Name: Andrea Vidler
Job Title and Description: Co-founder of LocalAventura
College Name/Major: Cornell, Public Administration
Website: localaventura.com
Twitter Handle: @localaventura
Instagram Handle: @localaventura
What does your current job entail? Is there such a thing as a typical day?
Andrea Vidler: I co-founded a travel tech startup called LocalAventura. The company is a booking platform that that connects local guides with adventurous travelers throughout Latin America for more authentic, unique, and customizable experiences. The social mission of our company is two-fold; first we make Latin American travel more accessible by providing travelers the meaningful, local experiences they have been searching for but may have struggled to find otherwise. Meanwhile we also also provide local guides with key business resources and mentorship they need to help their tour companies thrive.
For anyone who has ever founded, or even worked at a startup, you’ll know that there’s definitely no typical day. My job, at its core, is leading our passionate and hardworking team to success. I also work with our local guides by providing them with mentorship, feedback, and support. Day-to-day my tasks vary a lot, though. I do everything from meeting with advisors, helping clients plan trips, and collaborating on new marketing strategies. Somedays my job even requires me to travel around Latin America to meet with local guides and evaluate the quality of their tours. So far LocalAventura has taken me to Argentina, Peru, Brazil, and Chile, where I’m currently based out of.
What is the best part of your job?
AV: One of the best parts is definitely working with our local guides. I’ve been lucky to meet so many incredible guides across Chile, Argentina, and Peru. Each and everyone of our guides is an entrepreneur, whether they realize it or not. They go through so much, work with small budgets and little support, all for the dream of sharing their home with outsiders. It’s really inspirational to see this drive and it motivates me create a service that can really provide them with the support they deserve. Everytime I hear them talk about their passions, for their hometown, hobbies, and businesses, it really reaffirms my belief in LocalAventura. They have such interesting and unique stories to tell, and I think my fellow travelers deserve to hear them!
What inspired you to co-found LocalAventura?
AV: I was born in Chile, so I’ve spent a lot of my upbringing traveling back and forth from New York to Chile. This originally sparked my interest in Latin America and led me to want to work and travel throughout region. From working in countries such as Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Cuba, I’ve discovered that while all these countries are so unique, they are all bound together by a clear entrepreneurial spirit, especially in the tourism industry.
Through my travels, I also noticed that many of these small business owners really lacked the key resources or time to make the endeavors succeed. This was shame to me, because while tour guides struggled to find clients, I could name so many people who I knew would love their tours but wouldn’t be able to find them without a recommendation. LocalAventura came about as a way to help the guides handle all the hardest parts of running their business, like finding clients, handling payments, marketing, etc., so that local guides can focus on what they do best — leading exceptional tours.
What is one mistake you made along the way and what did you learn from it?
AV: Because I went to business school and was a consultant for several years, I have been trained to be an academic and process-oriented person. I think this has both helped and hurt me when running a startup. It helped me stay organized, and develop a platform that I’m really proud to sell. However, I’ve learned that often times in the startup world you need to hustle and forget about being so organized. Instead of being so systematic and strategic, you need to be action-oriented, and try all sorts of new tactics to see what works. I think since realizing this, I’ve been able to step out of my process-oriented head a bit and find a happy balance between planning and taking risks.
What has been the most surreal moment of your career thus far?
AV: Because at LocalAventura we vet and interview all of our guides, we have gone on a lot of tours, and we have developed a strong sense of what qualifies as a high-quality tour. It’s always surprising when I meet a guide who struggles to find clients and/or is not ranked highly on TripAdvisor, but offers an incredible service. Meanwhile, I’ve met subpar guides or large, low-quality experiences that are on the top of the rankings simply because they have the time and resources to play the online marketing game. Now-a-days, everyone relies so heavily on online reviews, including myself, so it’s been really surreal to see where this system fails and how it has really harmed small businesses. It pushes me everyday to try to fix this fractured market.
What advice would you offer to a 20 something with similar aspirations?
AV: For a 20-something with an entrepreneurial mind, I’d say start by writing all your ideas down, no matter how silly they may seem at the time. Then go and tell your friends and family about these ideas, see how they genuinely react to it and how they think you can make the ideas better.
Once you’ve latched onto an idea that resonates with people and that you personally love, then talk to everyone you can find about the business. Whether it’s advisors, competitors, potential clients, build up your research and your network early on and get others to evaluate and refine your idea.
Then test it. Nowadays, it’s pretty easy to throw up a landing page for less than $100 a year, build a website (we started with SquareSpace’s student discount), and even drive traffic to it. With just a few early posts to Reddit talking about how we were interested in local guides, within a few weeks we got over 250 emails from people interested in working with us. This kind of testing can quickly show you whether you can get traction for your business.
Each step of this process has been key to helping me refine LocalAventura from just an idea into an actual business.