Idea Validation - Easy Rental Payments
Hey guys!
I have an idea that came to me recently, when I got frustrated with paying for my monthly rent for my apartment.
I recently moved to a new apartment, and got introduced to their online payment system. It was an absolute disaster of a system.
0 UI, horrible user experience, incredibly confusing information and navigation. This lead me to paying more for my monthly rent. The landlord couldn't figure it out as well!
I couldn't understand why a system, that's main purpose was to collect payment and send that payment to the landlord, was so complicated. I'm not talking about the complexity of building the platform, but in regards to the user experience.
The idea came to me, of developing a SaaS that allows easy payments for landlords, connected to Stripe & Paypal.
Got a new tenant? Have them register an account on our platform, and connect the new user to the correct landlord & rental space.
Got a payment coming up? Simply use paypal or another online service (I know "another online service" sounds completely vague).
Other features can include notifications of when payments are coming up, referals for a monthly discount, etc.
The main goal is to make it as easy as possible, without cluttering the page with useless information, to pay your rent. And for the landlord, collect your rent, without dealing with user frustration or technical support.
What do you guys think?
I think there are already lots of products that do this, and it's just that your landlord has chosen not to use them for some reason. Place I lived previously used AppFolio for this.
Sounds simple enough, but I think there are many external factors that play into this.
I'm guessing there are a couple reasons why landlords still use outdated systems (we just don't see them).
Also, Stripe/Paypal charge for processing. For high rent, that would be thousands of dollars in lost revenue for landlords (or added expense if they pass that on to tenants).
That's a very good point! What do you think would be the threshold for payment, where processing fees would become an issue?
The easiest solution would be to provide a direct way of tenants entering in their CC info or back info on the platform, but the overhead and security concerns with holding information like that on the platform itself could become too much to handle