Week #38: Without borders & limits
Every week, I sent you an email to crystallize ideas that I have in mind and to inspire you about working remotely, investing in startups, networking and personal growth.
This newsletter is an invite only, if you read it, it means we share the same passion and have the same vision about business and lifestyle.
🗓️ My week with Bullets points, perfect for lazy people.
While working from coffee in Medellin, I'm impressed by the amount of people working behind a computer 💻 far away from their hometown. I explore ideas and business that can support this new trend.
Mobile First B2B business in emerging countries 🌍 are mind blowing. Inspired by Khatabook.com (raised 100M$), who convinced 40 000 000 Indian businesses, I interviewed the Colombian Competitor.
"Is Medellin Safe?" 🇨🇴 the most common question that people ask me! Let me explain to you, with statistics, how safe this Jungle is.
I Interacted with a lot of Colombian Startups and remote projects: Ayenda.com, Treinta.co, plumia.country, launchhouse.co, acasa.com.co, nesspay.co...
Concept of the week: The 3 metrics I'm following when I'm building an Outbound Strategy with a concrete example of Ubu.
Meeting interesting people: Hugo Mercier (Founder), Mario Moscatiello (VC), Jordan Antunes (Growth Freelance), Nicolas Penaranda (Founder), Alfredo J. Prieto (Employee)
Business idea: Why not launch a Real Estate Marketplace in Colombie?
My Linkedin Account got banned for 24h! Let me tell you how crazy I depend on it.
My next destination: Río de Janeiro 🇧🇷
LATAM means Latin America (South + Central America)
What is coming? Secure one investments in Cybersecurity insurance: Stoik.io
🚀 Zoom on a startup that I love: Khatabook.com 🇮🇳
In emerging markets, hundreds of millions of businesses leapfrogged the PC to the mobile, that means that they adopted SaaS who are Mobile First. If you ever travel to emerging countries, you may discover that most of the retail economy is driven by small and independent stores. All this small business owner, manage their business with a 🖊️ and a 📒.
Khatabook, who attack the Indian market, helps those businesses to digitize themself. They replace the notebook and all the effort that this entails to a simple mobile application. From Accounting to Inventory and also Payment, with a single app, they can manage all the business.
Launched in 2018, they onboarded 40 millions of businesses across India and just raised 100m$.
Last week I had the chance to interview the alternative business in LATAM: Treinta.co (Last Y Combinator), and the numbers are also fascinating, 1,2 millions of users with 12 millions seed round. They also bring a powerful feature to create a simple shop (Shopify style) for every business in 1 click and have a seamless integration with WhatsApp. I will continue to build a strong relationship with Treinta, and maybe be part of the Serie A Round.
🚀 Others startup that I discovered or connect last week:
Treinta (Treinta.co) 🇨🇴 #Seed #YCombinator – The Super App to digitalise your small business in LATAM. I already share a lot of details above, it's the perfect mix of mobile first, accounting, scalability and emerging country. The company was launched by a Spanish guy (ex Mc Kinsey) and did an impressive seed round.
I will secure my spot for the Serie A if the valuation is aligned with my investment strategy.
Ayenda (Ayenda.com) 🇨🇴 #SerieB – Biggest Budget Hotel chains for LATAM with 300 hotels. 75% of hotels in Colombia are independant, the company launched in 2015 by engineer deploy an ERP (Software to manage the hotel) for Hotel Owner. During the first 2 years of the company they struggled to distribute the software, the recurring revenue was low, and the distribution a nightmare, despite the fact they were quite creative on the Cold Calling on Whatsapp.
They came up with a strategy to build a hotel chain, and rather than only sell the software, they guarantee an increase in the number of booking, in 3 years, they onboarded 300 hotels and multiplied the revenue per hotel by 20. You can find another similar business in India (OYO – oyorooms.com).
My learning: Pivoting your business model to find a better way to distribute your software.
Plumia.country 🌍 #Idea – Infrastructure for living anywhere, with the function of a geographic country. This crazy idea to build a country on the internet for Digital Nomad. It's still super early, but promising. In a world where you are not a fiscal resident of a dedicated country, with the blockchain and API, I'm sure this type of project can happen.
Launchhouse.co 🇺🇸 #Seed – A physical and online community for ambitious people who want to create. Started as private coliving for entrepreneurs, the idea was to rent a house with talented people who organize workshops and routines to create ideas. I particularly love this idea for a real estate opportunity, the world of business traveling is changing, and coliving is just at the beginning.
Acasa (Acasa.com.co) 🇨🇴 #Seed – Buy the house of your dreams while you sell the current one. In Colombia, to purchase a house, the bank asks you for 30% of upfront payment, in comparison, I paid 10% to buy my flat in Paris. Most of the Colombian people don't have a solution to switch/change houses because of that. Nicolas, the CEO of Acasa, explained to me how they are working. Inspired by Zillow, they gave you the money upfront to take a new house, and manage the sale of the old one. They just raised 4M$ to accelerate on the Colombian market.
NessPay (Nesspay.co) 🇫🇷 #Pre-Seed – Solution to allow employee to request an early payment of their payroll ("Avance sur salaire"). In France, it's a law, you can ask your employer to get pay in advance, based on some rules. Most of the companies don't give the opportunity to employees to do it because of the complexity of processing a payroll in France.
Nesspay is doing the job, giving the money to the employee easily and charging the company for the services. "Flexible Pay" is a strong trend in most of countries, Gusto 🇺🇸, Payflow (YC S21) 🇪🇸, Rosaly 🇫🇷 and some in emerging countries.
My opinion: The distribution challenge for that type of positioning (targeting HR team inside Big corporation) is not feasible, only partnership with Payroll or ERP can work. The idea to deploy a B2C solution can be powerful.
Freedomsurfer.com 🇨🇦 #NotAStartup – Holding as a Service, they help Digital Nomad people to set up a company and become a fiscal resident of a third country to simply manage their business. The blog contains a lot of information, and the CEO proposes very cheap services to Digital Nomad. The idea is mainly based on the approach that some countries (US, UK, Hongkong) don't taxe income coming outside the territory. I interviewed Simon the owner, and he explained to me his business model and some basic aspects of his business.
My learning: Most of the digital nomads earn between 200/80k and the banking, accounting and fiscal aspect is a pain point for them. I still believe there is a way with API and open banking to create an interface on top of local providers that allow Digital workers to simply run their business and personal life.
💡 Concept of the week: What are the KPIs that you need to track when you do an outbound strategy
I started to work for UBU, the social CRM on top of Instagram that helps Digital Brand build a community. After a successful seed round they accelerated the growth based on an outbound Strategy. I'm building the first reporting and KPIs and wanted to share the framework with you.
Most of the company focuses on reply rates or closing ratios. This is a truncate vision of the outbound strategy, for that reason I created the report and here are the KPIs that I'm tracking:
# Number of Brand Engages: Week after week we attack companies, whatever the number of touchpoints and contact, the most important is to keep an account view. We're a B2B business selling to Brands, let's track that. By tracking this number, you will also bring in the mindset of your sales team that the number of emails is not a northstar and focus them on the end goal: Number of Companies using your product!
# Number of Brand Interested: contacting people generates interest (I hope for you), so we decided to track the number of people who are interested. We use a simple spreadsheet at the moment, where the sales team puts the number of positive answers and meeting booked that they got. It's important to not only focus on the number of meetings because early stage companies always struggle to make lead advances in the pipeline, at least we know we have a pool of interested people blocked somewhere.
# Number of Brand Converted: closing companies is our top priority, converting a market into customers. At the end of the month or year, the number of new customers is the # north star. ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) only talks to VC and founders, but the number of customers is universal, and it's the simple metric that you need to track and communicate to your team.
It can be basic, but yes I love simplicity! With these 3 KPIs I can get an idea of the blocker and lever of growth for business. Also this is easy to communicate and to use with junior people to make changes in the organization.
🤝 Social life! Let’s see the interesting people that I met this week
Hugo Mercier #Founder (ex CEO of Dreem), a hardware that helps people sleep better. He is also exploring his new journey and we talk about how the idea is important behind launching a startup. We both decided to take some time before launching a project and explore the industry or problem during a few months before building again.
Mario Moscatiello #VC (VC Investor @Flex Capital), a talented Growth who turned into VC, also became a very close friend. We have monthly catchup to share our deal flow and ideas, it's mind blowing how we're always looking for the same subject. After 30 days without interaction we were both exploring the FinTech LATAM market. Cheers Marco, we don't need to wait another 30 days 🤣.
Jordan Antunes #Growth, Paid Acquisition expert who moved to Rio 🇧🇷 and become digital nomad, I learn a lot about the paid strategy for DNVB and the different setup possible as a Digital Business Holding. Definitely one of the first person to have a beer in Rio next month.
Nicolas Penaranda #Founder (CEO of Acasa), with a particularity to speak french fluently after studying in a French "Collège" in Bogota, he explained to me a lot about the real estate market in Colombia and connected me with an ambitious startup here.
Alfredo Prieto #Talent (Business Analyst @Nubank), after studying in ESCP in France, Alfredo went back to Colombia to launch Fair Money (French startup in the micro loans) as Country Manager, he lived a very similar experience as me during the covid as Country Manager for an early startup far away from the HQ. Post covid, Fair money closed the LATAM business to focus on Nigeria and he decided to move to the biggest Neo-Bank in Brazil. We also talk a lot about our vision of Real Estate for Colombia.
🤔 Why not launch the Real Estate Marketplace in Colombia?
Quick fun fact about Colombia: 75% of real estate transactions happen after a call to a number display on the windows of the property.
Let me explain to you, in Colombia, there is no independent marketplace where you can list your flat, house to rent or sell. So most of the owners are printing their phone numbers and sticking them to the balcony or windows. You don't believe it, but this is how I found my flat here!
My idea is to pay a student to walk in the streets (with binoculars), note down numbers, ask the doorman of the flat more information and then post that into a marketplace with a nice search and maps! The owners can pay to post their listing and manage their post without any agency exclusivity. If we capture the SEO and Traffic, we secure the market!
🌍 Travel stories – Why do I love Medellin 🇨🇴 ?
"Is it safe?" that’s the #1 question that I received, and not only for my mum, also from young people who are used to traveling the world. As you may know Netflix is the biggest enemy of Colombians, and the impact on the image done by the streaming service is visible. Let me give you my own opinion of the safety in Medellin after 6 months living here.
Disclaimer before I start: I never got robbed, threatened or drugged, maybe my opinion will change if it was the case :)
No! Medellin has not always been safe, and back to the Pablo Escobar period, it was the most dangerous city in terms of homicides, gun shootings and bombs, as you can see in the graph.
But the Medellin of today is completely different. In fact, Medellin's decline in violent crime means that the city is now safer than New Orlean 🇺🇸. You see?
My own and expert opinion behind this change is linked to the level of crime in the city in the past. Let me deep on this:
Everyone discovered the impact of cartel and drug trafficking, no one was winning, and the number of dead is in everyone’s mind. Colombian Cartels focus on the production of the drugs and leave the bad aspect of the business to Mexican Cartels.
The Society was fed up and want a change, I saw the same movement in Rwanda 🇷🇼, when I was exploring Kigali, when human dangerousness hit the maximum, we change and adopt a more sustainable society.
Strong government policy, since the election of Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010), who invested massively in the army and the fight the Paramilitary groups who were controlling the country. Also the number of police officer around Medellin are impressive.
Medellin is still a city where bad things can happen, like most of the cities around the world, but I never felt scared or in any danger for 6 months. Mainly because I'm following those rules:
Only use Taxi app (Uber or Didi)
Never go alone in a bar at night
Always close the windows inside the car while using your phone
Ask locals where are the area to not go
The perfect example of this transformation is Comuna 13, which was the most dangerous place of Medellin which became the most visited and attractive spot of the city.
One article to read to better understand Comuna 13 is:How Colombia’s Most Notorious Neighbourhood Reinvented Itself
👋 A little more about me to finish this newsletter
Building my Youtube channel is still a top priority for the rest of the year. I just found a Youtube Expert Coach to help me with 1:1, and 2 video guys to capture and edit the video. The goal is to release 5 videos before the end of the year!
Secure an investment in the Cybersecurity Insurtech: Stoik 🇫🇷 (Seed Round)
What inspired me? I receive this type of message that confirms I'm doing the right things at the moment! 🙏
"Hi Jérémy, I wanted to thank you 🙏🏻
Thanks to your Linkedin post of companies recruiting Growth, I got to know XX whom I joined this week. Sometimes we don't do things just for business but because we believe in it, because we feel this why in us. You do this stuff. Keep going, it's worth it, it changes lives (like really)! "
My apartment is fully furnished in Medellin🇨🇴, after some experience while buying on Whatsapp... You are more than welcome here 👋.
I finally booked my plane ticket for Rio 🇧🇷, I will be there for 1 month (6 october to 7 novembre). Don't hesitate to share startups or people to meet with me.
Another successful webinar for Growth Talent on Thursday with Virgile (CEO @Figures) where we give tips about salary negotiation to Growth people. I really enjoyed creating more content, and I need to increase the number of webinars/podcasts/videos to produce.
New customers this week for Growth Talent, we’re helping Masteos to build the Growth Team.
From Medellin with a agenda full of interesting meeting 📆
Jérémy