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John Richards
Welcome to The Architects of Travel. I’m John Richards. This is the show about the people building the future of travel—developers, founders, and innovators creating the platforms, APIs, and products that power how the world explores. Architects of Travel is brought to you by Nuitée, the company behind liteAPI, the world’s only open hotel and travel API with real-time rates and availability from more than two million properties worldwide. Start building the future of travel today at liteapi.travel.

Today’s guest is Marcin Teodoru, though you may know him better as Marcin AI. He’s an AI innovator, influencer, and the founder of AI Builders. Recently, Marcin and his wife combined their expertise in AI and travel to launch a new travel platform called Zzzello Travel—that’s with three Zs. In this conversation, Marcin and I explore how AI is opening doors that were once closed, making it possible for non-coders to build powerful tools while enabling experienced developers to move faster than ever before. We also talk about what it means for the travel industry, where new builders now have more opportunity than ever to challenge the status quo. The barriers are dropping, the tools are evolving, and the only real limits left are imagination and execution. Alright, let’s jump in. Marcin, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I’m so excited to have you here.

Marcin Teodoru
Likewise, my friend. Thank you so much for having me.

John Richards
For those of you who don’t know, Marcin Teodoru—this guy is an AI builder and educator, founder of AI Builders, a really cool community, and Zzzello Travel. I’m excited to pick your brain today about travel and AI. I wanted to start with: how did you get into doing this? You’re leading this community, you’re the face of so much AI building that’s happening—how did you end up in a spot like that?

Marcin Teodoru
Oh man, how far back do we want to go? So I’ll give you a quick brief summary. Immigrant from Poland, moved to the US when I was eleven, and I wanted to be a Hollywood director—that was my goal in life. Barely graduated high school, did one semester of college, so I was definitely one of those uneducated kids, you could say, and Google was kind of my savior in life.

So I started in film. I wanted to be a director and I ended up getting to do that. In my twenties I ran a film company, got to direct a few movies, got to direct a documentary, which was amazing at the time. And right around turning thirty, I realized I was kind of burnt out. I started when I was sixteen—very young. And the first job I actually had was working for a radio station called KISS FM. It was the early internet days—this is 1997, ’98, ’99. I remember moving into film as everybody was moving into the whole online space. All my coworkers were getting on the internet, setting up websites, doing all this stuff. And I went the film route.

Thirteen years later, after I left film, I started calling up all those old buddies: hey, you guys still doing this internet thing? I need to get in on this. And I did. My first journey online was getting into e-commerce—I got on Amazon, got into building e-commerce businesses, did that for about four or five years, made my first real dollars. Where I was like, okay, now I don’t have to have a job. I never really had a traditional job per se, but I always was a side hustler—I always needed to have four or five things going so I could survive.

Once I made a little bit of money, I opened up a business. Me and my partners opened up an app development company—this is 2013, 2014. We just missed that early wave where people were making clock apps and making a million bucks. We were a couple of years too late. And we also were a very ambitious team. I don’t have a development background—I built with my team. I put together a team that we still work with today, going on about fifteen years now. We got into the online stuff, did the apps. And then unfortunately it was a pain in the neck—too expensive, the development times, just the length of time it took to build projects. So I ended up shutting that business down, got back into e-commerce, and then OpenAI came out. And here we are.

John Richards
That story has a lot of learning new things—whether that was jumping into the movie industry, coming back, and now jumping into AI. What kind of mindset do you have coming into new technology or a new skill set? How do you learn it quickly to get value out of it?

Marcin Teodoru
For me specifically, I’ve always been trying to be on the cutting edge—always trying to stay ahead, because I felt like that was always my advantage. Coming from my background, I basically was all in on pretty much everything I did because I wanted to learn as quickly as possible. And I’ve brought that over into AI.

Once OpenAI came out, I started playing with ChatGPT. First thing I did was try to code, because I was like, wait, can this actually code for me? I built the first couple of websites, and as the versions got better and better, I realized—I told my wife I didn’t sleep for like four weeks. Four weeks straight, eighteen hours a day, bloodshot eyes, because I couldn’t believe that I could just create things out of thin air. Which was the dream, right? If you’re not a developer—if you’re a creative and a business person—it just opened up the world.

And that’s why, after building literally a hundred different projects, I started teaching. Because I felt like people have no idea what’s here and what’s coming. So I’m going to strip this down to the bare necessities for beginners and help people do this. And that’s what I’ve been doing since—just running full steam ahead.

John Richards
There was a skill set you needed to work with developers and get them to build the things you wanted, and obviously that was expensive and time-consuming. How has that shifted as you’re working with AI and building up this new skill set? What are the competencies you’re finding are most important?

Marcin Teodoru
The biggest one is the power with AI to handle both design and development. If we were having this conversation six months ago, I would have said I’m using 80% AI to develop and my developer is still doing the 20%. Now it’s like 98% that I’m doing, because the tools have gotten so good and I’ve also gotten better at vibe coding. And then he just kind of brings it home and launches the products. Same thing with my designer—before it was 98% him doing the work and me basically either approving or modifying. Now it’s been flipped. I’m coming up with the concepts, designing the UI and UX, and then he’s refactoring and putting on that final non-AI polish, which we like to have in our products.

But to be honest, if you’re just starting out, you really don’t need anything. You just need the drive—come up with an idea and build everything with AI. I truly believe that people can now start from zero on a Monday and by next Monday have a full product ready to launch with a marketing campaign. That’s how fast it’s advanced.

I’m still kind of old-school because I love to have people to work with and collaborate. But for beginners who don’t have big budgets or a lot of time, they can just go in and learn. Let AI teach you—you can just ask it exactly what you want to learn and do that.

John Richards
Has that life cycle shifted? Do you find it’s better to just get a working prototype out there and use it, or to wait until it’s a bit more polished and go through a bunch more iterations with the AI first?

Marcin Teodoru
Run and gun. Idea, MVP, waitlist, put it out there. Because you can move so quickly now that you no longer have to worry about investing three months and spending fifty thousand dollars. I could literally throw up a waitlist with a clever idea, make a couple of TikTok videos, put out some stuff on X, and next thing people are commenting, hey, when are you going to launch this? Oh, by the way, here’s my waitlist—go sign up. And next thing you’ve got a thousand people on your waitlist. You start emailing them: hey, I’m building this in public, you guys want to try it out? And then you’ve literally sold the product before you even built it. I really believe that’s where the whole industry is moving.

The things I see on X now—literally kids in their basements launching million-dollar wrappers of Open Claude and doing thirty thousand MRR within twenty-four hours. That’s how fast it’s advancing.

John Richards
It’s crazy. Even a year ago it was like, I’m not sure all this stuff is coming together, and now I’m seeing such polished products that come out without any extra layer added on top. Are there any common mistakes or hang-ups that you’re seeing, especially in your community—things where you’re like, hey, here’s the new way you need to be thinking about this?

Marcin Teodoru
The biggest thing is: don’t fight with the AI. If you’re trying to fix something and it’s doing a bad job, just take a step back and say, hey, you wasted $47 of my credits trying to build this feature and you failed miserably—let’s go back one step and use a different approach. That will save you a ton of money. Because if you start fighting the AI—and they’re getting better, the context windows are getting longer—just take a step back.

Second one, and probably just as important: go simple. Keep it simple. Something I learned early on, and it applies more to AI than ever. Don’t overcomplicate it. You only have to build one feature, for one product, for one audience, that solves one problem—and that’s it. There’s a million people that could pay you for that. Bring them in, get those users, and then start adding features and building out more robust infrastructure. Versus spending three, four, five, six weeks building this massive product, launching into crickets, and going, I just wasted six hundred bucks and four weeks of my life.

John Richards
I’ve talked to folks who’ve gone down that route, so that’s really wise advice. Now, speaking of focusing on one thing versus complexity—let’s talk about travel, which is very complex. You’ve launched Zzzello, an app is in the works, and you’ve really dug into this space. I’ve talked to folks who said this can’t be done—it’s too complex, too many moving parts. How do you take a complex project and make it simple enough that the AI can work with it?

Marcin Teodoru
liteAPI made it literally one click. I think that’s the first thing when it comes to travel.

My wife and I love traveling—we’ve traveled to probably fifteen different countries, actually living there and spending a lot of time. And we talked about it: man, it would be amazing one day to have a travel business. She actually had a travel blog for food—we would go to different countries and cities, meet the chefs, and she would do blog posts.

Then I was doing some content online and Mehdi reached out from liteAPI and we started talking. He’s like, hey, we have this product, it helps you build out a hotel booking business. And my first thought was, yeah, right. So I dug in, and after looking at the platform I realized: wait, it’s a white-label solution. It’s literally plug and play—you guys handle everything on the customer service side and I could actually set this up. So I did. I set up the website, connected my domain, and then I had a business. And I remember sending the link to my wife and she was like, oh, this is really cool. I was like, no—this is our business. She’s like, oh my God, when did you build this? I was like, today. She’s like, what do you mean? I’m like, nothing, it’s done. You could literally book hotel stays and look at the pricing. And I would show her and compare prices against these old legacy companies.

Just even talking about this still blows my mind—the fact that you could wake up, sign up to the platform, set this up, and have a business within a couple of hours. It sounds like it’s not real, but I can tell everybody here that it is real, because we operate this business. We’ve been running it for the last six months and we’ve built it up. We have quite a few sales coming in every day. We’re doing a native app for iOS, which is the next version—so we had the white-label solution, set up all of our socials, started doing marketing, and now we’re taking it to the next step with a native app that will use the endpoints with the API.

It’s been amazing and it’s been fun running a business. If anybody’s listening and wants to set up a travel business—it’s literally the best conversation starter in history. We’ll go into an event, a dinner, a party, and they’re like, oh, what do you do? And I’m like, I run a travel booking business like Booking.com. And they’re like, what? Because of how we’ve been trained that these are legacy billion-dollar companies and the average person could never compete—not to mention on the data side, but the development side. How would you even try to build something? So that’s been a fun thing. Me and my wife are doing the business together, I brought on partners to help, and it’s been great.

John Richards
What do you see as that shift? It felt like for a long time the big players had a lock on all of this. But we’re seeing, with AI especially—and with new habits around how people are booking through social—some proliferation. For folks looking to get into that space, where should they be going? Should they be driving this on social? Building a travel agent app? You’ve got the ideas, but also the marketing knowledge to make it come to fruition.

Marcin Teodoru
I think it’s a combination of things, but the main thing is just getting started. Because once you get it set up and send it to friends and family, and you see that register ring and realize, okay, this actually works—this is a real thing—then you decide how much you want to push it.

I would start with the simple things. Go to social media, build it in public like I’ve been doing—that’s been a fantastic way to validate through your community, your email list. And if you’re literally starting from scratch, just the fact that you could set this up and go on social media and say, hey, I just launched a travel business—you guys want to book on my site? Then as you start getting sales, you run it as a real business and develop the parts that drive the best results, whether that’s running ads, social media, content, blogs, YouTube. There are a lot of different ways to skin the cat. But once you get going and realize it is real—because that’s going to be the first thing for a lot of beginners—it’s a revelation.

John Richards
I like that approach of targeting the people you know and building from there, then growing it once you’ve got some market fit. Now, I also know that you were a huge asset to our engineers as we were building out the AI prompting for folks who want to vibe code on top of this. Can you share a bit about that process? Is there a platform people should be focusing on, or does each one have its own value? If you’re looking to start vibe coding something on top of liteAPI, what’s the best way in?

Marcin Teodoru
Right now there are obviously a lot of tools, depending on your level. If you’re an absolute beginner, I would look at web-based tools—Lovable, Bolt, Emergent—I’d go for one of those. And when you log into the platform, there is a whole vibe coding section that Nick and I worked on, where you have a master prompt you can drop into any vibe coding tool, put your API key, and it builds you a fully custom website—not the white-label, but still connecting everything through all the endpoints. It just works out of the box. Obviously there’s tweaking involved, but what it gives you is the ability to customize.

If you’re a bit more experienced in vibe coding, go to a dedicated IDE—Cursor, Claude Code, or Google Antigravity with Gemini. All the models are so good, all the tools are so good, that nowadays it’s just: pick one, put the prompts in, and tinker with it—because you’ll get results. When people talk about version 3.6 and 6.9 and the newest version, they’re talking about nuance. The average person building a pretty simple product isn’t running a million-line codebase with fifty connectors built on a legacy system. These are new products using an API that knows about vibe coding, so it really streamlines the process. Just pick one, take the prompts, start building, you’ll get results, and then iterate. As you get better, you can move to more advanced systems.

And with native apps—we’re building a native app with vibe coding. Rork, for example, just launched their Swift native app. I took the prompt from you guys and literally got an application built natively with your API connected, and it works. One prompt, one shot. This is how crazy things are getting. You still want to develop it further—add galleries, a social media feed, your colors and themes—but as far as the tech stack, just pick one of the top tools and put in one of the newer models, and you’ll be good to go.

John Richards
I love it. You mentioned early on that you’ve always been a side hustler, and it feels like this is opening up for people who thought their dream idea wasn’t possible—they don’t have the money to do this. And now all of a sudden they can say, hey, I can give this a shot with such a low barrier of entry that if it doesn’t work out, fine, but if I just throw some time at this, I have a chance to make this dream come to life. Do you see that side hustle culture starting to grow as folks shift away from the traditional nine-to-five?

Marcin Teodoru
1000%. It’s never been easier, especially with everything that’s happening now with Open Claude and those agents and automations. People could literally get in right now without knowing anything. They could watch one of my training videos, load up a vibe coding tool, and within fifteen minutes build a website from start to finish that they could sell for $1,500. Literally in fifteen minutes, first time opening the product. And I know this because somebody just did it in our group—a guy who just joined did exactly this and sold the website for fifteen hundred bucks. And then the person he delivered it to already called him back and said, I have four more people. That’s how fast you can use this technology and make money with it.

And that’s just website building. Here’s a fun challenge for anybody listening: if you’re trying to make money with AI but don’t know where to start, go to a restaurant. When you go in and they have a basic menu, take a picture of it, load up Nano Banana—which is Google’s image generator—and say, hey, can you redesign this menu as a modern luxury? Redo all the food images and give me a full menu. Then take a picture of the restaurant including the front awning, go to Veo 3—which is their video tool—and say, make me a commercial. While you’re eating your meal, you let the AI cook this up for you. When your bill comes, you say, hey, thank you, this was amazing—by the way, while I was eating, my team made you a new menu and a commercial for your restaurant. Show them. Watch their eyes open and their jaw drop. Then say, if your manager’s here, I’d love to speak with them and show you what else we could do. That’s how fast we’re advancing, and the results are going to be incredible.

John Richards
Yeah, it blows my mind—just seeing the space around you, being aware of where you can use this where people aren’t yet seeing the opportunity.

Marcin Teodoru
And the fun thing is also showing friends and family who aren’t using AI yet. I love it with photos. We’ll take a group shot—we were just in Portugal with about eight people, so obviously getting one perfect photo is impossible. The girls are looking this way, somebody’s got their eyes closed. Every time, I just take a photo and then show it to them after. They’re like, oh, the girls aren’t happy. And I literally go to Nano Banana: can you make everybody smiling perfectly and looking at the camera? Five seconds later I show it to them and they’re like, what? The power is at our fingertips.

John Richards
That’s incredible. For somebody out there who’s listening and wants to know more, wants to get started—you’ve got a ton of educational material. Where can they go to begin that journey if they don’t know what to do? Where can they connect with like-minded folks trying to build on this?

Marcin Teodoru
I have a Skool community called AI Builders—that would be the main place. We have almost 500 members in there building from start to finish. And then I have my social media—I’m on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, all just under my name: Marcin Teodoru. Everything connects through there. I make content and help people build products. If you have any questions, I’m happy to help. And the community is free for seven days—come and test drive it, go in there, take all the education, and you don’t have to give me a penny. As long as you go in there and start working and building, that’s all that matters. Because all we’re trying to do is just get people into the space—the more people who join pushes the AI companies to make better tools for us. We all win in the end.

John Richards
Well, I’ll make sure we have links to those in the show notes. I know from having worked with quite a few members of your community that they’re a great bunch of people. Marcin, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, sharing your experience, and giving us so much insight today. I really appreciate it.

Marcin Teodoru
Likewise—thank you so much, John. This was a pleasure.

John Richards
This podcast is made possible by Nuitée. Through liteAPI and its white-label platform, Nuitée helps startups, travel companies, and developers seamlessly launch booking experiences—whether you’re building a new travel app, adding hotels to an existing platform, or experimenting with new ideas in travel tech. Learn more at nuitee.com. Thanks for tuning in to The Architects of Travel. I’m your host, John Richards. This show is a production of TruStory FM, with audio engineering by Andy Nelson and music by Captain Qubz. You’ll find all the relevant links in the show notes. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to follow the show and leave a rating or review—it really helps others discover it. Join us next month for another conversation about building the travel future, right here on The Architects of Travel.