An instalment payments API for travel

Context

Travel is bought in large, lumpy amounts well ahead of departure. Yety lets travel businesses offer customers a deposit and a schedule of instalments, delivered through an API so it sits inside the merchant's brand and software rather than beside it.

The problem

The product only succeeds if it makes the merchant more money without adding work for their staff. That meant getting onboarding, activation and integration right before adding features.

What I did

• Owned the product end to end from zero to one: strategy, roadmap, discovery and delivery.
• Recruited design-partner businesses and used interviews, AI-assisted research and rapid AI prototyping to cut the time from insight to tested concept.
• Led the design of client onboarding and activation flows, treating time-to-first-value as the leading indicator of retention.
• Structured inventory data so LLMs could use it via MCP, saving a test client more than three hours of admin per full-time employee.
• Designed an API that returns a configurable deposit and weekly or monthly instalments once a quote is finalised, for integration with travel-agency software.

Outcome

A working API-first product shaped by real partner workflows, with AI used to cut the admin around each booking, not to handle the payment itself.

What I'd do differently

I'd bring pricing conversations into discovery from the first partner interview, rather than treating commercial model as a later question.