YONDER - LISTENING & LEARNING FROM AGRI-HOSTS

Yonder was building something I was excited about... a travel platform for farm stays and nature-based experiences. A niche space where travelers who actually wanted to slow down and connect with the land could find hosts who were ready for them. I found it on Indeed, liked the mission, and joined pre-launch as the person responsible for getting hosts on board.

The catch: there was no product yet. No listings, no bookings, no proof. Just a vision. My job was to convince farmers and nature hosts, people we eventually called "stewards"... that we’d highlight them in a way travel platforms were not at the time.

I spent the majority of my time at Yonder on the phone and in my inbox. Five to ten calls a day with farmers, ranchers, and nature hosts. Hundreds of emails. No playbook. I proposed HubSpot to my boss, figured out the segmentation, and built the system for inbound leads from the ground up.

I was doing generative research, trying to understand the problem space before there was even a product to test. And what I heard over and over was the same frustration: other platforms didn't understand them or highlight their type of stay. Airbnb attracted guests who showed up expecting a hotel experience. Hosts felt misrepresented, their value wasn't being communicated to the right people, and the wrong travelers were leaving bad reviews for the wrong reasons.

That told me something important: This was more of a trust issue. Stewards didn't need another platform.. they needed to believe this one was built for people like them, and that the travelers it attracted would actually appreciate what they had to offer.

With that understanding, I built the outreach and onboarding system around trust signals.

• Email funnel via HubSpot: Segmented sequences that spoke to stewards in their language, highlighted the niche positioning of the platform, and moved at the pace of someone making a real business decision
  
• Calls as research: Every conversation was a chance to learn what each host was proud of, what they'd tried before, what made them hesitant. That informed everything downstream
  
• Friction mapping post-signup: Once stewards started signing up, I shifted into evaluative research: figuring out where the profile setup process was losing them. What confused them, what they skipped, what felt off
• Cross-functional translation: I sat between farmers, the engineering team, and operations, making sure what I was hearing in the field actually shaped the product.

IMPACT

• 1,000+ host sign-ups during the company's first year on a platform that didn't have a live product yet
  
• Built the end-to-end onboarding communication system
  
• Identified key friction points in the profile setup experience and fed them to the product team
  
• Developed the CRM infrastructure in HubSpot that the team used to manage the entire host pipeline
  

REFLECTION

This was fast-paced and exciting in the best way. Discovering how hosts made the decision to trust a brand with their brand. That process was messy, human, and revealing all at once. It made a lasting impression on me: user research takes patience, gets messy, and requires a ton of curiosity. With that recipe, things start making sense.