Expert Interview: Hari Ganapathy, Co-founder of PickYourTrail

Are you planning to take an international vacation with many customisations in your itinerary? And, all of these at reasonable price? PickYourTrail, an online personalised vacation booking platform, addresses this need.

Hari Ganapathy, co-founder of PickYourTrail, talks about the challenges in holiday packages market, how they built the product to overcome these, variables to crack to address product scale, various growth hacks deployed that yielded results and many more.

In this app-first era, why PickYourTrail didn’t launch on app first? Will it have an app or PickYourTrail model doesn’t need an app?

Apps work beautifully for transactional tasks or casual browsing. For an involved exercise like vacation planning and booking, an app first approach would have meant that we over simplify the consumer journey.

When we decided to launch desktop first, we also backed our instinct that serious planners love the big screen impact of visuals and content.

We currently use the app route to enhance customer experience. Our Travel Genie app is a one stop resource for travellers who have booked with us to access bookings, itinerary, reminders on what’s coming up and also chat with us real time. We have seen folks request for surprises, room upgrades and share photos using this channel.

In the next few months, we are launching an enhancement to our product and it will be optimized for mobile as well.

Trivia: Did you know you can’t book multi-city flights on the Makemytrip app?

What’s the reasoning behind launching a chrome extension called TabTravel?

That was a side project by one of our interns. We wanted to see if we could use the empty tab to serve as an inspiration for folks. The fact that ixigo launched something similar was a huge shot in the arm.

What is that one thing that PickYourTrail product has that other players don’t have or haven’t implemented better?

Our fundamental belief is that for vacation/trip planning, controlling execution is key.

Every startup that has come about has always used the affiliate model where they drive traffic to one of the OTAs to complete booking. The fact that we have called this out and stuck to this touch+tech approach sets us apart from the current set of startups.

The trickle down effect of this belief has been our fanatical focus on customer happiness. We are rated 4.9 on 5 on Facebook from 300+ reviews. To set the context — On an average, a restaurant on Zomato does not have more than 30 reviews. Close to 60% of our businesses have been on repeat/referral and this circles back to the stringent quality checks we have when it comes to getting on board suppliers and partners.

Our ‘customer first’ approach has helped launch features (TabTravel, ChatBot etc) much ahead of the industry as well and am sure that the only way to stay ahead of the game is to keep a strong tab on the pulse of our customers.

What are some of the growth hacks you have successfully executed in PickYourTrail?

a) VEHO — we have doubled revenues from February 2016 till now without any additional manpower. Productising our learnings from over 1000+ Trails and building VEHO has been our most significant growth hack ever.

b) Trade Events — We have managed to find and discover great quality suppliers by attending the right trade events. Given that founders come from a non-travel background, it was important that we were able to build quality supply quickly, and we managed to identify the right events.

c) HotJar Sessions — We managed to double our click-to-lead percentage, thanks to insights from our hotjar viewing sessions. The best part is, we managed to do it in the free pricing tier.

d) Culture — This is a hack in progress. We are at a stage where individual contributors can no more drive our growth trajectory. It’s imperative that every single individual in the org realizes the importance of their job and is also empowered to take decisions. I strongly believe that as we grow, culture would be the single most important thing for success. Unlike a product or strategy — culture has no Ctrl+Z.

What are your top product mistakes?

There are no mistakes as such given the stage we are at. Two open items that continue to keep us on our toes are below:

a) Lack of documentation. Given the speed and chaos that exists at most early stage companies — sometimes we end up missing the finer details and that sets us back a bit. This is something we haven’t been able to solve for well enough. There is Slack, Trello, Google docs and the likes — but still some ideas or assumptions fall through the crack. I would like to hear from the readers on any other ideas.

b) Balancing the present and future with respect to products. There was a period when we tried too many things (some as pet projects, some as full blown features). TabTravel, Chat, our Visa portal were some of the outcome.

Even today it’s quite a task to arrive at a consensus when it comes to effort allocation between the current product and moonshots. One simple solution could be to hire more folks — but that will be inconsistent with our philosophy that companies throw people at the problem because they don’t know how to prioritize. I believe that being bootstrapped has helped us value things (people, time, money, users). And hence this constant push-pull actually works in our favour.

Scenario — You build a great product that adds value to your customers, your closest competitor is catching up with you in product value by offering deep discounts, what will be your strategy next?

Since time immemorial, the guy next to you on the airplane has paid a different price for his ticket. Discount wars help gain in market share, albeit temporarily.

It takes more than just price to retain that customer who has walked in through the door.

Currently, Indian consumers have moved from being value conscious to price conscious, and we believe this is a temporary shift. As long as you are able to add value and price it well — customers would continue to use your product/service.

What all qualities you look for while hiring a product management professional?

Empathy — while it’s not the easiest to measure, it’s also the most important skill for a product manager. He has to balance internal team’s aspirations (feature release, deadlines etc), business goals and at the same time keep an eye on what the customer has to say. It’s not an easy juggle but when done well — it can do wonders for the product.

Sales tools, sales team vs product team, your view?

I’ve used salesforce in my earlier company and I felt it was quite stifling and cumbersome. I would stick my neck out and comment that most managers use sales monitoring tools only when numbers turn south. My most effective sales reviews have been 1:1’s — understanding motivations, how to improve pitch and what stops folks from adhering to process.

Once you have two or three star sales folks in your team — you would be amazed to see how the overall quality starts to shoot up.

If you start looking at sales teams with the “emotional attachment” as that of a say, a design team — you would be surprised with the results.

What are all the variables to address to build a scalable product?

At a product level — the key things that we keep in mind are:

a) Product architecture — We are moving both our front end and backend frameworks to ensure that they are built for scale. While it was a bit of a challenge for the team to move frameworks, our initial product was an MVP and it was important to push it out even if it was quick and dirty. This current release is aimed at market leadership and it was imperative that the product architecture was also tweaked accordingly.

b) Minimising customer touch points — As a personalised vacations company, folks like the touch. As we scale we are attempting to minimise touch through the product. This meant significant changes in our overall UI/UX and also the kind of data that we need to share with the product for it to reassure the traveller the same way as a human.

c) Design challenges — As we scale, there are chances that new set of customer cohorts emerge that we hadn’t seen before or built for. It would be critical that we are able to spot and address such needs (could be either supplier side or consumer side).

At an org level:

a) Mindset — One of the key traits we look when we hire for senior folks is their ability to imagine scale. Unless the leadership team is wired to think at scale, it would be impossible to build a product that solves at scale.

b) Supply at scale — every partner we onboard, we ask if they would be with us when we are at 10x levels. This easily helps us bucket suppliers and focus on engaging with the long term ones. The kind of data that we share and also ask from such long term partners helps us enhance customer experience greatly.

Why nobody globally still hasn’t built a successful holiday packages company?

Because we are destined to build it :) Jokes apart — a lot of tech companies looked at trip planning as a mathematical problem. This works fine as long as you don’t have to own execution.

For example, you can combine Istanbul, Paris and London in one single trip of 8 days. But when the customer actually has to execute it — he realises that there are three visas (Turkish, Schengen and UK) and that he would have travelled for more than 50% of his time to get to these places. While you have solved for it mathematically, emotionally it’s a non-starter. A vacation is largely emotional (from the user standpoint). I believe this was missing in the approach taken by a lot of companies.

Lack of online supply. AirBnB set off a revolution of some sorts — maintaining calendars aka reservation systems was a huge pain point. And now in majority of the markets that we operate in — suppliers are open to sharing real time inventory and pricing. This helps in taking vacations truly online. One of the reasons why we don’t have domestic vacations on our platform is this lack of online supply in India.

Access to core technology — Amadeus and Sabre have set up incubator hubs in the last year. (We are part of the Amadeus Next program). These companies manage all airline information and the fact that they have opened up their APIs to startups speaks volume about how the timing is ripe.

Customer buying behaviour — International vacations are easily a $2,000 kind of product and its not as standardized as a car or a phone. But, thanks to shift in online spending and buying behaviour, we are now seeing a lot more customers willing to move this entire exercise online.