My Startup Turns Two This Week. We’ve Grown 15% MoM. Here’s what I learned

Lupa turned 2 years old this week. Building a start-up in Latin America is no joke. With many lessons learned, I wanted to share my story.

Lupa’s origins trace back to five years ago when I relocated to Latin America to become Head of Product at Rappi. As the business grew, the need to fill specific roles to work with high-tech stacks and very complex infrastructure became urgent. The question was: How to get the top talent needed?

Unfamiliar with LatAm’s talent pool, the important differences between each country, or the best tech companies, I took this issue into my own hands by crafting a massive market mapping with a data-centric approach that would later lead to the formation of a new business.

Through this journey, I discovered a great amount of underestimated talent who deserved and was ready for access to better opportunities. I realized my deep passion for helping them in any way possible.

A startup is born

I began to receive requests from entrepreneurs who heard I had success hiring at Rappi seeking consultation on the topic. After working with them, a few clients offered to angel invest in me as a founder building a recruiting-focused business and helped me meet larger investors. 

Meeting various headhunters and recruiting leaders, I validated a core issue: the amount of manual work and time the hiring process required. I realized that If I added automation to the most time-consuming and data-driven parts of recruiting, recruiters could focus on the most important part of hiring: deeply connecting with people who are making the big decision of changing jobs. 

More people started asking me for my services and I set out to build a small initial team. With a clear challenge, one data scientist and one recruiter by my side, Lupa began the journey to build the most technologically advanced—yet distinctly human—remote recruiting agency on the planet. After four months of bootstrapping, Lupa raised a pre-seed round of $1M USD and was off to the races.

Reaching new heights

We started with three brains building and selling our recruiting solution. As our demand progressively grew, we quickly scaled to a team of 30 people across nine countries.

Two years removed from Lupa’s founding, we now stand as an expert recruiting firm that helps companies find the best remote talent in Latin America, covering their specific needs for each role and making the process more effective and faster. Likewise, our purpose aligns with our main mission to provide better opportunities and increased visibility for the talented people in Latin America.

During these first two years of business, as in life itself, many things evolved. We changed a lot, learned from new perspectives, and added a lot of significant technology to try to stay ahead of our competitors: the traditional headhunter.

One question I never stopped asking myself while shaping Lupa was: how do I build a stable and great business where people can truly see the difference in the quality of our service while growing sustainably and quickly?

Here’s a timeline of our progression through our first 2 years: 

2022: Getting started

• Q2: Built a small team and started working with a small group of clients, offering headhunting services. Started designing our own ATS with the learnings.

• Q3: Grew our demand and accepted many clients. Hired 6 recruiters to support a great deal of demand, and a tech team to begin building our ATS.

• Q4: Learned that not all clients are good clients and suffered a lot with accounts that were a waste of our time. Finished building our in-house ATS, piloting with our internal recruiting at first.

2023: Adjusting our path

• Q1: Got rid of any service that wasn’t our main focus: providing the best Latin America talent to companies across the world. Saw massive increased efficiency in our processes using our own in-house ATS. Made our first internal hire in sales.

• Q2: Began to be very selective with the clients we work with, only working with those that had needs that aligned with our strengths. Used the base of our in-house ATS to build our own custom CRM.

• Q3: Formed our first “sales team”. Added to the tech team with a focus on improving client experience and growing our client base, instead of solely focusing the team on speeding up the process for our recruiters.

• Q4: Had a first major reorganization and learned a lot about what type of people we want to hire for our sales team. Merged recruiting and sales into a few small “pods”, rather than having two separate teams. Began to ask our clients for referrals.

2024: Spreading the word

• Q1: Had to grow the team again with new recruiters after experiencing significant commercial growth through referrals. Hired a marketing team for the first time. Had our best quarter ever in revenue by far.

• Q2: Investing in marketing to spread the word about our service to the right people and share all the knowledge we’ve accumulated — which is why you’re reading this article.

• Q3: Formed our first “sales team”. Added to the tech team with a focus on improving client experience and growing our client base, instead of solely focusing the team on speeding up the process for our recruiters.

Selectivity. Focus. Quality above quantity. Create an amazing service. Always prioritize your product. That’s what growth looked like for us.

Lessons learned as a first-time CEO

Starting your own business means going through a series of highs and lows, particularly during the early stages. Lupa’s first two years have been filled with priceless lessons, bringing us closer to what we aim to provide for our customers. Here are the top five lessons I learned:

1. People first, technology second: Initially, I mistakenly believed that successful recruiting would be 90% based on the right technology, and 10% based on having good headhunters. I’ve since learned that it’s exactly the opposite. Technology gives us advantages, but without having the best of the best on our team in Latin America, we wouldn’t have survived our first two years.
2. Empower your team through clear expectations: As a first-time CEO, I couldn’t handle the thought of someone not being successful in my organization. I felt a lot of guilt about making people responsible for their actions, which led me to avoid setting clear expectations. It was key to understand this about myself and to take action by asking my teams to set clear goals for themselves based on past data while making it clear that they are accountable for the results. It is my job to best equip my team with the tools for success and encourage initiative.
3. Invest in mental health: Offering therapy to employees has been my best investment. There’s a clear link: those who attend therapy perform better. Make therapy a key employee benefit — it’s crucial for a healthy, high-performing team. Also, seeing my team’s personal growth is the thing that has given me the most satisfaction as a CEO.
4. Avoid favoritism: Early on, I gave top performers the best leads or would even “gift” them accounts of my own, hoping to motivate them to keep performing well. I should have kept these accounts and leads for myself. What I thought would motivate them more, actually led to complacency, decreased effort, and a sense of entitlement. It’s tempting to want to cater to your best people, but beware of how you do it because it can backfire on you. Give them praise, recognition, attention, and increased responsibility.
5. Reality check your plans: Initially, I was ignorantly optimistic about lots of things, thinking that a great idea would magically lead to success. I’d lie to myself in order to lower the mental burden I was carrying around, and it’d end up coming back to bite me. True success demands honesty, detailed planning, strong conviction, and world-class execution. There’s no silver bullet. Everything will require hard work and iteration to get right. Be honest with yourself about what is truly worth doing, and focus on continuous improvement and execution every day. 

Putting it all together 

The idea that I feel most strongly about today is the same I had in my mind from the very first day of my Lupa journey: Any company that isn’t looking into Latin America’s rich talent pool for hiring is missing out on a huge opportunity.

I felt this so intensely that I left a very good job to start my own business. Today, I am even more convinced of this than on the day I resigned.

Over the last two years, I’ve worked ten times as much as I did in the past, and earned ten times less than I would have in a corporate job. I’d happily do it all again, but hopefully with a lot less mistakes.