Inside Stora’s New API: Automation, Integrations & What’s Coming Next | Self Storage Explained

We're turning that completely around and saying Stora isn't. You're not limited by Stora or your self storage software platform. You're limited now by your imagination. Hello and welcome to the latest edition of our self storage Explained podcast today. This is an episode for really forward thinking self storage operators who want to push the limit, want to focus on automation, try new things and really be at the cutting edge of innovation in the industry. Really going to start, we're talking about the release of our open public API which enables all of those things. So we're going to dig into that, we're going to dig into some of the, some of why we've done it, why it's open in public, and then some examples and what it actually means for you as an operator. So David, welcome to the podcast again.

Thank you very much.

Tell us then, what is an API and why have we done this.

Big loaded one to start with? So, so yeah, like a public API is a way for you to connect your system to other systems. Simplest way to think about it. And for a self storage operator, the simplest way to think about this would be the data that's inside store for you, your customers, your pricing, your unit information, your occupancy that's not all available to you to use and glue and send to other tools. So like to think of an example probably makes it a bit more concrete. So a lot of operators use external CRMs for example and sometimes what they want to do is they want to send that information for a customer when it comes in to store. They want to send that to an external CRM like HubSpot, right, or Pipedrive. They can now do that. So they can take that information when it comes to Stora and in real time send it to another third party system which enables so many more workflow automations. Time saved. And yeah, it just really, really helps open up the system.

A software platform, self storage software has, until now you kind of, you pick your software platform and you are limited by what that software platform does. So does it send text messages, does it send emails? What are the automated email systems you can send? How do I increase my price, how do I manage my website? And so in the past you've been limited to kind of what that does. For me, the big benefit of an open public API, what we've released now is that we're turning that completely around and saying Stora isn't, you're not limited by Stora or your self storage software platform. You're limited now by your imagination and what tools you can find. That's the only limitation because Stora now is the core, sort of sits there and the does the core thing like takes a new subscription, your customer booking, manages the invoicing, manages the payments, manages the access to the site, can do some of your emails, can do some of that stuff. But if you want to run your own CRM system, you want to connect to HubSpot or hundreds of others, if you want to send text messages or connect to some AI chatbot, or do something like an AI phone answering service or anything like that, or build your own website. Now, with Stora and our open public API, you can do whatever you want. That's why I see it, and I kind of see it as we've gone from people having to choose a closed platform between like, you know, look at which of these closed platforms suits me best to actually know there's one open one now it's completely open, I can do whatever I want.

Yep. So absolutely. So we're never going to be able to build everything.

Yeah.

And nor should we build everything. Even if we could, we shouldn't. So absolutely, we should deal with the core. We should specialize in self storage, specific needs and outcomes, and let specialist tools take over when they need to take over. And that's what the API enables.

If you're an operator listening to this, what's coming and why is an API an important thing to have?

The industry's growing, a lot of our customers are growing. And as they scale, a lot of the workflows that they would have put in place, sometimes manual, don't scale. So operators need systems that move data automatically, move things that talk to each other, not just people passing spreadsheets around, passing CSVs around, and all these different downloads and exports. And I think another thing that we see changing is because the industry is growing, it's getting more competitive. Customer experience is a competitive edge. And I think whether that's coming from a pricing point of view or even to the digital experience, online bookings are growing and a lot of operators we're seeing are investing heavily in their own online digital experience and they want control over it. And what the public API lets you do is it lets you pull information directly from Stora, build your own booking platform. You can have a very opinionated or, you know, copy somebody else, you know, your own booking flow that's totally within your control, but powered by Stora in the background. Right. So if you want to go and build a booking flow inspired by Big Yellow, you can do that. If you Want to go build a, a booking flow inspired by your competitor, you can do that. You're totally in control of that now. And you can have store powering all the pricing, unit availability, upsells, all in the background. So things I see changing are operators becoming more technically savvy and mature as well. So they're, you know, as they, as they scale, they're looking for workflow, automations and hacks and ways to save time and, and improve the customer experience. Those are the changes that I see. But the ecosystem is expanding as well. More, there's more tech coming into self storage. And if, if you're using a closed system and if you're not investing in how these tools speak to one another, then, then you're going to be left behind.

Almost every single one of our customers up until today has used our checkout flow. And so that's 450 different businesses, almost 900 different sites, and lots of people, rightly so, have their own idea of what way their checkout would be best suited for their customer base. And some people have different preferences for the order in which they do things. And do you hide prices behind the form? Do you show them upfront? What is the exact flow that you want to build in order to maximize the conversion of your customers on the website, rather than looking at a store and saying, do I accept their payment flow? And you got to remember, our booking and payment flow has to suit everybody, so it's never going to be the perfect thing that everyone wants, but on average it works well for people. This now allows you to do whatever is best suited to your business, the way you run it, whatever way you want. And I think that is a huge, huge step forward for the industry.

The fact that, the fact that we're making it public and making the information about it public is it's by design. And we're doing that to try and drive the industry forward so that everybody can see what we think good looks like and I think what a good API looks like. A well documented API that's easy to work with and easy to consume and easy to build on top of.

Tell us what's different about the store API versus what we've seen in the market and our approach to doing it.

Yeah, so the first thing I've already mentioned, we're building it in public and we're making it public, we're making the documentation public. And again, that's for a few reasons, but mainly it's for our customers to be able to access it easily. But accessibility, the other major Thing we're doing is that we're thinking about developer experience. So one of the things that sets Store apart up to this point and will continue to is our focus on user experience, customer experience, design. We're taking that same philosophy, that same thinking and applying it to the developer experience. That's at least what we're trying to do. So we're looking at how the API is architected, we're looking at how we're designing our endpoints, how we're designing the features around it to make it easy to build with. And you know, that may not matter to the, that may not seem like it matters to the operator because they may not be doing the implementation. But if it's easy to work with for a developer, it'll be faster to build, it will be cheaper to build, it will be more performant and it will, it will be easier to get stuff done. So developer experience is a huge part of what we're doing.

Yeah. And you know, we've hired a new team of people in Distora over the past 12 months who are really, really experienced in the development of APIs. So this is a really, it's a big investment for us and one of the things that we really do feel like this is needed for the industry. It's a world class documented API is a necessity to help drive this industry forward because really ultimately what we want, we want our customers to succeed. And this is a way of us saying we can't give you everything. With Stora as one platform that everyone uses, it has to become this. So I think it really is important for us now going forward that this is kind of like a second new product for us as well as our platform that is designed Ultimately we want developers to look at this and to see this and say that is the API that is most flexible. It's going to allow me to build what I want to build. And whenever looking at Stora versus anything else, it's going to ultimately help our business succeed more than any other platform.

Absolutely. So yeah, and that means a few things as well. When we kind of drill down a level deeper, that means read and write access from day one. So this isn't the first API in self storage. Of course not. But we are trying to make it as high utility as well possible. And that means not just read only endpoints, that means you're not just going to be able to pull information, you're going to be able to create things in store as well. Which is, we think again the example you use is creating a Booking from a. From a building your custom booking flow. That was a core use case we designed in from day one, because we've heard it so many times when we speak to, you know, operators of all sizes, but specifically larger operators. And this is the other thing, like a big question like this is we've been thinking about building API for years and we've always put it back mainly because, well, prioritization, right. It's just resource and. But now I felt like the right time because we've seen a shift in the customers that are. We're attracting and our own customers, and they're growing, they're becoming more sophisticated, their needs are changing. And I think that's. That kind of answers some of the. Why now? Because, you know, some people would say, well, why didn't you have an API from the beginning? And what would you say to that? Why didn't we do an API in the early days?

Yeah, I think, yeah, just the customer base. The first year or two, we were very focused on just helping people replicate what really I'd done on my site here in Northern Ireland, which was take bookings online, automate the booking process, automate the access. And then I'd say over the past two to three years, as we've had more and more and more customers, but more and more and more requests for features. And so we spend a lot of our time looking at all those requests, hundreds and hundreds of requests, prioritizing them and trying to say, okay, here are three things we're going to focus on this quarter, or whatever it might be. 1, 2, 3, 6. But we're never going to get to all those other requests. And a lot of those requests are things like, I want to send a text message whenever a booking's made or when a payment fails. I want a text message as well as an email. Those are just an example. And so then we think, okay, will we build that? Okay, there's 50 requests like that. Do we build all. We can't build all 50. So then the solution, the solution. Part of the solution here is we're not going to stop building features like that. Like text messaging is an important feature for us to build in the platform. However, an API suddenly opens it up. So of those 50 requests, 40 are probably now possible with the API using a third party. And then not only do you get. Just to keep on the text messaging example, whenever we do release a text messaging system, it's going to have to be limited in some way to the way we design it and the way we can have it, we can build it so that people can use it, so that 500 customers, a thousand customers can use it. Whereas if you use the API and you want to do something completely different, more flexible, it's always going to be you can send it to users for that. So I think that's why now is the time for the API for us. We have a couple of examples of it in use already.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Can you talk us through those examples?

Yeah, well, one customer integrated it very early on into their custom booking flow. So they have an external website, nothing to do with store in terms of the website piece of it, but it's pulling unit availability into the website. So if a unit sold out says sold out across the unit, so the customer doesn't go in expecting to be able to select that unit type, very simple, very useful. Right. But the other example that's just come in recently is someone is using it to send a customer a confirmation, SMS message or text message once the order is complete. So somebody books online, when that order is complete, it's going to send a text message using a completely third party system. There's many SMS services out there to confirm the booking with the customer. So they're going to get, you know, they're going to get an email from Store, but they're also going to get that text message is going to inspire confidence and make them feel good about their booking and all the information is there. So again, we didn't have to build that, right?

Yeah.

All we've done is open the information, all we've done is open the data so that they can glue two systems together. And that's what's really exciting for me because it's not that we will never build a text messaging service, we most likely will. However, what this does is it allows us to see what our customers are going to do with other tools before we invest the product and engineering time into developing it. So I think it helps customers get value quicker, but it also gives us data points, validation of what people actually want to do. Because people will tell you they'll do stuff all day long, but the difference between someone, what they say they'll do and what they'll actually do are two very different things. I think I'm very excited about that because like you said earlier, they're only limited by their imagination. Now we'll see all sorts of weird and wacky integrations that people will dream up for their workflows and I think that's really exciting.

So that's two examples so far. What are Some other examples of things that you expect to see.

Another example that we hear all the time is integrating with accounting platforms. So using Store as a public API, you're going to be able to send invoice information directly to your accounting platform now via, via the API. So it means you don't, means we don't have to build a custom integration for every single accounting platform. We may build direct integrations with some of the bigger accounting platforms at some point in the future. But what this gives our customers now is ability to send invoice data and payments and accounting information to those platforms. So that's another one I see coming up a lot and people are working on right now.

Okay, so accounting, text messaging, we've talked about CRM integrations, building your own website.

Checkout, the whole authors reporting, reporting is another one. So again there's lots of data in store now you have access to it. Programmatically, that's a nerdy way of saying you can get that out and send it to somewhere like a dashboard tool like Power Bi or whatever. So yeah, there's millions of them. Marketing systems, email marketing systems. When a customer comes into store as a prospect, you're going to be able to send that information to something like mailchimp, which is kind of like the CRM example but with a more marketing focus on it. But yeah, there's so many examples. AI assistance, another one that people talk about, which I think is going to be interesting, but we'll see what people will do.

So and is this the end of integrations for us then Stora or is it like, you know, because we've talked about integrating with HubSpot, Xero, all sorts of stuff. Are we not doing that anymore? Are we still doing that?

We'll definitely still do direct integration. So like we, for us, I think it'll, we'll do direct integrations where it makes sense. And when I say direct integrations I mean like a deep, deep integration where it's customized and you know the, there's a kind of a good relationship between the subject matter and the smart entry systems is a really good one. Right where we need, in store we need to say here's your PIN code or here's your gate access code or whatever. So I think it's always going to make sense for us to do direct integrations. It'll just be, we'll do it now with more data I think we'll be able to analyze. Well, when are people using something like Zapier to connect to HubSpot and store and what are they doing there? It'll validate that for us before we go and build a deep integration. Because like, realistically building a deep integration with something like HubSpot or Xero, it takes months and months of work and subject matter experts. Not that we don't have those. It's just a dedicated time and we could feel like some of those things are better, some of that resource is better spent elsewhere. So it's not the end of integrations. We will continue to do deep direct integrations where it makes sense. But what this does is this means we're going to be able to do your own integrations faster without relying on us to build a full integration that you know is very custom.

So if there are a thousand CRM systems out there.

Yep.

You know, a year or two from now, maybe we've got integrations with the three or five most commonly used.

Yep.

So you don't have to go and build your own.

Yep.

But you can use the API to build your own to whatever else you want.

Yep, exactly.

Okay. Okay. So anybody listening to this? So you're an operator, you want to test it out? Do you want to check out the docs?

Where do you go to go to store co API?

Okay, thanks David. I suppose one final thing to say is this is just the start of our API. This is the start of a massive investment. We have a dedicated team focused on developing this, improving it over time, making it more and more and more accessible. So if you have feedback, if you're testing it out, then please get in touch if you want to check it out, as David said, go to Stora Co. And as always, if any comments or questions, just get in touch. Thanks very much. At Stora, our mission is to help our customers build the best self storage businesses. Self Storage Explained is here to try and bring you the best from inside and outside dentistry to help you grow your business. If you want to find out about more resources, go to Stora Co to sign up for a demo or find out more. Or you can go to Stora Co Academy for lots more resources including our financial model and other in depth guides to setting up and growing your business.