FearINN
A US marketplace for haunted stays, private paranormal investigations and ghost tour experiences. Migrated off Sharetribe no-code and built in five weeks, with three booking engines, safety disclosure written into checkout, and a bespoke dark design system, ready for a national radio launch.
About FearINN
FearINN connects owners of haunted and historic properties, and the operators who run ghost tours and paranormal experiences, with guests who want to spend a night somewhere genuinely unsettling. Founder Richard Slejmar built it for a market that had never had a home of its own: the stays were scattered across personal sites and phone bookings, and the experiences were sold on Facebook posts.
Listing is free and hosts keep their full rate, so the marketplace earns from guests rather than from the people supplying the inventory. It launched alongside a national radio campaign on Coast to Coast AM, which meant the platform had to be finished, tested and provably able to take a crowd on a known date.
The Challenge
Richard came to us with a no-code Sharetribe marketplace and a launch date he could not move. The radio campaign was booked. Everything the product needed had to exist by then, and it had to be his to run afterwards.
The brief was harder than a usual stay marketplace:
- Three genuinely different ways to book in one marketplace: a night in a property, an hour of a private investigation, and a seat at a ticketed session
- Real physical risk. These are old, dark, sometimes structurally difficult buildings, and a guest has to understand what they are walking into before they pay
- A host must never be able to change what a guest already agreed to by editing their listing afterwards
- Guests pay a service fee on top of the host's rate, so the price a guest sees has to be the price a guest pays, everywhere
- Capacity for a national radio audience arriving at once, with a plan costed before the campaign rather than discovered during it
- A platform the founder could run himself: copy, listings and accounts all in his hands at handover
Our Sharetribe Solution
We migrated FearINN off no-code onto custom code and built it out across five phases, delivered on schedule:
Safety Written Into Checkout
Every listing declares its hazards and conditions in plain language, and a guest cannot pay without reading them and ticking two confirmations: that they accept the risks, and that everyone in their party meets the minimum age. The confirmations are stored as the exact words the guest saw, not as a pointer to the listing, so a host editing their hazards later can never change what was already agreed to.
Three Booking Engines, One Marketplace
Overnight stays book by the night, private daytime investigations book by the hour, and ticketed experiences run as fixed sessions with a set number of spots. Three listing types, each with its own availability model and checkout, sitting behind seven place-based categories and fourteen custom listing fields.
The Price You See Is The Price You Pay
Hosts list free and keep their full rate; the marketplace earns a service fee from the guest instead. Because the guest pays more than the listed price, we show the all-in price with fees everywhere a price appears: search cards, the listing headline, the mobile booking bar and checkout. The fee rate is read from configuration rather than written into the code, so it can change without a deploy.
A Design System Built From Scratch
A dark, atmospheric system with a near-black palette, a teal accent and four self-hosted typefaces. Every screen was designed and approved before a line of it was built: landing page, search, listing pages, checkout and the full host journey. The result reads as its own product rather than a themed marketplace template.
A Host Journey That Saves As It Goes
A short signup, a welcome screen, then a five-step listing wizard that saves drafts as the host works: grouped fields, tap-to-select chips, a month calendar for availability, drag-and-drop photos with a cover image, and a pricing panel showing exactly what the host sets, what the guest pays and what the host receives. Listings are submitted for review rather than published instantly, with a dashboard showing draft, in review and live.
A Landing Page That Changes Audience
The landing page is coded to the approved design, but every word stays editable by Richard through Sharetribe Console with no developer involved. It also carries an audience switch: it launched focused on recruiting hosts, and once the marketplace has enough of them, the approved guest-focused design returns automatically.
Notifications On Their Own Footing
A separate notification service tells Richard whenever a host signs up or submits a listing, and keeps featured hosts marked across their listings. It runs independently of the site, so a mail problem can never take the marketplace down. Every email a host or guest receives is branded and deliberately light rather than dark, so it renders correctly in every inbox, and we extended the booking process so a host who has not responded gets a reminder timed against their actual deadline.
Built For The Radio Campaign
Campaign attribution sits on a dedicated URL, captured the moment a visitor arrives and carried through to signup, so Richard can measure whether national radio actually brings hosts. A load test before launch established real capacity per server and showed that adding servers scales the platform almost linearly while bigger servers barely help, which turned campaign week from a guess into a costed plan.
The Results
FearINN launched five weeks from kickoff, delivered on schedule across all five phases:
- A marketplace with three booking engines behind one search: nightly stays, hourly investigations and ticketed sessions
- Safety as a product feature, with hazard disclosure at checkout stored as the words the guest actually saw, and Apple Pay and Google Pay held back until both confirmations are ticked so a thumbprint can never skip the warning
- All-in pricing on every surface, so a guest never meets a new number at payment
- A bespoke dark design system, every screen approved before build, with the landing page copy left in the founder's hands
- A costed capacity plan for campaign week, backed by a real load test rather than an estimate, with monitoring and error tracking on the site and the notification service
- Campaign attribution from the radio spot through to host signup, so the spend can be measured
- Everything transferred into the founder's name, hosting, both repositories and every account, with a plain-language guide to what he can change himself
Technologies Used
Aleksa and his team were absolutely wonderful to work with. I feel like I hit the jackpot by selecting Butterfly to build my coded site. The designs were beautiful, and the collaboration and help from Aleksa was invaluable. He truly thinks everything through and has a ton of real world experience building these sites. I'm proud to call Aleksa and Butterfly partners moving forward.
Launching a Stays or Experiences Marketplace?
From three booking engines under one search to safety disclosure written into checkout and a capacity plan proven before launch day, we build marketplaces that are ready for the crowd you are about to send them.