The Two Numbers This Founder Watches Above Everything Else?

You started the company at 23 with no outside funding.

What did staying independent allow you to do differently? And what has made growth harder?

I think there are pros and cons to every path that a business can take, whether you bootstrap, whether you receive funding.

There's perks and hardships that come with both routes.

I knew early on that I wanted to bootstrap, and that was a decision I made right off the bat.

If you think about businesses in 2016, this was like the heyday of Girlboss and accelerator programs and Y Combinator.

And it was right when Uber and Lyft were really taking off and social media was becoming huge and everything out there was VC backed with hockey stick growth and seemed very glam and very exciting.

And my first job out of college was at a venture-backed startup.

And I found it really invigorating in a lot of ways, but I could tell that there was a ton of pressure on the company's growth and the company's performance coming from the VC firms that backed it.

And that felt really intimidating to me.

And so I think at first, the decision came from just feeling intimidated by that requirement to grow, right? But I also knew that the company would be profitable pretty quickly because the way that Pack Up and Go works, our travelers are prepaying for their vacations and then we use their funds to book their vacation, but we take a little cut out of it.

And because the company was just me and my laptop and I was working out of a co-working space, my expenses were really low.

And so I knew that I didn't need venture-backed funding to accelerate the growth.

And I wanted it to really be a sustainable company.

Both of my parents ran their own businesses for decades.

And I really liked the idea of having a company that was self-funded, that I maintained 100% control over, that could grow and be healthy and provide me with a healthy salary and employ a couple of team members and grow sustainably over the years and provide an exceptional service to our travelers that we maintained control over.

that wasn't dictated by someone else's terms or someone else's timeline for growth.

That was my original business plan.

And I am still to this day really glad that we did it.

Of course, there have been times, especially during the pandemic, where I thought, wow, having somebody else's money right now would be really helpful and maybe give us a little bit more of a cushion.

But it has forced us to really think about what is the profit model here and how do we ensure that we stay in business? And what I've come to realize is that there are basically two KPIs that I think matter most.

The business cannot exist without either one, and they have to always be in balance.

One of them is your profitability, because if your business is It'll stay a business, but if it's not, you go out of business.

The second is your traveler or your overall client satisfaction.

Because if you have a business that your clients love, but you're not profitable, you're you're not going to stay in business.