Zumper's expansion into Canada happened accidentally through acquiring PadMapper, run by Eric and Rob. The company relies almost entirely on organic traffic through SEO and re-engagement. Canadian markets are easier to rank in, while US competition makes SEO relevance much harder to gain.
Chapters
Well, one thing I did want to, you know, discuss a little bit too is, you know, as far as when it comes to the markets that you operate in and kind of like what that expansion kind of playbook looks like, because I'm assuming the markets are kind of quite nuanced in, you know, regulatory kind of considerations there too.
Yeah, our 2 biggest markets, I mean, our only 2 markets in terms of national markets are the US and Canada. Just, I guess the interesting observation I've had Is Zumper is a very organic-driven audience base. So our monthly users and our annual users are basically 100% organic, meaning they're either coming to the brand, they come through SEO, or they're kind of re-engaged. So like building kind of using our existing database of tens of millions of users and kind of re-engaging them when we think they're ready to rent again using data science. My interesting observation on that kind of expansion, Mike, is the US is an incredibly difficult market to build a marketplace in. No regrets, all in, absolutely love it. And I love the hardest challenge. And my data point is Canada. So we launched in Canada almost by accident when we acquired another marketplace that some people may know called PadMapper. So there's a great company called PadMapper run by Eric and Rob, They were like a YC company. They existed before Zumper wrote his first line of code. And in 2016, we acquired them and they had operated in Canada and we inherited their Canadian business and thought it was a great opportunity and built Zumper into Canada. If you do like an SEO search for like Toronto apartments or Montreal apartments, whatever, you'll see Zumper's in the top 2 or 3 results typically. In the US, as the largest kind of private player from an audience perspective, where there's us and like a couple of public companies, we're still not in the top 2 or 3 results on SEO. And so for one of our biggest distribution channels on demand and MAUs in the US, we're still fighting for relevance. And we're pretty big. In Canada, we're one of the top 2. And it happened almost overnight. That literally took about 3 months after we acquired Pamapper and integrated their listings. Zumper started ranking at the top of page 1 on Google in Canada. So I guess my geographic and scale lesson is the US is the hardest market in the world, probably, maybe China, to build a marketplace business. It is so competitive. There are so many venture-backed players, and it's not to say Canada is easy, but I would say it's 10 times easier looking at the fight we've had in both markets.
