down the road we can also think of like a name and we want to think of like the tech stack that we might want to build this in and other other sort of technical considerations as you're building out maybe like a brand new business this is kind of like ground zero or day one of trying to like build a startup right is you're trying to think through a lot of the different pieces uh maybe at like a hackathon like a startup weekend hackathon this is the kind of stuff that you would be ideating about um but most importantly it's important to to actually like go out and talk to users uh so maybe this is called uxr uxr it's like user experience research and so one thing that we'll want to do pretty early on is actually go and talk to some users and ask like um where they booked the most recent short-term rental space or um yeah like um what goes into the decision when picking a listing things like this where we want to like actually figure out number one is someone going to book and number two would they use the system number three like why did you list your house on a short term versus long term market because maybe we want to pivot at some point and like pivot to long term or pivot to short term we got to really like listen to to the users one thing one common thread that i have heard a lot about um airbnb in particular is the lack of price transparency so as you're browsing around you might see a price that looks like oh i have like 100 a night but then when you actually go through the whole booking process it ends up being significantly more and that's because of fees that's because of taxes it's because of maybe um yeah the fees that um the host is adding on between cleaning fees and the fees that airbnb is adding on uh to take their sort of cut as part of the transaction also oftentimes the cleaning fee isn't well represented when folks are browsing around so including maybe maybe that's sort of an angle that we take and i know for a fact this is one of the things that a lot of users complain about when using airbnb in particular and so that's kind of like one way that we could um differentiate is by having very transparent pricing in fact like maybe we try to figure out like a mission statement or something and like what actually differentiates our product from the competitors and so here we might say like short term rentals with transparent pricing or something like this like always know exactly how much you'll pay when browsing and i know there's like ways to hack around this and you can look at airbnb from different countries or you can sort of browse booking.com or homeaway or a lot of these different listing sites from different countries which actually enforce price transparency and so then you kind of like get a better look at it but i think everyone really wants price transparency and so maybe that's sort of one of the differentiators maybe for a name we can call it like clear bnb or something so that tran we're like leaning into that transparency thing in terms of the tech stack i really think when you're picking a tech stack for a startup you have you have a lot of different things that can feed into a decision for picking a tech stack right but i think that the most important factor when you're picking the tech stack is which stack are you most comfortable with and you can move the fastest with as a startup i think that is really the most important thing it's not is this the right tool for the job necessarily it's i mean at a high level you're not going to want to pick a tool where there's not a lot of support or plugins or you know i don't think you would want to pick like a brand new sort of uh tech framework or tech stack that's not necessarily even out of like v0 or something but as long as it's a tech stack that you're familiar with and that you feel comfortable with and that you think that you can be productive in that's the stack that i think you should pick it's not necessarily like you know if you're trying to pick between next js and rails and django and laravel right if you have experience in javascript but you don't know python or ruby or php then pick the next js right if you have experience in ruby but not in python pick rails over django uh so i've actually worked with all four of those um but i prefer to work in ruby and i prefer to work in rails so that's actually what i'm gonna uh that's what we'll we'll use is uh rails um and then i guess like the next thing is to really just dig into the design here so this whole episode will all be about kind of just like the planning process or like the early stage of planning process um and we also want maybe like some sort of like to do's where we're going to need like a list of stuff that we actually have to build out so we'll have to have some sort of authentication we'll have some way to like crud for listings we'll need a way to a way to book we'll need a a way to message we'll also need what else we're going to need away let's see um we will i've got like a bunch of ideas about features that we can add early on but one of them is identity some sort of identity verification um maybe even like background check we can do document checks to just see if they have the right driver's license we can do like a phone number check and then underneath underneath messaging right we want at a minimum we want like two-way messaging between one guest and one host sometimes if you're traveling in a group you can add like other people who are in your party to a thread and then you can all chat with the host but i think in the beginning we want at least just two-way messaging between one guest and one host there's other features we could build in here like canned responses from hosts this is a common feature of many of these platforms is if you like right when someone books if you always say thanks so much for booking like we're looking forward to hosting or whatever then you might have a canned response that just kind of like plops in and is sent you might also have like scheduled messages that's like um right before like maybe two days before they check in you automatically send them an email with like the door codes and then uh maybe the day of checkout you send them an email like a couple hours before check out reminding of the checkout procedures so that's an example of that ways to book this i think we need um like some payment uh methods i think we'll we'll use stripe for that obviously and then we need like a way to um i guess okay so the other thing here that's part of a listing is we'll need the calendar so we need some sort of like calendaring uh system and calendaring is actually surprisingly challenging yeah so just messing around with dates and time zones and all that is is kind of a nightmare but we'll figure that out uh we also want some way to like discover i guess this is part of like ways to book this is discovery so uh on on most of these platforms there's a map where you can sort of roughly see the location of the listing for privacy purposes we don't want to put the pins of the exact address directly on the map so we would want to pick some sort of like way to show a radius around or like randomly drop a pin within some radius of where where the listing actually is you'll want to also be able to fill by filter by the dates that the listing is open things like that okay what else have we got here there's probably lots of other things with messaging that we could do like translation and like conf like ensuring on platform discussion because i think a lot of times folks will like in the first couple of messages they'll say like oh uh let's book off platform and if they're doing that then you're losing we're losing revenue right for people who are trying to book so one of the ways that some of these platforms do this is they will strip out or they'll sort of like redact phone numbers email addresses websites anything that like happens pre-booking in the message that will redact it so that you can't take the conversation off platform to go book off platform so that's a pretty common feature um yeah okay so this is i think this is what we're going to try to build clear bnb with rails we've got to do some user research if you have a short-term rental or if you have uh stayed in a short-term rental before i would love to hear from you maybe just kind of like uh hit me up on twitter at cgivdev and we'll just chat about your experience and then yeah maybe we'll use some of your ideas as input into this system and then we'll kind of like in the in future episodes we'll go through the process of building all this stuff out we have other episodes on this channel where we've covered a lot of these things before but i think it'll be fun to kind of build something a little bit more complex so in the last series we did a blog that had some cool features in the series before that we built out a tool for tracking some stock uh stock trades that were happening through the sec for insider trading this one will be all about building this giant platform for um yeah for short-term rentals so i hope that you'll uh subscribe and stick around and uh yeah in the next video we'll we'll break ground and start writing some code thanks so much for watching we'll see in that one [Music] you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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