Landlord-friendly Property Management. It’s About Time!
By: Claire Smith
Tags: Founder Interviews, Startup Life, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Startup

Interview with Kenny Dahill, CEO & Co-Founder of Burbz

Interview with Kenny Dahill, CEO & Co-Founder of Burbz

Tell us about your business. What do you do?

Burbz is a platform for landlord-friendly property management. Built on top of property management software, Burbz provides landlords an opportunity to hire a property manager and share access to the property data so they are always informed of their property needs.

The property management software is used for rent collection, screening applicants, accounting, and maintenance ticketing. Between the landlord and property manager, they can delegate and use the software to manage the tenants.

The best part: rent is paid directly to the landlord with the management fees taken out. This means fewer tasks and risks for property managers while landlords get their rent money faster!

What is your startup’s origin story?

As a landlord myself, I knew there was a significant problem in property management with a lack of trust and affordability. In 2018, Jon Johnson and I decided to launch Burbz to help landlords find and hire better property managers while providing more control back to the landlord.

Had you been involved in the industry before this startup? What is your background?

Prior to Burbz, I was involved as a landlord for personal investments. My primary career was in commercial real estate as a developer.

What’s unique about your company? What are the key differentiators between you and other players?

Burbz unique value prop is the integration of landlords and property managers on one platform. Other property management software only allows a single user. Whereas we enable the two parties to co-manage.

As well, property managers are on month-to-month contracts to ensure they remain focused on great customer service. Traditional management is year-long agreements that trap landlords to unfair terms.

Take us through a day in your life. What does the typical day look like?

Currently we are running as a bootstrapped startup and a lean team. My typical day ranges from handling our marketing efforts, CRM or product strategy. What has helped me is defining a primary goal per quarter and breaking it down into 12 weekly goals. Throughout the week, I am typically working to achieve my weekly goal.

What has been the most challenging part of growing your company?

As a SaaS company, our challenges will always be developing product and growing our userbase faster. It took us a while to find our marketing niche: content. We dabbled in all of the channels and didn’t get a lot of traction on any until we focused solely on content.

What has been your best marketing channel? What are some channels you are looking to explore next?

Our greatest marketing success has come through our content efforts. Providing content for all our different user types: landlords, property managers, and tenants. What helped our SEO growth the most was creating a guide for all 50 state’s Landlord-Tenant Laws.

Up next, we ware focusing on email marketing and social media. As our organic traffic continues to grow, our goal is expanding our email list and social media followers.

What apps do you use that you would recommend to others?

Slack is great for communicate. ClickUp for product management. Ahrefs for SEO.

Do you have a book, podcast, or Youtube channel you would recommend to other Entrepreneurs?

Stuff You Should Know. It’s not business or entrepreneurship-related but it’s a reminder to unwind! Listen to something that gets you out of your business for a little while.

For business, Marketing School provides a solid foundation of knowledge. Old episodes of Y Combinator are good too.

If you could go back in time to the day you founded your company, what advice would you give yourself?

Establish a strategy that resembles building blocks. Then focus on one building block at a time. Eventually you’ll build that momentum.

What’s something you’ve learned from building your business that someone else can learn from?

Executing your strategy in smaller doses leads to faster gains. A well thought out strategy should be broken down into large goals with a lot of mini-tasks.