Travel that made me an entrepreneur amidst fun & chaos

It was almost a year of living in the US, and my then-partner & I were invited to a beautiful wedding in Los Angeles. After spending a weekend amidst love and celebrations, we headed to our Airbnb in the Westside neighbourhood of LA to enjoy the rest of our stay. We had chosen a beautiful house to spend some cosy time in LA and devoured all the amazing Mexican food. Although LA is a full-blown city, unlike Manhattan (where I lived at the time), there was no easy public transportation, and we still did not have our driving license, which is why we had to book expensive Uber cabs to move around. It was manageable, however, on our last day, when we wanted to explore Venice Beach, we realised that after our Airbnb checkout, we may have no place to drop off our luggage, and there was no way to explore those beautiful beaches with all our suitcases. It was a bummer to a potentially romantic day!

We were quite perplexed at the thought of Americans not having found a solution to this pain point. Or aren’t there enough people going through this problem? Keeping these thoughts within our ongoing rant, we reluctantly went to the airport, checked in our bags and Uber’ed back to the beach. Half a day was lost, but I was not going to waste another minute sulking about this half-day hiccup. I started soaking in the beautiful, endless beach, got ourselves the bikes, danced with the random troops and saw a glimpse of what makes Venice Beach such a tourist attraction.

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On our way back to New York, we continued to chat about how wonderful it would have been to spend the whole day at the beach had it not been for the lugging problem. As we chatted, we both thought of finding a solution to this problem and started thinking of a startup idea. It was a perfect thought because I was not very happy in my new job, and researching this idea would be a great purpose for now. As we returned, I took the initiative of creating a questionnaire and started talking to the pedestrians in New York City to validate our problem. Those who haven’t been to New York City must know that pedestrians are always in a rush and do not like to be stopped to ask questions (most of the time). After many rejections and some snubbing, I managed to collect a lot of data, and it seemed like the overall representation of the sample size was big enough to act on that idea. From that idea, some grassroots-level resourcefulness, a few SEO driven blogs and many conversations later, a company called Vertoe was born. We made a basic website and started the basic operations in New York City.

The experience of going through a frustrating morning during a vacation day helped us solve a problem that wasn’t going to solve world peace but getting customer feedback on how their overall travel experience improves when they don’t have to lug around their bags so they can enjoy their time on their holiday was a huge boost to my self-confidence. It showed me that while having the most fun, you can allow your creative juices to flow, and if a problem is getting solved along the way, you can experience what entrepreneurship looks like, like it did for me from 2017–2020 as co-founder and CMO of Vertoe.

I have captured what the experience of building that startup looked like in this Forbes article about building a company from a place of authentic creativity. Vertoe is not actively functional today as it used to be according to this Business Insider feature story. But it was a creation from a space of love, companionship, and the mutual love for travel.You can also read it here.