Launched a real-time STR market data API — here's what the first week of distribution looks like
Background: I built Rareplace Hospitality Intel — a REST API returning live short-term rental market data (occupancy, ADR, RevPAR, demand index) for Nashville and Austin. Stack is Cloudflare Workers + Supabase.
The product exists because I needed the data myself and couldn't find it in queryable form. The build was maybe 3 weeks. Distribution is the actual challenge, which is what I'm figuring out now.
What I've done for distribution so far:
Live docs site with SEO-optimised content at docs.rareplace.site/hospitality/
Public market report pages (Nashville + Austin) that fetch live API data — designed to rank for "Nashville STR market data 2025" type queries
Submitted to GitHub public-apis, APIs.guru, RapidAPI Hub, Postman API Network
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The interesting part: the AI agent angle seems more tractable than the "data for investors" angle in terms of finding an audience quickly. There are active communities around LangChain and n8n where "here's a real data endpoint your agent can call" is a concrete, useful thing. The real estate investor audience is larger but harder to reach.
Questions I'm sitting with:
For an API with this kind of niche (two cities, one vertical), is paid acquisition ever worth it or is it purely content + community?
Anyone built integrations with AirDNA or similar and hit the pricing wall I'm describing? Curious how others navigated it.
Happy to share more detail on the build if useful. Early days.
“Real-time STR data is seriously valuable.
Would be interesting to see how different user types (analysts vs operators) actually use the data — I’ve seen cases where the same dataset lands very differently depending on context.”
The part that stood out to me was realising distribution changed once you started thinking about AI agents instead of investors. That’s a subtle but important shift.
Have you noticed whether developers are discovering the API because they already have a use case, or does seeing a concrete example spark ideas they hadn’t considered?
The interesting tension is between two very different markets: developers who need structured data access and investors who need decision-making intelligence.
What would convince you that one of these segments is the better initial wedge, rather than trying to build distribution across both?