In 2015, I co-founded Onblay to create a peer-to-peer marketplace where adventure seekers could book guided experiences with local experts — sometimes described as “Airbnb for adventure guides.” I built the team, led the product design vision, conducted market research, raised funding from investors, and participated Utah's top startup accelerator.
We launched the marketplace with thousands of pre-launch sign-ups, hundreds of curated adventures, and a robust and easy-to-use platform. However... the bookings were coming in at a glacial pace. We soon realized that people liked the idea of being a guide, but didn't love the responsibility of running a guiding business. Adventure seekers wanted unique experiences, but were perfectly happy using real professionals even if they had to call their office to create a reservation. Without sufficient revenue, we had to pivot.
This experience taught me critical lessons about the challenges of obtaining unbiased market feedback, recognizing alternatives as the true competitors, testing assumptions more rigorously, failing fast, and understanding that the most important aspect of any MVP is its viability.
This failure meant losing investors, losing staff, and scrapping everything we built. With only a 6 month runway, we had to learn from our mistakes and build something that would keep the lights on.
We knew we had to pivot, and with only a 6-month runway, we had to be agile and strategic. Through our first product, we had deep industry knowledge and had established some relationships with professional tour operators. We knew that many professionals were unhappy with their core Reservation Management Systems. This led to the idea of using our existing booking engine powering our P2P marketplace and repurposing it for professional tour operators. But in learning from my mistakes, I knew even more disciplined and careful customer research was needed.
To validate the market need, I put a much greater focus on research. Before crafting a single design or asking developers to write a single line of code I interviewed over 50 tour operators to learn about their operations and the areas of frustration they experienced with their current systems. Through these qualitiative discussions, I gained ample understanding of the people problems and the jobs to be done. Not only did this process inform rapid iterations of the product, it also secure advocates and champions would become our first testers and early adopters.
Ahead of our 6-month deadline, we had customer contracts in place, and we launched our new professional tour management system just in time for Spring (a peak season for bookings that would occur in the Summer). The reservation management system was easy to use with little to no training -- a key need for operators who experience heavy annual turnover. Most importantly, the user interface and backend logic preventing booking errors. Both over-booking and under-booking tours were costly errors that our system promised to solve.
Through the ups and downs -- from initial failures to hard-earned success -- I led the Product org with intention and commitment. I was able to learn from my early mistakes and have carried the learnings with me ever since. The booking engine we built powered a range of tours, including tours with the largest tour operator in Rocky Mountain National Park. Within two years, the reservation management system was processing over $2 Million in bookings annually from over 7,000 annual reservations.
