The following interview is a conversation we had with Alexa Berube, Co-Founder of Reposite, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $13.5 Million Raised to Redefine the Way Groups Plan Travel and Events
Alexa Berube
Yeah, no problem. Thanks so much for having me.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Excited chat. So before we can talk about what you’re building there, can we just begin with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Alexa Berube
Sure, no problem. So I’m Alexa grew up in New Hampshire. I went to Santa Clara University out in the Bay Area, and then pretty much since college, I’ve been working in the sales kind of tech startup realm. So started my career at a company called Main Street Hub. We did social media management for small local businesses all across the US. Was there for about four or five years, basically in the entry level 150 cold call game in the beginning and worked my way up to building and running our sales training program. Then pivoted into Sales Management. Ultimately was the director of sales of our New York City office. And then I left there to join another startup called Bettery, which was an online hiring marketplace. Joined us, head of sales there, helped scale that company up from like, five people to we probably were like 300 ish by the time we got acquired back in 2018.
Alexa Berube
And that’s where I met my Co-Founder of Reposite, Heather, and our CTO, Joey, our head of sales, has been with me at Reposite since Main Street Hub and veteran so full Circle. But after that acquisition, Heather, my co Founder, and I just kind of looked at each other and said, that was an awesome ride. We feel like we learned a ton and we feel very capable and prepared to go out and do this on our own, and so that’s what we did. I don’t know if you want me to go into the full kind of story at this point, but that is my background.
Brett
Yeah. So to zoom in on a few things there, mainly just around sales. What was it about sales that attracted you to it? And did you know early on in life that you wanted to have a career in sales, or where did that come from?
Alexa Berube
That’s a great question. No, to be honest, I never thought I would land in sales. I really like, probably not the most inspiring story, but needed the job right out of college. I’ve always been super competitive and played team sports my whole life. So I think those elements of sales lended itself very well to my personality of wanting to compete and be on top of the leaderboards, but feel like I was on a team that was winning and accomplishing something and seeing my results kind of firsthand there. So I think that’s what kept me in it, but I’m honestly kind of stumbled into it after school. I wasn’t quite too sure what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do something big, but how I would get there, I wasn’t too sure in the beginning.
Brett
Nice. I appreciate the honesty there. You could have told me that since you were two years old, you always dreamed about sales but appreciate it.
Alexa Berube
I think I had a notebook that said I wanted to be the first woman president of the United States when I was five. So that was where my brief going. And we’ve landed here. So slightly different, but ambitious nonetheless.
Brett
Nice. I love it. And the question we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder, what book has had the greatest impact on you? And this can be a business book or it could be a personal book.
Alexa Berube
Yeah, my whole sales team will know this for sure because I am making them read it probably for like, the six time now. But Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, I think is my favorite business oriented sales book. Personally, I like a good murder mystery. But never split. The difference is amazing. It’s by the number one hostage negotiator who was part of the FBI for a really long time, and he talks through real life hostage scenarios and how they used negotiation tactics to save lives and how you can also apply those to business and your personal life negotiations. So super interesting, super impactful. Not like an off the shelf, boring sales book. I highly recommend it.
Brett
Nice. Yeah. I think you’re the third person now to recommend it, so adding it to my list, and once I hear three people recommend it, I take it seriously. So I’ll dig into that over the weekend. Good.
Alexa Berube
Yeah, it’s awesome.
Brett
Nice. And let’s talk about Reposite there. So can you tell us just about the origin story and then we can dive a bit deeper into the product?
Alexa Berube
Yeah, so I think we have a pretty interesting founding story. So when heather and I left veteri, just for a little bit of context, her background is really heavy in finance, product and operations. And then clearly, as we’ve been talking, mine is more in the sales and marketing realm. So felt like we just complemented each other’s skill sets really well. But when we left veteri, we just wanted to do something really fun and cool, and we ended up launching a business that is definitely not reposit today. But it did lead us here. So we raised funding for it was called nowaday. And we bought a whole fleet of cars from the 1920s. So Ford Model A’s, Ford Model B’s, Chryslers, Buick, Chevys, you name it. We hired these actors all across New York City, kind of dressed them up like they were in that 1920s era.
Alexa Berube
And we provided these really cool, on demand private experiences for locals and vistas to New York City. And we had mixology classes and it was a really cool thing. We had Drew Barrymore run our launch party. We started booking kind off the shelves right away. It was a big hit throughout that process. It was like kind of our first time. One, stepping away from B2B SaaS, and then two, stepping into the travel industry, which is totally different than recruiting HR or some of these other industries that Heather and I had experience in. And I think just like coming from a tech background, entering that space and operating as an experience provider, partnering with different professional travel planners, it was just super eye opening to us. The whole industry of B to B group travel. And I’m talking about wedding planners, corporate meeting planners, international group planners, student groups, all of the folks behind planning any of those trips or events are operating their business almost entirely offline today.
Alexa Berube
And we knew that because every time someone wanted to book with us, they were calling us, emailing us, like sending us paper checks, asking us to fax things. It was just really super outdated and manual. And the way you met these people was spending 510 thousand dollars to go to a trade show to exchange brochures and shake hands. It felt like we stepped back in time in some way and were really hit in the face with like, whoa, this is a really huge industry. B2B group travel in the US alone is $127,000,000,000. It’s 2019 numbers, but we’re like spiking back to those this year. It’s trending in that direction and it operates almost entirely offline. There’s no book now for group travel. There’s no way to pull together a large event through one tech platform today. And so after just really thinking through that and doing a bunch of discovery calls, we essentially had enough conviction that we wanted totally pivot our experience company into kind of going back to our B.
Alexa Berube
Two B. SaaS routes and basically building an all in one workspace and marketplace to pull together activities, experiences, hotels, menus, restaurants anything that could be part of a group. Itinerary and get those folks easily connected with the planners themselves. And then give the planners a way to basically run their whole business online instead of operating out of outdated spreadsheets, phone calls and emails.
Brett
And why do you think the industry operates that way? And I’m sure you’re not the first Founder to say, wow, look at this massive market opportunity here. And you had super ripe for change and disruption. So why hasn’t been so slow to change and embrace technology, do you think?
Alexa Berube
I think it’s because groups are like they’re really complicated and hard. If you think about all the major technology that exists in the travel sector today, there’s a lot of incredible solutions. They’re just all geared towards consumers. So if you or I want to go on a trip, you’re probably not going through a travel agent. You’re going to expedia, you’re going to TripAdvisor, you’re going to OpenTable or Yelp or any of these things to make your reservations. But when you go to any of those sites and you try to book for 20 people, 30 people, 50 people, it doesn’t allow you to do that. You hit that drop down usually of somewhere between eight to 14, and then it says, call this phone number or fill out this private events form. And when you do that once for one dinner, it’s not a huge deal.
Alexa Berube
Right. Like, if you have to plan a group dinner once, it’s a little annoying. But if you put yourself in the shoes of these professional planners who have to book transportation, multiple restaurants, a hotel, like, Airfare, everything, it becomes super overwhelming to get all of those responses back, just like in a notebook or in your email. And I think no one’s wanted to tackle the issue because of that. It’s very complicated to tackle group bookings. There’s dynamic pricing for everything. So, like, hotels cost different on a Wednesday in a certain season versus a Saturday in prime season, and same with restaurants. It’s like, it’s very dynamic in that. So it is a very large problem we’re trying to solve.
Brett
Wow. Yeah, sounds like it. And is something that’s in house. Do big, huge companies have somewhat in house that’s responsible for this, typically? And are you working with them, or is this working with companies that offer this as a service and you’re helping them deliver this service to their customers?
Alexa Berube
Yeah, so we do work with both customer profiles. There’s a lot of internal meeting planners or EA or office managers who are responsible for planning all the events for their companies. We’ll see that more so at large scale organizations, and then usually they’ll outsource it when it gets to a certain threshold, though. So, like, if you have a President’s Club for 500 employees, it’s typically they’re going to hire a third party planning company to come in and do it at that stage. So we work with those companies as well. I would say that’s more of our user base today are going to be like the professional third party planners. But we do have in house meeting planners as well for the direct corporate companies.
Brett
And just to have an idea of what that looks like. How many independent travel planners are there, would you say, in the US. If you just had to guess?
Alexa Berube
Oh, my gosh. Thousands. There’s so many different types of group travel, and to be clear, Reposite services, anyone who’s planning groups. And so any wedding planner could be a good fit, any student tour operator could be a good fit. There’s tons of people who are responsible for coordinating sports team travel. Corporate travel is massive. And then there’s also leisure groups, and those can be domestic or international. So we work with a lot of receptive tour operators who are responsible for bringing groups from other countries into the US. And a lot of times that’s like a multi day tour where they’re hitting a lot of the major us. Cities, whether it’s an east coast or west coast tour. So those are the groups we’re seeing kind of across the board. I’d say we’re heaviest in probably corporate, and then those, like, international groups are the two largest components that we see go through the platform today.
Brett
And do you see that evolving over time? Do you think corporate is always going to be the majority of the market for you, or how do you see that changing?
Alexa Berube
I do. It’s funny, when we started, were born in the middle of COVID so it’s a very interesting time to be building and launching and raising money for a travel tech company. But when we started, things looked a lot different. It was a lot of domestic leisure groups who were going to national parks, who wanted glamping experiences, who wanted access to hikes and things where they had a lot of outdoor space because that’s what was on the top of everyone’s mind. And then over the past year or two, we’ve really seen a huge return to cities, we’ve seen a huge return of corporate, we’ve seen international travel come back in a really big way, I’d say especially over the past like six to eight months. And so it’s interesting, we collect all the data of every trip that’s going through the platform, everything from budget, number of people, destinations that they’re going to, the audience that the trip is being planned for, and so we’re able to track all those trends over time, too.
Alexa Berube
So it’s cool to see and it’s interesting to see the shift. I don’t see corporate ever going away, and I think the international return has really just started. So I think we’ll see a big push of that in the back half of this year as well.
Brett
And as a travel company, raising funds and trying to bring this to market during COVID did you have family and friends and just people you talked to just ask you, what are you thinking? Are you crazy right now? Or did everyone get it and still see the opportunity?
Alexa Berube
I think I got a lot of crazy looks when we started buying old vintage cars and doing that, and then I think I got a lot of crazy looks as well. When we had bare bones about a product in 2020, just trying to raise that initial round, I think we had a lot of people who didn’t think we could do it and it felt very good to get that first round under our belt.
Brett
Yeah, I can imagine. And then what’s that go to market motion look like? Do you have an enterprise sales team or is it just all product lend?
Alexa Berube
Yeah, we do have a sales team in house on both sides today, but the platform is really by invite only at this stage and we’ve been able to create just a really powerful invitation flywheel that’s led to like, I would say over 90% of our onboards today. So we have organically about 80 to 100 suppliers sign up with no marketing or no outbound sales effort from our end. Our sales team steps in after they sign up, basically to walk them through the different partnership options that we have. And then on the planner side, it’s been pretty organic growth on that side too. We’re starting to do a little bit more direct outreach, but yeah, it’s pretty much been this invitation flywheel and I think the reason it’s worked is because the industry and the relationships exist, right? Like the B, two B group travel space isn’t new.
Alexa Berube
These people have been talking and emailing and calling each other for years and I think they’ve really craved an easy solution to be able to track everything in one place, communicate, connect, give each other updates. And so when one planner comes on, they want to manage their whole vendor database through the reposit network. And so one of the first steps in the implementation process is for them to upload their existing spreadsheet of their vendors. And then if they invite them, those vendors can manage their own profiles. Kind of like how on Yelp a restaurant could add their own photos, add their own menus, and if they want to make changes, we see those updates in real time. Reposite operates the same way, so the planners are incentivized to have as many of their suppliers using the system as possible so that they don’t have static profiles, that they’re responsible for updating and they know they get the most up to date information from their vendors.
Alexa Berube
And then on the flip side, the vendors want to have one place to manage all of their different B, two B partners. So they usually will invite their planners they’ve worked with in the past as well. And so that just really fuels the sales engine. So the second someone signs up, my team is kind of on it and scheduling like a more formal walkthrough.
Brett
Wow, that makes a lot of sense. You have virality almost built into it then.
Alexa Berube
Yes, exactly. The flywheel is definitely real nice.
Brett
And given your background in sales, was it hard for you to transition away from Founder led sales or did you feel okay doing that because you were managing sales teams in the past?
Alexa Berube
I’m totally comfortable, like running and building and scaling sales engines is my bread and butter. And then been fortunate enough about in Q Four, I was able to bring on a VP of Sales to kind of help oversee everything who I’ve worked with across two different organizations now and for close to ten years. So I trust the team is in good hands on that side now.
Brett
Nice. And are there any numbers that you can share to highlight some of the growth and traction that you’re seeing so far?
Alexa Berube
Yeah, so our vendor database is now we just had over 12,000 offerings that we have on the platform today across 6000 locations globally. We are most heavily weighted in major US cities. So think like New York, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Vegas, San Francisco, La. Those types of things. Those were our first markets to launch and are definitely still our bread and butter. And then on the planner side, we have new ones signing up every day as well. I think we’re over like 3000 unique users on that side. And think about it, for each professional planner we work with, they have multiple clients and they’re planning multiple events every month. I would say, like, on average, a medium professional travel planning company is quoting for like 60 to 100 groups a month. And so they can put through really serious volume. Which is why we started with the strategy of going after these third party professional B, two B planners that do volume versus a lot of people asked us in the beginning, like investors included, why not go after corporate first?
Alexa Berube
It’s just the volume is so much lower when you’re going direct to corporate versus through the third parties.
Brett
Interesting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what do you attribute to that success outside of the flywheel? What’s the secret there? How are you able to grow so fast?
Alexa Berube
I think we’ve been through a few successful companies where we had incredible mentors and we really had like a front row seat to see how it’s done. And Veteri was a different industry, but it was a hiring marketplace. And so I think Heather and I both feel very comfortable with marketplace dynamics and knowing which levers to pull to make sure you’re growing supply and demand equally and at a pretty healthy clip. So had it not been for those experiences, I definitely think B, two B marketplaces are super complicated. There’s always like a different hole you have to plug. If we hadn’t seen it and done it before firsthand, I think it would have been a lot more challenging. But I think that experience in particular really helped us scale and then Main Street hub from just like a sales training perspective. And the founders there, I learned a lot about just like, how to build a repeatable sales engine.
Alexa Berube
And so combining those few things, it’s been just a formula, I think, at this stage.
Brett
Nice. I love that. And what about category creation? What are your views on category creation? And for you here, is this a category creation play or is it really just chipping away and redefining that legacy category?
Alexa Berube
That’s a good question. I think we get asked all the time, who are your biggest competitors? And it always feels like a hard question to answer because I genuinely don’t think we have a direct competitor. I think there’s people who do parts of what we offer and maybe serve the same market, but in a different approach. And so when I think through Reposite and like group travel planners, I’m not saying that there’s been absolutely no technology to try to help a planner’s workflow or day to day, but there’s nothing that streamlines it and pulls it all together. So, for example, a day in the Life, they get a new client request that comes in, they need to create and track that project somewhere. Then they need to begin all their vendor outreach, whether it’s through RFPs or through direct quote requests to their existing supplier base.
Alexa Berube
They need quotes from hotels, from venues, from a caterer. They need some team building activities. They need transportation. It’s a lot of moving pieces. They need to get those responses back, ask some questions, figure out who they want to book with, and they need to pull all of that together into a proposal to send over to their client to get final approval on. And then a whole separate thing we do is just dealing with the hairy payments aspect of things because these B, two B planners, sit in the middle of two payment flows. So they need to invoice their end client for the total summary of the trip value. They need to collect that, and then they need to pay out the hotel, pay out the activity provider, pay out the transportation. It’s a lot of moving pieces. Everything I just described they can do through Reposite.
Alexa Berube
So are there other categories going back to your original question and solutions out there for building proposals and itineraries yes, but that’s all they do. Are there purely travel payment solutions? Yes, but that’s the only piece of the workflow they do. Are there other sites where they can go source for hotels? Yes, absolutely. But to have to be on five or six different sites and have no way to pull the trip together and track everything in one place, I think that’s really the core difference that Reposite brings to the table. So in a sense, I would say it’s creating a new category, but yeah, that’s my viewpoint on it. I’m not sure if I fully answered your question.
Brett
No, you definitely did. So super helpful to hear. Now, what about go to market challenges? I’m sure there’s a long list of challenges that you face so far, but if we had to pick one that you experienced and overcame, what would that be?
Alexa Berube
I think in the very beginning we changed our product vision, I would say probably like, maybe even after the first seed round. So we set out at first to basically build like, a CRM and workflow tool for group planners. We had no intention of building a marketplace. I think were like, hey, salesforce doesn’t really work for these group planners. They don’t have a great way to just see, track, and find through their existing relationships what they need. Let’s build that. And I think that worked. It didn’t scale the way that the marketplace did. We didn’t have invitations, like, flowing back and forth and all the planners kept coming to us and saying, like, how do I see the other hotels you work with? Or how do I see the other restaurants? Or I need to find a new transportation company. Mine went out of business during COVID We just heard it enough times that were like, wow, we really need an element of discover in here and a way for people to find and connect with new folks.
Alexa Berube
And so I would say it was hard to build the business in a really big viral, go to market way until we made that shift, and then that really changed everything. Since then, it’s taken off big time. And I’d say there’s been really no challenges, just like, getting new people in front of it or on board.
Brett
It nice. That’s amazing. One question I wanted to ask, which is more on the business side? So three weeks ago, TechCrunch came out with their article. With the incredibly depressing numbers that women founded startups raised, it was like 1.9 or 2% of all funding in 2022. What’s going on? I feel like we put a spotlight not right four years ago, and I just don’t understand how we’ve made no progress, and I think it actually declined. So from your perspective, how do we change this and fix this? Because it just isn’t right and it just seems like it doesn’t make any sense.
Alexa Berube
I know I agree with you, and it’s definitely frustrating and upsetting to see. And I feel fortunate that I do have a community through Forbes and other channels of amazing kick a** other woman founders that I can always lean on and go to and get support in. I think what we need to do is make sure we have women in leadership roles so that they feel confident that they know what they need to do to have the confidence to go out and start their own thing. I think that’s the big thing. I was given a lot of trust and mentorship and leadership very early on in my career. I think I was director of sales at Main Street Hub by the time I was 25. I had like 120 person team under me. And so I was able to build enough confidence that early on and then know it wasn’t a fluke.
Alexa Berube
Go do it again at Veteran, but really from the ground up, build out the whole infrastructure that I knew I could go do it myself after that, had I not had that early belief in me or leadership. And I’m so thankful to Matt andrew, the co-founders of Main Street Hub, and then Brett and Adam at Betterie for just trusting in me and letting me prove that out. I don’t think if I had not been given those opportunities, I would have had the strength or conviction to know that I could go out and do this, because starting a company is pretty hard.
Brett
Yeah, I can see that. And do you think this is going to get better? Do you think we’re going to start to see these numbers increase at all? Or what else can we do to hopefully solve this and address this?
Alexa Berube
Yeah, I think there’s a lot more awareness around it today than there was like, five or ten years ago. I definitely think that’s like a good step in the right direction. But again, I think it’s on every company to make sure they’re giving women really, truly an equal shot and there aren’t removal of these kind of biases in the workplace, because there’s been challenges through my career for sure. But, yeah, I think it’s on all of us to keep bringing it up and making it apparent.
Brett
Nice. That makes a lot of sense. All right, last question for you before we wrap here. So what’s the three year vision for the company?
Alexa Berube
So I think we will literally be the platform that all of Group Travel operates on. That is, our long Term vision is to fully move this offline archaic industry from spreadsheets, from phone calls, from emails into one centralized database. Right now, we’re really working on refining our AI and our matching algorithm, and we are close to having the experience of you put in a project, you put in the dates, you put in the city, you put in the group size, you put in the audience, and we’re able to serve up almost a full itinerary of options for you. And so really taking all of that manual aspect out of travel. And as we continue to collect all this data, our end long term vision is to have this book now kind of functionality for Group Travel. I think we’re taking all the right steps to get there.
Alexa Berube
And so big time goals and big time vision, but we want people to hear Group Travel and think reposit amazing.
Brett
I love that. And that’s certainly an exciting vision. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Alexa Berube
You can follow me on LinkedIn and then our website is just reposite.io.
Brett
Awesome. Alexa, thank you so much for taking the time to chat, talk about what you’re building and share this vision. This is super exciting and look forward to seeing you execute on all of this and making it happen.
Alexa Berube
Cool. Thanks so much, Brett. I appreciate it.
Brett
No problem. Keep in touch. Our.
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