This is not a founder bio. It is the actual sequence of events — including the ones most founders leave out — that produced both the scar tissue and the system called Marketics.
Jason Baxter · Montréal
In 2015, Jason Baxter was not trying to build a business. He was trying to pay rent on a Montréal apartment he couldn't fully afford while also figuring out what came next.
The building had a second unit — a small, unloved condo he had access to. On a friend's suggestion, he listed it on a platform that was still, at that point, considered a niche experiment for travellers who didn't mind sleeping on strangers' couches. The platform was called Airbnb.
The first month's revenue covered both rents. The second month covered both rents and groceries. By month four, he was spending more time thinking about the listing's photos and pricing than about anything else in his life.
"I didn't set out to master Airbnb. I set out to not be broke. The mastery came from necessity, and from paying very close attention to what was actually happening in the data." — Jason Baxter, Montréal, 2015
What he noticed early — what most hosts never notice — was that the platform was not neutral. It rewarded certain things and punished others with a precision that felt algorithmic, because it was. Response time. Review frequency. Booking velocity. Photo quality. Title construction. Jason began treating the listing like a software system rather than a classified ad.
It worked. Within six months, the Montréal condo was the highest-rated listing in its category. Guests were leaving reviews that used words like "flawless" and "exactly what I needed." He started getting calls from neighbors asking how he did it.
The scale didn't happen because Jason moved fast. It happened because he moved methodically. Every property that came under management was treated as a problem to be solved: what was suppressing this listing's performance, and what specific intervention would fix it?
He built the pricing framework in a spreadsheet first, then graduated it to custom software. He built the listing architecture rules by testing titles, photos, and descriptions against measurable outcomes — not intuition. He built the review velocity system by understanding that the algorithm wasn't measuring quality directly; it was using review frequency as a proxy for quality.
By 2018, the portfolio was generating over six figures annually. By 2019, Jason had refined the operation to the point where each property was running with a level of systematic precision that most hotels couldn't match. He had built something real.
On location · Marketics-managed property
There is no way to write this that doesn't sound like a dramatic device. But it isn't a device — it happened, and it changed the direction of everything.
In the summer of 2018, Jason was stabbed. The details of the incident are his to keep. What matters for this story is what the experience did to the way he thought about time, purpose, and what he was building.
He recovered fully. The physical recovery took weeks. The internal recalibration took longer — and produced something more durable than the portfolio he had spent five years building.
What Jason realized, in the months that followed, was that the thing he had found genuinely satisfying about the work was not the ownership. It was the problem-solving. The architecture. The moment a listing moved from page nine to page one and a host's income changed. The moment a host who had been leaving money on the table for eighteen months finally understood what dynamic pricing actually meant.
He had been building a machine for himself. He began to wonder whether the machine could run for other people instead.
In the second week of March 2020, the bookings stopped. Not slowed — stopped. Within thirty days, revenue across the entire portfolio had dropped by ninety-four percent. The platform that had generated six figures annually was generating almost nothing.
Jason had no investors to call. No runway to extend. He had built a real business generating real revenue, and it had been zeroed in three weeks by an event no one predicted and no one could price for.
He did not sell the portfolio. He did not pivot to something else. He did what he had always done with hard problems: he went into the data, found what was still working, and built a survival system around it.
"COVID didn't break the system. It stress-tested it completely — and the parts that survived were the parts that were actually built right. That knowledge is worth more than any property I owned before the pandemic." — Jason Baxter, 2020
The survival involved things that aren't glamorous: renegotiating with property owners, finding the thin seam of demand that persisted even in lockdown (essential workers, extended stays, medical housing), and rebuilding the pricing framework from scratch for a world where event demand no longer existed.
When the market returned — slowly in 2021, then all at once — Jason had something no amount of pre-pandemic success could have given him: a system that had been tested at absolute zero and rebuilt.
Coming out of COVID, Jason had a choice that most people in his position would have made in a single direction: own more properties. The market was recovering. The systems were proven. The playbook existed.
He chose differently.
"The thing I kept noticing," he says, "was how many hosts were making the same mistakes I had made in 2015 — but they were making them with properties that represented their primary income. Not a side project. Their actual financial life."
A host in Nashville running a listing at a flat rate through CMA Fest week. A host in Miami who had never heard of Art Basel pricing. A host in Scottsdale charging $119/night during Barrett-Jackson Auction — when comparable properties were getting $380.
The gap between what these properties were earning and what they could earn wasn't small. It was enormous. And it existed almost entirely because the hosts didn't have the data, the system, or the time to close it.
Jason had all three.
He spent six months building the Marketics framework — not from scratch, but from the decade of operational data he had accumulated across fifty properties in nine markets. Every pricing rule. Every listing architecture principle. Every stage of the review velocity system. Every event calendar signal. Documented, systematized, and built into a service model that could be applied to any property in any qualifying market.
The guarantee — refund the $500 setup fee if there's no measurable improvement in 90 days — came from the same place everything else came from: confidence in the system, and an understanding of how trust actually gets built with someone who is betting their income on a service they can't yet verify.
Jason Baxter · Marketics founder
Jason is 35× Superhost across his personal managed properties, with a Superhost conversion rate of 100% across all Marketics clients who reached the review threshold and followed the recommended process. Results depend on the host's active participation. He manages properties across 22 active markets and is personally involved in every audit. He is based between Miami, Montréal, and wherever the work takes him.
He has never run a paid ad for Marketics. Every client has come through a result someone else saw and told someone about.
Marketics-managed property · Riviera Maya
This is why I built
Marketics.
— Jason Baxter · Founder
