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How Lula Turned System Integration Into a Distribution Strategy That Replaced Paid Marketing

Most B2B founders build integrations because customers ask for them. Bo Lais realized integrations could replace his entire customer acquisition engine.

In a recent episode of BUILDERS, Bo Lais, CEO and Founder of Lula, explained how his property maintenance platform abandoned paid marketing in favor of deep PMS integrations—and why that decision unlocked processing 1,000 work orders daily across a 9,000-contractor network.

The Usage Pattern That Revealed the Real Market

Lula launched in 2016 as a B2C app connecting homeowners with vetted contractors. Bo had personal motivation: renovating his first house exposed him to contractors who “didn’t finish the work, put deposits down, and never showed up on time.” With maintenance experience from working in his uncle’s painting company and a background in product and technology, he built what seemed like an obvious solution.

The product worked. Users liked it. But about a year in, Bo noticed something in the data: “The majority of our customers that were using it were actually landlords.”

This wasn’t just an interesting cohort—it was a signal that the actual pain point lived elsewhere. Landlords managing maintenance across multiple properties faced coordination complexity that homeowners didn’t. Bo pivoted to serve property managers, where he discovered maintenance consumed roughly 40% of operational time.

The Adoption Barrier That Became the Strategy

The pivot seemed straightforward. Property managers were already using the app. Lula just needed to tell more property managers about it and drive adoption.

The strategy failed immediately.

“We found out there was quite a bit of friction there because they need everything to live in their system of record, which is the PMS system,” Bo explains. “They don’t want swivel chair.”

Property managers weren’t being difficult—they were being rational. Their entire workflow lived in platforms like AppFolio, Buildium, Yardi, and Rent Manager. Adding another tool meant context switching, duplicate data entry, and broken workflows. No matter how good Lula’s standalone app was, it required behavior change that property managers wouldn’t make.

Bo faced a choice: convince the market to change, or change the product to fit the market’s existing behavior.

He chose the latter, and it fundamentally altered Lula’s go-to-market motion.

Instead of selling a standalone product, Lula built native integrations into every major PMS platform. “That was like one of the first of many dominoes to fall,” Bo says. “Okay, we need to integrate with the system of record they’re using.”

The integration solved the adoption problem, but it also delivered something property managers desperately needed: workflow visibility. “Prior to that they get a work order from the resident, they then assign it to a vendor, and then they cross their fingers and hope that it gets done. They have no visibility in what’s happening throughout that process. And we provide that.”

Now when a resident submits a maintenance request through the PMS, the property manager can activate Lula with a single click. Lula handles contractor dispatch, coordination, and real-time status updates—all surfaced directly in the PMS interface the property manager already monitors.

The integration didn’t just reduce friction. It became Lula’s primary distribution channel, replacing the paid marketing spend they’d burned competing against Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, and Thumbtack in the saturated homeowner market.

Partnership Depth Over Partnership Count

As the integration strategy gained traction, Bo made a decision that most founders struggle with: he rejected partnership proliferation in favor of partnership enablement.

“There’s a lot of opportunities for partnerships out there, but I think we really like to remain focused,” Bo explains. “You can’t be good at everything. With our partnerships, it’s not about stacking on another 10 partnerships, it’s about how do we go deeper and enable those partners to co-sell with us and talk about the value props that together we can provide.”

This meant investing in co-selling infrastructure rather than just technical integration. Lula equipped AppFolio’s sales team with tools, training, and incentives to actively recommend Lula during their own sales cycles. They developed joint value propositions showing how the combined solution delivered outcomes neither platform could achieve independently.

The result: Lula became embedded in AppFolio’s Performer workflow (previously called Smart Maintenance), where property managers handle maintenance intake and work orders. Rather than being listed in a marketplace alongside dozens of competitors, Lula sits inside the daily workflow as an activation option when property managers need coordination help or additional contractor capacity.

This depth-over-breadth strategy requires patience and discipline—but it creates distribution leverage that marketplace listings never deliver.

The 250-Door Threshold Where Coordination Breaks

Lula refined their ICP through operational experience, not market research. Their sweet spot: residential property managers in single-family homes managing 250 to several thousand doors.

The lower bound isn’t arbitrary. “Property management companies that get up north of 300 doors, they’re probably spending about 40% of their time managing and coordinating maintenance,” Bo explains. Below 250 doors, property managers can handle coordination manually. Above that threshold, the volume and complexity overwhelm manual processes.

But ICP clarity doesn’t automatically translate to ICP discipline. “It’s one thing when we understood who our ICP was, but then it’s a whole nother thing to adhere to that and get the sales team to adhere to that ICP,” Bo says. “And we’ve been able to do that.”

Sales teams naturally resist ICP constraints when quota pressure hits. Enforcement requires structural changes: compensation plans that reward ideal deals, approval processes that flag out-of-ICP opportunities, and CRM workflows that surface fit scoring during qualification.

The discipline pays off in conversion rates, retention, and product focus. Building for a specific segment beats building features for everyone.

How Operational Scale Creates Pricing Advantages Software Can’t Match

As Lula scaled to 9,000 contractors across 50 markets, Bo discovered something most SaaS founders miss: operational density creates competitive moats that pure software plays can’t replicate.

“We’re doing 30 HVAC replacements a day, which has allowed us to take that buying power and go to direct manufacturer to get materials and equipment at a very competitive cost, and then negotiate the labor with our pro network,” Bo explains.

This volume unlocked direct manufacturer relationships—bypassing distributors entirely. Lula offers contractors guaranteed volume (the lion’s share of those 30 daily HVAC jobs) in exchange for accepting flat-rate pricing. Contractors get predictable work flow. Lula gets cost predictability. Property managers get transparent pricing.

The flat-rate catalog now includes HVAC, water heaters, appliances, roofing, and garbage disposals, with expansion planned to 40-50 common services. Software competitors can facilitate connections between property managers and contractors, but they can’t negotiate manufacturer pricing or guarantee flat rates at scale.

The density advantage compounds. Processing 1,000 work orders daily generates training data that makes Lula’s AI work order intake more effective. They troubleshoot issues before dispatching contractors, reducing unnecessary truck rolls and improving one-trip resolution rates. Each additional market and contractor strengthens the network effect.

Lead With Outcomes, Bury the Technology

Despite leveraging AI extensively—work order intake, troubleshooting automation, internal efficiency agents—Bo learned that property managers don’t buy technology. They buy outcomes.

“They care about the outcomes,” Bo says. “If we’re able to move the needle on the outcomes and provide a better experience for residents by automating communication, automating the time to schedule, automating the time to get the resolution—it’s not the how, it’s the result.”

This framing discipline matters more in 2026 than ever. Every vendor claims AI capabilities. Property managers face AI fatigue. They tune out feature lists.

But they pay attention to metrics they’re measured on: resolution time, truck roll reduction, one-trip completion rates, resident satisfaction scores. Bo’s messaging focuses there: “It’s the outcomes, not necessarily just saying we use AI.”

The lesson extends beyond AI. Property managers don’t care about your impressive tech stack. They care whether you move their KPIs in the right direction.

The Criteria for Commercializing Internal Tools

Lula is launching Foresight, an AI work order management SaaS platform, in Q1 2026. The decision to productize their internal technology followed a specific pattern that other founders should note.

First, customer pull came from systematic feedback, not opportunistic requests. “We put together a customer advisory group a couple years ago, just started having conversations,” Bo explains. As Lula moved upstream to larger institutional operators, these companies consistently expressed interest in the technology approach. “They’re like, we would love to have a product out there similar where we could drive efficiency, still have access to your vendor network.”

But customer interest alone doesn’t justify product expansion. Bo’s team identified defensible advantages that software-only competitors couldn’t replicate: “Our competitors that are just doing software don’t have this network of contractors nationwide. They can’t offer that.”

Foresight launches with built-in moats: the contractor network for instant fulfillment, manufacturer relationships for flat-rate pricing, and learnings from 1,000 daily work orders that train better AI models. Without these operational advantages, Lula would just be building undifferentiated workflow software in a crowded market.

The framework: commercialize internal tools when you have both customer pull and structural advantages competitors can’t easily copy. One without the other leads to either products nobody wants or products where you can’t defend margin.

Staying Focused When Adjacent Markets Tempt

Bo’s vision remains deliberately narrow: “Make maintenance easy. If you were to cold call 20 property managers today and ask them what their biggest pain point is, I would be shocked if all 20 didn’t tell you it’s managing, coordinating maintenance.”

Property management offers adjacent opportunities—leasing, accounting, legal compliance. But Bo resists expansion: “It’s easy for us to think about getting into something else in the property management space besides maintenance, but maintenance deserves all of our attention because it is just one of the most complex parts of being a property manager.”

This focus discipline becomes harder as companies scale. Board members suggest expansion. Sales teams want more products to sell. But complexity in maintenance—vendor compliance, coordination overhead, cost control, resident satisfaction—justifies sustained focus.

The takeaway for B2B founders: integration strategy can be distribution strategy. Network density can create pricing power that pure software can’t match. And sometimes the right product expansion strategy is staying relentlessly focused on the problem complex enough to deserve all your attention.