Dtravel

The short-term rental market is dominated by a small number of platforms that take 15–20% per booking and control the relationship between host and guest. The thesis behind Dtravel was that Web3 could fix this — give hosts more control, reduce fees, and distribute ownership of the network to the people who actually built it.

The thesis was right about the problem. The harder question was how to make it work for real operators who needed practical tools, not a philosophy, and a broad spectrum of hosts who differed vastly in their needs as hosts.

We launched in June 2021 with a $7M seed round from investors including Kenetic Capital, Future Perfect Ventures, DHVC, and AU21 Capital. The TRVL token launched in November 2021 across MEXC, Bybit, Gate.io, and Polkastarter. By TGE launch in December 2021, we had 250,000 homes across 20,000 destinations available for crypto booking.

My role started in growth, marketing, and community, and expanded into full company leadership when I became CEO. As CEO, I owned product and strategy direction, fundraising, hiring, board management, partnerships, PR and the operating cadence of a 30-person team through the 2022–2024 crypto market reset.

The most important thing we did during that period was change what we were building. Early 2022 market research — interviewing hundreds of operators — made it clear that professional hosts didn't need a decentralized marketplace. They needed practical infrastructure to reduce OTA dependence: PMS integrations, branded direct booking sites, payment flexibility, damage protection, and control over their guest relationships.

We phased out the marketplace and built Dtravel Direct instead — think Shopify for short-term rentals. Operators connect their PMS, launch a branded booking site in just minutes, accept crypto and fiat payments, and remain the merchant of record so they'd always be in control. We processed the world's first on-chain hospitality booking facilitated by a smart contract in 2022. By 2023, we had integrations with Hostaway, Uplisting, RentalWise, and others, Google Vacation Rentals distribution, $5M damage protection through SuperHog, and BNPL via Affirm and Klarna.

Decision 1: Build the product first, integrate token utility second. The dominant Web3 playbook in 2021–2022 was to lead with the token and bolt on a product later. We did the opposite — built the booking platform first and were deliberately slow to integrate token mechanics. We didn't want to be a token in search of a use case and wanted to legitimize what we were doing because we were here for the long run. The flaw was that our growth strategy still depended on crypto-native users and token incentives, while the product was being built for mainstream operators. The two strategies were pulling in different directions.

Decision 2: Build for non-crypto hosts, crypto-native guests. Hosts onboarded with normal UX — no wallet required, and Dtravel looked and felt like Booking or Airbnb. Guests paid in crypto natively. The thesis was that native crypto users would bring net-new demand to hosts who wouldn't otherwise see it. In execution, our native integration limited which chains and tokens we could accept, and adding new ones was technically expensive. The crypto-native guest pool was smaller than we thought, and credit card guests had no compelling reason to switch from Airbnb, where supply was vastly larger. We ended up serving neither audience fully.

Decision 3: Target professional hosts via PMS integrations. Pro hosts bring more supply per acquisition and were more visibly frustrated with Airbnb's policies because they were less well served and more affected by policy changes. So we built PMS integrations and went after them. The tradeoff: professional operators evaluate software as a business tool — they care about reliability, conversion, and operational fit, not token upside. Token rewards would have been more meaningful to smaller hosts building income gradually, who also would have generated the community and user-generated content a token-distributed network needs. We chose volume over alignment. We also couldn't leverage my existing large community of hosts because they all fell into the smaller host category and weren't the right user persona for the product we were building — a large potential pipeline without any way to service them.

The meta-lesson: We made three decisions, each individually defensible. But they didn't cohere as a single strategy. Web3 marketplaces need either a fully crypto-native loop where token utility is the core value proposition and token and chain interoperability are built in, or a fully mainstream loop where crypto is invisible infrastructure. Strategic cohesion — every major decision pulling in the same direction — matters more than the quality of any single decision in isolation. That's the muscle I want to bring to a senior PM role.

Pick a side and commit. Either fully crypto-native — accept the smaller addressable market but build a tight loop where all demand-side users in that persona could use our product — or fully mainstream with crypto as invisible infrastructure. Trying to serve both audiences in one product surface created complexity that slowed every decision.

I'd also have targeted average hosts with token rewards from the start. Pro hosts were the right segment for supply acquisition. They were the wrong segment for a token-incentivized network.