He got rejected by 50 VCs & had 4 months of runway—3 years later, he's at $150M ARR & profitable. | Hussein Fazal, Co-Founder of Super.com

Hussein's travel startup was doing $10s of millions when COVID hit. His revenue didn't just go to zero, it went negative. There were more customers asking for refunds than new sales. He was 4 months from running out of money.

He ended up making a complete pivot, he changed the company's name from SnapTravel to Super.com. He went from travel to fintech and launched a banking card. It seems like a strange pivot —but through deep research he'd realized what his customers truly needed. They needed more money—not for travel or vacations—but for every day life.

The new card helped customers earn points and rewards, it helped them save on everyday expenses. The pain was so acute and the solution so perfect, that just 3 years later, Super.com is doing $150M in ARR.

Like Hussein said, he got 50 'no's from VCs for every 'yes' he got. He saw his business grow and then crumble over night. He was literally going to zero. 

But he turned it all around. Now he's not just growing, he's profitable now.

And here's how it went down.

Why you should listen:

• How to think from first principles to figure out the right product expansion.
• Why cross-selling is much harder than you think, and how to make it work.
• Why finding an unfair advantage is key to scaling a startup.
• How to use actual customer behavior to understand what customers truly want.
• Why testing and validating ideas through smoke tests is essential.

Keywords
Super.com, SnapTravel, COVID-19, travel industry, pricing strategies, customer needs, market fit, entrepreneurship, AI, business growth, COVID-19, resilience, travel industry, financial innovation, membership model, customer insights, entrepreneurship, investor relations, business strategy, cross-selling

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro 
(00:02:39) The original startup: Snap Travel
(00:08:40) Why a great user interface is a big edge
(00:11:26) How to acquire customers
(00:13:30) When your entire hypothesis is wrong
(00:22:52) Meeting Steph Curry
(00:29:03) Nearly crashing to zero-- and going bankrupt
(00:33:51) Starting over and rebranding
(00:42:42) Creating the Fastest Growing Membership Program
(00:52:17) Finding Product Market Fit
(01:00:00) One Piece of Advice

Chapters

• 2:39 The original startup: Snap Travel
• 8:40 Why a great user interface is a big edge
• 11:26 How to acquire customers
• 13:30 When your entire hypothesis is wrong
• 22:52 Meeting Steph Curry
• 29:03 Nearly crashing to zero-- and going bankrupt
• 33:51 Starting over and rebranding
• 42:42 Creating the Fastest Growing Membership Program
• 52:17 Finding Product Market Fit
• 1:00:00 One Piece of Advice

Transcript

Hussein Fazal (00:00:00):

Every round we raised, we probably had 50 no’s, literally 50 to a hundred no’s every single round. Seed stage, A stage, B stage, C stage, every single round, 50 to a hundred no’s. But you gotta have that resilience. If you believe in the business you're building and you believe in the team that you have, you can get through. You only need one yes. One of the things I tell a lot of early founders is that you kind of need to find a little bit of an unfair advantage early on, and that's how you can really get some scale. And yeah, personally it was a little bit scary and a bit isolating and a bit like, what the hell is going on here? Then of course you combine that with the business and the business is literally going to zero, in fact, going to negative.

(00:00:51):

Each day, there were more people requesting refunds than there were people making new bookings. So you're literally refunding money more than new cash coming in and you're like, wow, this is a bad situation. We're going to run out of money if we continue doing that. We were talking like months, right? Like four months, six months. I would call this probably one of the fastest growing membership programs in the world. Haven't really publicly shared exact numbers, but what I can tell you is-

Previous Guests (1:23)

That's product market fit, product market fit, product market fit. I call that the product market fit question, product market fit, product market fit. Product Market fit, product market fit. I mean the name of the show is Product Market Fit.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:35):

Think back to the last few months, the last few years as you've been running the startup, how many different founders have helped you out? The reality is, founders help each other out. That's just who founders are. They pay it forward. So help a founder out, take literally five seconds, take your phone out of your pocket and hit five stars. 

Alright, Hussein, welcome to the show, man. 

Hussein Fazal (00:01:54):

Thank you. Thanks for having me, man.

Pablo Srugo (00:01:54):

I mean, you have a crazy story like super.com has been through so much, and now you're truly on the crushing it part of the phase of the business, right? 150 million in revenue growing, 40% profitable. And I think the craziest part is you started, it was Snap Travel, it was in the travel space. You go through Covid, you hit zero and somehow rebrand the most kind of painful type of pivot and now just a completely different business. So we will go through all of that and let's do that. Let's start at the beginning. Snap Travel, born in the chatbot era. What was that? What was the thinking? What was going on back then? And just even when is this? Just set the context for us.

Hussein Fazal (00:02:38):

Yeah, yeah, sure. I'll give you the context. So that was about eight years ago, and this was around the time when chatbots were really hot. So everyone was saying apps are going to be dead, everyone's going to do everything over chat. We had all these big companies building on chat, and this was at the time me and my co-founder Henry were trying to figure out what to do. We were kind of testing a bunch of business ideas and we thought that we would try and get people to book hotel rooms over chat. So that's kind of how it started. When it started it was a hundred percent manual.

Pablo Srugo (00:03:13):

Was this a wouldn't it be cool if moment, or did you have some sort of experience or something that led you with the idea like, man, chatbot's going to be big, wouldn't it be cool if you could book a hotel through chat?

Hussein Fazal (00:03:22):

Yeah, actually what happened was we were chatting with the ex-president of hotels.com and he had this idea, let's just say you land into a city and you could send a message and say, “Hey, here's what I'm looking for”, and a bunch of hotels would kind of compete for your business and say, oh yeah, you just landed, my hotel's empty. I'll give you this price if you come to my hotel. So it was kind of an idea we did through some market research and that's how it started. But maybe already, my first lesson, which is very early in this podcast to be talking about it, is that Henry and I were both engineers and the logical thing to do would've been to start building, but we did it a hundred percent manually. So what would happen is a customer would come in, we built a basic landing page, they would come in and send a text and say, “I need a hotel in New York tomorrow night”. Then Henry would literally get it on his personal cell phone and we would go and search on Google and try and find a deal and we would text them back and be like, Hey, yeah, we've got a deal over here at this hotel at this price. And if they said, yes, we'd send them a credit card form, we'd manually type it in and we'd book them a hotel. 

Pablo Srugo (00:04:29):

So it was like you were pretending back then. AI today has changed the game, but AI back then, you're still pretending that this is an automated chat bot or you connected to an agent and then you kind of-

Hussein Fazal (00:04:39):

Yeah, we tested both. We tested pretending to be a bot. We tested pretending to be a human. We tested all the different options, but the interface was the same. It was you would come in via chat, you'd request a hotel, and then what we would do is we'd go look it up and try and get you the best hotel deal. It was interesting, we made our first 50 to a hundred hotel bookings completely manually. So no automation, not really a single line of code written. We made about 50 to a hundred bookings and that kind of kicked us off and we raised an early 1.2$ million seed round proving that people wanted this. And that's how we got started.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:16):

Even just the size of the seed round tells the story of the fact that it was eight years ago, the game has changed so much now it'd be like a 5 million seed round.

Hussein Fazal (00:05:22):

Seed rounds now are not 1.2 million. That was a weak seed round, at least relative to today's.

Pablo Srugo (00:05:28):

Well I think back then is probably fine compared to today's unfair comparison. And then you two, you were engineers. What were you doing at the time? Had you started something else? Were you first time founders into this? What was your story?

Hussein Fazal (00:05:40):

Yeah, so for me, I'm a second time founder. My first business was AdParlor. It was a Facebook ad optimization company. We managed and optimise ads for Starbucks, Netflix, and Groupon. I eventually sold that company to Ad Knowledge, stayed on for a few and then took some time off travel. I did some volunteer work, tried to figure out what I wanted to do, but I definitely wanted to start something else. And my co-founder Henry, he also had a B2C company called uMentioned, and then he was at Google as an engineer. When we met each other, we realised we wanted to work together, we wanted to be co-founders. So I was ready to go. He quit his job at Google and that's how we got started.

Pablo Srugo (00:06:23):

So it wasn't like your first rodeo. Is that one of the reasons you knew not to just build stuff right away and go to customers?

Hussein Fazal (00:06:31):

Yeah, it's all about de-risking what you think's not going to work. Because to be honest, writing code and connecting to a hotel's API and that stuff's easy, you know you can do it, it just takes time. But we had to de-risk the hard part and the hard part is like, do customers really want this? Do they really want a book over chat? Now it's an interesting story in that even though we made 50 to a hundred bookings as we started to scale, we learned that customers in fact don't like to chat to book and to browse. They like chat for customer service, they like chat for notifications, but they do not like chat for searching and browsing. It just became so frustrating. Imagine you're like, Hey, I want a hotel in New York tomorrow night. And then we give them an option and they're like, wait, that's too expensive.

(00:07:20):

Then we give them more options and they're like, I want to be closer to Times Square, and they'll give them more options and then they're like, fuck, just show me a map or show me a list. I just want to see it. I want the UI. So we raised the seed round and then we started building and we realised that chat's actually a pretty bad interface for searching and browsing. But what we started to discover is ways to get access to discounted hotel pricing. And this is kind of a much longer story, but what we found is that there's a lot of discounted hotel pricing available. Hotels need to fill up their hotel rooms, and if you can offer rates to the right customers in the right formats, you can access this discounted hotel pricing.

Pablo Srugo (00:08:03):

So we'll go down this road soon because that's super, I think, relevant to the second version of Snap Travel and the super.com story. But a couple tangents. The first one you mentioned, the chat interface. Today, one of the big discussions going on is with AI, what happens to just UIs in general? I don't know if you spend any time thinking about this, but it seems just super relevant, that insight seems super relevant today. Do you have any guesses of where UI is going to happen with this Gen AI stuff, how much chat can really play? Because these days a lot of people saw the open AI chat, ChatGPT success, and they just want to recreate that for basically every single use case.

Hussein Fazal (00:08:40):

Yeah, so I think the UI is absolutely critical for anything that requires a UI. Ultimately, no matter how good the AI is, if you are buying a hotel room, if you're buying a physical product, if you're doing anything that requires visuals, like pictures or a map, you're going to need a UI, that's fundamentally required. It doesn't matter how good the AI is. So I mean, there's no world in which you're like, Hey, I want a hotel in New York tomorrow night. And then the AI is like, here's the perfect hotel for you, and you're like, okay, let's book it. Right? Even if that was the right hotel, you still want to see the room options. You want to see the cancellation policy options, you want to potentially add insurance, you want to be able to pick from a saved credit card. There's all these things you need to do in the UI.

(00:09:26):

So I think that chat will be very relevant. I think it's very, especially with AI now, it's going to allow you to quickly get you to a good spot, but you're going to need a UI. So one of the interesting things is I'm a big AI user, obviously as most of us are these days. I've actually started to find Google's Gemini better than ChatGPT in certain situations because Gemini leans more into a UI into a Google search. So you'll start with chat, and then Gemini will be like, Hey, here's a link to the Google search, or here's the hotel view option, or whatever it is. So I've started to see that that's what really important. So chat in AI chats definitely going to be there early on to get you to the right spot, but you're going to need a UI to go in, do more, learn more, browse more, and complete a transaction.

Pablo Srugo (00:10:18):

Well, one of the frameworks that, at least for me, my simple buy likes to think about it is almost think about the kind of experience that the super rich could get before with humans, and how do you bring that to everybody through AI? And if you think about, let's say travel, yeah, sure, you would have somebody who goes and does all the research for you and comes back to you and you can talk to them, natural interface, but they're not just talking to you. They will show you at some point, like you said, okay, here's what the rooms look like, here's what the hotels like, here's the map, here's where we want to go, and et cetera, et cetera. So they make use of this idea of the right UI at the right time, the right place, instead of you opening an app and needing to understand everything about it and then click through, it's almost like, there is some amount of talking in the right places, and then showing you the right things at the right time. Very similar to what you're mentioning with Gemini. Kind of more natural.

Hussein Fazal (00:11:05):

Yeah. Chat's like your shortcut. So instead of starting from scratch, you use AI chat to get you to the final decision making point or the recommendation point, and then from there, you'll need a UI to be able to make that final decision and complete a booking, complete a purchase or whatever it is you want to complete.

Pablo Srugo (00:11:26):

And then going back, the other question I had about Snap Travel, one of the hardest parts is because you mentioned getting those 50 to a hundred bookings, especially in travel, so competitive with so many people going after those users, I would think, how do you get those first leads? How do you get anybody to even start chatting with you in the first place?

Hussein Fazal (00:11:42):

Yeah, I mean, I guess part of it comes down to my experience with Facebook advertising. So I do think that spending six years buying ads for Starbucks, Netflix, Groupon, some of the largest performance marketers in the world, it's something that I know how to do, but it's actually not that hard when you have such a massive market. The number of people searching for hotels every single day is massive, right? We're talking about booking.com and Expedia which are a hundred billion dollar company’s like GMB companies, they're driving a ton of volume. So at the start, you just need to get a small sliver of that. And obviously there's a lot that we've done now to continue to grow that business and get a bigger sliver of that. But to start, there's just so much volume. You're going to capture some of it.

Pablo Srugo (00:12:33):

So you just ran Facebook ads at the beginning, find your hotel with a chat bot or something. 

Hussein Fazal (00:12:36):

We ran Facebook ads, we ran Google Ads, yeah, Facebook ads and Google ads drove people to a, I think at that time it was like an Insta Page landing page, and there'd just be a big button and people would just click on it and then they would start chatting with us. That's how we initially built it. But anyone can get traffic to any website if you just spend some money right now, the question is, is it going to be profitable or not? What's the return on ad spend going to be? But you can give me any idea or any business in the world. I could build you a landing page in a day and I could go buy some ads in half a day on Google and Facebook and I can get you any amount of traffic you want if you're willing to spend the money. And obviously again, like I said, there's some optimization. You don't want to be paying a thousand dollars a lead, so there's some optimization there, but you can test anything if you want to build a landing page and spend some money.

Pablo Srugo (00:13:30):

So here's the funny thing to me is your reason for being is, people want to book hotels through chat, through a chatbot interface. You raise a seed round, and then what you're telling me is you find out very quickly actually people don't really want to book through that, they want to book through normal UI, put me in that frame of mind. I mean, what's finding that out like?

Hussein Fazal (00:13:51):

Well, I mean one of the things that Henry and I have always believed in is that you got to be truth seeking, right? And way too many entrepreneurs are like they have an idea and then they try and bend the customer or bend the world to what they want. And there's some element of that, but primarily customers know what they want. And it's very obvious if you take a step back and you just look at how customers behave and you talk to customers, and what we found out is that 98% of customers, all they care about, the only thing they care about is getting the best price. And if you take a bit of a step back and you think about it logically, regardless of who you are, whether you're booking a two star hotel, whether you're booking a five star honeymoon, what do you do when you book a hotel?

(00:14:43):

You go, you search, you check as many websites as you can, you check Google, you share Kayak, you check the websites directly, and it's the same hotel. So if everyone's offering it at 500 bucks a night and you find a site that's offering it at 400 bucks a night, where are you going to book? Right? You're going to book where it's 400 bucks a night, obviously assuming there's some level of like, Hey, this is a real company, this is legit, a booking's going to be there. That's all that really matters. So once you get to that realisation, then nothing else really matters. It's like, let's go and solve the biggest problem, which is, can we get you better pricing? So it was a big realisation, but it was very obvious.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:19):

You know it's funny, what comes to mind is I had Vitali, the CEO of StackAdapt, another Canadian company doing 4 million revenue.

Hussein Fazal (00:15:27):

StackAdapt was actually in my last company, AdParlor. Vitali was one of my first few employees at AdParlor. He was employee number six. He knew nothing about digital marketing. He walked into my office, I hired him at AdParlor, he was there for about two years, and then he took some time and started StackAdapt.

Pablo Srugo (00:15:48):

Man, so our podcast starts when he literally, he's like, I used to work at this kind of ad thing and then I left. I didn't realise it was your company. It's full circle. That's awesome, man. Holy shit. Anyways, he said to me, he's like the Henry Ford quote, if I asked people what they wanted, they would just say a faster horse. He's like, dude, it turns out a lot of people want a faster horse. You know what I mean? What comes to mind is like, man, people just want that thing for cheaper. Can you do that? There's big business there.

Hussein Fazal (00:16:13):

Yeah. You want something cheaper, you want something faster, you want something light, you want something more convenient. And I mean, everyone talks about Amazon. You can get things faster, easier, cheaper and it's like, that works so you don't need to completely reinvent them. Now there's other areas in our business, which we'll talk about later on, where we've kind of reinvented the way credit building works. We've reinvented the way a debit or credit card works, and that's a lot more work and a lot harder to figure out, but hotels is pretty simple. It's just get a better price and it's going to take off. So we started to move away from chat. We really focused in on getting better pricing, and then the business starts to take off. You have the same product at a better price, and that's what people want. 

Pablo Srugo (00:16:56):

How do you do that? That seems so obvious, but also so competitive. Everybody must want the cheapest price. So how do you, a relatively small startup, have any edge there?

Hussein Fazal (00:17:06):

Yeah, it's not easy. What I can say is it took us a lot of years to figure it out and to figure out how to access better pricing, but ultimately a quarter of hotel rooms go empty every single night, and when their hotel room goes empty, that's lost revenue, that's revenue that they've lost, and they're not going to be able to make that up. So they're willing to sell at lower prices, and everyone has their own take on it. I mean, HotelTonight has a take on it where it's like last minute deals and a hotel needs to fill up their inventory. You had PriceLine and Hotwire where it was like, name your own price and we can get you in a room. You have travel agents where if you physically walk into a travel agent, they'll be able to get you access to a better price because it's not publicly available.

(00:17:53):

So we've found ways to access inventory, and we've shifted our model a ton. Where we are now, which is a really, really good place, is that we've now layered on a membership program called Super+, right? And when you are a membership program, hotels are very willing to give you access to discounted pricing. Like this is a closed user group of members who we can get unique access to, who we wouldn't be able to get access to otherwise. So think about a Costco membership. So if you're a Costco member, everybody knows you can walk into Costco and buy physical goods and products at discounted prices. What a lot of people don't realise is you can log into the Costco travel portal and you can get access to discounted pricing, Disney and flights and hotels. They're all willing to give discounted prices to Costco members.

Pablo Srugo (00:18:42):

I did not know that. And I'm a Costco members, so I'm missing out, man.

Hussein Fazal (00:18:46):

Yes, go check it out. But similarly, because it's like a closed user group paid membership program, you have that same concept now, and then again, SnapTravel.com and Super.com has evolved so much. But now the majority of our really good discounted pricing as you come in, you become a Super+ member, you're part of this closed user group. And hotels were like, yeah, of course I'll give a discounted rate to this customer.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:10):

Because what, it's segmenting for them, what's the reason for it?

Hussein Fazal (00:19:13):

Yeah, it's segmenting because they simply can't fill up their entire hotel room with someone going directly to the hotel website booking full price on.

Pablo Srugo (00:19:24):

They need a way to have cheaper prices, but not on their main website basically, because then it cannibalises the people that are buying.

Hussein Fazal (00:19:29):

Correct. But what's interesting is you'll even see price segmentation on desktop versus mobile, which is kind of crazy. Or if you go on expedia.com, you can go there right now and you'll see something that says become a member and get 10% off. So all you got to do is become a member, which is free, and you log in and hotels are willing to drop prices. They're just finding ways to distribute different prices amongst different groups of people. They need to fill up their hotel room, but they don't want to cannibalise their default retail rate. So there's just different prices everywhere on desktop, on mobile members, non-members, closed user group, non-closed user group, name your own price, travel agents, tour operators, hotels actually have a rate card with 50 to a hundred different rates all distributed in different ways. And it actually gets really complex. There's a whole web of rates being traded. You as an end customer wouldn't realise this, but you could book with Expedia and Expedia could have bought that rate from booking.com. We could have bought that rate from a reseller or we could’ve bought that rate from the hotel. So it's kind of crazy all the stuff that happens in the back-end.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:34):

And with SnapTravel back then, what of all these things are you mainly making use of to show those kind of discounted rates?

Hussein Fazal (00:20:41):

Yeah, I mean we were considered a travel agent and travel agents usually have access to discounted rates. If you physically walk into a travel agency, you would have that. And we were a travel agent, we were just a travel agent over messaging as opposed to a travel agent that had a physical location.

Pablo Srugo (00:20:56):

So you were different from Hotel.com where you just get a list because of this kind of one-on-one kind of interaction to the chatbot?

Hussein Fazal (00:21:03):

Correct. That's how it started. So that was the end. And one of the things I tell a lot of early founders is that you kind of need to find a little bit of an unfair advantage early on, and that's how you can really get some scale, and it could be like this or it could be something else, but you got to find something that's a little bit of an unfair advantage or a little bit of, how are you doing this? And that's how you get started. And again, it's obviously evolved a lot. And now with the scale that we have, we're able to negotiate directly and get really good deals because of the volume we have. We added the Super+ membership, which is better for hotels because most of the people coming in and booking are now members. But when we started, it was finding this way to be classified as a travel agent by doing things over chat.

Pablo Srugo (00:21:56):

And I love the price thing because it's so uncool, I think in startup land or venture land to be like, we're winning, we're better priced, we're cheaper or whatever. But I just had this conversation literally earlier this week with one of the co-founders of Amplitude, right? Public billion dollar company. Hey, what was your edge? In the early days like, oh, we were cheaper than Mixpanel. That's why we landed so many customers. And then you realise Walmart, why are they a 400 billion dollar company? Because they’re cheaper than the earlier retailers. This stuff matters.

Hussein Fazal (00:22:25):

But we use Amplitude, by the way. And probably when we got started we did a little RFP and we were just like, wow, Amplitude is cheaper and it works. And obviously now the products evolved a ton. It's actually a really, really, really good product. But you start by being cheaper and then you continue to evolve.

Pablo Srugo (00:22:42):

So walk me through the timeline towards Covid. Obviously Covid happens, travel freezes, but before that, how well is Snap Travel doing?

Hussein Fazal (00:22:52):

So things are going well. We raised the 1.2 million seed round, I believe at that time we had raised an $8 million series A and then we did an extension over there. I think at that time we had probably raised, I would say 40 to 50 million bucks. Things are going well, company is growing. We're doing at that time, at least over a hundred million in GMV in top line, call it a 10 to 15% margin. So business is doing well. We got some cool investors. We got Inovia, we got Telstra, which is now Titanium Ventures, we got Steph Curry. 

Pablo Srugo (00:23:37):

Oh, Steph Curry was before, I was going to ask, you have a Steph Curry jersey there, but that was the SnapTravel days..

Hussein Fazal (00:23:41):

Yeah, he was pre-Covid. It was SnapTravel days. Things were feeling great and we're like-

Pablo Srugo (00:23:46):

Wow. What's the story there, by the way? I'm curious.

Hussein Fazal (00:23:50):

Yeah, so when we did our series B led by Telstra Ventures, Yash Patel, who's a friend and who led the round, he was like, Hey, I just did another deal in Steph Curry C30. And he's like, if you take money from us, I'll try and get them to invest as well. And I was like, okay, sure. Who's going to say no to that? I'm a big basketball fan, a big Steph Curry fan, and yet it actually was not any different than any other kind of VC firm. So his sort of business lead and venture lead, Bryant, looked at the business just like anyone else would, asked a bunch of questions, did a bunch of due diligence, and when Telstra actually decided to lead the round, they were like, yeah, we're into it, we're going to participate. So it was cool. So I actually never met Steph or talked to him before the round.

Pablo Srugo (00:24:48):

I would've been like, Steph, if you make a half court shot on this next shot, then you get 10% discount.

Hussein Fazal (00:24:54):

Well, when I did meet him, we had an interesting conversation. So I spend my time, I split my time between Toronto and San Francisco, and I told him, listen, the Raptors are still going to be my number one team, but if you're going to invest, you got to be okay with that. And he was okay with that. I will say now the Warriors are my number one team because the Raptors are absolute shit. But anyhow, so I never got to meet him before the round, but after the round, he's been awesome. He came to our office and we spent time with the team. We went on stage together at Tech Quench Disrupt. We just went the weekend in Napa.

Pablo Srugo (00:25:28):

That must have been epic for you, but also for your team to be like, man, Steph crazy. You're like, what?

Hussein Fazal (00:25:33):

It's incredible, right? It is awesome. He's absolutely amazing. So it's been awesome. So anyway, things are going really well. We've got these great investors, company's growing. We've got access to discounted pricing, other things up into the right. Every month there's a record month. We weren't profitable at the time and we were thinking about raising another round and we're starting that process. And then Covid hits and Covid was such a messed up time. So first, just personally and mentally, it was tough for everybody. You can no longer see family and friends. You're reading the news about how deadly this thing is. You are seeing hospitals being overrun, you're questioning whether you're going to be able to even go outside anymore. You're doing groceries with your mask on. And the whole thing was messed up. And I will say that one of the things about me is I feel like I'm generally very stable and don't have so many ups and downs and generally quite mentally strong and I can ride through those things. But Covid was a tough time for me, and it was something I didn't realise how much it would affect me, but personally it was kind of scary thinking about where-

Pablo Srugo (00:26:55):

Beyond just the fact that your business was having an existential crisis, it was even just personally being isolated like that.

Hussein Fazal (00:27:01):

Personally, it was a little bit scary and a bit isolating and a bit like, what the hell is going on here? And then of course you combine that with the business and the business is literally going to zero, in fact, going to negative each day, there were more people requesting refunds than there were people making new bookings. So you're literally refunding money more than new cash coming in and you're like, wow, this is a bad situation. We're going to run out of money if we continue doing that.

Pablo Srugo (00:27:30):

Yeah, it wouldn't take that long to run out of money in a situation like that.

Hussein Fazal (00:27:32):

No, it would not, right?. At the same time, there's all these complexities because people booked a non-refundable room and then they want their money back and obviously we want to give 'em their money back, but we've already passed that money along to the hotel, so we're like, Hey, hotel, we need the money back so we can give the customer the money back and the hotel is literally closed and there's no one there to answer the phone. And the customer's getting pissed at us saying, hello, its COVID, give us our money back, and we don't even have the money because the hotel has it and we can't contact anyone at the hotel. The whole situation is really, really messed up. 

Pablo Srugo (00:28:14)

How many people are you at this point? 

Hussein Fazal (00:28:15)

At that time, we're probably 40  to 50 people.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:19):

What runway, realistically, when you think through it, what runway were you looking at?

Hussein Fazal (00:28:24):

I mean, if things had continued with zero new bookings and the refunds that we saw and we didn't make any changes, we were talking months, four months, six months, that type of situation, which is like, man, that sucks. That's four or five years of building a business and now it's going to go to zero.

Pablo Srugo (00:28:45):

Especially the volatility means this is what I always go back to from the highest of highest to lows of lows. It's one phone call, it's one investor, obviously one pandemic, but still it's just crazy. In this case, it took a lot, but it also is so fast. That's the crazy part. It's just so fast to go from the best to the worst.

Hussein Fazal (00:29:03):

And it truly was a Black Swan event. No one could have predicted something like that, and it was just an absolute shit show. So we're sitting there, okay, what do we do? As mentioned, we were sort of thinking about another round. At that time we were actually pretty deep in discussions with Ctrip, which is kind of the Expedia of Asia. They were talking about giving us a term sheet. They obviously were like, Hey, now's not a good time. We're like, yeah, obviously this is not a good time. And we had to step back and figure out what we wanted to do. And this is where I would say the resilience comes in. One of the things again, I pride myself on is resilience. I always feel like I can get through anything. I'm generally a very positive person, and I think that if you put enough efforts and smarts into something, that you're going to be able to figure it out. So we were resilient and we had to do a lot in order to-

Pablo Srugo (00:29:59):

Was that your mindset, being fully honest, even then? Or did a part of you or maybe your co-founder or somebody else kind of look at it and say, guys, this might be, you know what I mean? Maybe this is it.

Hussein Fazal (00:30:10):

There was definitely a time where we're like, this could be it, right? There was definitely a time where we're like, Hey, we should just fold this whole thing and maybe restart and do something new. But after a few weeks and taking some time to really think about it, I'm like, what am I going to do? I'm not going to throw this away all these years of work we've done, so let's see if we can turn things around. And honestly, I would say in those first few weeks, it was more just a bit of a panic and just trying to do what's right by the customer and trying to do what's right by the investors and just trying to take care of everyone, I would say.

(00:30:50):

And so here's what we did. First thing is we had to make some layoffs, which is natural at the time. So I think at that time we let about 20  to 30% of our staff go. For whoever remained, we actually increased their equity stake. So we said, whatever equity you have, we're going to bump you up by 10% because if you're in, you're in, and we want you to be in and committed. We set a clear direction for the company, which is that it's all about profitability. So cut out the marketing channels that aren't working, cut out all the fluff, innovate on the product to see how we can get more profitability out of it and just get focused. And the teams were now slimmer. The scope and the definition of what they needed to do was now slimmer. And we had a bunch of people just really step it up and turn things around.

(00:31:43):

So there was that piece. And then we got a little bit lucky in that the one part of travel that actually turned around the fastest was US domestic hotels. Because what happened was half of the US didn't believe in Covid because they were on the other side of the political spectrum. And what happened was, they weren't getting on planes and they weren't doing international travel or even going across the country, but they still wanted to stay at hotels. So they would get in their car and drive an hour or two hours, they would stay at a three star hotel.

Pablo Srugo (00:32:22):

We have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You want to be a part of the group? You want to be a part of those tens of thousands of followers. So hit the follow button. 

Even hotels, because I know Airbnb went local during this time, but it was a lot of cottages, things like that. I'm actually surprised that hotels were part of that kind of equation.

Hussein Fazal (00:32:41):

Yeah, they did. And what you don't realise unless you're in this space is when we think of a hotel, we often think of, oh, we're going to go take a nice vacation and we're going to go to New York, or we're going to go to Hawaii, or we're going to go to whatever. What a lot of people don't realise is that two, two and a half star, or three star hotels, people are using it for different reasons. They're using it because someone's sick and they need to go stay close to their family and they need to stay in a hotel. They're using it because they're a business person driving through the states selling something and they need a place to stay. They're using it because their son loves swimming and they don't have a swimming pool nearby and they want to go drive an hour away and give them a weekend where they get to swim every day. So there's like all these different use cases.

Pablo Srugo (00:33:31):

It's a bit more of a need than a want. They kind of can't cut it out as easily

Hussein Fazal (00:33:35):

And a bit more of not the most glamorous holiday or vacation, but still like a getaway. And people were doing that. In the US it picked up really, really fast. So we cut out the marketing channel that didn't work. We made some layoffs. We focused on profitability, plus we had US domestic travel start to pick up. And what we started to see after even just a few months is that things started to shift. People were booking hotels again. Again, we had a lot of work to do on the product. We talked a lot about a covid policy or covid refund policy. We did a lot of work to make it very clear on what you could do and what you couldn't do. And things started to turn around and it was just a few months later, it was kind of a night and day difference where you'd see hotel bookings really start to pop up. We focused a lot and it would shift. So it went from if you looked at a heat map, you would see major cities where all the bookings were made. And then you looked at it three, four months later and it was like all these small towns, all these small cities, especially along the coast, there were a lot of things along the coast near the water that started to pick up. Vegas, started to pick back up again. Anyone who could drive to Vegas would go to Vegas. And yeah, it was a very pleasant.

Pablo Srugo (00:34:56):

And did you raise a bridge round as part of these new layoff plans?

Hussein Fazal (00:35:00):

We didn't. We were able to turn it around without raising that bridge round. Sorry, we probably did, but it wasn't like immediately. It wasn't like a few months later.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:11):

It wasn't part of that whole kind of equation.

Hussein Fazal (00:35:13):

A little bit later as we started to turn things around probably, I don't know the exact timeline, but probably a year, a year and a half-ish after that, we saw that travel business starts to kick back up and we had all these other products we were working on. And again, this sounds crazy. It's like you're going through Covid, you're trying to stay alive, and obviously we've had to get through that immediate phase, but as soon as we saw hotels starting to pick back up again, we went back to working on some of the other projects that we were working on.

Pablo Srugo (00:35:46):

Those were happening pre-Covid already, these other projects?

Hussein Fazal (00:35:51):

They were happening pre-Covid, but in a bit more of a exploratory, talking to customers, contracting type of stage. Then obviously when Covid hit, we put that on hold and we just focused on the core business. Then once we realised the travel business was going to recover, we said, okay, now let's go put our efforts back into this. And in fact, we put even more effort into it post-Covid, we realised we don't want to be just a travel company. We saw what happens, and obviously it was a black swan event and you can say it was never going to happen again, but we really didn't want to be just a travel company combined with what we were hearing. So let me talk about what we were hearing. So what we were hearing when we talked to customers, and this is qualitative research, quant research, this is picking up the phone, this is surveys, this is doing everything to talk to customers in any which way and from every different angle.

(00:36:45):

What we saw is that customers who were coming to us were obviously, like we said, customers who want to save money and customers who need to save money, even though people use us for five star honeymoons, a lot of our customers were using us for two, two and a half star, three star hotels. And what we saw is that our customers really, really needed to save. And when we asked them what they wanted to save on, they were not saying, oh yeah, I want to save on flights and tickets and tourism activities and car rentals. They were saying, I need to save on everyday expenses. I need to save on my groceries, I need to save on my insurance. I need to save on my cell phone bill. And they needed to save across the board. And then on top of that, a large percentage of our customers, at one point, 70% of our customers were paying with a debit card and not a credit card.

(00:37:34):

And we're like, what are you doing? Why are you paying with a debit card? You're not building your credit. You're not earning any cash back, you're not earning any rewards. It was because they couldn't get a credit card. They didn't have the credit score to be able to get one. They were afraid of credit. So they were kind of in this situation where it's like, I need to save money, can't get a credit card. I'm paying with my debit card. I'm not earning any cash back. I'm not building my credit score. I'm kind of in the cycle of using the money I have and not being rewarded for it. So that was sort of a big discovery and when we thought about what we wanted to build next, the next logical product for us to build, it would be very illogical for most people from the outside.

(00:38:13):

Most people from the outside would say, oh yeah, you're a hotel company. Go build flights, go build car rentals, go build tour and activities. But for us, the most logical product to build was to build a card, a FinTech product. And so what we did is we spent almost a year building this very innovative card product and what I call it a card product. It's kind of a hybrid debit credit card. So the way it works is you come in, let's say you don't have the credit score to get a traditional credit card. You come in, you sign up for this card, and it gives you the best of debit and the best of credit. So you sign up, you connect it to your Bank of America account as an example. When you swipe your card, we check your real time balance. If you don't have enough money in your account, the transaction doesn't go through.

(00:39:03):

If you do have enough money in your account, the transaction goes through, we secure the funds, and then at the end of the month, we let you kind of pay off your credit card bill with the funds that you've secured. So it kind of works like a debit card in that you're not spending more than you have. We make sure you have the money and it works like a credit card. You are truly getting credit, and then at the end of the month, you can decide to pay it off with the funds that's been secured, or you can pay it off from a different source if you'd like to pay it off from a different source. But we're helping you save the money to pay off your credit card.

Pablo Srugo (00:39:32):

And the advantage of credit is what. A, you build your credit score and B, you get more access to points and these other sort of things that are typically associated with credit.

Hussein Fazal (00:39:40):

So in the underlying way credit cards and debit cards work is that with a debit card, there's just no margin there, it just works on these rails where there's no margin. The underlying credit card rails has about a two to 3% margin built in. That's why a lot of times when you go to a store that's trying to save money, they're like, Hey, I don't take credit card. I only take debit. Or let's say I don't take Amex, I only take Visa and MasterCard because Amex charges a bit more. So fundamentally, the merchant, when a customer is paying with a credit card, the merchant is paying roughly two to 3% to accept Visa.

Pablo Srugo (00:40:18):

To a Visa MasterCard, but Visa, MasterCard share it with let's say Super.com or whoever and you can share with the customer, correct?

Hussein Fazal (00:40:24):

Exactly right. So typically the merchant's paying 2%. If you're paying with Visa and MasterCard, typically a merchant's paying like 4%. If a customer's paying with Amex that money goes to Super.com or the company that's issuing the card, and then that company can decide to keep it or pass it back to the customer. Now what most companies do is they give points, they give cash back, they give rewards. So in our case, we're getting roughly 2%. We'll keep 1% and we'll give the customer 1% cash back. So now we have this card product where you can go and you can start using this card and immediately you get to build a credit score and you get 1% cash back. But you can imagine a hotel booking flow where you come in, you found a great hotel deal, you're like, wow, this is awesome. You type in your debit card number and then we're like, hold on, you're about to pay with a debit card. Why don't you switch over to the Super.com card? You're going to build your credit score and you have 1% cash back, and guess what? We'll even give you an extra 10% discount immediately on your hotel booking if you switch over to the Super.com Mastercard.

Pablo Srugo (00:41:27):

From an underwriting perspective, because of the way it works, I assume you get to hit lower credit scores. People might not be able to access even a $500 credit card. They can access a Super.com card because you have basically collateral built in.

Hussein Fazal (00:41:39):

That's right. It's almost like a secured credit card where they're starting to put the money upfront, but it still kind of allows 'em to build a credit score. So it's a pretty unique capability that we built, and we kind of have the free traffic because we already have customers coming into book hotels. We already have customers coming in, typing in their debit cards. We have a product that we know they want, and that's the perfect time to upsell them and to say, Hey, do you want to switch over to the Super.com MasterCard?

Pablo Srugo (00:42:08):

One question I'm going to ask, we know obviously this ended up working out super well at the time, and especially as you're building throughout in this kind of crazy, let's say from early 2020 to early 2021 before all the hype happened and you're building this card at the board level with your investors. This is a weird thing. You have an ongoing business, you're starting something very new, but it is an ongoing business, so you have that baggage you have to deal with. What was the perspective internally? Were people around the table like, yeah, this is great, this makes sense, or was a lot of hesitation like, dude, I don't know what you're doing, but whatever. Let's see what happens.

Hussein Fazal (00:42:42):

So, a couple of things. First of all, Henry and I had incredible conviction around this. We did a lot in terms of testing, smoke tests, talking to customers. We had good conviction that this was going to work. And then number two, we had incredibly supportive investors in a supportive board of, chairman of the board who's been with us and one of our first investors and earliest investors and has invested in pretty much every round was Chris Arsenault, who's the managing director of Inovia. And I don't know if you know him, but just an incredibly supportive human, and that helps and makes a big difference. I could easily see an alternate world where a board member or an investor was like, no, what are you doing? Just focus on hotels, right? Because there was a good year where over 50% of our staff were working on non-travel related products, and it was generating zero revenue.

(00:43:46):

So you can imagine you're looking at the P&L and you're like, what is going on here? Right? Over half of your company is working on non-revenue generating activities, and we're burning money, so that's not really a great look. But they believed in us and we ended up raising another round, which gave us a lot more cushion, allowed us to continue to innovate and build these other products. Obviously at the same time, the travel business continued to grow and improve, which really helped. And then things started to hit. So I would say about two years ago is when things started to really click.

Pablo Srugo (00:44:25):

2023.

Hussein Fazal (00:44:27):

Yeah, 2023. Yeah, end of 2023, things started to click and the card got launched. We saw that people really wanted it. We started-

Pablo Srugo (00:44:36):

When did you launch the card exactly? Was it end of 2023? 

Hussein Fazal (00:44:38):

It was around 23. Yeah, around end of 23 is when we launched it. Actually at the start, there was some uptake, there was a great uptake. The big game changer for us, which would probably have been early 24, is when we launched this membership program, which I mentioned to you. And what we did is we launched Super+. Now Super+ is 15 bucks a month and you get a whole bunch of stuff with it. So you get access to this debit/credit card. Before we gave out the card for free, but people got it, but they didn't really use it. They didn't really value it. As soon as we put it behind the paywall and people had to pay 15 bucks a month, we saw usage like skyrocket, right? Obviously conversion rate was lower, signup rate was lower, but when people got it, they really valued it and they started to use it more.

(00:45:30):

When you pay 15 bucks a month for the Super+ membership, you also get access to deeply discounted hotels like I talked about. You can get access to deeper discount. You also get an extra 10% cash back. Every time you book a hotel. You get access to Cash Advances, which is a new product we launched based on our customer demands. So you can go in and you can get a cash advance between 20 and 200 bucks that you got to pay back within two weeks. You get discounts on pharmacy, on gas, on insurance, you get the ability to earn money, so you can fill out surveys, play games, and you can do things to earn money. So all these products were kind of in development roughly at the same time. And then we wrapped everything under the Super+ membership, and that's when things really took off. And it just really changed the trajectory of the business because now not only did we have the transactional revenue of people booking hotels and swiping their card, but we now have this recurring membership revenue of people paying us 15 bucks a month.

Pablo Srugo (00:46:29):

Can you walk me through just even round numbers like zero at mid 2020, and then what does that look like from then till now?

Hussein Fazal (00:46:38):

I would call this probably one of the fastest growing membership programs in the world, and I haven't really publicly shared exact numbers, but what I can tell you is that we are already in the hundreds of thousands of members, and that's incredible because this is hundreds of thousands of members paying 15 bucks a month. So it's not a small hurdle to be able to get through. So it's hundreds of thousands of members paying 15 bucks a month. So you can imagine this is already a very big and profitable business, even if you just look at the membership revenue that's generating.

Pablo Srugo (00:47:17):

But even if we take your 150 million in revenue number, where was that? When you think about your old travel business a year after Covid, two years after Covid, were you already profitable? Were you back to those old numbers that you had pre-Covid or just kind of getting a sense of that kind of trend line?

Hussein Fazal (00:47:35):

I mean, we weren't profitable at the time with just travel. We are at a spot now with the travel business on its own as profitable and everything else under the membership business as profitable. So I kind of think of our business as travel and then financial products and earnings, and then the Super+ membership kind of layers on top of both of that, right? You can become a Super+ member because you want discount in a hotels, you become a Super+ member because you want the card or a cash advance. You become a Super+ member because you want to earn money. And it is kind of like, think of it like Uber One. So Uber One, they obviously have their rides business and they have their Eats business, and then Uber One sits on top of both of them. That's similar to how I think about our business.

(00:48:15):

So you have the travel business and then you have financial products and earnings, and then Super+ sits across all of that. But right now, everything's been lifted, so even the profitability of the travel business has been lifted because you have a good percentage of people who come in and they're like, wow, this is a great hotel deal. I'm going to become a Super+ member so I can access an even deeper discount. I want to get 10% cash back on online bookings. Then that obviously helps the travel business as well. So the recurring revenue of the membership business has really helped us grow and be profitable. And that's why, as you mentioned earlier, we're now at that kind of 40% plus growth number. We're a profitable company across the board because of the membership program that we've added.

Pablo Srugo (00:48:56):

How quickly did it take you just to hit early milestones, like whether it's a million in revenue or 10 million in revenue, something like that, from this Super.com new launch?

Hussein Fazal (00:49:05):

Yeah, I would say that the membership program actually beat all of our expectations. We did not expect it to grow this fast, and it was really a pleasant surprise. And then we did a lot of customer conversations. We did a lot of smoke testing even to come up with that $15. We smoke tested five bucks, 10 bucks, 15 bucks, 20 bucks, 25 bucks, 30 bucks, and we saw what people clicked on if they went through with it. It's harder to test retention. You don't know when they sign up if they're going to stay retained. But on the initial membership sign up, we had some good confidence that the people would pay 15 bucks a month. And so it did take off much faster than I expected. One thing I will say is that people become a Super+ member typically for one reason and one reason only, and then we'll try and cross-sell them to other products within the business.

(00:50:13):

And this is a bit unintuitive. A lot of people think that when I have a membership program, let me add more and more value to the membership. So we have a whole bunch of things that the membership gives you. And logically most people will say, oh, let's add something else. Let's add an extra, I dunno, 5% cash back. If you book an Uber, let's add Paramount+ free for a year. Let's add whatever. And what we saw is that, when we added all these things, it didn't actually increase the growth of the membership program or necessarily even conversion rate when someone was looking to sign up. What happened was we had to narrowly focus on the one reason why someone was signing up. And we had to narrowly focus on how the customer heard about us and what is the funnel from hearing about us to signing up to becoming a Super+ member.

(00:51:10):

So let me explain that. When someone's coming in to book a hotel, they don't really care about all the other benefits of Super+. All they care about is the fact that I can now get even better pricing and I can now get 10% cash back every time I bought the hotel. So if you make that front and centre, that's how you convert them as opposed to telling them all the other things that Super+ gives you. So if you look at the flow, it's very much about become a Super+ member now, get an extra 10% cash back. If you are, let's say on Facebook or on Instagram and you see an ad for a cash advance, all you care about is the fact that you can get a cash advance. You have to become a Super+ member in order to get a cash advance.

(00:51:56):

And becoming a Super+ member unlocks these cash advances of 20 to 200 bucks. The fact that you save 10% on hotels or you get to earn money or you get to get access to discounts on insurance or pharma doesn't really matter. And you can continue with that analogy over and over again. So if you want to build your credit score, you earn Credit Karma, you see this great hybrid debit/credit card that helps you build your credit score, that's all that matters. You're becoming a Super+ member because you want that debit/credit card.

Pablo Srugo (00:52:23):

It's like the whole meeting customers where they're at, giving them the right things. I mean all these little things are basically hooks, but what you say to the right ICP at the right time matters a lot. They might care about all the other things, but they don't care right now in this moment and they're not clicking on that thing.

Hussein Fazal (00:52:39):

It's the job done. Then the other framework I like to talk about is the product market model channel fit. So a lot of people talk about product market fit. I think a lot about what's the business model, which for us a lot of it has been the membership and then what's the channel they're coming in from. So if you are selling hotels or flights, it's a very high intent product. So Google is going to work for you. Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and social are not going to work for you. If you are talking about a cash advance, typically, like Facebook and Google is a great channel, sorry, Facebook and Instagram and TikTok is a great channel for you. If you're talking about credit building, Credit Karma is a great channel for you. If you're talking about earning money, again, social is a great channel for you.

(00:53:28):

So think about your product in what channel works. And for most companies and for most products, there's typically one channel that works really well. I mean if you even want to oversimplify it, think of it as Google versus social. Social, I'll put in Meta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. And what happens is a lot of companies are like, oh, Google is working really well for me. Let me try and also get social to work and they waste all this time and money and it doesn't work. Or social is working really well for me. Let me try and get Google to work and it doesn't work. And sometimes your product just has a natural fit with one of those two channels and you got to figure it out. Now we're in this crazy advantageous situation in that we have multiple products. So we have products that work well for Google and we have products that work well for social. So it allows us to kind of bring in customers from both these major sources.

Pablo Srugo (00:54:21):

What do you think you got sold? Right? Because in the sense that so many people want to either build these all-in-one solutions or these multi-product solutions to kind of expand their market, expand their revenue opportunity, and I find a lot of times it kind of falls flat. It just doesn't really work. You become nothing to everyone sort of thing. You dilute your message, you seem to be doing it the right way. And even in terms of the idea of launching that first product, which was that credit/debit card, which was a little bit unintuitive, there was some serious thinking behind what would be the right thing for my users. Even though other companies in my space might do hotels, they might go that way. I'm going this very different way. But what do you think you got? How do you think about that? How could a founder who's trying to add more products and expand the wallet share of their ICP, how should they think about it?

Hussein Fazal (00:55:17):

Yeah, that's a good question. I would say three things. One which everybody knows is talking to customers and really trying to understand what they want. Two, is we ran a ton of smoke tests. You couldn't imagine the number of smoke tests we ran at different placements on different sources based on different customers coming from different channels.

Pablo Srugo (00:55:37):

You’re talking about landing pages or are you talking about ads? Are you talking about things like that?

Hussein Fazal (00:55:39):

Yeah, landing pages, ads. We ran so much of that way more than I think most people run because we want to know to an exact science, if we built this product, here's where the customers would come from. Here's what the CACs going to be, here's the conversion rate, here's what we expect, the LTB to be down to a spreadsheet science of what would happen. And I think we just do that a lot more and a lot more granular than everybody else. And then three, and this is a big one, a lot of people rely solely on cross-sell. They say, Hey, I have this product and I think that we're going to be able to cross-sell whatever, 10% or 20% into this new product. And what I can tell you is that cross-sell is very, very, very hard to do. And it requires the two products to be very similarly and closely linked together in order to work well.

(00:56:37):

So when someone comes to book a hotel, we have almost no chance of cross-selling them into a cash advance, right? No matter what we do, and no matter how appealing we make it, if someone comes in for a cash advance, we have a really good chance of cross-selling them into earning money. Like they need money, they came to get a cash advance, maybe they got a cash advance, maybe they got denied of a cash advance. But we now present to them an opportunity to earn money, playing games, filling out surveys, doing certain things. So that cross-sell of the two products have to have very similar intent in jobs to be done.

Pablo Srugo (00:57:15):

Yeah, it's the jobs to be done. It's almost like don't forget the demographic. You might say, well, I've got people that are 20 to 30 with this income bracket that live here. So typically they want these things versus, I've got somebody whose job to be done is I need money, therefore here's money and here's a different way to give you money, and a different way to give you money.

Hussein Fazal (00:57:34):

So in that case, when you have a similar job to be done, like cash advance and playing games to earn money, cross-sell words. In any other case, even if you have the same demographic, cross-sell does not work. So then what we thought about, and this goes back to the PMMC model, was can this product live standalone without a cross-sell? And can this product have its own user acquisition channel and on its own be profitable even if the other products didn't exist? So when we launch cash advance or we launch the card product, or we launch earning money, can we buy ads or is there a way for us to get that to be profitable on its own with its own channel and its own flow and its own sign up and its own business model and can that work? And any cross-sell is just bonus after that. And I think that's where people get it wrong. People just cross-sell, like you said, based on demographic. You got to cross-sell based on jobs to be done. You can't cross-sell based on jobs to be done. Then you got to make sure that that new product has its own acquisition channel and that the model and the profitability and the scale of that channel product market model channel fit works out on its own.

Pablo Srugo (00:58:45):

Perfect. Well listen, we'll stop it there and just end with the two questions we always end on. The first one is, actually, let me just do one more question. When did you do the rebrand, the Super.com rebrand?

Hussein Fazal (00:58:56):

Yeah, it was about two to three years ago. So after we had launched some of these products, and obviously SnapTravel wasn't the right name, we briefly rebranded to Snap Commerce, but really we rebranded Super.com about two to three years ago.

Pablo Srugo (00:59:10):

So when did you feel like your true product market fit on this new post-covid Super.com play?

Hussein Fazal (00:59:17):

I would say when we launched the membership program, which is about a year and a half ago, that's when we truly saw it and we were like, yeah, this is a product. There are products that are really going to scale.

Pablo Srugo (00:59:29):

So that product in a year and a half grew to a hundred thousand plus.

Hussein Fazal (00:59:34):

Hundreds of thousands of members.

Pablo Srugo (00:59:35):

Hundreds of thousands paying 15 bucks a month or a year.

Hussein Fazal (00:59:37):

Yeah, 15 bucks a month.

Pablo Srugo (00:59:38):

Yeah. Okay. Well there's some math to be done there in terms of- That's crazy, man. Holy shit. Okay, cool. Then the last question is, if you could go back to yourself, especially given so many ups and downs you've been through back into 2016 when you were just starting SnapTravel with one piece of advice, what might that be?

Hussein Fazal (01:00:00):

Ooh, that's a good one. I would say that for me, and I talked about this kind of halfway through the podcast, the resilience is really important. I think having that mental fortitude to be able to get through things is, for me at least one of my defining characteristics, and I think it's important for all entrepreneurs, despite all the growth and success that we've had. If you were to look at it from the outside or you were to look at Steph Curry or the Tech Wrench articles or even listening to this podcast, you would think it's been all fun and games, but it's been hard, right? Obviously through Covid. But every round we raised, we probably had 50 no’s, literally 50 to a hundred no’s every single round. Seed stage, A stage, B stage, C stage, every single round, 50 to a hundred no's. But you got to have that resilience.

(01:00:57):

And if you believe in the business you're building and you believe in the team that you have, you can get through it. You only need money. And now we're lucky, we don't need to raise money, we’re high growth and profitable. So we're in a really good spot that we don't need to raise money. But every single round we got 50 plus no's. And I sometimes go back and look at my CRM in my pipeline and I'm like, holy shit. And obviously now these investors come up to you and they're like, damnit, I shouldn't have said no and I didn't realise this or that, or whatever reason it is. And I don't hold it against them. Investing is hard, right? But yeah, 50 plus no’s. So the resilience is probably one of the most important pieces. And if you believe in your team, you believe in the business, and you believe in the model, just keep pushing through.

Pablo Srugo (01:01:43):

Love it. Well, thank you man. Hussein, it's been great to have you on the show, dude.

Hussein Fazal (01:01:46):

Awesome. Hopefully you enjoyed it.

Pablo Srugo (01:01:48):

85% of people who listen to the show just started listening to it this year. You're probably one of those people. In fact, the odds are 85%. Guess what? You need to go back. There are over a hundred other episodes that you need to check out that are just as good, if not better than this one. Don't miss out.