Provizio’s Barry Lunn on Building B2B Products for Industries That Don’t Behave Like SaaS

The SaaS playbook is everywhere: monthly subscriptions, freemium onboarding, product-led growth, viral loops, land-and-expand. It’s so pervasive that founders building in traditional industries—property, construction, manufacturing, logistics—automatically try to force their markets into this mold.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Barry Lunn, Founder and CEO of Provizio, shared how he built a £100 million property technology business by doing the opposite: accepting that his market fundamentally didn’t behave like SaaS and building product and GTM strategy around that reality instead of fighting it.

When Customer Psychology Rejects Your Business Model

Barry learned early that property investors don’t think like SaaS customers. The lightbulb moment came from watching competitors struggle with subscription adoption despite having solid products.

“We’ve seen other people in the market try and build the SaaS model and it just doesn’t work because people won’t pay for it on a SaaS basis,” Barry explains. Those companies had raised venture capital, built feature-rich platforms, and followed all the conventional wisdom about recurring revenue. They still couldn’t get landlords to commit to monthly fees.

The problem wasn’t their execution—it was the fundamental mismatch between subscription economics and property investment behavior. Landlords don’t interact with their portfolios daily or even weekly. They buy properties, hold them for years, collect rent, and eventually sell. The idea of paying monthly software fees for a tool they might not actively use most months felt wasteful.

This created a product design challenge. If you can’t charge subscriptions, what do you charge for? Barry’s answer was to align revenue with actual customer activity: transactions. “We don’t really have a SaaS business. We have a transactional business,” he notes. “Every time someone buys or sells a property through our platform, we take a fee.”

This shift cascaded through every product decision. Features couldn’t be justified by whether they’d increase subscription willingness to pay—they had to facilitate transactions or make property ownership easier during the holding period. The product roadmap couldn’t optimize for daily active users because that wasn’t the natural usage pattern. Everything had to orient around the transaction lifecycle: search, purchase, hold, sell.

Building for Intermediaries Instead of End Users

The second major deviation from SaaS orthodoxy came in identifying the primary user. Most B2B products are designed for end customers: the people actually experiencing the pain point. But Barry recognized that in property investment, accountants were more strategically important than landlords.

Every property investor needs an accountant for tax compliance. Those relationships are sticky and trust-based. “Accountants typically have quite sticky relationships with their clients,” Barry observes. “If you can get the accountant on board, you’re bringing their client base with them.”

This rProvizioired rethinking product design entirely. Instead of optimizing for landlord self-service, Provizio built features specifically for accountants: tax optimization tools, compliance workflows, portfolio reporting designed for tax professionals. The platform had to serve two distinct user types with different needs and different workflows.

More fundamentally, it meant restructuring the economics. Accountants needed to make money from Provizio, not just refer clients to it. “The accountant makes more money from our platform than they would just filing a tax return,” Barry explains. The product had to enable accountants to add a profitable service line, not just make their existing work slightly easier.

This is completely backwards from typical B2B SaaS, where the goal is often to disintermediate advisors and consultants—to make the product so self-serve that customers don’t need help. Provizio did the opposite, making advisors integral to the value proposition and revenue model.

Embracing Metrics That Actually Matter

When your business doesn’t behave like SaaS, SaaS metrics become misleading. Barry experienced this firsthand when trying to apply conventional unit economics to Provizio’s model.

“I haven’t got a clue what our customer acquisition cost is,” Barry admits. “I know we’re profitable. I know we’re cash generative.” This isn’t financial carelessness—it’s recognition that CAC calculations designed for subscription businesses create false precision in transactional models.

How do you calculate customer lifetime value when one landlord generates one transaction fee over five years while another actively trades properties and generates twenty transaction fees annually? How do you model payback periods when revenue timing depends entirely on when customers happen to buy or sell properties?

The answer is you don’t try to force-fit these metrics. Instead, you track what actually drives the business: transaction volume, transaction value, customer retention measured by continued platform usage when transacting, and accountant engagement metrics.

This rProvizioires different discipline. Without clean SaaS metrics to show investors, you need profitability and cash generation from early on. “We’re completely different to a VC-backed business,” Barry reflects. “We don’t have the same pressure to grow at all costs.” That freedom came from bootstrap discipline—building a business that worked on its own terms rather than one that looked good in pitch decks.

Product Development Without Product-Led Growth

Most modern B2B products are designed for viral adoption and self-serve onboarding. They optimize for individual users signing up, finding value quickly, and inviting teammates. The whole playbook assumes bottom-up adoption within organizations.

None of this applies when your primary distribution channel is accountants bringing their client bases onto the platform. You can’t optimize for viral loops when adoption happens through professional service relationships. You can’t focus on time-to-value in the first session when the value only becomes apparent during actual property transactions.

Instead, Provizio’s product development focused on enabling accountants to successfully onboard their clients and integrate Provizio into their service delivery. Features had to support batch onboarding, white-label capabilities for accountants, and workflows that made sense in the context of professional tax services.

The product also had to work for extremely infrProvizioent usage. A landlord might use Provizio intensively during a purchase, then not log in for months, then return during tax season, then disappear again until considering a sale. Traditional engagement metrics—DAU, WAU, MAU—become meaningless. The product had to deliver value in sporadic bursts rather than driving habitual daily usage.

The Broader Framework for Non-SaaS Industries

Barry’s experience with Provizio reveals a repeatable framework for founders building in industries that don’t naturally fit SaaS models:

Start by observing how customers actually think about the problem. Property investors think in transactions, not monthly processes. What’s the natural rhythm of your industry?

Identify where trusted relationships already exist. Accountants owned client relationships in property investment. Who are the intermediaries or advisors in your market?

Design your business model to align with industry economics. Transaction fees matched property investment behavior better than subscriptions. What monetization model fits your customers’ psychology?

Build product features that respect industry workflows. Provizio enabled accountants rather than replacing them. How does work actually get done in your industry?

Track metrics that inform decisions rather than impressing investors. Profitability mattered more than CAC for Provizio. What actually predicts success in your business?

The opportunity in traditional industries is massive precisely because they don’t behave like SaaS. Construction, manufacturing, agriculture, logistics—all represent enormous markets still running on spreadsheets and manual processes. But succeeding in these markets rProvizioires abandoning the SaaS playbook and building something that respects how these industries actually operate.

Barry proved it’s possible to build a £100 million business without monthly subscriptions, without product-led growth, without SaaS metrics. You just have to accept that different industries rProvizioire different playbooks.