Every lead that showed up after 5pm was revenue nobody collected, because a tour required a human with keys. Self-guided touring turned dead hours into signed leases — and the lockbox wedge turned a hardware-gated product into a market-wide land grab with its own pricing and GTM. New revenue stream, new vertical, and Lennar signed before competitors finished their pilots.
For context: I was SmartRent's second product manager, hired at Series A. Self-guided touring didn't exist as a product — anywhere.
We piloted touring without instrumenting the funnel. Analytics was an afterthought, and it took someone flagging users stuck "in progress" before I pieced the funnel together by hand from the database with an engineer. What we found: 60% of users were dropping off, and 95% of those drops were at identity verification — a selfie match so strict it flagged legitimate applicants as fraud, with no fallback.
We loosened the match, added a manual fallback, and conversion jumped north of 90%. The fix took a week. The lesson has lasted a decade: instrument before launch, look at the data daily. It's why success metrics now get defined before a line of code on everything I ship.
The lockbox wedge. Touring only worked on properties with SmartRent hardware installed — massive change management for everyone else, while competitors circled. I found igloohome, a smart lockbox with an API our architecture could swallow easily, and made the case against existing roadmap items on opportunity cost. Any property could now adopt tours with a lockbox shipment instead of a hardware retrofit — onboarding in under a day, and a land grab won.
The integration playbook. Every PMS/CRM integration — Yardi, RealPage, Entrata, ResMan, Funnel, Knock — was being rebuilt from scratch. I led 10+ of them and codified the pattern: standard data contracts, partner onboarding steps, testing gates. Implementation time dropped 30% for every subsequent partner.
300,000+ completed tours in under seven months, a flagship product for the company, and a wedge that opened self-guided touring to millions of doors SmartRent didn't own. The single-family builder vertical opened on the back of it — with Lennar signed as the flagship enterprise customer.