Jubair Bin Amin is the co-founder and CEO of vromon.com, a recently launched Travel-tech startup in Dhaka. Graduated from BUET [CSE], Amin is not new to the world of startup and entrepreneurship. He is one of the co-founders and directors of rokomari.com. Earlier he founded hatbazar.com, which he had to discontinue for reasons. Jubair took ample lessons from his journey and has learned a lot from his failure.
Jubair started Vromon along with his co-founder, from the same institution, Mamun Zaman. Mamun has his share of experience in the world of startups and entrepreneurship.
Recently, we had a chance to speak with Jubair about Vromon, early days, challenges of building a travel startup, and future plan for Vromon.
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Give us a little bit of background story and what is the core idea?
Last year I went to Kuakata for few days. It was a good tour but I missed lots of fun and faced difficulty finding information regarding food, tourist spots and more. I came to realize that there is no complete travel solution services online and there is definitely a need for such a service. That’s when the idea of building something to solve this problem came to my mind. Vromon aims to solve this problem.
There are too many things to do. At Vromon our plan is to make travelling easy and simple and let you have all the fun when we do everything for you related to travelling. Now we offer tour packages, online hotel booking service, location information, information related destinations, tourist spots, and local food and more.
It is easy to find outbound tour packages, usually offered by tour operators. But it is quite difficult to find domestic tour packages and other relevant services. We are building a platform where you can finalize your complete tour schedule from home regardless of destination.
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When and how did you get started?
We started working on the platform form May, 2015 and officially launched on 12 December, 2015.
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We have few more Travel startups launched recently. How Vromon is different from those?
We are building a product that meets all your travel needs starting from planning to booking to executing your tour plan. We have collaborations with tour operators to offer best packages possible and make your life easy.
You can book hotels for your stay in a destination, buy your bus/transportation tickets, or rent private one from our selected vendors, we help you to find local guide to explore a site better, help you to find and choose best local foods and destinations.
We have built-in review option on our platform. You can review a destination and see reviews of previous tourists before choosing your travelling destination.
We have now 100+ hotels on Vromon platform and we are adding new services and options everyday. Since we have strong relationships with hotels we can manage booking within shortest possible time..
Top of that, our experienced operation team will guide you to select few famous outbound tours in India, Kashmir, Malaysia, and Thailand with Visa assistance. We aim to build a strong travel community in Bangladesh.
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How is the growth, so far?
We have just started out, two weeks, and received tremendous response from the market. In last two weeks, we had 22k visitors on our website. People are highly interested and frequently asking about vromon.com. We have already served 50+ bookings in the first week. We are still doing background works and growth will accelerate further once we start promoting our service actively.
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Tell us about funding.
We started off with a small angel fund. Since our launch two weeks ago, we are in talk with few renowned venture capital firms in London, Bangladesh, and Singapore who are interested in what we are doing.
Tourism is one of the fastest growing sectors in Bangladesh. In the coming days, things will only get better. We aim to build country’s largest tourism platform with best technology and team.
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What is the current team size of Vromon?
We consider team to be the most critical for any startup success. We are a team of 15 full time members looking after technology and business operation along with 3 to 4 part-time employees.
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Let’s talk about challenges and problems.
This is a relatively new idea in Bangladesh. As a result, building trust is the most critical challenge.
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What is your future plan?
To build a complete travel platform. Now, you can book hotels from our site, we will launch ticketing, restaurant information with food items very soon. Within next year, we are targeting to add 1000 hotels to our platform.
We want to build a travel community in Bangladesh. Very soon, we will launch Bangla language website too.
