Hi, I'm Emily. I was a nurse for 13 years, and then I spent four years hosting people who needed somewhere to live for a few months. Now I'm building Goldilocks, and I'm writing down how it goes while I still don't know how it ends.
Extended stays carry a lot of guesswork- guests wondering if the house and host they see listed are real, hosts wondering who they're handing the keys to. Goldilocks is a booking platform I'm building so both sides can stop guessing.
No surprise fees. Availability that means available.
Not vacation rentals. Not year-long leases. Extended stays live somewhere in between.
I was a nurse before I ever owned a single rental. The jump into real estate felt like leaving one world for a completely different one, and there are still days I look around and wonder how I got here.
So much of nursing was making people comfortable while keeping them safe and alive. You notice the small stuff. You try to make a hard day a little less hard. I wasn't sure how any of that translated to real estate.
I started with a few furnished rentals of my own. That turned into Extend Your Stay, a management company that grew to 43 homes in Wichita.
We hosted travel nurses, families relocating for work, people pushed out of their houses by insurance claims, and a lot of people who needed somewhere for longer than a vacation but weren't looking for an apartment.
Somewhere in there, the nursing thread pulled through. The same hope: make people comfortable, make their day a little easier.
Most of the job was problem-solving, and you usually only hear from people when something's wrong. So silence was a good thing. It meant the house worked, they knew what was happening, and they were off living their lives. The only confirmation I'd get was a message after checkout: if they were ever back in Wichita they'd want to stay with us again.
Some guests came to me after leaving a place where things had gone badly, and I could hear the relief. And I loved the owners I worked for. They had homes that could serve someone and no time to run them.
Behind the scenes, it was held together with checklists.
I changed our process more times than I can count. I tried a lot of software over those four years, and plenty of it was good at what it was built for. Most of it was built for vacation rentals or year-long leases, though, and extended stays live somewhere in between. So we made checklists for everything that fell through the gap. Add the cleaning fee. Send the lease. Send the check-in info. Return the deposit. Follow up, and follow up again.
Then there were the inquiries. One would come in while I was driving or making dinner, and I'd tell myself I'd answer when I got back to my computer. Hours later I'd remember and wonder if they'd already found somewhere else. By the time I replied, a lot of them had messaged twenty other hosts and couldn't remember which place was mine, and I got why. So every reply started the same way:
I have the two-bedroom near the hospital, Boho Bungalow.
The hard part was never the houses. It was two people who couldn't see each other clearly.
168 guest reviews · 4.89★ average
“We felt safe and taken care of… I really can't thank her enough for her kindness and taking care of my son's needs while he was far from home ❤️”
“I'm so happy I stayed here for my 13 week assignment at the hospital… It was a peaceful place and relaxing to come to after working.”
“I was in this Airbnb for 6 months… She cared much about my happiness and made the long stay away from home for work a lot easier!”
“I wish every host was as helpful as Emily! In the future she'll be the only host we use when staying in Kansas.”
I started brainstorming Goldilocks while I owned Extend Your Stay and eventually I hit a fork in the road. I couldn't run 43 homes well and build Goldilocks well, and everyone deserved better than half of me.
So in July Extend Your Stay found its next home. Part of me was relieved, because the operations were heavy. Part of me was sad to stop working with owners I'd known and cared about for years. Hardly anyone outside my close circle understood why I'd pass the keys on a business that was working. I'd never said much about the frustrations, or about what I wanted to do next.
That business let me take everything I learned at the bedside somewhere new. It provided for my family. It taught me this industry from the inside, and I have so much gratitude for it.
I kept the homes I manage myself. So I'm still hosting, still finding the annoying things, and I'll be the first one using whatever I build.
Some days it feels like everything I've done led me right here. Other days I think, who in the world am I to build this? I'm not a software engineer. I've never started a tech company. It's a huge swing.
I don't know what I'd do if I woke up 10 years from now and realized I never tried. So I'm going for it.
I've worked three 12-hour shifts in a row. Clock out, then you have 10, maybe 11 hours before you walk back in. Drive home. Eat something. Shower. Sleep.
That's why the bed matters. Why blackout curtains matter. Why the house being clean matters when you walk in at 7:30 in the morning. Why you shouldn't have to argue with anyone about a broken dishwasher. Why you should feel safe walking up to the door at midnight.
Where you live for these 13 weeks is more than an address. It shapes the whole assignment. Sometimes it shapes the whole city.
The best hosts want the place you come home to to be the easy part.
Goldilocks is very much being built, not built.
September 2026
I'm trying to figure out what "verified" has to mean. A guest needs to trust a host they've never met, and a host needs to trust a guest with the keys. A badge on a profile isn't enough. I don't know yet what is.
What I'm sure about: No surprise fees. Availability that means available.
August 2026
I realized the software wasn't the missing piece. The trust between host and guest was. So Goldilocks became a booking platform for both sides.
May 2026
First users as a property management software
February 2026
Started visualizing and workshopping what Goldilocks would look like as a property management software.
The goal is a stay where nothing needs saying until the goodbye text.
I'm sharing along as I go. The decisions, the screenshots, the stuff I get wrong (there will be plenty).
If you want in, I'll email you new build journal entries as I write them, and every so often I'll ask what you think.
You don't need to know a thing about software. I'd way rather hear your stories than your feature ideas. Tell me about the stay that went sideways, the one that went perfectly, and the part of this whole process that makes you want to throw your phone across the room.
So happy you're here!
Emily