I'm here with David Chait, CEO and founder of Travefy, which builds digital solutions for group travel. David, thanks again for joining us. >> Thank you so much, appreciate the chance. >> David, you talked about that the story of Travefy, thank you. And can you talk a little bit about what it's like day-to-day to actually do this management of the venture, using data and using observations about customers? >> Absolutely, so, per our previous discussion. So much of what we do at Travefy is driven by a lean-mentality thesis. Where everything we do is about pushing product quickly, learning from that and iterating, and from that, really underlying that, is data itself. Data is really our lifeblood, and it is a real decision-maker for us. Now at different stages of the development and lifecycle of Travefy, the form of that data can change. Very, very early on, it was pretty qualitative, frankly, based off of customer interviews, focus groups and other things to understand those underlying problems. As we've grown and developed, it's been much, much more about the actual underlying data of how individuals, customers and partners are using our platform among other areas. And to make sure that we really embody and live that data aspect, it's important for us that we make that a part of our daily rituals, and the way we think about everything. So the way we structure that at Travefy is beyond our daily check-ins and stand-ups we have morning for the team, we have a standing Monday morning meeting, which everyone from the team, whether you're on the product side of the house or the sales marketing side of the house, comes to. And we have rotating topics every Monday where an individual owner of data presents that data and we have a group discussion about that, both interpreting it, but also what are the implications that we should take from that? So that could be on financial data. How's it going? What are sales like? That could be on sales and marketing data. What are our different channels of ways we acquire customers, be that actual outreach in sales on a business development standpoint, ads, and other things? What do those look like? Or on the product side, what are some really great insights we can glean? If someone adds three things to an itinerary, they're X percent more likely to purchase a package or a hotel, or whatever that might be. And what should we take from that? How can we drive that behavior? So, we really make sure that we're constantly having these discussions. And being thoughtful that that data is the underlying rationale and reason for really any large scale decisions we make. >> And so, can you talk about the meetings that you have, is this something that you do every week, and who comes, and how does the data get shared? >> Yeah, so these meetings are every week. The way we structure ourselves is every Monday, it's a full team meeting that everyone's there and different individuals are owners of different topics. So, I personally own our over-arcing financial metrics. What's the health of the company in terms of our cash positions, finances, sales, etc. There's another person on our team who owns the sales and marketing funnels there, everything from traditional ads to your more rote sales development representative, sales executive types of numbers. There's another person on our team who owns the product funnel. What are those behaviors, what are those lessons, what can we take from it from an improvement standpoint? And these happen all the time. So while we also have your more traditional quarterly planning offsites and annual meetings of our team for more broad-based decision making and focus, those are not the points where people are presented with data for the first time and think about it. It's a much more regular thing so that when we really do have those, step back and let's talk broad vision. What is Travefy 2020? Or what not. Those are able to be much more thoughtful because we are using our data on a daily basis. >> And if you were to look back at where you are now and if there's anything you would do differently, what would that be? >> Well, hindsight's 20/20 so, in a good way, there's lots of different things we would do differently. And if we only knew now what we only knew then. But there are some really core things that I would take away that I think both for Travefy, but also for any business are really transferable lessons. Number one would be to just go for it. A line that we try to toe is that balance between on the one hand as lean as possible. Build something as quickly as you can, ship it. Learn from it, build lessons that way versus I think an ivory tower approach on build it till it's perfect, till it's complete, and then push it out there. And I think trying to find that right balance where you're not afraid of pushing new product out there. You're not afraid of learning lessons from testing things. Go for it. Now, be smart about it. Any time we test and push stuff out there, which we're always lean in our approach, you try to mitigate that risk. So, you say if building something is going to take this amount of time. What is that smallest piece that gets us an MVP maybe to here where we can actually push it out and learn from it. You're kind of buying an option where you're saying I'm pushing it out. I'm learning about it and if I see the right things, the right data, we're going to double down in terms of that investment. And if not, well that's actually a smart thing and that's great, and we now know to pull back. And so that is something that I would say for anyone if you're thinking about something, just jump in and test it. And there's times where I think we've done a great job of that. And there's times frankly where I think we've sat on our hands a little too long or pushed it a little too far before building that test. I think some of the other lessons that we've gleaned from our experiences which sort of go with that, number one would be, and this is actually one of our core team values is, celebrate success but embrace failure. Failure is not a negative thing. It's not a dirty word. Failing is great because failing lets you know paths to not go down. And so with that, and similar to what we were just discussing, if you can smartly fail and mitigate risks into bite-size chunks and tests, you're being as lean as possible. You're learning as much as possible, and those micro failures actually put you on the right path. And so that's very, very important for us. >> I like that idea of a micro failure, when we say failure we just mean, we in a sense, it's not a failure at all. Right, because if you're using a disciplined approach, you have a feature that was a plausible thing to try and it didn't pass the test then it's just progress, right? >> Absolutely, and so that's the reason we have it as one of our core values is the way we talk about that at Travefy. We think that, it's exactly that, it's an unemotional thing. If my job is to test ten things and all ten of them don't work, that doesn't mean David did a poor job this week. David succeeded by saying, guys, let's not do these ten things. Now let's find ten other things to test. >> Those are some great tips on running a lean team from David Chait. Thanks David again for joining us. >> Thank you so much.
