We tore up the planning in the pandemic, says founder of app for women travelers

After hearing a number of complaints from women who travel, designer Jussara Pellicano Botelho, 33, decided to make what is going to be a social network for women travelers.

Sisterwave was born in 2019, which means that the platform for tourism has been around longer in the pandemic than outside of it. Therefore, a dose of challenges is implied. At the beginning of the health crisis, “the first step was to tear up the 2020 plan”, says the entrepreneur.

In the last two years, it has reinvented itself and started to offer not only accommodation through the app but also spaces for sharing ideas and virtual tours.

Pellicano denies having created an Airbnb for women — it is possible to offer only one room on the platform, not the entire house. “We are increasingly moving towards being a social network for the traveling woman”, she says.

The startup has yet to raise funds. In addition to the users’ signatures, the company obtained funding from public notices —R$147,000 in all— and from the support of their families. There are 22,000 women registered and two major awards: one global in the category of gender equality, from the WTO (World Tourism Organization), and another from Desafio Turistech Brasil, from the Ministry of Tourism.

In testimony to leaf, the entrepreneur tells how the first years of the platform were.

Sisterwave came traveling. In 2015, I went with a friend to Thailand and Bhutan. She returned to Brazil earlier and I stayed there for a month alone. I met people who had been traveling for six months, a year, even five years. I believed that travel was the same as a vacation and, as a self-employed person, I saved a lot to be able to travel. These people were digital nomads, they traveled and worked at the same time. Now, with the pandemic, this is very common, but in 2015 it was a rarity.

I came back wanting to become a digital nomad. And I planned during 2016 to visit every continent – ​​a trip that is still open. I did half of South America for six months and then spent another three months in Europe.

Along the way I met many other women who were traveling and often heard that there could be a travel platform similar to the existing ones, but geared towards women. As a designer, I saw that I had an opportunity. I returned to Brazil in November 2017 and performed at Startup Weekend Women. At the end of the event there was an award and we took first place. That’s when Sisterwave was born.

I heard many reports during the trips that motivated me to create the platform. Women being harassed at the hotel reception and putting a chair at the door to get to sleep, for example.

During a trip to Ecuador, I received a tip from a Brazilian woman: always ask women. Because they speak things that are invisible to men. And so I experimented with what information the man and the woman gave to the same question. “What time is it good for me to come back?”, for example. The difference was about two hours. And there were some alleys where only the men passed, the women took a longer turn. There’s an invisible curfew: if something happens to a woman at a certain time or place, it’s as if it’s her fault.

What I’m telling you now is a bad part, but there are wonderful connections you make when you’re traveling alone. You’re much more open to new friendships, you create your own script, you don’t have to make many deals with other people. What we want is to make the trip more peaceful, because traveling is very transformative.

It is very interesting to travel alone if you have the opportunity to be silent and at a slower pace than ordinary life demands. A few years ago, I was looking for what my purpose was. I had a eureka moment in Montañita, in southern Ecuador, a coastal area. It was an epiphany: I had clarity of purpose. There are three pillars: being in touch with nature, eating creative things and doing actions with social impact. After that, it was very easy to say yes to what is mine and to say no to what is not.

Sisterwave is a supportive community for the female traveler. They create their personal profiles and access the profiles of others. There is the community as a whole —that friendly contact, asking for tips, arranging to travel together — and there are travel service providers.

We started with accommodation, during the pandemic we did virtual tours and now we are undergoing a transformation of the platform based on three pillars: internationalization, expansion of services and match of interest. The user tells the platform what her travel style is and, using artificial intelligence, we make this pairing.

There is a possibility that we can start renting the entire house, but one of our great values ​​is this connection. More than a marketplace, we are a community. We are increasingly moving towards being a social network for the traveling woman.

Our first year of operation was in 2019, when we strengthened the brand. We’re talking about security, and no one knew about Sisterwave, so some women thought it was a scam. There were 98 accommodations that year.

Then came the pandemic. We used to say “go travel” and then the pandemic arrived and we started saying “stay at home”. The first step was to tear up the 2020 plan and look at the startup logic: create minimal viable products.

To find out what to do, we took it to the community itself, interviewed some users. We reach groups, which are spaces for sharing, and virtual tours, which are online experiences in which a destination expert presents you. It is live and is a way to plan a trip. Sometimes you are in doubt between two destinations, pay a much lower price than a trip to get to know a little bit and decide where you are going.

I realized things were tough in August 2020 when my first partner left. And at the end of the year the other partner announced that he was going. It was a moment of crisis. I wondered if I continued or not. In those moments I turned to my entrepreneurial friends. It was time to say: “either go or crack”, and then came the awards. A sign that I was on the right path. Now we have a team of ten people and we are four partners.

Entrepreneurship as a woman has its difficulties. Sometimes a reference is missing. The advice I have for all entrepreneurs is: connect with other women who have gone through similar challenges. It’s happened that I go to a venture capital event and only have me as a woman. It was the feeling of stepping into a men’s room. I thought I didn’t belong there.

After that initial thud, I changed. If there’s me, there’s at least one woman there. May I open doors to make it easier for the next ones.