Pro Cool 2: The connectors that aren't in the marketplace

Last time: the starter kit. A Claude subscription, the desktop app, the phone, and whatever's already in the connectors list. That gets you a long way for free.

But Troy needed more than what's on the shelf, and that's where it gets interesting.

He runs two businesses on systems without a good off-the-shelf connector. Hunter River Retreat takes bookings through Cloudbeds. Pro Cool runs its field crew through Connecteam. The accounts sit in Xero, which does have an official connector, but the one I built reaches a lot more of their API, payroll included, so it covers the full job across both businesses. Xero are updating their own service later this year too, which will be good to see.

I'll be straight about the do-it-yourself path, because it's more real than it used to be. Claude Code is built into the desktop app now. If you're a bit technical, you can point it at a provider's API docs, give it a key, and have it knock together a little MCP server on your own machine, or even just call the API directly. It works, moderately well. It's just not the tidiest, and here's the catch: it runs on your computer, so it only works when your machine's on.

So I built him proper connectors instead. Hitting the APIs directly, hosted on Cloudflare Workers, so there's nothing for him to run or babysit and nothing chained to a browser window. The Cloudbeds and Connecteam ones I knocked together right there in his office in the afternoon.

Here's the part I find genuinely exciting, and it's more about the business than the tech. Troy's connectors were a first version. He's already a hosting client, so I charged him for my time on site and left it at that, no big connector bill on top. But once a connector exists, building it again for the next business costs me almost nothing.

That changes the economics completely. Instead of quoting every business a custom job, I can take the same MCP server, make it self-serve, put billing on it with Stripe, and anyone can plug in themselves. Build it once, and it can serve a hundred businesses instead of one.

That's not a someday plan, it's already live. A few are self-serve products now: ProMCP for trade businesses on simPRO, RezMCP for tour operators on Rezdy (Troy's Cloudbeds one, basically, for the Rezdy crowd), and AxMCP for anyone on Axigen email. Connect in about five minutes, pay a small subscription, no call to me needed.

That's the difference between a chatbot and something that does your actual work. A chatbot can tell you how to check a booking. A connector lets Claude go and check the booking, in Cloudbeds, on your behalf, from your phone.

Which raises the obvious question. Once Claude can reach into your bookings, your staff system, your store and your accounts, what happens when those start talking to each other? That's the next one, and it's where the time actually comes back.

Cheers,
Jez

Want to dig in? What MCP is, the open standard all of this runs on.