How The Zumper Product & Marketplace Experience Has Evolved

So you mentioned as far as like, you know, being transactional and kind of owning that transaction. So was that something that you did kind of since the beginning or could you maybe— and then also describe like what that product experience is like for kind of both sides that use Sumper?

Yeah. So that, that kind of first MVP basically had, I think it was at the time the first ever and it was super janky, but the first ever online application for a rental apartment and which it's obvious now, but it was not obvious 10 years ago and this is before native mobile. So kind of like on mobile where people on BlackBerrys literally doing it in an open house. And in terms of product strategy, I guess not the irony, but the kind of tack of the ship was we raised $1 million from these like really amazing VCs, many of whom have been with us for the entire journey. And we then took the venture capital and didn't execute on that original product vision. We said, hey, The endgame is to build an end-to-end platform. Our MVP showed that it will happen, but it's not valuable on its own. Just building a transaction layer wasn't that valuable. You were kind of a feature of someone else's marketplace, but you weren't a marketplace. So actually, I remember one of the most seminal kind of conversations I had with my co-founders was actually, and credit to my co-founder Russ, who is still with us and is amazing. He said it's much more valuable as a marketplace. Now building the marketplace is going to take A lot of time, but a transaction layer is a feature of a wider marketplace. So actually, kind of TLDR, we went back to the drawing board with the million dollars and actually didn't build the transaction layer first. We spent what we thought would be a few years getting to tens of millions of annual users. Obviously that took longer than we thought, and I think it took 3 years to get to our first month of a million users. So still happy with it, but took basically 1,000 days to get to a million users. a month. And then the next steps were easier to get to where we are now. But, um, spent the kind of first real stage of the company building marketplace liquidity. And honestly, only in the last 2 or 3 years have we started to make strides on like the end-to-end play. So what does that look like on long-term rentals? Our core product, we built kind of the first ever tenant screening tool you could do from your iPhone and now Android. You can sign leases within Zumper. There's, uh, kind of lease customization for landlords. So we kind of take both the supply and demand side all the way through the transaction. And then as we got into short-term rentals kind of in the last 6 months, there are obviously kind of good paradigms for renters closing a 1 or 2 month lease online where it's pretty easy to see why they would do that and that they're comfortable doing it. So actually we, the kind of headline is the transaction tools on their own weren't a big enough TAM or opportunity, but they're much more interesting when you already have the marketplace liquidity and you can kind of guide both sides of the market down into your transaction layer.

Yeah, no, that actually brings up a pretty common topic that comes up in the community, which is actually, you know, thinking about like as a marketplace and if you're kind of taking an end-to-end approach, how you kind of go from like that kind of core, you know, value that you offer, thinking about like sequencing into like layering on new services or kind of, you know, products and features. You know, how have you kind of thought about that? And, you know, maybe more recently if you're kind of looking back.

Yeah, I, it's a, it's a really hard question. Um, I'd love to say that the answer was, well, you just build the best product and people come, but that just isn't true. Um, we have launched phenomenal transactional tools before the market did, uh, when we were like a Series A company. We just didn't have distribution at the time because I think at the Series A, we weren't a must-buy in our industry in terms of the core kind of baseline product that if people know Zumper, they know us mainly as a search marketplace to find a place to rent. And I think the key lesson is distribution is the cheat code. And so what I mean by that is now Zumper on our vanilla core product, which is advertising for landlords for renters to find their places before they transact, Now we have distribution there with the enterprise, the SMBs, and the long-tail landlords who all know who Zumper is now, and many of them use us. When we launch transaction tools, it is so much easier now to launch them to a captive audience who trust us because we deliver value to their core kind of like demands. I think 99 times out of 100, the cheat code to getting those tools adopted, especially when it's a new workflow or something that might risk, you know, someone's job or like threaten some people is distribution and having an existing relationship with a customer. So to come back to your question, Mike, now we've actually built a great relationship across the supply chain when we launch more innovative products, whether they're AI products or products that might reduce the need to have so many people in a building kind of working at, but so you could redeploy them somewhere else. It's, it's a much easier conversation. And I think it feels much more like a partnership than it does just like an annoying startup telling everyone that they're smarter than everyone, because it's often not the case.