Inside Storeganise: How a Self Storage Platform Scales Across Continents

Interview with Miles Davison

Unwired Logic: As a quick summary for readers, who are you and what do you do?

Miles Davison: My name is Miles. I'm the co-founder of Storeganise. Storeganise is a property management solution for self-storage businesses. We are working with companies in more than 55 countries around the world. We help operators all around the globe optimize and automate their business, improve their customer engagement and online bookings, and future-proof their business.

Unwired Logic: In the last conversation that we had, in 2023, you mentioned that there is more resistance to fully automated facilities in Asia compared to Europe and the US. Some time has passed, and things have changed. How is the status quo now?

Miles Davison: I think it's changed. There are definitely a lot more businesses that are adopting methodologies, which are now kind of the status quo for businesses in Australia, Europe, and the US.

So, handling a lot more of their bookings online, their customer engagement online, looking to automate more of their operational stack, payments, and so on. It's moving in the right direction.

I think there's still a way to go for a number of operators that still feel like consumers need a little bit more handholding than they maybe actually do. But I think that this process will continue to speed up as we move forward.

Unwired Logic: You have built Storeganise across many different markets. Was there something that you found surprisingly difficult to standardize across markets when you were expanding?

Miles Davison: We've built Storeganise from day one with customers across different geographies, countries and continents. The basic parts around handling multiple languages, multiple currencies, tax codes, accounting codes, and things like that were incorporated fairly early on.

As you start to work with businesses in more and more countries, one of the largest pain points is payment processing because there are very, very few payment processors that cover a large number of countries. We've had to identify best-in-class payment processors, so to speak, for different markets in order to address that. We integrate now with quite a number of different payment gateways in different countries.

And we've also built our add-on marketplace, which is where integrations are housed within Storeganise, to be a place where other operators or businesses can easily add in other integrations. We have clients, for example, in the Faroe Islands or other smaller countries where they need a very specific payment gateway. We have a starter kit that they can use to build that integration out as quickly as possible.

Beyond that, you know, as we still relate to payments, but more on the invoicing side, European regulators and Latin America in particular are moving pretty quickly to having all invoicing electronic and registered with government systems. So that's another thing that needs to be managed. Companies need to bear in mind, as they look at platforms, they need to be able to handle those regulatory requirements.

Unwired Logic: This actually ties in very well with my next question. Was there something about integrating local payment methods that sort of made you rethink aspects of the product itself or how you market it?

Miles Davison: Yeah, that's a good question. I think to a certain extent, yes. We've always had an open API within our product, but we needed to make sure that the infrastructure allowed us to build different integrations, whether we did that ourselves or partners or customers did that on their side; we needed to make sure that was easy.

I referenced our add-on marketplace. That's kind of a framework that we built into the product. It helps people get up and running very quickly with integrations. Our customers that need to use any of the different add-ons that are in there, they can quickly see that, similar to how one would interact with an app store on a phone. They can browse what's out there and quickly install and manage those add-ons. I think that is probably one piece that was important as we looked at the payments side.

In terms of the online booking journey, a lot of that is designed to work across different gateways, too. And then those gateways handle the different payment methods. We tokenize and manage all the invoicing, but the payment processor does the payments.

The other thing that we did from day one within Storeganise was to fully own the billing and invoice management. There are some platforms out there that rely on outside systems, like Stripe, for example, to manage the invoicing logic. That means operators are tied to a specific platform or restricted to how that works, rather than being able to leverage different gateways, but also have invoicing and billing logic that makes sense for their business and for the self-storage market as a whole.

Unwired Logic: Can you give examples of either challenges or surprising things that you found in certain markets, or even something that you discovered in one market where you thought, hey, this could be something that could be applicable in other markets

Miles Davison: Yeah, for example, in Japan, conventions around how businesses, within self-storage, but across different industries as well, manage the invoicing and charging of their customers is very much tied to when employees generally are paid. The entire structure is about trying to ensure that you get as many successful payments each month as possible. Reducing failed invoice payments is structured around when employees get paid.

So invoices might need to be created in the system 20 days before the next billing period, and set up in the payment gateway on the 20th of the month, but then they should only debit the customer on the 27th of the month. All of these kinds of variable settings are really important to ensure that the operator is able to reduce delinquencies.

So that granularity of settings becomes quite important and actually something that is very useful for operators around the world. As we work with companies in different countries, we realize that each of them has slightly different tweaks that they need to make in those settings. Having that customization makes it possible for us to address pretty much all those different scenarios.

Unwired Logic: Markets like the US are very mature when it comes to self-storage, compared to somewhere in Eastern Europe. When you approach such markets, how does the maturity of the self-storage industry there change what operators expect from the software?

Miles Davison: Yeah, so for mature markets like the US, the expectation is that customers are very clear on their requirements when they're signing up. They generally have a pretty good understanding of the product, of what they want to rent. So, the percentage of bookings that come directly from online without having to have much involvement of staff is very high. The process of billing those customers and handling the day-to-day can be pretty automated, too.

Whereas in other markets where they maybe don't have as much product understanding within the consumer base, or operators are still a little bit reluctant to put prices online, they need to handle a lot more of that offline.

The product is meant to be able to handle both of those different journeys and different processes.

For US & EU customers, you know, the focus for them tends to be very much on what the online journey is for customers, how much you can optimize conversion rates, and simplify the UI and the UX.

They think a lot about how to improve conversion rates, but also about the different steps that a customer needs to go through and how quickly you can confirm that order before you add friction points like signing agreements and identity verification.

Whereas in countries where they have fewer online booking journeys, they rely more on bilateral discussions with the customers in order to close those clients, moving those in manually, andpotentially taking manual payments.

In the US, the approach for all businesses tends to be fairly similar. Whereas, in less developed markets, there still doesn't necessarily seem to be much similarity in how each of the different businesses within that market operate. They want to be able to tweak how they do it versus maybe their competitor versus another competitor.

Unwired Logic: What role have local partners played in making Storeganise so successful in all those different markets?

Miles Davison: The partnerships that we have are really important. The majority of those are going to fall into integrations. So, where we work closely with the partners - product or solution right, whether that's payments, accounting, insurance products, CRM and marketing, website solutions, or even facilities management. Those all play critical roles. Being able to partner closely with the different suppliers is really important and being able to know how we can make the most out of both products to solve the problems that the different customers have.

We also have deeper partnerships with companies that handle more consultancy-level solutions and help companies put Storeganise as the core platform within their tech ecosystem. Advising customers on everything else that falls into that. How are they going to look at things operationally, whether it's managing collections or integrating with different CRM platforms, different accounting solutions. So those partnerships go deep because they have to have a very deep understanding of the product in order to be able to solve that for the different clients.

Unwired Logic: It was possible to run a fully automated self-storage facility even before the widespread adoption of AI. Obviously there's a lot of applications for AI in marketing, but what are new workflows that now can be automated with the use of AI, on the operational side of self-storage?

Miles Davison: The first things that people have tackled with AI were communication with customers, right?

Storeganise directly has its own AI booking assistant, which just sits on top of Storeganise and helps automate, or take care of, a lot of those initial customer inquiries and push customers through the funnel. For example: Customers can just upload a photo of what they need to store, and then the AI bot will advise the right unit size. We also integrate with a variety of other chatbots or voice agents. So things like Lumio, Unity AI, or Patchwork Labs.

Beyond that kind of customer engagement piece, we released our AI connector, which is essentially an MCP on top of Storeganise, allowing operators to dive into their data through their preferred platforms like Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT. This is super powerful because it allows companies to ask whatever question about their data and get instant responses that can then be tied in with public market data or other integrations that they might have.

So, they can bring in accounting information, Google Analytics data, and Storeganise data through AI, be able to dive into that really quickly, and generate custom dashboards.

Things that in the past needed a lot more time and effort and proper data scientists to sit down, pull the data out of the API, and then put it into data repositories and work through there can now be done pretty instantaneously without having to have any outside resources like that.

I think that's really important because everybody cares about the data and really wants to know it. But the biggest challenge is being able to deliver it in the way that each business wants it, right? And every company wants certain data points differently. They know their market the best. They know their local and regional market requirements. So they can bring in that context through the agent that they're using and then pull the data and be able to drive exactly what they want.

So that's one of the reasons why we made the strategic decision not to build AI reporting directly in our product, but rather to allow operators to connect to their own preferred platform, because then they can choose the models they want to work with, and they can set the standards of how they want that to run.

Operationally, Services like Patchwork Labs have a lot beyond the voice agent, which help operators with facility management. For example, if they have a call come in and somebody reports that, you know, the light bulbs are blown in the corridor, the agent will pick that up, automatically create tasks, and assign them to facilities management people.

I think operationally, those kinds of tools are really important. So is how they plug into the PMS as well. So we've got a direct integration with them.

Unwired Logic: Who do you think will be the next hotspot markets for self-storage that people should keep in mind or should have a closer look at, or where you as a company are considering to expand next?

Miles Davison: So we're definitely seeing a lot of continued growth within the European market. The U.S. market as a whole has slowed down in terms of new builds and supply, as there's been a bit of an oversupply over the last few years since COVID. Europe is still expanding, and more countries are coming on the map: Eastern Europe, as well as Spain, Italy, and Portugal, are growing quite a lot.

Australia is still going from strength to strength as far as we can see. Asia has a slightly smaller base, but from that is expanding. Thailand's had quite a lot of growth. China has, too, although it's probably less documented, or run under a slightly different kind of body than other operators would be under, in terms of associations. And Latin America as well. We're having conversations with companies in pretty much every country.

Whether the market itself is growing there, there's definitely a lot of companies looking at how they want to structure themselves for the next five to 10 years from a technology perspective and from a customer engagement perspective. Obviously, the PMS provider is one of the core platforms that come in there.

But also in terms of looking at their entire stack, partnerships with companies like Unwired Logic are important because they can give pretty unbiased views to companies on what they should consider and what questions they need to be asking themselves before they make changes on their tech stack.