If you’re a peer-to-peer platform designed to help travelers connect with local insiders, should you get out of the Bay and see the world ? Most definitely yes, according to Vayable! The San Francisco startup has decided to relocate its headquarters to Paris for a month. Vayable founding team is now being hosted at Mutinerie, a co-working space in the 19th arrondissement of Paris where they are connecting with their local community. The initiative is one week in, and according to Jamie Wong, co-founder and CEO of Vayable, things are going well: “the focus of the first week was discovery. We hosted an event for our community, went on guided experiences every day, invited members of our community into our work space for user testing, collected testimonials and feedback and connected with our local liaisons. I’m thrilled with the results! This coming week is all about design and outreach.”
So why Paris? It happens to be Vayable’s biggest market. If you are a company offering a way to discover the world in a more authentic way than the regular tourist experience, you should probably start with yourself and leave your comfort zone for a while.
For companies such as Vayable, creating a global online community is just the first step: being able to grow local communities is far more critical and challenging. After several interviews and feedback sessions, Vayable will also soon host a community summit at Mutinerie to build a roadmap. The results will be made public later this month. “Products are nothing without the people using them. If we’re building something people want, then we’re doing our job. It can be very challenging to know what people want, and it’s nearly impossible to decipher this without talking to them. Co-creating takes this a step further in that we build conversations and user testing into our design and development process. It truly is a collaboration!“, says Wong.
Vayable graduated from Y Combinator in 2012. In a recent blogpost, Paul Graham wrote about the best piece of advice he can give to startups: do things that don’t scale!
You can read more about this story here, and can follow the team’s journey here.