Podcast Guest: Johan Lundin, Co-Founder & CEO, Agendo
Host: Laura Heuer, Sensorberg (Head of Sales & Marketing)
Topic: Mixed-Use Buildings — Booking, Access, and the Fully Automated Operator
Episode Overview
In this episode of The Smart Storage Talk, Laura Heuer sits down with Johan Lundin, co-founder and CEO of Agendo — a Stockholm-based business operating system for shared spaces.
Johan started Agendo in 2020 with a straightforward idea: operators of shared spaces — whether conference rooms, self-storage units, or coworking desks — shouldn’t have to do any admin. A customer makes a booking, pays, and gets access. The operator monitors. The system handles everything in between.
Agendo recently integrated with Sensorberg One Access, making that fully automated flow a reality: a reservation activates access, and the end of a booking revokes it — no manual step required.
Together, Laura and Johan cover:
- Why mixed-use buildings are an underexplored revenue opportunity — and how to unlock them without adding staff
- What holds operators back from going fully unmanned, and what the data actually shows
- Why operators should design for a digital flow before building their business model — not the other way around
- How digital systems reveal customer behaviour that analogue operations never could
- Silver Plate: a new initiative to give first-time operators a single contact, single invoice, and single point of accountability across all suppliers
This episode is essential for self-storage operators, property investors, and anyone planning or modernising a mixed-use facility.
About Agendo
Agendo is a booking and operations platform for shared spaces, founded in Stockholm in 2020. It runs as a white-label system embedded in the operator’s own website — customers never see the Agendo brand. From there it handles reservations, recurring payments, notice periods, and digital access handover. Agendo serves conference rooms, self-storage, coworking, student accommodation, and niche shared spaces like golf simulators. The platform is now expanding into Europe.
What Is Agendo — and Why Should Self-Storage Operators Care?
The short answer, in Johan’s words: “You want to see as little of us as possible.”
Agendo is deliberately invisible. Customers book on the operator’s website, pay through the operator’s payment flow, and receive access through their phone. Agendo runs the logic behind all of it — and connects directly to Sensorberg One Access to handle the physical door.
Johan: “What our ideal flow is — it’s a completely automated flow for a customer. To make the reservation, do the payment, and get access. And you as the owner or operator, you are not supposed to do anything really, more than monitor and make sure that the facilities are in order. The administrative stuff should work itself out.”
For self-storage specifically, the model maps cleanly. A tenant books a unit, pays an initial fee, and is billed automatically every month until they or the operator ends the subscription. Access is live from the moment the booking starts. When the contract ends, access stops.
Why Mixed-Use Is a Bigger Opportunity Than Most Operators Realise
Self-storage doesn’t exist in isolation. Many operators also have coworking desks, meeting rooms, lorry rentals, or awkward floor space they haven’t figured out what to do with. Johan’s argument is that digital infrastructure — booking plus access control — is what turns that dead space into revenue.
He’s seen it across Agendo’s customer base:
Johan: “You have a company that has several self-storages, but they also have a coworking, and they also rent out offices. Usually, the self-storage is part of a wider context. We can handle other side businesses as well. And the value of having everything in one system is apparent — because you don’t have to waste time copying and pasting information between different systems.”
The most striking example he gives is conference rooms. In many office buildings, beautifully appointed rooms sit empty for most of the day — used for two internal meetings, costing the organisation €1,000 a month or more. The same room, opened to external bookings at a few hundred euros an hour, could generate double that. The technology to do it already exists. What’s missing is the willingness to open the building up.
Johan: “That space probably costs €1,000 a month. For nothing, you could rent it out and make €2,000 if you’re open to the idea.”
The barrier is usually not technical. It’s that operators assume opening a space to external bookings means more admin, more keys, more coordination. With the Agendo–Sensorberg integration, it means none of those things. The booking controls the access. The system manages itself.
The Operator Experience: From “Email Us to Check Availability” to Instant Move-In
Johan’s interest in self-storage isn’t just professional. He recently tried to rent a unit himself while moving flat — and ran straight into everything that’s wrong with how many facilities still operate.
Johan: “I go to the website and you have to fill out an email form to see if there’s anything available. And then I have to wait for them to come back to me. Two days have gone by and I could have already been moving my stuff.”
This is the revenue that leaks every day from facilities that haven’t made the digital transition. A potential tenant who needs storage now — because of a move, a renovation, a life event — doesn’t have two days. They find a facility that lets them book in five minutes, and the one with the email form loses the deal permanently.
Laura connects it directly to what Sensorberg hears from operators:
Laura: “We have less space at home to store our stuff. Our lives are more flexible. People move around. Demand is structural — and it’s immediate.”
Design for Digital First. Then Build Your Business Model.
One of the most practical exchanges in the episode comes when Laura asks what operators underestimate when they try to go digital. Johan’s answer is counterintuitive.
The problem isn’t the technology. It’s that operators design complex business models first — multiple membership tiers, different access rules, different pricing for each — and only then try to squeeze them into a digital booking flow. At that point, the complexity is already baked in and the system can’t handle it cleanly.
Johan: “Usually when people come up with their business models, they don’t think about how this is going to be handled digitally. It gets convoluted pretty quickly. If you think about it — put it in a digital flow first. What makes sense in a digital flow? How do you make your business rules easier?”
His advice for anyone starting out: keep it simple. One membership type. Clear pricing. Transparent terms. Customers understand it immediately, and the system can handle it without exceptions.
Johan: “Keep it simple. If you’re starting out, make it very clear — because it’s very clear for customers as well. That’s what transparent looks like.”
He’s not saying complexity is never warranted. But be open to the possibility that some of what felt like a necessary feature of the business model was actually just something that had never been questioned.
Dare to Go Fully Unmanned
The fear of running a facility with no staff on site is real. Laura hears it constantly from operators considering the move. Johan’s response is to point to five years of lived experience.
Johan: “Dare to go fully digital. Dare to not have it manned. I think that’s a big step for property people — to go hands off. It’s kind of scary. But we’ve been working with these situations for almost five years.”
Agendo runs several of its own unmanned spaces — including golf simulators — as a way of testing what they ask customers to trust. The results have been consistent.
Johan: “We have 2,500 customers in our internal businesses that are unmanned, paired with digital access, open late at night. Out of those — maybe 0.2% have not been able to follow the journey and require help. There are huge gains if you dare to just leave it unmanned.”
His explanation for why it works is memorable:
Johan: “People are surprisingly self-reliant when there’s nobody there. If there’s somebody there, they get kind of complacent — they just run to the nearest person. If they’re on their own, they spend another 10 seconds like, ‘okay, so, oh, I’m supposed to go there.’ And they figure it out.”
Laura adds the practical complement: clear signage, a simple digital flow, and a contact channel for edge cases is all the backup you need. You don’t need someone on site.
Digital Operations Unlock Customer Behaviour You’d Never See Otherwise
Laura raises a point that often gets overlooked in the digitisation conversation: data.
When every booking, access event, and cancellation flows through a digital system, operators can see things that were previously invisible — when customers prefer to access their units, which unit sizes are in highest demand at which times of year, how far in advance people book, what triggers a move-out.
Laura: “If you have everything smart and digital, you can try to understand your customers — because you can see everything. What are their preferred booking behaviours? With having everything smart, yes, it takes some investment from the start. But you can eventually understand your customer behaviour and scale from there.”
Johan’s recommendation to new customers is the same every time: before you change anything, do a customer journey yourself. Book through your own website, make a payment, check what the access experience looks and feels like. Then look at your data.
Johan: “When you make a change — you change a price, you change a description, you change an image — just go check out the customer journey. Look at it like the customer. Always ask: does this make sense? Does this not make sense?”
Silver Plate: One Contact, One Invoice, One Less Headache
The final part of the conversation addresses a pain point both Laura and Johan encounter constantly: new operators who know what they want to build, but have no idea how to coordinate the suppliers needed to build it. Booking system, access control, CCTV, installer, alarm, insurance compliance — all separate conversations, separate quotes, separate timelines.
Johan is pioneering an initiative — still in stealth — called Silver Plate. The concept: one counterparty who coordinates all the sub-suppliers, delivers the full solution, and bills it as a single monthly fee.
Johan: “The vision is to deliver it on a silver plate. The customer has one point of contact. You can call one person and say, ‘I don’t understand this quote. Does this system work with that system? Is it compliant with my insurance?’ One answer. That’s it.”
The appeal is as much practical as it is commercial. Today, coordinating multiple suppliers can add weeks or months to a project before a booking platform like Agendo even goes live. Silver Plate collapses that timeline.
Johan: “You have a self-storage, you need this, this, this, and that, and you want to be online August 1st. It’s going to cost you this much per month. First invoice: August 15th. You’re good to go. That’s all you need to know.”
Silver Plate is not part of Agendo and will operate as a standalone initiative. Johan sees it as a way to make the entire ecosystem — including Agendo — easier to adopt.
Key Takeaways
- The Agendo–Sensorberg integration creates a fully automated move-in flow: booking triggers access, booking end revokes it — no manual step required
- Mixed-use buildings are an underused revenue opportunity; the same digital infrastructure that runs self-storage can open conference rooms, coworking desks, and unused floor space to external bookings
- Design your business model for a digital flow first — complexity that can’t be expressed cleanly in a booking system is a signal to simplify, not to find a workaround
- The fear of going fully unmanned is understandable but not justified by the data: 99.8% of customers in unmanned spaces self-serve without issue
- Digital operations reveal customer behaviour that analogue facilities never could — use it to adapt your model and scale with confidence
- First-time operators shouldn’t have to coordinate five suppliers alone; initiatives like Silver Plate point toward a future where the full digital stack is delivered as a single, managed service
The technology to run a facility with zero manual admin already exists. The question is whether operators dare to use it.
