Who the Hell is Driving This Thing, Part II
Editor’s note: Almost exactly two years ago (March 30, 2015), Pana’s CEO, Devon, wrote a post about a tumultuous pivot from a social network to a travel app. Today, we’re at a similar (albeit less dramatic) crossroads. Brandon, our first sales hire, decided to take a crack at Part II of our startup journey.
When friends and family ask me, “What does Pana do?” I usually talk about our apps, Pana Concierge and its complementary counterpart, Pana Free, and how they’re like having your own personal travel assistant.
It’s the easiest way to describe what we’ve already built. Plus, it’s actionable: both Pana Concierge and Pana Free are available on iOS or online, so anyone can try them out firsthand.
I’ve realized, though, that only talking about our existing apps often leads to the perception that we’re just a consumer travel company.
Admittedly, that’s how our co-founders originally conceived of Pana, and much of the press since then has focused on Pana’s use of conversational commerce, bot-like functionality, mobile design to improve the traveler user experience.
However, if you ask our CEO, Devon, today what we’re aspiring towards, he’ll articulate a very different vision. He’d tell you we’re not really building a travel company at all.
Instead, we believe that travel, particularly business travel, is just a means to an end. Whether it’s inter-office collaboration, the big client meeting, onsite interviews for top candidates, or transformative quarterly retreats, travel helps grow businesses through in-person relationships.
In this light, Devon would tell you our mission is to make those outcomes happen more often — to grow people-first teams — and building delightfully simple travel products is our way of doing that.
What does this mean for us?
Devon will deep dive into the “people-first” part soon (full update from him next week!). The “teams” emphasis, though, has been a central shift to our strategy for over a year now. We’re committed and passionate about helping teams of all sizes—two person tech startups to Fortune 500 enterprises—use travel to grow their businesses.
With this lens, we’re starting to imagine new ways to approach the processes surrounding travel, like policies, budgeting, booking portals, and more.
On the face of it, this type of travel is way less “sexy” than piecing together a backpacking trip across Southeast Asia or finding the perfect island beach for a week-long getaway.
But, as we’ve come to appreciate, the “gap-to-delightful-products” in the business travel space is wide, meaning we could have a huge impact if we’re successful — and to us, that is sexy.
So, how did we evolve into this vision of a corporate travel company for the 21st century?
Here’s a peek into Pana’s evolution from my vantage point as our first salesperson — starting over a year ago, in February of 2016, when I heard of Pana for the first time…
1st Sales Hire
I discovered Pana one day after typing “60-second travel agent” on Google.
At the time, I was a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I’d already committed to Venture for America, a 2-year fellowship to work at startups in emerging cities.
As soon as I found Pana, it quickly rose to #1 on my list of dream startups to work at.
Between the way that the co-founders invested in one another and the team and their spirit of rapid iteration, Pana embodied everything about startups that I had idolized from afar in Paul Graham essays and classes through UNC’s entrepreneurship minor.
In my excitement, I reached out to Devon about an opening that I was unqualified for, “Head of Revenue” — writing what was, in hindsight, a ridiculously lengthy email (1309 words, 3 pages single-spaced). Here’s a short excerpt:
After stumbling upon Pana’s product, I began furiously researching your company itself and this is where everything — as cheeky as this may sound — felt crazy and oddly serendipitous: the company background, employee size, validation stage, and non-technical hiring needs of Pana fit every parameter that I was imagining for a “dream” first job out of college.
1. Post-product/MVP, yet otherwise as early stage as possible (ideally 5–20 employees)
2. Location that is not Silicon Valley, NYC, Chicago, Boston, or Washington D.C (b/c Venture for America will only accept placements in an emerging city)
3. (In a dream scenario) a company that has gone through either Y Combinator or Techstars
4. Non-technical hiring needs, particularly in sales and marketing or account management
The context of my previous job exploration and these four criteria made stumbling upon Pana that much more surreal.
Moreover, Pana helped me realize that although my first priority was a focus on the people and day-to-day tasks of the company itself, I do care about working for a company whose product and mission I fundamentally believe in. As someone who has studied abroad twice in college and traveled to 18+ countries, many of the most transformative periods of my life have happened abroad, and I do believe in your mission statement that travel is a force-multiplier for change.
Miraculously, Devon responded.
(Devon later shared with me that he assumed I was either brilliant or a crazy person, but it was probably worth a 20-minute Skype to find out one way or the other.)
Luckily, I ended up not being a crazy person — or maybe I was just crazy enough — and that first conversation with Devon spiraled into an onsite interview with the team in Denver and then a day out in Boulder to meet with advisors like Nicole Glaros and Sue Heilbronner. (Our co-founder Sam’s only advice: “You can’t bullsh*t them.”)
A couple weeks later, which happened to be the night after our graduation, I heard back from Devon. He extended an offer letter, and I was beyond ecstatic. It felt like the perfect cherry-on-top to an amazing four years at UNC.
Beyond how much Pana’s offer changed my own personal trajectory, making a full-time sales hire also solidified Pana’s B2B trajectory. After all, you don’t need a salesperson for a consumer travel app.
Moreover, by the time I was interviewing with Devon, the first version of Pana for Teams already existed…
Pana for Teams
Pana for Teams gave all employees access to Pana’s 24/7 concierge for travel bookings and support, while employers also received an admin dashboard in order to centralize travel itineraries, purchases, company-wide preferences, and flexible policies in one place.
While Pana’s individual concierge product had been growing steadily, especially after front-page coverage in the business section of the New York Times, the team saw that corporate travel had experienced less technological disruption over the past decade than consumer travel, and very little love in the user experience department.
As a result, when I started full-time in August (June and July were spent at Venture for America’s mandatory training camp), Devon had already been selling Pana for Teams for over half a year.
He passed on the reigns, and I spent the rest of 2016 helping startups and other high-growth companies adopt the platform. The sweet spot, we found, was organizations where office managers, executive assistants, or other admin had taken on the de facto role of internal travel agent and wanted to offload those tasks ASAP.
Pana Agent, Pana Web, and Pana Free
Meanwhile, our product and engineering teams went into “maker mode” for Fall of 2016.
We overhauled large parts of Pana’s agent platform, re-building our integration on top of the global distribution system (GDS) and creating new features to improve the efficiency and quality of our user experience.
We launched Pana for Web in the fall so that anyone could access Pana on any device. This had been our #1 feature request since Pana launched originally as an iOS app.
We then released Pana Free over the holidays, which was our spin on a free trip itinerary app. The launch not only brought exposure to Pana in the press and with thousands of new users, but also pushed our team to build out new capabilities, like email parsing, in record time.
End result: we now had a host of new technologies and products to play with for 2017. But things were starting to get pretty complicated…
Pana Business Pilot
Throughout the end of 2016, we also made improvements to the Pana for Teams platform — like re-designing the layout and adding custom expense fields to make life easy for accounting. (Special shout-out to our friends at Nav, Thoughtbot, and VSCO for continually helping us improve here!)
Ultimately, though, these were incremental changes. At the turn of the New Year, we decided to take a fresh look at Pana for Teams and see how we could expand our product beyond what was, essentially, a bundled offering of Pana Concierge for employees.
We identified two key areas for us to tackle: (1) to support do-it-yourself bookings (some people really preferred to book on their own favorite sites or apps themselves), and (2) address not just time-savings but also hard cost-savings in an explicit way.
This culminated into what we called the new “Pana Business Pilot.”
The premise was bold: allow employees to book literally anywhere they wanted to, whether from Google Flights or their favorite Marriott app, yet we would still capture all the data around these bookings in real-time.
We accomplished this through a combination of email parsing (i.e. seeing the flight, hotel, or other confirmations that came through via email), the transaction purchase history for travelers using an assigned virtual credit card, and other capture methods.
From there, we developed a series of reporting and analytics dashboards — a subcomponent of the Pana Business Pilot that we called “Pana Insights.”
The traditional approach to reporting dashboards in travel is an aggregate analysis, letting you know how much your travelers have spent with various airline and hotel vendors. That way, you can leverage high spend with certain vendors to get better negotiated rates.
With Pana Insights, we wanted to go one step further and also provide behavioral insights. Because travel is one of the largest corporate expenses (second only to salary in most companies), we wanted to help CFOs understand how and why their employees made various travel decisions.
For example, was there an alternative available that was cheaper than the option your salesperson chose? What were the compounding variables (like brand loyalty or length of flight) that influenced the salesperson’s decision? Would making this data transparent drive better decision-making?
We’re still bullish on Pana Insights and Pana Business Pilot as models for travel programs of the future, but we’re increasingly cognizant of the inherent complexities surrounding organization-wide travel. While there were inefficiencies across the board, tackling every broken process at once felt overwhelming.
It was like trying to boil the ocean.
Plus, things were getting pretty complicated for a 24-month-old startup. We had Pana Concierge, Pana Free, Pana Insights, Pana Pay (a virtual credit card solution… I skipped it to avoid this being too much of a novel), and already in the incubator were concepts for products such as Pana Preferred, Pana Policy, and Pana Search.
We had a focus problem, which is startup killer #1.
So we began to ask, “What is the one use case for travel within a company that we could become truly world-class at first?” (Rome wasn’t built in a day, but which building did they start with?)
Pana for Recruiters
“Think about all the times where someone travels but isn’t paying for it.”
Scott Gillespie, a friend of Pana and travel industry guru, shared that advice with Devon as an offhanded comment. Yet, the notion stuck with us.
Our MO generally was to focus on the road warriors within a company, like executives and salespeople, but Scott’s comment pushed us to consider more niche use cases like quarterly retreats, company-sponsored conferences, and… onsite interviews for out-of-town candidates.
From the get-go, our COO, Sam, was jazzed by candidate travel. He became the chief evangelist of re-purposing parts of Pana’s concierge in order to create a product specifically for recruiters.
He argued (convincingly) that candidate travel represented a unique moment where a company covers your travel yet won’t onboard you into their corporate travel system since you’re not an employee. As a result, recruiting teams were either: (a) acting as “travel agents”, handling all the back-and-forth (which felt like a huge waste of their time), or (b) asking candidates to float the cost of travel and get reimbursed weeks or months later (also a hassle, and not a great experience).
But a convincing argument alone wasn’t enough. We had to hear from real potential customers.
As it turns out, the more we spoke with recruiters and candidates — including those at top-tier management consulting firms, investment banks, and technology giants — we became even more confident in our hypotheses, learning that even companies with seemingly limitless resources weren’t always providing the best candidate travel experience.
Energized by these conversations, our product team quickly built out the first version of Pana for Recruiters.
They first created the ability to invite candidates to Pana as a guest account, coupled with a budget estimator for each trip — an incredibly powerful feature built upon a comprehensive search of all the hotel and flight options available within our global distribution system in real-time.
For additional capabilities, we’ve also focused on leveraging our VIP-level, 24/7 concierge in order to create a more personalized and high-touch experience for the candidate.
There’s much more to come with Pana for Recruiters as we specialize further and further on creating a world-class candidate experience. Already, though, this newest direction has the entire team more excited than ever before.
Amazingly, the companies we admire most — and would have normally considered dream clients one day far, far away — counterintuitively, have been some of our strongest early users. Maybe hyper-growth tech companies overlap with a high volume of candidate travel, maybe well-branded companies intuitively put a premium on candidate experience… we’re not sure of the exact correlation, but we’re certainly not complaining!
What’s next?
As Devon wrote in the original Who the Hell is Driving This Thing: “If you made it this far, you pretty much understand our company history as much as I do (perhaps even a little better).”
The same sentiment applies here, as we’re now on the brink of entering Q2 2017.
Moving forward, we’re dedicated to growing Pana for Recruiters in midsize and enterprise markets, and piloting new types of travel programs with young and growing companies.
As we reflect back, our story over the past year seems to be part of a more universal startup arc: that even after a big pivot (which, for Pana, was from a social recommendation app to a travel company in 2014), there’s still a ton of continual evolution towards achieving product-market fit.
And there will probably always be a next challenge. If we achieve product-market fit, how do we scale our growth? How do we scale up our team? Then, how do we build the second product that takes off? And the next? And avoid the near-death experiences along the way?
It’s a long, long road to build an enduring company, and we’re still in the trenches. Success isn’t preordained.
This isn’t a retrospective of how we made it.
There are seemingly a million moving pieces between our team, products, technology, and markets, and we’re grinding away day-in and day-out to, as Ben Horowitz put best, “build a business when there are no easy answers.”
While the long-term outcome for Pana is unknown, we can commit to how we go about the journey. In that vein, one principle that we want to embrace moving forward is to work in the open.
As a starting point, we’ll be sending out weekly updates to friends of Pana, sharing the latest and greatest of what we’re prototyping, throwing out contrarian ideas we’re debating, and overall bringing a new level of transparency both internally and externally around our direction.
If all works out, the ideal is that we never need to write “Who the Hell is Driving This Thing, Part III”; all of our heart and guts and work will already be laid to bare within the weekly updates.
We hope you’ll join us for the ride.
Thank you to our beloved mentors for getting us here. Nicole, Sue, John(s), Josh, Nir, Matt, Scott, Natty, Sean, Jason, Zach, and so many more, we couldn’t be doing this without you. Onward!
Want to make your team’s travel delightfully simple? Whether you want to deliver a world-class candidate travel experience or try out one of our travel programs internally, shoot me an email at brandon@pana.com.
Want more posts like this? Every Sunday, we send regular updates on the inner-workings of Pana. They range from our latest prototypes, updates on company progress, interesting conversations we’ve had, to productivity hacks from our team that might help others.
