Even though my role was that of Community Manager, being employee #7, I was constantly involved in several commercial and product initiatives, through which I approached for the first time to the Agile manifesto.
At Tripwell I was responsible for:

• Community, social media, and localisation management at Schibsted New Ventures, the branch of Schibsted specialised in online marketplaces
• The creation of an anti-fraud task force within the Customer Success team

Mission & Opportunities
We were operating both B2B and B2C, with the mission of conquering the major European markets for holiday home rentals - whilst competing with big players such as Airbnb - and had the unique advantage to be able to leverage Schibsted’s global classified platforms’ user base to scale our services on a European scale.

Failures & Learnings
With such a vast user base at our disposal, I reckon that if we had prioritised providing basic, strategic features that we lacked, users demanded and competitors already offered, we could have retained and engaged a considerable portion of the users we were converting every month.

As a startup approaches a geographically and culturally diverse user base, it can be tempting to execute on the assumption that a successful growth strategy for a specific region will achieve as much success elsewhere. In order to monetise as one expands in new markets, it is essential to make strategic decisions informed by business intelligence analysis: data that can validate or disprove the assumptions made about new markets and competition.