Hussein Fazal
Co-founder & CEO, Super.com. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@hussein_fazal ↗super.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Hussein Fazal is the co-founder and CEO of Super.com, formerly known as SnapTravel. Previously, he co-founded the social advertising optimization platform AdParlor, which was acquired by AdKnowledge.
1shows
1appearances
22statements
1resolved
0supported
0contradicted
0%fully supported
Everything Hussein Fazal said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Putting the Super.com card behind a $15 monthly paywall skyrocketed usage
“As soon as we put it behind the paywall and people had to pay 15 bucks a month, we saw usage like skyrocket, right? Like obviously conversion rate was lower, sign up rate was lower, but when people got it, they really valued it and they started to use it more.”
Adding more membership benefits does not improve sign-up conversion
“People become a super plus member Typically for one reason and one reason only, and then we'll try and cross sell them to other products within the business, right? And this is a bit unintuitive. Like a lot of people think that when I have a membership program…”
Multi-product cross-selling fails unless the products share identical user intent
“A lot of people rely solely on cross-sell, right? They say, hey, I have this product and I think that we're going to be able to cross-sell whatever, at 10% or 20% into this new product. And what I can tell you is that cross-sell is very, very, very hard to do.…”
Chat is a bad UI paradigm for searching and browsing products
“We learned that customers, in fact, don't like chat, right, to book and to browse. Like, they like chat for customer service, they like chat for, like, notifications, but they do not like chat for searching and browsing, because it just became so frustrating, …”
Pure conversational AI cannot replace graphical UIs for visual purchases
“Like, ultimately, no matter how good the AI is, If you're buying a hotel room, if you're buying a physical product, if you're doing anything that requires visuals like pictures or a map, you're going to need a UI. That's fundamentally required, right? It doesn…”
98% of hotel customers care only about getting the best price
“98% of customers, all they care about, the only thing they care about is getting the best price, right?”
SnapTravel accessed wholesale hotel rates by operating as a messaging travel agent
“We were considered a travel agent, right? And travel agents usually have access to discounted rates. Like, if you physically walk into a travel, you would have that. And we were a travel agent, right? We were just a travel agent over messaging, as opposed to a…”
Most products naturally fit only one major customer acquisition channel
“And for most companies, and for most products, there's typically one channel that works really well. I mean, if you even want to oversimplify it, think of it as like Google versus social. And social, I'll put in Meta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, right? And wh…”
Super.com received 50 to 100 investor rejections in every single funding round
“Every round we raised, we probably had 50 no's, like, literally 50 to a hundred no's every single round. Seed stage, A stage, B stage, C stage, every single round, 50 to a hundred no's”
SnapTravel generated over $100M GMV with 10-15% margins pre-COVID
“We're doing, you know, probably at that time at least over a hundred million in, in, in GMV like in top line and, you know call it a 10 to 15% margin.”
Super.com allocated over 50% of staff to zero-revenue projects for a year
“There was a good year Where over 50% of our staff were working on non-travel related products and it was generating zero revenue, right?”
Super+ membership has hundreds of thousands of members paying $15 monthly
“We are already in the hundreds of thousands of numbers. And that's incredible, right? Because this is hundreds of thousands of members paying 15 bucks a month”
Super.com is profitable across all units with over 40% revenue growth
“We're now at that, kind of, 40% plus growth number we're a profitable company across the board because of the membership program that we've added.”
SnapTravel executed its first 100 bookings manually before raising $1.2M seed
“We made our first 50 to a hundred hotel bookings, like completely manually. So no automation, not really a single line of code written. And we made about 50 to a hundred bookings. And that kind of kicked us off, and, you know, we raised an early, you know, 1.2…”
Gemini outperforms ChatGPT for some tasks by leaning into UI elements
“I've actually started to find Google's Gemini better than ChatGPT in certain situations because Gemini leans more into a UI, into a Google search.”
A quarter of all hotel rooms go empty every single night
“A quarter of hotel rooms go empty every single night. And when the hotel room goes empty, that's lost revenue, right? That's revenue that they've lost and they're not going to be able to make that up. So they're willing to sell at lower prices.”
SnapTravel raised $40M to $50M in venture funding prior to COVID
“We raised the 1.2 million dollar seed round. I believe at that time we had raised an eight million dollar Series A, and then we did a sort of an extension over there. I think at that time we probably raised, I would say, like, 40 to fifty million bucks probabl…”
SnapTravel's net revenue went negative at the start of the pandemic
“In fact, going to negative, right? Like each day, there were more people requesting refunds than there were people making new bookings, right? So you're literally like refunding money more than new cash coming in, and you're like, wow, this is a bad situation.”
SnapTravel had just four to six months of runway when COVID hit
“I mean, if things had continued with, like, zero new bookings, and the refunds that we saw, and we didn't make any changes, we were talking, like, months, right? Like, four months, six months, like, that type of, yeah, that type of situation”
SnapTravel nearly secured a term sheet from Ctrip before COVID hit
“We were actually pretty deep in discussions with Ctrip, which is kind of like the Expedia of Asia. They were talking about giving us a term sheet. They obviously were like, hey, now's not a good time.”
SnapTravel boosted remaining employees' equity by 10% after pandemic layoffs
“So I think at that time we let about 20 to 30% of our staff go. For whoever remained, we actually increased their equity stake. So we said, whatever equity you have, we're going to bump you up by 10%.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Hussein's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Super.com | 1 | 22 | 0% 0/1 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |