What the first cohort is teaching me

We are onboarding NAMA's first cohort right now, and I am on every call myself. Not because we cannot afford to delegate it. Because these calls are the product roadmap.

Signup takes minutes. That part of the promise holds. Then setup begins, and setup is where the truth lives. A travel agency's rates are its crown jewels, and today they sit in Excel sheets, PDFs and WhatsApp messages, in formats only one person in the office fully understands. Getting that knowledge into a system is the real onboarding, and every agency's version of it is different.

Three things the first cohort has already taught me:

1. Where tenants get stuck during setup: rates, not screens. Our earliest tenants were through registration and first-run in minutes; every "can't quote" moment since has traced back to Masters - a city missing, a hotel with no INR price, USD rates read as rupees. The onboarding UI was never the blocker; the agency's own rate sheet was. Nearly every unresolved line in this week's auto-drafts was a Masters gap - the currency guard, the "no INR-priced hotel" check, and the rate-inbox reader all came from watching that happen.

2. Which integration they ask for first: their own WhatsApp number. The reason is identity, not automation. Every agency wants the customer to see their number and their name, not a shared one - a traveller's trust belongs to the agency's brand. That is why tenant channels only, why the shared NAMA number is intake-only, and why voucher WhatsApp now refuses to send without the tenant's own WABA. Email SMTP is the second ask, for the same reason.

3. What they expected the AI to do on day one: answer the enquiry, correctly, before they had even read it. Not "write itineraries" - acknowledge the customer in under a minute, with the right name and the right missing questions. The failures worth catching are exactly that expectation breaking: "Hi there" instead of "Hi Beena", or a draft that never appeared because the lead was never scored. The bar is simple: the customer feels answered, and the agent never sees anything go out that they would be embarrassed by.

Pre-launch means every customer is a co-designer, whether they know it or not. The agencies in this cohort are taking a chance on a product that is still earning its polish. The least I can do is be on the call.