Yesterday my startup Zumper launched its flagship product – the Zapp, the first guaranteed one-click rental application in the US.
Just under two years after we started our company, I wanted to write a short story of how we got here. In particular, I wanted to describe the pain of the patience required in getting to this stage, in the hope that it might resonate with fellow early stage entrepreneurs.
I have been thinking about our launch since I was an undergraduate at Oxford in 2002. When I had to move out of college accommodation and into a real world apartment for the first time, I was shocked that there was neither a common standard for a rental application and credit report, nor a transparent process with which to close the deal with the landlord or agent.
A decade on, at grad school in the US, I found the problem not only still existed but was even more acute in the US than it was in the UK. And that’s when Zumper was born.
In 2011 I built and tested an MVP platform that allowed renters to make real-time and on-site applications for apartments. Renters could fill out a comprehensive application online, apply for the unit, and see how many other applications had been made, and when. In some trials we even tested the concept of exposing the monthly rent of other applicants’ offers so that our users knew exactly where they stood.
We raised a $1m seed round in 2012 on the back of this trial. The results overwhelmingly showed that renters heavily engaged with this new process.
About three weeks before we were about to launch this product on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2012, we changed our minds. The product we’d built was widely adopted by consumers, but was attractive to only a subset of professional users. Most rental professionals still wanted simple email and call inquiries on their units. They weren’t ready for real-time applications via a company they’d never heard of. And I’ll never forget the reaction of Alexia Tsotsis, the TechCrunch co-editor, as we prepped our pitch for the stage. She was nervous about our messaging to consumers. How could we convey that one-click applications and the transparency we showed renters was ultimately beneficial to them, and would not be used against them?
It was clear. We weren’t ready. We postponed. It sucked.
Instead, for the next 18 months, we focused on building a more vanilla post and search rental platform, the first version of which we ended up launching at Disrupt. During our seed stage we were to become the first ever mobile to mobile rental platform. We built the first iOS and Android apps for landlords and agents to create, photograph and post rental listings. And then we built a neighborhood-focused and real-time search experience on top of this for renters, with both our iOS and Android apps featured by Apple and Google. We raised a $6.5m Series A from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in early 2014 based on the large volumes we’d started to run through this platform, on both the B2B and consumer side.
And yet this holding pattern while laying the foundations was such a frustrating time. We had to sit back and watch other companies enter the space that we heavily believed in. Zillow bought a company called RentJuice that could have launched what we launched this week. A few other players also tried to do things that touched upon the trial we’d been the first to run back in 2011.
As a highly future-focused and competitive CEO, it was hard to wait. But a degree of patience, painful as it was at the time, was – in retrospect – critical to get to where we are today. It has improved our chances of success for three reasons.
First, by focusing on basic lead generation during our seed stage, we gained a much deeper understanding of the fundamental mechanics of the US real estate industry. Turns out we didn’t understand the market as well as we had thought at launch, and we would have made big mistakes early on if we’d launched more innovative products off the bat.
Second, we now sit upon a great ‘vanilla’ lead generation business. We work with fantastic partners – both large landlords/brokerages and other tech platforms – to point our thousands of daily renter inquiries to the highest quality listings. Although this will no longer be our sole focus, it will always be a core piece of our value proposition.
Third, and most importantly, by building strategically and focusing on B2B products from day one, we are now confident we have the best chance in the industry at pulling off our vision of a clearing house for residential rentals. In the early days, some of our investors (especially one) had questioned our decision to build a strong B2B play. Other older companies (with the exception of Zillow) had not spent time building B2B products but were instead simply adding third party listing feeds or scraping the ultimately litigious Craigslist to build supply-side liquidity.
But we were convinced that our end-game only worked if we had strong B2B adoption and so we doubled down on this before later aggressively growing our consumer platform (which is 10x larger now than 6 months ago). This week, as we launch the Zapp, we have wide B2B adoption in most major US rental markets, meaning a significant volume of listings have already opted-in to receive the Zapp. This makes the guaranteed ‘one click’ application world a reality for the first time ever. Over the coming weeks and months as we come out of beta, we will switch on an increasing number of these listings to receive the Zapp. In a year, we are confident a significant percentage of the top rental markets in the US will receive and review your central Zumper Application. 
None of this is to say that the Zapp product we launch this week is perfect. Far from it. There are holes in the functionality that you may notice as you use it. We are not perfectly patient. We wanted to put this out there to see what you guys do with it before we start to evolve the product over the coming months. But the right blend of patience coupled with an overwhelming anxiety to launch turned out to be pretty powerful.
Anth
Zumper CEO
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