STARTUP STAGE - ACT II: Jubel reveals its recent challenges and success with hiring

In this past year, what is the one operational initiative you wish your brand could have handled differently? 

An initiative we could have moved forward with and made public sooner, in conjunction with the launch of our new platform, is a meaningful focus on sustainability.

We are developing a new feature that uses our destination’s sustainability data to make experiential travel a force for good.

The problem we are addressing is the lack of information and “greenwashing” that makes travelers unknowingly visit destinations with detrimental environmental practices - such as Tulum, where uncontrolled overtourism is destroying its nature (deforestation for garbage dumps and human waste polluting oceans).

Jubel’s reliable information about specific destinations’ sustainability practices allows users to easily get matched to places actively protecting our last natural regions. This ensures tourism dollars reach the locals actively working to protect them.

Are there any new addressable markets that you are targeting? (Other than the markets you mentioned last year). 

We are actively pursuing the European market. Europe has historically been a strong travel ecosystem and has sourced many of the technological advances we benefit from today. 

Since being invited to South Summit in Madrid in October and winning best “Travel and Tourism” startup as well as “Best Team” out of 3,800 startups, we’ve built valuable investor and corporate relationships that will help us gain headway in the European market. 

Sustainable travel is currently also a new market we are addressing. 

How has the founding team evolved in the past year? 

Hiring and management was a big challenge this year; we had to manage tough workloads and alignment of goals between team members. 

Thanks to this, we’ve individually become better leaders and better communicators together as co-founders [Juan Pablo Toscano is Jubel's other co-founder].

We progressed significantly in our fundraising know-how and widened our network, we closed deals with angels and a venture capitalist and formed meaningful relationships with advisors that led to new opportunities. 

We also gained a lot of marketing and product management experience. This happened thanks to hands-on implementation through a joint accelerator program with Facebook and an accelerator program hosted by MassChallenge.

What has been the most unexpected challenge in the past year?

Training new advisors to sell complete travel experiences is not easy, and we experienced some growing pains with increased demand that we did not expect.

Ultimately, we struggled with making the decision to hire a sales manager to help us grow the sales team.

What feedback about your product have you received from customers in the past year?

Customers are thrilled with the level of personalization we offer, and the hassle-free travel experience they have.

We’ve received great feedback from them over recent months on our new platform. It has led to many exciting upcoming changes - with features coming out soon such as an improved tutorial flow on how to use our planner. 

This includes the flexible, fully dynamic editing of itineraries so that users can personalize trips from the get-go themselves! 

How many times in the past year have you pitched to investors, and what feedback have you received from them?

We are constantly pitching not only to investors but to prospective employees, partners and clients.

We’ve connected with some very successful players in the VC space who have invested in (unicorn) high-growth travel companies, and the feedback has been positive - relaying that the opportunity to create something innovative and hyper-personalized in the travel planning space is ripe, and we are neither too early nor too late.

We received funding, and from those that have not committed yet - they are keen to see progress with our new product.

What is your biggest risk heading into the next year? 

A global recession and the coronavirus gaining ground significantly impacting people’s ability to travel; however, as we are budget agnostic and personalize to any traveler’s budget, we hedge well against a global recession compared to, for example, travel advisors that are mainly focused on high-budget clients.

If you could go back in time one year ago, what management issue would you warn yourself about? 

Remote hiring was tough, and we faced many challenges - but now we have learned to better interview, set expectations and manage working relationships.

For example, we created a more rigorous and holistic interview process that led to successfully hiring a new well-performing remote team member. 

Also, constant feedback and bottom-up reviews of operational challenges to ensure quick learning has been a key lesson over the last year that I would have liked to bring to our attention about a year ago.