It started with a villa in Goa
I didn't set out to build a property management platform. I set out to fix a problem that was costing me money every month.
In 2025, I tied up with an Airbnb Superhost to manage my villa in Goa. On paper, it was straightforward — they handle the guests, the cleaning, the maintenance, and I receive my share of the revenue. In practice, it was chaos.
Cleaners showed up at the wrong property. Inventory restocking was reactive, not proactive. There was zero visibility into where workers were or what they'd actually done. Revenue reporting to property owners was a manual, error-prone process that happened weeks late.
The tools that existed — Guesty, Hostaway, Lodgify — were built for channel management and booking. They're good at syncing your Airbnb calendar with Booking.com. But none of them touched the operational layer — the stuff that happens between bookings. The worker dispatch, the checklists, the inventory, the issue reporting, the live tracking, the owner transparency. That whole layer was still running on WhatsApp and hope.
I'd seen what a real engineering team could build
Before LivAround, I founded LivQuik, where we had a 30+ person software engineering team building fintech products. I saw firsthand how complex, enterprise-grade systems get built — the architecture decisions, the deployment pipelines, the product thinking that goes into scalable software.
I understood what good software looked like. I just couldn't build it myself.
Then I discovered Claude Code.
One founder. One AI. One platform.
I started using Claude Code and realised something remarkable: the gap between "knowing what to build" and "being able to build it" had essentially closed. I could describe the property management workflows I'd seen break down in real life, and Claude Code would help me turn them into working software — complete with database schemas, API routes, real-time tracking, mobile apps, and polished dashboards.
Every module was born from a real problem I watched happen at my property. Every workflow was designed to prevent the exact failures I experienced as an owner.
Why open source?
I could have kept this proprietary and charged a premium. But I believe the future of software is open. In an age where AI can help anyone generate code, the moat isn't the code itself — it's the community, the ecosystem, the accumulated operational knowledge, and the trust that comes from transparency.
LivAround is released under the AGPL license. Anyone can self-host it for free, inspect the code, contribute features, and build plugins. If you want managed hosting, automatic backups, channel integrations, and priority support — that's what our paid tiers are for. But the core platform belongs to the community.
I want LivAround to become the standard operating system for Airbnb hosts worldwide — not because it's the most expensive option, but because it's the best one, and it's built in the open by people who actually manage properties.
What's next
I'm building LivAround from Goa, India — but the platform is designed to work for any host, anywhere. Whether you're managing beach villas in Bali, city apartments in London, ski chalets in the Alps, or countryside retreats in Tuscany, the operational chaos is the same. Workers need dispatching, inventory needs tracking, issues need resolving, and owners need transparent reports. Geography changes; the problems don't. The plan is to take LivAround to every market where hosts are scaling past a handful of properties and realising that WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets aren't going to cut it.
The bigger picture
LivAround isn't my only bet on the future of living. For the past year, I've been using HomeExchange to hack my way out of paying rent in London — swapping my Goa villa with other homeowners around the world so I can live in places like London without the cost. It's a brilliant concept, but the experience of finding matches is painfully manual — you send dozens of individual swap requests and hope someone wants exactly what you have.
That frustration led me to build Livinbnb — a home exchange platform that finds circular 2, 3, and 4-way swaps automatically. Instead of A and B needing to want each other's homes, Livinbnb finds loops where A goes to B, B goes to C, and C goes to A — multiplying your match options by 10x. It borrows your existing Airbnb and HomeExchange listings so there's nothing to re-upload.
Both projects come from the same place: I live in the world of short-term rentals — as an owner, as a traveller, and now as a builder. I see the gaps because I experience them every day.
If you manage properties and you're tired of the operational chaos — LivAround was built for you.
If you're a developer who wants to contribute to open-source hospitality tech — the repo is open and PRs are welcome.
If you're an investor who sees the opportunity in building the "GitLab of property operations" — let's talk.