Startup Interview with So Iizuka, Trambellir's Co-Founder and CEO

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Co-Founder/CEO of Trambellir Sdn Bhd. Serial entrepreneur who has managed enterprises in Tokyo, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur for past 15 years.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

We are Trambellir.com, the Online Marketplace for wellness holiday activities.

What is the origin story?

Travel beyond Food and Sightseeing. Enrich your itinerary with treatments for your health, wellness and beauty.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Our company is managed by a Japanese and Malaysian team. We are pursuing the democracy of medical tourism. One of our founding members has multiple experiences to take volvulus surgeries every 4 years since 4 years old. And other founding member has handicapped with his hands. We know the feelings of patients.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I cannot imagine doing any other things.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

During the pandemic, we have focused on to support local expatriates for their wellness and beauty activities and expanded our business model to Employee Benefit Program to provide variety of wellness treatments for employees to maintain their wellness and mental health during this challenging period for everyone.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We have achieved GMV increased YOY 2019-2020 700%. And YOY 2020-2021 500% to-date.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

Deep learning. We are planning to develop some feature with deep learning technology.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

We have received notification from HackerNoon that we have nominated.

It’s always good to be listed on social platform to expose our brand to pursue our vision.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Keep being bold.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

We all have different level of resilience capability but it doesn’t depends on ages. Our employees has great resilience even they are just graduated.

To maintain mental health is crucially important for everyone especially in this kind of tough situation. People feel that it seems like we all need to be positive thinking in tough situation but we believe that we can share our real emotions and we don’t need to pretend to be positive thinking. There are someone to support you. And Trambellir is also there to support you.