Zefir is an all-in-one real estate platform that allows users to buy and sell homes in one simple and secure transaction. It empowers anyone to move houses in the best way possible, on their own terms, so they can easily and freely embark on new adventures.

Tackling a major pain point of many European homeowners, they’re growing at a fast pace, now at 70 employees in just 2 years. They operate in France currently, but have ambitious plans to expand across Europe. We’re delighted to help them leverage data to continue their rapid growth trajectory!

• Zefir is connected to 10 sources via Whaly: Aircall, Days, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, HubSpot, Jaffle Shop, Pennylane, PostgreSQL
• Zefir leverages Whaly for analytics reporting for: Operations, Finance, and Pricing Analyst Team Performance

Zefir has a small data team of 5 people, all data engineers and data scientists. With highly technical backgrounds, none of their roles are specifically dedicated to Analytics. However, the rest of the business relied on them for data related to performance and operations, to ensure that their business was moving in the right direction.

Back in 2021, before Zefir started using Whaly, business teams were not able to consume or learn from data. Since uncovering this data required technical expertise, data was essentially “trapped” in this small team that already had a lot on their plate. Without this team putting time and resources into extracting the data for analytics, nobody else in the business would be able to access or work with data, which was problematic for business growth and implementing a data-driven culture.

They knew they needed a tool to help streamline this process. Not just any tool, something that gave them an easy way to gather data from various sources, visualize the data in dashboards and reports, and share with business teams who needed it.

The challenge was getting data out to rest of the business quickly, particularly with the limited bandwidth of this team. Whaly made it possible for them to get set up on the platform in lightning speed, and present the data in a clear, simple way that would provide ongoing visibility to the business teams. With Whaly, for the first time, Zefir was able to answer analytical questions and understand key data around operations and performance, to meet their KPIs. They plan to hire a Data Analyst at some point, but Whaly really helped them fill this void with its simplicity of use for both data teams and business teams.

Whaly was implemented in January 2022. Thiago Sabetta, Engineering Manager who oversees a team of data engineers and data scientists, is the main builder. He decided on Whaly because he was convinced by its ease of use and implementation speed. In addition, for a startup like Zefir, it was clear that Whaly was the most flexible option, offering a solution that is tailored to them, with a highly collaborative product team that worked in partnership with Thiago. They weren’t in the position to go for a bulky BI tool with a long learning curve and heavy implementation requirements. For them, Whaly was the best choice for getting up and running quickly, and to start adding value right away.

The use cases for Whaly are:

• Team performance of pricing analysts: The Pricing Analyst team is responsible for figuring out the correct price for a home/apartment based on market conditions, and prepare offers accordingly. They have daily targets of how many offers to prepare, and have a dashboard set up in Whaly to track this. The Pricing Analyst Team Lead refers to this dashboard on a regular basis and relies on it for his regular team meetings. Based on this reporting, the Team Lead can quickly understand team performance (how many offers each team member is producing), and see how many offers met the criteria vs. not fit to be put forth.
• Global company dashboard with company KPIs
• Operations: by aggregating data from different sources on Whaly, Zefir can show an overview all houses that are in the portfolio and evaluate performance: how long have they been on sale? Are they selling quickly enough? They can also manage the logistics and visits of the houses. Operations is one of the main use cases, and is used to drive efficiencies, optimize, set processes, and troubleshoot any issues.
• Finance reporting that looks at the operations from a finance point of view. Maintenance cost vs. profit.

Zefir has 4 users signed up to the Whaly platform itself, but they have more data consumers who are viewing the data that’s been pushed out to Google Sheets. Whaly’s Push feature allows for data from Whaly’s dashboards to be sent to the existing channels and systems that the business users are accustomed to working in. This is step one to data adoption. Once business users trust in data and become more familiar with it, we’re hoping more of them will understand how to self-serve the analytics they need within the Whaly platform.

For the first time, Zefir’s business users have access to analytics that will inform key business decisions and enable them to track KPIs. That’s a big win! This ensures that their business growth is on the right track, and allows them to optimize or troubleshoot areas that could be improved.

With Whaly, this visibility into analytical data was provided to business users in record time, with impressively low effort. The data team was pleasantly surprised by how simple it was to connect to sources and get going. Whaly empowered them to efficiently gather data and make it useful almost immediately. As a result, this team of data engineers and scientists would no longer be a bottleneck to accessing data, and has offloaded a lot of work and pressure from their team.

With Whaly’s user-friendly self-service capabilities, Zefir is assured that once adoption improves, business users will be able to work efficiently within Whaly to get what they need, when they need it - preventing chart requests from piling up, and reducing dependency on the data team.

Whaly is adding a lot of value already, but they’re looking forward to Whaly being more integrated across the company and boosting widespread data adoption, which is sure to happen over time. Currently, business users have their dashboards and ongoing visibility into data for the first time, which is a great first step. However, it’s easy at this stage for people to take this data access for granted. If Whaly were to be turned off tomorrow, a lot of people would notice and request help! Once familiarity with Whaly and data is achieved, things can only go up from here. According to Thiago, once they hire a Data Analyst and invest a few more resources into Whaly, it will add even more value.

Plus, Whaly is much cheaper than established solutions, like Looker, for example. Looker’s cost and learning curve was off-putting, and they quickly realized that Whaly has all the benefits that you’d get from Looker, but at a fraction of the cost, time, and headache.

What Zefir loves about Whaly:

• Time to value. Fast implementation; easy to connect to sources and set up
• Highly reactive and collaborative support team. From day 1, it has felt like a true partnership with Whaly’s product team
• Interface and features have evolved in a great way over the 10 months of using Whaly
• Whaly has all the benefits and features that you would get with Looker, but at the fraction of the cost and set-up time