Beanstock is an online real-estate marketplace that simplifies how retail investors buy and manage buy-to-let properties. The Beanstock platform equips retail investors with the tools they need to finance, acquire, and manage these properties entirely online, streamlining the end-to-end process and disrupting the traditional real estate market in Europe. They offer research and insights to help evaluate a property’s potential, and help investors every step of the way - making real estate investing incredibly simple. Beanstock is fast-growing Series A startup based in Paris, with ambitious growth goals.

• Beanstock is connected to 7 sources via Whaly: Days, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, HubSpot, PostgreSQL
• Beanstock mainly leverages Whaly to track team performance and company revenue. This is currently handled by the Business Operations teams, who are setting up a scalable data foundation and efficiently building reporting to C-levels, managers, and individual contributors.

Combining Multiple Data Sources & Lack of Robust Reporting

Beanstock’s main challenge was that their company’s data was fragmented and trapped in their various tools. This meant they were only able to create reporting that reflected data from that single source system.

Beanstock uses HubSpot as their CRM for their front-line revenue teams, for example, which means all deal, prospect, and customer information lives within HubSpot. They also have their own back-office data repository called “Soil” in Postgres, with valuable data that needed to be combined and analyzed with HubSpot data. With most dashboard creation happening within HubSpot at the time, it wasn’t possible to include data from Postgres or any other sources.

They knew that continuing in this way would not make for a scalable foundation on which they could consistently perform robust reporting. There were three main challenges that they needed to overcome:

1. HubSpot’s limited analytical capabilities, since it’s not a data analytics platform and dashboards and visualizations are not their main strength. Without a proper BI platform, they would be a lack of robustness around the dashboard & chart creation capabilities.
2. The inability to combine data from other sources. They weren’t able to combine HubSpot + Postgres data - there was also no way to combine Marketing information around acquisition (from Google & Facebook Ads), together with Sales, for example.
3. Limited resources with no “data” team or technical team assigned to analytics

To resolve this, they needed a robust BI platform that was built for data analytics. They also knew that implementing a BI platform would make them well-positioned to become a data-driven company, which was always the goal, but with smaller organizations, it’s always a balance of cost and priorities.

As they were getting to a point where they knew what they wanted and needed from data, with with the work completed in “Soil,” it was time for a BI platform to be prioritized. Last but not least, the platform would need to be intuitive and user-friendly to non-technical users.

Whaly was implemented in July 2022 as the answer to their fragmented data challenges. Not only does Whaly serve as a proper business intelligence platform that allows for combining various data sources, it was the precisely the cost-effective and intuitive tool that they needed.

Beanstock has 4 main Builders using Whaly - 3 members of the Business Operations team: namely Romain Valverde and Dylan Besset, and Beanstock’s CFO, Sleiman Sleiman. These roles do not necessarily require technical expertise, so it was important to be able to get up and running without knowing code or SQL. Whaly’s Flow (visual modeling language) and intuitive exploration and visualization layer quickly empowered the Builders to create valuable reporting for the rest of the business.

Beanstock has connected 7 sources to Whaly, and now have all the tools they need to model the data together in a way that’s useful for monitoring business performance and uncovering insights quickly.

Beanstock’s Business Operations team are the main champions, helping these below functions with dashboards for ongoing performance monitoring, critical in steering them in the right direction and informing key business decisions:

1. Marketing - Acquisition data
2. Sales - Deal and prospecting data
3. Supply - Partnerships data around properties and real estate agents
4. Operations - Customer, legal data for client projects

In addition to dashboards for the ongoing monitoring of business pulse and performance, they also use Whaly to help them with forecasting, leveraging forecasts to create KPIs and objectives, and also answering Ad Hoc questions. They also rely on Whaly to help them answer questions like “when someone makes an offer on a property, how long does it take for the offer to get signed?”

While all business users can view reporting within Whaly, for now, the Builders push dashboards and reports to display environments for consumption by the rest of the business. This is how they ensure that business users can get access to their relevant dashboards.

However, in the coming months, once there’s total confidence that data is properly structured within Whaly and everything is clean, they plan to boost adoption of Whaly across the entire business, and empower more business users to use Whaly for its self-service capabilities. They plan to take take advantage of the free Viewer licenses, by encouraging everyone to have their own logins for Whaly, to access and fetch their own analytics when they need it.

Within only 4 months of using Whaly, Beanstock is now able to conveniently share analytical information to anyone within the organization much more easily. All internal stakeholders are now much more aligned and up-to-date on the performance and results of various teams. This helps people do their jobs better and track goals across three layers:

• Individual contributors at the team level (CSM, Sales reps) - reps and contributors are able to visualize their work and outcomes on an ongoing basis
• Manager level view - managers are able to understand how their whole team is performing, and try to troubleshoot any issues with specific team members or opportunities
• C-level view - Beanstock’s leadership team can now get an ongoing pulse into how the company is performing and show compelling visualizations that tell an accurate story in board meetings

With Whaly, Beanstock is also able to efficiently organize their company’s data so that it’s always easy to find in the future. They leverage the Folders within Whaly to ensure that users can always find what they need.

The Whaly dashboards are even broadcasted on TV screens around the office so that everyone’s aware of goals and progress. With this level of transparency and alignment around data, they are surely set to become a truly data-driven organization! We’re confident that soon enough, they will achieve their adoption goals of Whaly and foster trust in data at a company level.

Once adoption grows among business users, the Business Operations team will also save time by reducing the energy and work they currently put into creating dashboards and reports.

What Beanstock loves about Whaly:

• Quick implementation
• Interface - intuitive, drag & drop features make it really easy to figure out
• Attractive price and value for money
• A tailored experience and trusting two-way partnership in which Whaly’s product team has swiftly implemented new features based on customer needs. They didn’t want to go with a rigid “one size fits all” legacy platform that wouldn’t have taken their needs into account
• Product flexibility and customization

We look forward to helping Beanstock grow through ongoing data visibility!