Interview: Waitly’s CEO Tim Myhrvold on developing a B2B2C SaaS solution

Waitly is a digital waitlist platform that currently is being used by property owners and home seekers to create more transparency, keep data secure, conform and centralized and make sure that both property owners and home seekers get the best results out of their rent experience. (Read the Waitly success story here)

Read more on the Waitly website

The Danish company was founded in 2019 by CEO Tim Myhrvold and CTO Morten Pyndt Dalgaard.

The start of a SaaS business

Juliane Waack: Can you explain, how it all started?

Tim Myhrvold: We did start building our product with the property owner, or B2B side, in mind because that was our direct use case. I worked as a volunteer chairman for a Danish housing association. I still worked with excel sheets and I desperately wanted to digitalize that process. But for a good process, you need to acknowledge the home seeker, or B2C side, as well.

We wanted to fix the main problems straight away, which we thought we could do by building a relatively simple solution that was complex enough to handle most cases in the Danish real estate industry.

We started with our housing association which had 40 units. And we called other associations to pick their brains and ask if they had the same issues and needs.

We focused heavily on the B2B side of the solution because that is basically the foundation. If there’s no B2B customers, aka property owners offering their properties, then the B2C customers have no reason to sign up and that in turn makes B2B customers turn away. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation.

Juliane Waack: And you still had to make it attractive enough for B2C customers, functionality-wise, so they would also see value in the platform.    

Tim Myhrvold: Of course, we needed to take the home seekers/tenants into consideration. 

But when you are working with a product where you have a low supply (rental space) and a really high demand from the home seekers, you need to concentrate on the supplies.

And that’s the core value of these waiting lists, because there is a big discrepancy between demand and supply. So that is why we are still focusing mostly on the B2B side when it comes to our product development.

B2B2C: A chicken & egg situation

Juliane Waack: That’s interesting because that’s what you have to figure out, which customer base needs to be there first, which then draws in the other customer base.

Tim Myhrvold: And it is actually a little bit in conflict with our revenue model because 85 % of our revenue are coming from the B2C side or the tenant side. And only 15 % percent are coming from the B2B side. So, we earn all our money from the tenants, but we need to prioritize product development for the B2B environment.   

Juliane Waack: So, did you know immediately that your solution would be a SaaS, or did you initially plan something with a one-time-payment option?

Tim Myhrvold: We knew from the beginning that our B2C customers would be willing to wait for a long time to get something of high value to them and that’s why they sign up in the first place. Other people wouldn’t wait if the neighbourhood and property was not important.

So, we decided against a one-time fee upfront because that would result in a lot of home seekers to sign up to dozens of waiting lists. But they wouldn’t have any reason to remove themselves from the lists if they found something else. The subscription fee acts as a signifier for a high interest in the specific rental properties.

And we didn’t re-invent the wheel, I actually had some startup experiences before Waitly and was inspired from the recurring revenue models and signing up for paid waiting lists is quite common in Denmark.

We simply built a digital solution for it, because it used to be the case that home seekers would transfer money to the landlord’s bank account and then someone would need to check all payments and names on the waiting list to make sure the fee was paid.

This was also long before easy payment and recurring payment solutions like Billwerk+ were created.

Juliane Waack: That’s a very interesting point, because a lot of B2C customers who suffer from subscription fatigue often think that the subscription model is only there to make them pay regularly.

But in this case, it really helps to ensure committment on both sides. And that is very important, because home seekers also don’t want to be part of a gigantic waiting list due to a one-time payment. The subscription fee ensures that the waiting lists stay relatively sensible in size which increases chances to get invited to a viewing and get the flat.

So, what were the biggest pain points for your customers that you considered when developing the solution?

Identifying customer pain points

Tim Myhrvold: So, there’s three areas with the biggest pains.

The first pain was of course the whole signup process.

Beforehand, if you were a tenant, you would not be able to find the property online, because many small properties with only a few rental units usually do not have a website. So, you’d need to hear about this property or housing association somehow and then look for an email, write to the chairman or board and send a request. And then the chairman or board member would write back, and it would be a back-and-forth via emails without any real documentation. 

We actually found that it usually takes up to 8 emails and more to get all details and acquire all necessary information from the tenant (payment, credentials, etc.). And that used to be all manual, but Waitly automates all this.  

Another big pain point was the whole announcement of vacant apartments.

If you have a property, you usually have not just one but several lists. You have a list of tenants who already live in your property and who are usually prioritized because you know and trust them. Then, you have existing tenants who signed up their children when they were still small to make sure that their kids can live close by. And then you have the third list, which is everyone who is new and wants to move into one of your properties.

So now we have three three lists with different priorities to manage. As a board member, this could easily turn into 100-200 emails that you had to send and respond to manually for one flat viewing.

And Waitly automates all this as well. Making sure that invites were sent out according to priorities and to collect and rank all people who have shown interest after the flat viewing and rank them automatically based on their defined priorities.

Thirdly, data maintenance and GDPR, for example, deleting data of people who are not interested anymore.   

In the past, most people were writing to the landlord/board member and ask to change their email, to change their waiting list or preferences or to delete their entire data set.

Juliane Waack: Not to mention the highly sensitive information that usually home seekers would send via email. In Germany, this often includes financial statements, ID copies, etc.

Tim Myhrvold: Just imagine how many people have your application folder full of highly sensitive data, lying around in a lot of email boxes who I can assure you were probably not deleted for a long time.

And of course, this is one of the things we want to help out with because it’s not only tenants and federal agencies that want to ensure data protection and transparency but also the landlords who do not want to have the responsibility of managing all that data.  

And with our software, B2B customers can maintain their own data. And that is a huge difference to a standard newsletter on a rental website.

This is also where we tried to deliver a more B2C-centric experience about ensuring that the sign-up is actually leading to something and doesn’t get lost in an inbox or excel.

Home seekers can simply log in to Waitly, see and manage their own data, see all their waiting lists and apartments that are being offered and they also get a lot of data before they sign up for a waiting list.  

Differences between the B2B and B2C platform

Juliane Waack: When it comes to user experince and design, how did you differentiate between the B2B environment and the B2C environment. Are there differences?

Tim Myhrvold: Back in 2018, me and my co founder built the most MVP version of the website and the web design to look and feel nice. 

When expanding to Germany, we also split the two customer universes up. So now we have the B2C side, which has light colors and it’s about easiness, smoothness, everything should be very simple and transparent, and the visualized data should be easily understood at a glance.

And the B2B side which is a little bit darker to visualize trust and security and to fit the more financial and administrative side of it and the accounts obviously have a few more functionalities to manage all the waiting lists, etc.

So, it’s two feature universes. And with our small team of only four developers, it actually goes back to one of your first questions: we really need to prioritize where we use our resources.

Juliane Waack: That leads me directly to my next question: Is it difficult to keep that power balance between the two groups? So, both feel that they get the best out of it.

Tim Myhrvold: Yeah, it can be difficult. It’s really important that we are internally clear about our priorities. So, we have a clear set of priorities and rules of which customers and regions come first.

So, we have two people sitting with all our support tickets and they know these rules. When they are building their SLA (service level agreement), they know for example that landlords have first priority, and German landlords would have even higher priority, since we’re currently expanding. And that’s how we want to navigate it.

And we also try to communicate this externally to both landlords and tenants on Waitly.

Sometimes you might have an opportunity to add a product to your home market that could actually generate revenue, but you have to say ‘No’ to it for the time being because you need to keep an eye on the bigger picture. 

Expanding to another country: differences and challenges

Juliane Waack: How do you go about the marketing? Was there a big difference between Germany and Denmark?

Tim Myhrvold: It actually is very different in Germany. In Denmark, we don’t really need to invest money in our marketing.  

We get a lot of organic B2B leads in Denmark because we are a known brand. On top of that, most B2B customers already have their own lists of home seekers, usually around 100 people and more, which we can simply onboard. It works so well that we don’t really have to do any B2C marketing in Denmark. Instead, we focus a lot more on newsletters, that B2C customers or potential customers can sign up to.

In Germany, we have a completely different situation because we don’t just have to market to B2C customers, we also need to teach B2B customers how to develop their own customer base.

Most German landlords do not work with paid subscription lists as is the case in Denmark. Many of them don’t even have fully updated excel sheets or newsletter lists. When they have a vacant apartment, they go to ImmoScout, create a page and an open call and get 600 applications within three, four hours and then they just randomly choose whoever fits their requirements best without a proper system. And the following month, they will do it all over again with another apartment.

And this is where we have to come in and educate German landlords by explaining to them how much time they can save with a curated list of 100 known interested participants who have the right documents and a high interest.

Right now, when we onboard a German landlord to Waitly, it’s up to us to collaborate with the landlord to find waiting list customers. And we need to find these B2C customers because as previously mentioned, even though our main focus is bringing B2B customers onto the platform, 85 % of our revenue actually comes from B2C customers. So, we don’t earn anything unless we find tenants for the landlords that really want to live in these properties.

For our German B2B customers it’s very low risk to start with us but we need to put in a lot more work than in Denmark. I have even hired two people here in Berlin to do SEO and go through social media groups to get to know the B2C customer base and find potential tenants.

Because even though the business model itself is fantastic for German home seekers, they don’t know our brand yet.

Juliane Waack: Yes, it’s really not very common for German landlords to have organized waiting lists, it really all comes down to platforms like ImmoScout which is actually a huge disadvantage for home seekers because it puts them in a situation where they have to keep in touch, ask about apartment viewings, do the follow-up and make sure they do not fall for a scam.

Tim Myhrvold: Our biggest challenge is finding the landlords who are willing to change the status quo of the German real estate market. If we’re being honest, it’s much easier being a property owner than being a home seeker.  

It’s not difficult to find tenants, there’s a big demand supply issue on the market in Berlin and Hamburg and many other cities in Germany. For the landlords, it’s easy to find tenants, they hardly ever have vacancies for long.

Waitly’s advantage for B2B customers is therefore not to find them tenants. What we provide is a much simpler, less time-consuming and compliant way to manage waiting lists, property viewings and data maintenance.

This can save them a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of administrative hassle as well as an alternative to platforms like ImmoScout which can be very expensive.

SaaS flexibility: Scaling into other verticals

Juliane Waack: You mentioned that your solution could potentially also be scaled for other purposes and markets. Did you already have this in mind when you developed it first?

Tim Myhrvold: When we started out within the real estate industry, we did not think about other use cases. My co-founder and I thought that we could go into other verticals using our our tool maybe one or two years into the process of building the product.

But we did make sure to built everything for modular uses very early on. That way, we don’t have to rebuild the entire solution in case we have the resources to expand into other verticals at any point. 

And I’m happy we have built a really modular backend system to facilitate other types of verticals. We even tried and tested out some of them already. And I do believe that once we have more resources to go beyond the real estate market, we would have at least three other viable verticals to go into immediately. 

We actually want to spend 2025 to build a more generic waiting list solution that can be easily adapted to different uses.

For example, now that we are operating in Germany, we’ve found that Kindergarten waiting lists are ripe for automation. It’s such a big pain for so many people.

But with a new vertical also comes more market research and identifying existing solutions to consider partnerships or integrations with, etc.

Juliane Waack: It’s interesting that even though you didn’t think much about verticals, you built Waitly as a flexible platform which now makes it so much easier to expand. It’s a combination of the right timing and the right idea but it does teach you that you always should consider flexibility when you go into developing.

Tim Myhrvold: To be honest, the first 12 months after we launched our company in Denmark, Morten and I didn’t believe this was going to be a big business with 15 employees and markets in Germany and Denmark and other countries. We thought it was going to be a side-business.

But after year one, other markets asked us whether our products could be built for their use cases. In Denmark, we had a lot of sports clubs, for example, who have the same painful excel list problem. And many of our current customers’ pain points are the exact same in these other verticals.

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