Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Glamping Hub CEO Ruben Martinez (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about financing? Did you bootstrap it? How did you get it off the ground?

Ruben Martinez: At the very beginning, it was bootstrapped. It took about two years, more or less, before we got our first angel round. We had a small round that allowed us to invest in a little bit of technology and hire a few people.

We just realized that for a high-growth strategy, we needed capital. For any business owner, they don’t like giving up equity. We knew that that was the only path forward for us to grow at a fast pace. We figured that since we were early into this market, somebody is going to pick up on it.

We raised our first seed round. After that, we raised three rounds in total. We had some professional investors.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these angels? Were they Denver angels?

Ruben Martinez: No, they’re actually international. The first angels were based in Spain. It was just through the network that we had. It was a very difficult and daunting process. Nothing really discourages you more than pitching in front of people day in and day out and people just declining.

We finally found a really good fit with some angel investors. It was just basically through the network and pitching as much as possible. 

Sramana Mitra: Your angel round is investors from Spain. 

Ruben Martinez: Correct.

Sramana Mitra: How much was the amount that you raised?

Ruben Martinez: Around $200,000.

Sramana Mitra: That was in 2015.

Ruben Martinez: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: $200,000 in 2015. What milestones were you able to hit with that?

Ruben Martinez: One of the first ones was to become a transactional website. We had gone through an outside company to help build our technology. It worked okay, but it was very difficult to make any changes or to scale.

When we built our own platform from the ground-up, the first booking was a huge milestone. That milestone, in itself, of building your own technology and having that first proof of concept was great. The other milestone was just getting through close to 5,000 listings on the website. That showed us that there was a big appetite for this globally.

Some of the reservations that investors had at the beginning was that this was not a global idea. The fact that we were adding accommodations all over the world and we couldn’t keep up with them showed that it’s not just a UK idea. This is really a global idea. 

Sramana Mitra: What is the next inflection point in the business?

Ruben Martinez: You don’t know what you don’t know, and we’re trying to do our best to figure out what the plan was. At that point, we had committed to increasing our internal technology and having a significant marketing effort.

The next one after that was really formulating a viable plan, whether it was the right one or not. We took the steps to do our best to look five years down the road and create a plan that everybody would grab on to. When you’re going into an industry that’s very new, you don’t have a lot to hold on to.

You’ve got to take the information in and do your best to make some good  decisions. The next point after that was creating and executing some version of a plan that would get us to the next pitstop.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Glamping Hub CEO Ruben Martinez
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