Last Spring, RoomVa was a mere idea, sketched out in a Powerpoint presentation, aimed at connecting locals to small Latin American hotels (“telos”, “hostales”, “moteles” depending on the country) through an online directory and booking system. Five months later, RoomVa has amassed the most comprehensive hotel database in Lima, Peru, has a network of 16,000 Facebook fans, has 1,000 unique visitors per day and growing, and as of last week, is facilitating online hotel reservations. Why is our Latin American startup relevant to you? Because it was Built-in-Chicago-and-in-Peru!
I am a second year at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and until 2012 spent my entire life in Lima, Peru. Prior to Booth, I was a consultant with McKinsey&Co but unlike most US-based consultants, I was living with my parents. In fact, most young adults in Latin America live with their parents until marriage. As a result of this cultural setup, there is a strong demand for “telos”, hotels by the night for locals. In fact, over 75% of all hotels in Peru are telos. However, there is a significant lack of transparency in the market as the hotels have limited online presence let alone a reservation system, which makes the “spur of the moment” bookings nearly impossible. Thus, the idea for RoomVa was born.
By last spring, I had validated the magnitude of the problem, but did not have the local Chicago relationships to get started on my new venture. Enter: Dashfire Launch, a startup competition that would provide one startup from Booth or Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management business modeling, design, development, and access to branding, legal and digital marketing firms for ten weeks at 1871. Even though I had significant consulting experience, my knowledge of startup technology, branding and marketing was limited so I applied. Dashfire Launch would allow me to leverage the Chicago startup ecosystem (one of the reasons I came to Booth from Peru) and work with startup experts. After an arduous application and interview process that challenged our business model, the RoomVa team won the competition. Together with Kelsey and Rick from Dashfire, we set out to convert RoomVa from a Powerpoint into a business. And with the help of Dashfire’s advisors and strategic partners, we succeeded.
What I Learned from Dashfire Launch
Brand Matters. Working very closely with Jeff, Joe, and John from Listen, we put ourselves in the shoes of our Latin American customers and built a brand personality that would appeal to them. We are now keenly aware that “brand” is much more than logo and a tagline. Defining and adhering to your brand purpose is critical for any company when making development, strategic, or financial decisions. And at RoomVa, we make sure that our customers never lose a beat.
Build An Audience Before You Launch. Kelsey and Rick always said that the loneliest feeling is launching a website that receives no traffic. We worked with Kate Hamilton and Mana Ionescu of Lightspan Digital to devise a digital strategy that would build on our demand. We learned quickly that there is more to Facebook than just “likes” and cute photos of kittens! And by understanding our core audience and their needs, we limited the development roadmap to features that mattered most to them.
Startups Have No Boundaries. The world is becoming more global and Chicago is a great place to build an international business. Despite our team being located all over the world (Chicago, Peru, Croatia, India), our team still felt cohesive (even our rock star developers in India and Croatia went out of their way to learn and communicate in Spanish!). Katten Law advised us on financing and the merits/considerations of setting up a company abroad and Offside in New York helped us understand marketing analytics. And of course, working out of 1871 allowed us to connect to not only Dashfire’s network but some of Chicago’s most influential startup professionals including Paul Spiller of Belly, Deon Bradley of Bradley Consulting, Todd Wyder of Pathfinder, Jim Spinello of Birdsong Ventures, Coco Meers of PrettyQuick and Jeremy Klein of TableSAVVY, among other people, who were all essential in forming RoomVa.
Our time building and growing RoomVa in Chicago has not only been an amazing professional learning experience but also a personal one. We have built personal relationships and friendships with our partners, which is a true testament to the Chicago startup culture. And while the journey has just begun and our core business lies 3,500 miles south in Latin America, we will always have Chicago roots. In entrepreneurship, there are no barriers of culture, language, or geography. We are witnesses of the fantastic entrepreneurial movement in Chicago and proud members of it. Thank you to our partners –Dashfire, FarShore, Listen, Lightspan, Katten, Offside, and 1871 – who, instead of asking “why?”, kept asking “why not?” and that is the magic of entrepreneurship!
(** This post had the collaboration of Hendrik Chásse and Mauricio Paiva)
