This company has only published one article—a case study. I dare say though, this is the reason they’re growing day by day despite having a tiny team… And why you should want a look behind TopKey’s marketing.
Now before content marketers go off shaking feet and spreading dust where no one wants it, TopKey is early and their voice of customer data shows signs of ridiculously strong product/problem-market fit. Their go-to-market strategy is highly focused (hence, the few blog posts); making my wandering eye notice them time and time again.
So if you’ve never had a chance at a front-row seat watching a fintech’s early-stage growth, this is it. PS: They went from 0 to 20 paying customers in 12 weeks (founder-led sales).
The problem (and why it’s the right problem for this company)
TopKey is a vertical fintech company serving the vacation rental and short-term vacation rental industries. The team is not made up of 20-year fintech veterans who were sipping coffee at the table where the terms “fin” and “tech” were hammered together. But after digging, I saw why they were well-positioned to have seen a fintech opportunity in this vertical.
One of the co-founders has roots in financial services and hospitality, having last worked at Airbnb and HotelTonight in charge of partnerships, which gives them domain expertise in vacation rentals. (You will see how the company is leveraging this ahead).
I find it’s often helpful to contrast how founders describe the problem they’re trying to solve vs how their users do so, based on their “voice of customer data.” So I’ve gathered both points of view in this study.
According to one of TopKey’s past job descriptions, vacation rental property managers manage up to 79 rental units, spending thousands of dollars in expenses per month per property, which need to be reimbursed by each property owner they work with.
The pain
For their customers, TopKey’s value proposition appears to be efficiency, resulting in time savings that translate into cost savings.
Day-to-day, property managers type their fingers numb manually coding expenses across all their properties. They chase receipts trying to string together a profit-and-loss statement, then turn into finger detectives as they try to tie back each transaction to a specific property within the 79+ units they manage.
Solution: bundled vertical fintech
TopKey is using embedded finance (through Thread Bank) to sell multiple solutions for the financial side of the property manager’s life described above. They know vacation rental managers are cobbling together financial products from different places. Creating the need to manually reconcile expenses across all digital and paper trails.
And like how many vertical software companies position themselves against off-industry competitors, they’ve bundled five products to work towards solving the problem of manually having to reconcile expenses across multiple properties.
Positioning: the forced choice
TopKey is forcing vacation rental property managers to choose between dealing with five companies for the following things:
- Opening a bank account
- Bill pay (account payables automation )
- Corporate cards ( go look at fintech company Ramp, to see the value proposition of using cards to simplify expense reporting)
- Expense categorisation/classification software
- Bookkeeping (integrates both with popular property management software and accounting software such as QuickBooks)
Prospective customers’ decision is between the above, versus buying all of these in one place, where the products have been tailor made for vacation rental managers. Plus, the financial data that’s the major frustration of this ideal customer profile can be automatically moved around for easier account reconciliation.
Note: we saw this product bundling playbook in use by Constrafor. They work with general contractors outsourcing work to subcontractors and use Constrafor for financial and non-financial activities around this.
Seems you can’t claim to be building a vertical fintech/SaaS without dipping your toes into bundling. If you’ve seen a vertical software company successfully selling one product only send them my way I’d like to see how they’re doing it.
PS: I was having trouble seeing why TopKey would list bookkeeping as a separate product yet advertise an integration with QuickBooks as a feature rather than a replacement. So I scraped the copy on their bookkeeping page and fed it to GPT to see if I’d get more context around the product positioning. I got more clarity.
It seems TopKey looked at everything QuickBooks didn’t offer property managers as an off-the-shelf product. E.g. integrating with property management software, filtering data by property, etc. And then made a product out of this problem.
So if we flipped our thinking, TopKey can be seen as a QuickBooks/Sage/Xero add-on, which opens up the opportunity to sell this product to property managers within those channels, differently than it could be sold as an independent product on TopKey’s website.
See how STRATAFOLIO is doing this on the QuickBooks app store.
This technique is popular amongst small sales-tech companies — particularly email-finding databases — who position themselves as Chrome extensions for finding emails rather than databases, which would otherwise put them in the same mind-space as better-financed competitors like ZoomInfo or Apollo. They get traction that way.
So with TopKey, that would mean appearing in “10 best QuickBooks add-ons” types of articles.
Voice of customer data
This data helps get a unique understanding of the problems/impact/benefits and the job a company’s products do for their ideal customer.
Here’s a summary of what there is to learn about vacation rental managers, their financial life and where fintech can touch them.
Though the company has five products, most of its customers talk about expenses (tracking and managing them) and not the other products on offer, like bank accounts. Which leads me to believe, companies that choose to bundle multiple products will always have a “lead” that drowns out every other voice trying to whisper, “we help too. We help too.”
If you ask some random e-commerce seller to tell you what Shopify is to them, they’ll name it a website-building thing for their online store. They probably won’t refer to it as “a method of receiving payments,” or “how we get loans;” both of which accounted for 74% of Shopify’s 2023 revenue.
So, in a nutshell, if you’re bundling products in a vertical software/fintech play, your lead product better be as seductive as they come. Otherwise, your secondary products stand no chance of getting in and opening a wallet or two, no matter how good they are. And, be prepared to experiment and shift what you see as your lead product.
Events
I’m not sure if this was intentional or if it happened organically, but, from all the events TopKey’s people attended within the last two years, they are positioned as experts in financial operations for vacation rental companies.
They’ve carved out a category for themselves that makes it easier to slot in as speakers and moderators around any discussions that need a point of view around modernising the financial tech stack of the vacation rental industry.
The company has been aggressively using vacation rental industry conferences as a go-to-market strategy. For instance, you’d find one event where TopKey has a booth. You walk around and see the CEO sitting cross-legged, moderating a talk on financial operations for vacation rental managers, and when you’re unlucky enough to blink too fast, you find yourself at a startup pitch battleground session where the same company is on stage. All in the same event.
In the same breath, they’ve been doing webinars with partners and podcast appearances. This habit of tapping into other people’s audiences rather than struggling to build their own is central to TopKey’s early growth.
I’ve put everything I’ve learnt about their events activity on this spreadsheet.
Analysis
Unless there are multiple events attended by TopKey’s team that they did not promote on social and skipped my grasp. This is the picture that’s shaping up:
They are ramping up: five months into 2024, the number of events they have been part of equals all those they attended in 2023. From the last quarter of 2023, TopKey is averaging one event every 1 1/3 of a month. That is some early-stage hassle right there and part of the reason I wanted to dig into their marketing.
TopKey’s vertical fintech events advantage versus horizontal fintechs
I’ve been part of the Fintech Marketing Hub slack community for a while. And when I compare TopKey’s activities at events versus what I hear from fintech marketers the day after they attend fintech-themed conferences like Money20/20, TopKey has one major advantage.
They can’t help but stand out because of their positioning as part of the “modern financial operations category” within the vacation rental industry. So it doesn’t matter if their booth is hidden at the back of a coffee machine, the category speaks for them.
As such, the company can easily escape the “I felt like a fintech trying to sell to other fintechs who are not in my ICP” phenomenon, which has been part of the complaints I’ve heard from the unfortunate souls who are yet to figure out an events strategy with more hits than misses.
TopKey seems to have figured out how to fish from the right ponds early, which I think comes from the CEO being part of the vacation rental industry before launching a fintech company.
Okay, before I get into another rabbit hole, let’s end it there. Off to drink some Kenyan tea…
Two ways I can help:
If you need secondary research done: gabriel@behindfintechmarketing.com
If need content marketing help: Write Garage
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