Hospitality / Tourism / Community / Growth Systems
RIVERSIDE ECOLIVING
A hospitality project where growth, community and daily operations had to be designed together.
- Hospitality
- Growth
- Community
- Systems
Introduction
Riverside began as a rural hospitality and coliving project in Jericó, Colombia. The challenge was never simply to operate a place to stay. It was to understand how hospitality, community, customer experience, growth and daily operations could work together as one system.
2019–Present · Founder, Product Strategy, Growth, Operations & Customer Experience
OBSERVATION
Over time, the project became a living environment for observing how people behaved when work, travel, community and nature occupied the same space.
More than 1,100 international guests and 700 international volunteers passed through the experience. Conversations, post-stay feedback, purchasing behavior, acquisition data and day-to-day operations became a continuous source of product insight.
The questions became more useful than the assumptions: What made people stay longer? What created more value for guests? What increased average spend? Where was the acquisition system breaking? What was actually improving the guest experience?
PROBLEM
The business was growing, but growth created a deeper systems problem.
Acquisition, hospitality, community, product development and operations were being treated as connected activities without always behaving like one system.
The objective became to improve the guest experience while increasing retention, average order value and revenue — without losing the community and human experience that made Riverside valuable in the first place.
SYSTEM
The work moved from isolated tactics toward an integrated growth system.
Customer observation informed product decisions. Product decisions informed the offer. The offer informed acquisition. Acquisition data revealed friction. Guest behavior informed retention. Operations made the experience repeatable.
- Observation
- Customer insight
- Product development
- Acquisition
- Experience
- Retention
- Revenue
- New observation
ACTION
- 01
Redesign the acquisition funnel
Integrated SEO, Google Ads, Meta Ads and lifecycle marketing around a clearer understanding of the customer and the product. - 02
Develop complementary products
Additional products were identified and developed around observed customer needs and purchasing behavior. - 03
Improve the experience continuously
Guest feedback, behavior and retention became inputs for repeated product and operational changes. - 04
Connect the systems
Marketing, product, customer experience and operations were treated as one continuous feedback loop rather than isolated functions.
RESULT
+50%
Sales in six months
+27%
Average order value
70%+
Voluntary stay extensions
Evidence & outcomes
The results came from changing the system rather than optimizing a single channel: acquisition, product development, customer experience and retention were improved together.
WHAT I LEARNED
Growth was not primarily a traffic problem. The deeper problem was understanding the product and the behavior around it.
The right complementary product can increase value without requiring more customers.
Retention is not only a customer-success metric. In hospitality, it can reveal whether the experience itself is creating enough value for people to choose to stay longer.
Riverside became an early laboratory for the way I work today: observe first, understand the system, experiment, measure the outcome, then redesign.