Why would you ever bootstrap an online company in Latin America?
Have you ever asked yourself that question? Did other people ask you? Or did you ask other people?
Hernán Amiune has probably asked himself this question about a million times, but the difference maybe is that he has found his personal explanations for why he did indeed take that risk of bootstrapping in LatAm.
Continually asking himself why led him directly into an entrepreneurial path and ultimately inspired him to found elMejorTrato, an Argentinian online comparison site that helps people to save time, money and effort in finding the best deals on financial services in just a few seconds.
Hernán states that his biggest achievement to date as an entrepreneur has definitely been making his very own company profitable. CONGRATS!!!
If you want to know what Hernán thinks of the rarely used alternative of bootstrapping among Latin American entrepreneurs, read his tips below of how he did it!:
Are you still asking yourself why bootstrap an online company in Latin America?
Here are Hernán’s answers!
1) Speed of growth:
“The speed of growth of a country is never as fast as the speed at which internet start up investors want to earn money,”
– says Hernán
People need time to develop themselves. They basically first need internet access and a credit card before they can even use and pay for your services. So note, you need patience!
It all takes time, but exactly because of that it is easier to start a company without loads of cash. So it is even possible to start with only US $2,000 dollars and a shared server, just like Hernán and his team did.
2) Unpredictability:
It is a fact that you cannot really make any mid-term or long-term plans, maybe not even short-term plans for where and how to invest your money, due to inflation, currency depreciation and much more.
But, of course, because of that you are forced to just keep everything small and especially flexible, in order to be able to adapt to any kind of changes.
Hernán explains:
“We started comparing mobile phone plans knowing that a law will allow users to change between companies without losing their phone number, the law delayed two years more than expected, we stopped comparing mobile phones plans after 4 months.”
3) Competition is low!
As a consequence of the first 2 points, all you need is some computer skills and a little bit of money. This allowed them to be the very first financial comparison engine on the market, having skipped all those steps like business plans and prototypes etc.
Now they have become the number one provider on the market in just one year, spending lots of time and effort in tweaking little details every day, while only investing a small amount of money into everything.
So eventually, all you need is:
- a bit of money
- PATIENCE
- loooots of GUTS
If you are able to “check” the boxes for all of these, this may be the perfect time to bootstrap your own online company in the LatAm market!
