About
Doorstead doubled developer velocity by building better internal tools.
Doorstead is a US-based property-tech startup that’s reimagining property management. It offers guaranteed rental income to landlords while acting as a property manager for single-family rentals, managing pricing, advertising, tenant vetting, maintenance, and online payments. Its unique model—designed to reduce vacancies and align outcomes to serve both tenants and landlords—has led to high demand.
$21.5M Series B fundraise
$50B+ property management market size
100% of its guarantees have been recouped
Challenge
Property management is operationally heavy, and as demand grew for Doorstead’s services, its internal tools for managing operations and properties started to strain. Its existing solution, Airtable, had worked well to get things moving, but was reaching its limit—the Doorstead team was seeing capacity issues and running into edge cases like accidental data deletion.
They needed new systems that could scale with them, and robust internal tools that could efficiently handle pricing and operations-related tasks
Solution
Doorstead evaluated various options and ultimately chose Retool to enable both the flexibility and scale the team needed. Retool allowed them to build custom tools specific to their domain, doubling or even tripling developer velocity.
Using Retool, Doorstead created various critical internal tools serving different functions, such as:
1. Intelligent pricing: They utilized machine learning models and domain-specific business logic to generate competitive rental guarantees, evaluate offers, and test potential rule changes on past offers for optimizing conversion rates in different markets. This app is essential for Doorstead to create real time recommendations that ensures its business recoups its guarantees.
2. Rent-ready process: They created a Retool app to consolidate the complex process of preparing a property to rent, collating details around things like property inspections, repairs, estimates, and owner approvals. This single app replaced multiple spreadsheets, reduced human errors, and became a central source of truth by integrating Zendesk tickets and other data.
3. Tenant servicing: They built a Retool app to streamline tenant request submissions, which operates like a decision tree. The structured form gathers relevant details from tenants and has reduced the time spent on processing tenant tickets by 20–30%.
“We basically got an internal tools org for the price of one or two engineers. Time in Retool is just so leveraged.” - Philip Lee, CTO of Doorstead.
Results
Doorstead built critical internal tools using Retool in weeks to help its business to scale more efficiently. These tools streamlined workflows, decreased human errors, and increased operational productivity by over 50%. And tenants got a better customer experience thanks to faster ticket resolution times.
“We’ve built extremely complex things on Retool at this point. I really think there is nothing we can’t accomplish in Retool.” -Philip Lee, CTO of Doorstead.
What’s next
Doorstead plans to continue leveraging Retool for both internal and external use cases, with a focus on efficiency and creating scalable systems. With optimized tooling, the company aims to grow in more markets, providing guaranteed rental rates and better property management for landlords and renters alike.
Read more about Doorstead, and how they rebuilt internal tools with Retool.