AppFolio is a vertical SaaS pioneer. Founded in 2006, the company evolved from a back office control point—accounting for property managers—to a cloud-based platform that serves as its customers’ system of record, system of engagement, and system of intelligence. AppFolio’s platform helps its customers unlock more value in their business and keep up with the pace of digital transformation across the real estate industry. As of the writing of this essay, the company had $105M in revenue in Q1 2022 and boasts a ~$3.45B market cap. 

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I’ve been fortunate to get to know AppFolio’s President and CEO Jason Randall over the years. As a former product management executive, Jason has a unique lens on the building of a vertical SaaS company.   

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For avid VSKP readers, our talk will bring to life a number of foundational concepts:

• Accounting as the initial control point
• The role of regulation—in this case, trust accounting 
• The VSKP frameworks in action: follow the money, follow the workflow
• Building a platform for engaging all stakeholders
• Balancing adding value vs. monetization and ARPU vs. retention 
• Extending to consumer, extending to the owner
• Industry benchmarks and best demonstrated practices
• The multi-vertical opportunity

I learned a lot from our talk, and I hope you will as well!

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This interview took place on June 21, 2022, and has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

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Dave: We’re really excited this afternoon to have Jason Randall, CEO of AppFolio, for our series of case studies in vertical SaaS. We’ve done the Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project, which lays out a variety of different strategy frameworks, but I love actually speaking to executives and CEOs who have built some of these large vertical SaaS leaders – the pantheon of greatness, so to speak – to bring the strategies to life and talk through their journeys. I really appreciate you joining us today, Jason.

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Jason: Thank you. Great to be here.

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Dave: Maybe we can kick it off with your own personal journey, Jason, before we get into AppFolio.

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Jason: I’ve been in technology for quite some time now. I’m in Santa Barbara (where our headquarters are). I came to UCSB [University of California, Santa Barbara], grew up in Southern California, and then stuck around. I didn’t think I was going to plant roots here, but I really liked it, and said, okay, I’ll give it a try! 

I did a few different things, but I actually got really lucky –  it’s kind of remarkable to think about, but almost all of my tech career has been in vertical SaaS. I joined a vertical SaaS company in the late ’90s, if you can believe it, doing web-based supply chain management for the automotive industry. We would put a box in their data center, kick out inventory information, and then build a web interface to share that information. Then I moved to another B2B SaaS, which was a little more horizontal but I was focused on verticals, at Citrix Online, building the go-to products. Then I moved to AppFolio. 

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I just have this B2B experience that I got lucky with, and actually vertical SaaS software experience from the very beginnings. I look back now and just can’t believe that I was so fortunate to get that introduction way back when.

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Dave: What an amazing run. I do want to ask you later about what’s going on in Central California, because there sure seems to be a lot of SMB and vertical SaaS software companies out of Santa Barbara. It’s a great place to live, obviously, and it’s known as a tech capital…now there’s four, five, six great companies there, right?

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Jason: Yep.

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Dave: I’d love to hear about that, because I’d love to live there at some point myself! [Laughs] 

Let’s quickly go through the origin story of AppFolio, and contrast that with the scale of operations that you currently run today.

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Jason:  I joined in 2008, but the company was founded in 2006 by two local entrepreneurs: Klaus Schauser, the founder of Expert City, and Jon Walker, who had founded a number of IT-focused tech firms here in Santa Barbara. They had this vision back then that all businesses would need software to survive and thrive in the future. This was still back in the day when small businesses especially were pen and paper, and maybe a little bit of back-office software. You couldn’t imagine it! But the founders had that vision, and then they put another step in place back then, too, which was really prescient. They said that over time, vertical software will win out over horizontal software because of the intense focus you can have on the specific needs of that vertical. 

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When they went to raise money back then with this vertical software idea, focused on SMB, they got laughed out of a few VC offices because everyone would do the math – how much an SMB could afford, what kind of subscription you could get – and the conventional wisdom was that vertical software businesses, especially SaaS, would top out at maybe a hundred million in revenue. So the founders said, “Okay, if that’s true, then we’re just going to get into a bunch of verticals. That’s how we’ll solve that problem, because we want to be a really big, successful company.” 

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Klaus and Jon kicked off, and they went out and did what we call market validation. It’s a pretty well-known process now, but basically it’s making sure that whatever we decided to build would actually sell. They actually went to a few different verticals before they picked real estate and property management specifically. For example, they walked around and talked to beauty salons. Then they looked at automotive repair shops – that was a big one. They were really jazzed about that. They found a lot of pain there when they walked into the office: these green screens with the greasy keyboards, I’m sure you’ve seen them. And the shoebox with all the receipts and billing that they’d have to pay vendors with that they hand to their spouse or whoever at the end of the day. But what Klaus and Jon found was that the mechanics, the owners, would rather spend $10,000 on a new hydraulic lift than they would on software. These business owners were in pain, but not recognizing that they’re in pain. 

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Then they shifted over to property management, and it just turned out to be a fantastic industry to get into. People were in pain and they needed software. There was regulation involved with managing trust accounting (keeping track of client funds that are held in trust), and there was a deep and broad ecosystem of people to talk to and work with, which we’ll probably talk about in a little bit.

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Dave: Maybe share what the scale of the revenues are, to give a sense of the scope of operations today.

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Jason: We expect to be north of 400 million in 2022 annual revenue on, for the most part, a single vertical, and still growing rapidly. 

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Dave: If you could only go back 20 years and tell those VC folks what they missed! 

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Before you took over the mantle of CEO, Jason, you headed up product. Maybe one way of talking through the AppFolio story is through the lens of product evolution. Let’s start with the initial customer, obviously in real estate. You chose the property management companies, not necessarily owners who are consumers. What was the rationale behind that initial product and customer?

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Jason: We’re talking about either owner/operator or fee-based property managers managing typically 50 or more units. Think of units as a door. It could be a single-family residential, which we call SFR, which stands as one door, or a big multi-family residential – maybe an apartment building with a hundred doors. We target the people who either own and operate them or who have been asked to manage those units. When you imagine getting to scale, all the normal activities you have to do to manage an apartment building become complex. There’s a lot of busywork, and software is very important to help you manage that. 

We started with accounting. There were a couple different ways we could have entered the market, but we put the stake in the ground and said from the very beginning that we wanted to be that core software. We used to call it the “last light out.” If you had to shut down the office, it’s the last thing you would turn off. We would say that kind of tongue-in-cheek, but when Covid hit people were literally turning off the lights in their office and going home for a while – but they kept the software running. It turned out to be true. 

There is this thing called trust accounting in our industry that’s regulated. It turned out to be an important factor. You can get in big trouble if you pay one person out with someone else’s money; you have to keep track of that. These owners and managers are regularly audited by state agencies to make sure that they’re not doing anything they’re not supposed to be doing. It’s yet another reason why software is actually critical to their business.

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Dave: Trust accounting has to do with the liquidation of proceeds if there’s a default? Or is it different?

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Jason: It’s different. Back in the day, before regulation, you might have had a landlord collecting a bunch of funds, and then paying out other owners. If all of a sudden something happened, and the money is not there… It’s a really simplistic example, but it’s very important to make sure everybody’s money [is accounted for]. You can mix them all into a single account, but to do that you need very clear accounting that shows you the ins and outs of that money.

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Dave: Got it. Segregating customer accounts is a term that a lot of financial services companies use.

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Jason: Yeah. We actually had a fun goal early on to have state auditors recommend our software. And we did end up hitting that goal. They’d go into a property management company and say, “Oh man, your books are a mess. You need to get AppFolio.” What a powerful recommendation that is!

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Dave: Absolutely. When we think about vertical SaaS, we think about the initial product; you really want to land at the control point. Part of it is “last lights out” – Covid was a great test for you guys, for the restaurants and hotel software companies of the world. I think people really sailed through that test with flying colors. You talked about the importance of trust accounting. How else do you think that your initial accounting solution was the control point? Why start there?

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Jason: The other reason why is that the movement of money in this industry is really the lifeblood. You have activities, you do marketing, you conduct sales to get people in. If you’ve got an owner who’s given you their two or three rental units to manage, you’ve got to collect the money from the resident. You’ve got to account for it, and then you’ve got to pay the owner their cut of that. Many times there are laws about how fast you can do that, between collecting the renters’ money and then paying out the owner. That was a huge pain point. 

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There is this thing called Rent Week, where you’d have to get all the checks in, do the accounting, and pay out the owners within a certain amount of time. People would be working 24 hours a day trying to do this. And Rent Week turned out to be a scaling issue for the property managers as well. They could only get to a certain size and couldn’t add any more units past that because it was just too much work to do in a compressed time. Having accounting software that could smooth that out, take that pain away, and add on things later that helped everyone in the ecosystem – it just turned out to be a powerful entry point.

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Dave: The term “system of record” takes on new meaning when you’re actually moving money. That makes a lot of sense. 

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In general in vertical SaaS we tend to find one control point in the front office and one control point in the back office. You started out from the back office, where everything gets reconciled and accounted for, and built a strong platform there. Where did you go next? How did you think about your second and third products?

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Jason: We started to build out what we called the value-plus [V-plus] ecosystem. It consists of those things that you add on to the core functionality that you might engage a different user with. Or that you might start to charge for; the most obvious one is payments. It was not our first V-plus, but it was early on. All of a sudden we can start moving money, and then you charge various users to move that money around. 

We were doing two things. We were adding more functionality to the core software that you get in the subscription, and also adding on these V-plus services. The very first one we did was websites: we started to build and host websites for customers who may have not had websites before, or not been in control of them. We would allow you to publish listings from AppFolio Property Manager to all of the listing agents, and then we built an automatic way to publish to your website that we hosted. We always look for things where there is a very seamless integration.

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What we were doing was taking a step back, looking at everyone who interacts with the system, and trying to draw as big a net as possible around all of the users, because we knew two things would happen. We knew that the value of the product would increase the more people we got onto the platform, and we knew that we would have more opportunities. Our platform touches, obviously, the property managers. It touches owners. Investors are on our platform; residents and tenants are on our platform; vendors who do maintenance are on our platform. We just keep expanding the net. I think that was one of the biggest eye-openers for us. The more you expand that, the more you start to touch all these different areas that are well outside the original thesis.

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Dave: I love that. We think about it as evolving the workflow. You have a core piece and from there build out all the extensions. You, in some ways, did it in a different and much more powerful way, thinking about all the different constituents and stakeholders and how to extend the workflow to them. Are there certain stakeholders that are higher priority than others? Which ones did you decide to go after first?

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Jason: Well, first we had to get the accountants and bookkeepers on our side. [Laughs] There’s always that one person in the back office who can veto the new software, right? We had to really work hard to get accountants. Then you just keep moving around the cycle. 

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The way I think about this is – and it may be true for other verticals, especially SMB. You would know more than I would about this – the problems that our users are solving have not changed in a hundred years. Find a person to rent a place, collect the money, fix the washing machine or the door that’s broken, and move them out at the end. Those problems haven’t changed. The only thing that’s changed in all these years is the technology that you can apply.

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We were very fortunate; we rode a couple of big waves. First, a SaaS wave allowed us to solve those problems in new and unique ways, and in many cases bring enterprise-level software back down to the SMB, because now we had a distributive platform. Then mobile came along. These waves of change just keep happening. These new viewpoints allow us to reexamine the same problem with new solution sets from the different views in the ecosystem.

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Dave: Yeah, I love that. Was there an explicit customer research process where you sort of ranked these long-term jobs to be done? Is that just your typical product management process? Or was there something specific and unique?

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Jason: Being a long-time product manager in this world, I kind of laughed when you said “typical.” It’s evolved so much. I can remember the bad old days before Agile, even. But yes, we definitely ran a thorough process there to keep an eye on everything. We learned. The interesting thing for me is that I had no background in real estate. I came up to speed on real estate as a product manager, and then I had to become enough of an expert to launch products and payments. We have risk mitigation products; we have background screening products; we have call center products. You can go a couple routes with those, but we chose to do pretty deep integrations to keep that user experience really tight. 

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We ran a very thorough process. We do market validation so you can make sure that, when you hand it over to your sales team, they can actually sell it. We would go up the learning curve, rate where we thought they would be, and then tick them off. The other thing, though, is we didn’t get ourselves too wrapped up in the priority order. Klaus used to say it’s a matter of when, not if, we’ll build all these things. If you get the order close enough, that’s good enough. But to this day we still run a very thorough market validation discovery process to assess and then prioritize opportunities.

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Dave: Yeah. This is the discussion that a lot of late-stage vertical SaaS companies are having. They’ve got the system of record or control point, they’ve done payments – which I think is pretty well understood, although not always easy. It becomes an arm wrestle of where we go next. Do we expand with cross sales? Do we go after the consumer? Do we go after the employee, the supplier? And I love that ethos of, “It’s not if, it’s when.” You’re taking a little bit of the drama out of it.

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Now that you have extended to many of these different constituents, if you were to look back and think about your experience and learnings, is there anything that you can share, having gone through that process and built out onramps and multiple stakeholders, that you might do differently? Or things that you did really well? How would you talk about that for CEOs that are interested?

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Jason: You know, for us, what worked really well was making sure we had a balance where we were pulling on the lever to add core value. Subscription is still valuable, and getting more valuable, as newcomers come on to the market and try to attack your position. The system of record is very sticky, but you’re not guaranteed anything. So you keep adding that value, and then you’re layering on these value-plus services. Don’t get too far out of whack; if you do and, say, the core value is there and you’re just going for V-plus because you can drive a lot of revenue – that’s great. But you can start to get the sentiment from your customer base that all you’re doing is adding on more expensive things and not really fixing the problems. That can lead to churn or other issues. 

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As we all know now, churn is like the lifeblood of a SaaS company, especially SMB. Retention is how we talk about it. I would just say, make sure you have a balanced approach. Sometimes you’re going to add value to the core product and not even raise the price, but maybe in a year or two subscription price will go up. And you have that to fall back on, as opposed to waiting for something new to do that. And really keep an eye on retention.

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You talked about a couple levers. There’s, yes, ARPU: let’s add some more value and sell something more. There’s the new customer lever: let’s build some stuff that’s going to attract this group that we’re not really getting to now. But there also is a retention lever, and if you’re not pulling that lever and investing there, then you can build up debt that leads to problems down the line.

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Dave: That’s super interesting. We always think about engagement versus modernization. It’s ARPU versus retention, or work flow and engagement. That’s a really cool framework. 

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Maybe we can hit on a couple of the stakeholders that I think are high priority, or certainly that people have a lot of focus on. Let’s start with the big one, which is consumers. Tenants. In most industries, if you can make the phone ring for your merchant, you’re solving their biggest pain. With property managers, I suspect it’s bringing in tenants. If you could share a little bit about your experience in building a product for property managers engaging with tenants, we’d love to hear your journey there.

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Jason: This is where things can get super interesting. The first thing that we learned (and that we continue to prioritize) is that whenever you engage your customer’s customer, it’s got to be a win-win. It’s got to be something that is a win for your customer and doesn’t put you at odds, or sideways. Even perpendicular is a problem. We looked for things where we’re going to help our customers’ lives get better, and then help our business as well. Those are the things we prioritize. 

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Payments is an obvious one but even before we launched any way to monetize payments, we gave away payments for free. Rents are high-dollar-amount payments. We give away ACH for no cost to the tenant or the property manager. We did that in order to spur adoption of the tenant portal back when people were still learning how to adopt portals, but it was also a clear, easy win for the property manager. They can tell tenants to stop sending checks, to go online and pay rent. Remarkably, we ended up getting a number of property managers who started charging tenants a fee for taking a check. This was just a huge win-win. Later on, we were able to add credit card payments and other payment types – that helped too. 

I think it’s just critical to think about that win-win component there. Make sure you’re not doing something to monetize a new group that then puts you at odds with your core customer.

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Dave: That’s well said. You want to land with a utility function that your customer’s customer finds value from. Then, over time, if you have an ongoing engagement with your customer’s customer, that’s great for everybody. How did you think about building up an experience for the tenant over time?

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Jason: First, that trust with your customer is critical, right? They need to trust that they’re not going to wake up one day to find you’ve changed the portal somehow to benefit you, and it’s going to negatively affect their business. You build that trust. Then, over time, you can start to do things a little deeper. 

One of our products is enabling a tenant to buy renter’s insurance off of the AppFolio Online Portal when they move in. This doesn’t involve the property manager at all; AppFolio Insurance Services is selling directly to the tenant at that point. But it’s a win for the property manager, because now the contents are covered and there’s liability insurance on the unit. We’re then able to think deeper about tenant engagement and the selling funnel for renter’s insurance, and tune that experience in. You start with something easy, build the trust, and then you can start to apply more consumer-type analytics and flows to that buying behavior.

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Dave: Yeah. You’re highlighting a key point, which is the merchant objection. You don’t ever want to get in between the merchant and their customer. How do you accelerate that process of establishing trust? Is there a way to accelerate? I guess that’s the question. [Laughs]

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Jason: Oh, man. You’ve just got to show up in a good way. Trust is either always building or taking away. First of all, you have to build that into your culture. Who is our customer? How are we focused on them? How are we building trust with that customer? Is this action we’re taking building or degrading trust? I really think it’s important to look through that lens. 

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Then, there’s another component of it, regarding accelerating. We had big debates about adding new functionality and whether we should be slowing things down. We’re moving fast, we’re adding a lot, and we’ve always opted towards keeping speed. You have to do your best to help people stay up with you even though you know you’re not going to get there all the way. It’s really difficult, because they’ve got businesses to run, but at the end of the day, they’re hiring you to future-proof their business, to make sure they’re surviving and thriving into the future. You have to keep running a fast race there. It certainly is a balance. The key things are to maintain the trust, build on the trust, and keep moving fast.

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Dave: Yeah. As you think about the opportunity to scale out that consumer presence, oftentimes the design, the workflow, and the UIs for an SMB or midmarket company are different from a consumer company. How have you infused your organization with more consumer product design DNA? Has it been a relatively straightforward progression from your core team to now?

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Jason: Well, we run a successful marketing department that’s become very adept at marketing to a crowded market. Yes, it’s B2B then going to B2C, and there are certainly differences there, but the tenants at that point are a captive audience. We can apply a lot of that same knowledge and analytics, and how we think about the top of the funnel. There’s a lot that transfers over, especially when you go deep into our team. We have such a fantastic team, who have experience on both sides of that coin. It hasn’t been a giant leap. There’s a lot of knowledge that you can apply to both sides.

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Dave: Yeah, yeah. At this point, you have a great tenant experience. Are you actually sourcing tenants for your property manager clients?

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Jason: We help make it easy for the property manager to list and get leads, but we’re not running what in our space is called an internet listing service, an ILS. That’s a whole separate segment of the market – that we do work closely with, to facilitate the units that are up, but we’re not running those sites.

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Dave: Got it. It sounds like you go as close to the marketplace as possible without actually entering it.

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Jason: Yeah. We help our customers get their units out into the marketplace. But it’s just such a different business model than what we’re doing.

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Dave: That makes sense. Maybe we can shift gears to the owners. You start out with the property managers, and I suspect a lot of the workflows and data need to be reconciled with various different owning constituents. When did you start providing functionality to non-property managers, or up the ownership stack? How did that evolution occur?

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Jason: We started out with owners very, very early in the process, building an owner portal and starting to distribute information. If you think about it, our customer’s customer is not actually the resident. Our customer’s customer is the owner who handed them the property to manage (or the investor, if they’re fee-based). 

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We built out a system of engagement early on so our property managers could easily engage with owners. Then we started to look at other opportunities there. A couple of years ago, we launched a new product, AppFolio Investment Management, for real estate investment managers. That product is for investors who are raising money and distributing funds out to a pool of investors all based in real estate. The product talks to AppFolio Property Manager, but you buy this independently to do your CRM, your distributions, everything else. It’s a great example of us ticking up the ladder to find a new constituent to sell to.

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Dave: Yeah. Is it a workflow that links these different entities? Or is it different panes of glass on the same financials…or both?

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Jason: It’s mostly a data share. You’re operating the units over here, and over there you’re facilitating the tracking and moving of the money based on the fund that you raised. There is key data being exchanged there but they’re two separate workflows. The important part there is, yes, we have overlap, and we have customers who are using both, but we’re also able to sell to non-AppFolio customers who are just raising money and then outsourcing the running of the units. It lets us move into a bigger pool.

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Dave: Wow, that is a big extension. That’s really cool. And are there specific trust elements there as well? Because, again, you’re on two sides of a transaction, two sides of a relationship.

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Jason: Certainly there’s trust. I mean, you’re building trust in these investment pools. They’ve raised money; they’ve got to distribute money in a timely way and report on that. They have a whole constituent base that they’re working with. You have to extend that same trust. The data, starting from the operation side, has to move in right, and it has to be accurate, and there’s a whole big workflow built on that. But at the end of the day, you’re doing the same thing. You’re asking how you can add value. Where are you in the most pain? How can I build trust over time to make sure the subscription model really pays out over decades, not just years?

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Dave: The thing I love about this is you’re so entrenched. You’re adding so many aspects of value to the big constituents. Let’s talk a little bit about what you guys are doing on the supply, or employee, side. Are those big areas of opportunity for you as well?

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Jason: Within our customers?

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Dave: Exactly.

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Jason: Like most industries, attracting and retaining talent is a top concern, priority, and challenge for our customers. We do things programmatically within the application – helping customers get new teammates onboarded and contributing faster through trainings and configurable workflows – but we also do something which turned out to be a bit of a surprise to us. As a successful company, we’re able to share our best practices, how we create culture, and how we think about employee satisfaction and engagement. We get a lot of questions from our customers about how to do that. At our customer conference that we’ve done before and that we’ve got upcoming this year, we’ll have whole tracks about building great culture and how we run our business. That turns out to be something our customers want to learn about.

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Dave: Before we shift to outside of real estate, how does this get easier with scale? You started talking about best administrative practices. I imagine there’s massive benchmarking opportunities, both at the asset level, at the portfolio level, from a capacity utilization, and from a tenant onboarding standpoint. Has this become easier? How do you become a benchmark for the industry?

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Jason: Easier is such a funny word. There are just different types of challenges as you scale, but as we all kind of talk about pretty consistently, with these SaaS businesses it’s the flywheel. Every day you’re pushing and adding a little more energy to the flywheel. For us, it’s a few more units on the platform, or better adoption, or better usage. As long as you’re watching that energy flow grow, slowly but surely, that flywheel gets kicking after a while. You just get so much momentum from what you’ve built into that. 

The trick is to figure out how to leverage that to fuel future growth. Yeah, you could step back and the business could kick off cash for a long time, presumably, in these SaaS businesses. But you want to keep growing too. How do you keep reinvesting so there’s future pushes into that flywheel? For us, thinking about that at scale, how we’re going to do that tomorrow, not just today, is really the crux of it. How do you maintain speed and urgency, but make sure you’re taking care of this great customer base that’s going to hopefully be on your platform for decades?

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Dave: Absolutely. To shift gears a little bit, you mentioned multi-vertical in the very beginning. Almost every vertical SaaS I know of, in the early days, has thought about adding either very different or adjacent verticals. There’s a lot to that, right? There are a lot of common processes and concepts. Yet there haven’t been that many companies that have truly created multi-vertical franchises. I know you guys were in a couple different verticals through the progression. Tell us about your experience. Do you think in the future you will see more multi-vertical SaaS companies? Why or why not?

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Jason: I think you absolutely will see multi-vertical SaaS companies, for the very reason that Jon and Klaus had some difficulty with early VCs – there’s a cap to this. With any really specific vertical, the great thing is you can know all the customers in that vertical. The bad thing is, there’s a finite amount of them. Wherever that cap is, it still exists. Over time, I do believe you will see companies that break out and end up being multi-vertical businesses.

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I think the real question is, are they big disparate verticals that have nothing to do with each other, or do they provide leverage? Are they natural extensions? You’ll start to see vertical SaaS software companies extend their boundaries into places that make you scratch your head and say, “Wow, what vertical is that? Is it within the one they started with? Or is it on its way to something else?”

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Dave: That’s a really interesting way of framing it. To your point, there already are existing proofs of multi-vertical companies. Yourself and CCC. That’s really interesting. 

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Maybe we can end with this question: Where do you find inspiration, Jason? Whether it’s other great vertical SaaS companies, whether it’s companies in other industries, where do you look for inspiration of what AppFolio can be over time?

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Jason: We try to be as long-term thinkers as we can. We’re really in it to build a very valuable and successful company over time. I look for the companies that have great cultures, to start with, and then great business models on top of that. I’ve always been a big fan of Veeva in the vertical software space. I’ve had a chance to talk to a few people over there over time. I am really impressed with their focus on the customer and on culture as the foundational elements of building a great company that's getting into a market and really dominating it. Then, you just look for the people who are putting the customer first, truly. You hear that a lot these days, and I think there’s a reason for it: when you move to subscription, you’re literally asking the customer every month to open up their wallet and give you some more money. I think that focus on the customer has been a wonderful turn for the software industry as a whole. I try to learn as much as I can when talking to any companies who really have that as their North Star, so to speak.

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Dave: Absolutely. Jason, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing the AppFolio story. There’s so much cool stuff in here that I look forward to unpacking and getting out there.

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Jason: Thank you so much. Great to talk to you. 

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We love the idea of bringing together a community to explore the boundaries of Vertical SaaS and are excited by what we can learn from each other. If you have thoughts or comments or want to get involved, reach out to us at knowledge@tidemarkcap.com. If you would like to keep updated as we publish these essays, sign up below.