I'm here with David Chait, CEO and founder of Travefy, which builds digital solutions for group travel. And these are embedded components that other travel sites will use to enhance their travel experiences. Thanks for joining us, David. >> Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity. >> Can you talk a little bit about how you initially became interested in the problem of group travel? And how you started to learn about it? >> Absolutely, so the real genesis of travefy came from experiences within my own life. The phrase necessity is the mother of all inventions really exists for a reason. And so for me it goes back to my time in business school which was also around the time lots of my friends were getting engaged and married. And, I was having frustrations in terms of group travel in my own life. Getting people organized for bachelor parties, destination weddings, and other things. And the specific genesis of Travefy actually goes to one particular bachelor party that I was a part of organizing. That really exhibited all of those coordination headaches that one faces when planning group travel. The endless threads of emails, the frustrating lack of transparency. The awkwardness collecting money from others. And on this particular bachelor party, I literally have a screenshot of it in some of our early presentation decks. We were 78 emails into this thread figuring out where we were going to go and what we were going to do. And one guy said, I got it and he booked a hotel room in Atlantic City and it didn't even work for the guy that was getting married. Fast forward to the end of that bachelor party, and I still have friends who still owe me money for the weekend, and it was a problem. And so, I started looking around to say, are there solutions that solve these group travel planning headaches. Very quickly, I found that there were lots of single dimension tools that solve problems, you could go to an online travel agency like Expedia or Priceline and book a hotel. You could track expenses in Excel. Settle some payment with PayPal or Venmo. Or group chat on group meet. But there wasn't really a comprehensive tool. And frankly, if you're solving a coordination problem, you need a comprehensive tool to actually get to that. And from there the idea for Travefy was born, from that consumer pain point I felt. From there we did lots of research to discover that there was actually was a use case and a market and actually a business market for distributing the product. That went from an idea to product, to ultimately a business. >> And you decided to run your own travel brand, retail brand online, even though it wasn't your intention to run a travel site. Can you talk a little bit about that decision and observations and learnings you were able to accrue from that. >> Yeah, so very early on during our research phase as we were building up really the business case for Travify and itinerary and collaboration tools, we very quickly realized that our preferred distribution model and frankly what we found to be the most sustainable distribution model was by licensing this software to travel businesses. Ranging from your small independent agencies and advisors all the way up to your mega vacation rental companies and online travel agencies, think Expedia and Priceline. But to get there, we very, very quickly realized in discussions during that customer discovery phase that people don't want to buy your license or product until they've seen what it can do. So they wanted to see the product. They want to see data around how do those end customers actually engage with it. What are their conversion rates? So even knowing that we were going to be a business to business to consumer product distributed, we had to release our products direct to consumers to actually accrue that data. And so for the first year of Travefy's life, even though we were going to be in that business and business space, we pushed the consumer product out there. Now, if we were going to be a pure consumer brand, we would have raised and spent ginormous sums on advertising. Very expensive to build a consumer brand. Well, we spent a small budget that allowed us to get statistically significant sample of hundreds of thousands of active users. Where they went through the product leverage of flows, and we were able to really learn all of those things, accrue that data. And ultimately move into the business to business space. In fact, we still run our consumer site, even though it's not our core focus for those same reasons of accruing that data. Now, on looking back on that, there were two really vital things we got out of that, and it's why again, to this date, we still push that way. Number one, which is our rationale for doing it, is that it helped us close sales. Today, Travefy powers hundreds of travel businesses, ranging from those small independent agencies, advisors, and tour operators. All the way up to some of those larger travel businesses. Like Home Away on the vacation rental side. Travel and Transport which is the fifth largest travel management company. Which leverage aspects of our tools in their business. So obviously that was a core component. But the second one is also why I don't think we'd be here today, at least in the state we are today without that, is it helped us build a great product. We were able to very quickly get large number of users onto our tools. Where we were able to identify and understand what was great, and more importantly what was not. We were able to innovate, we were able to see where were the bottlenecks, where were the issues, where were the problems. And had we gone purely to a business to business distribution model first. A, those sales might not have been as quick because there wasn't that back up data. But two, I don't think the product would be nearly as good as it is today because as those sales on the business to business side would have slowly crept up, we wouldn't have had those large volumes of users really equipped us to constantly improve and so for us it was really important. It was part of that lean mentality of build iterate, build iterate. It allowed us to do that. >> Those are some great tips on doing lean and practice from David. Thanks David. >> Thank you so much.
