[Raised $35 million] Ep.163 - This Founder was able to get buy-ins from 300 Global Payment Providers

Juan Pablo Ortega is the founder of Yuno, which enables any company to manage all payment methods and fraud providers through a single integration. Yuno has raised to date more than $35 million from notable investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Kaszek Ventures, and Monashees.  

This is Juan's 2nd startup. Before Yuno, he co-founded on-demand delivery unicorn Rappi (which as of last July was valued at $5.25 billion).

Where to find Juan Pablo Ortega:

• Website: Yuno | The Go-To for High-performing payments teams
• LinkedIn (7) Juan Pablo Ortega | LinkedIn

Where to find Hadi Radwan:

• Newsletter: Principles Friday | Hadi Radwan | Substack
• LinkedIn: Hadi Radwan | LinkedIn

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Transcript

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I have a small favor to ask that takes you literally a few seconds. If you like the first 100 podcasts and the guests that we have invited so far, can you do me a small favor and give us a thumbs up on any podcast platform that you are listening on? It helps the podcast more than you think, because the higher we go on the ranking, the more interesting guests we can invite. Thank you again for your support. Let's do it. Broadcasting from around the world. You're listening to the first 100, a podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers. Here's your host, Hadi Rodwan. Good to have you on the show, Juan. How are you doing today? Oh, thank you for the invitation. I'm doing great. Amazing. Thank you for stopping by. Juan Pablo Ortega is the founder of Yunno, which enables any company to manage all the payment methods and fraud providers in one platform or one integration. And you've raised to date around $35 million from notable investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, and few other more. And Juan, this is not your first startup. You've co-founded the on-demand delivery unicorn now, Rappi, and you're now focusing on the second startups. I have so many questions to ask you, but first, did young Juan exhibit any signs of entrepreneurship while you were growing up? Yes, 100%. So, since I was little, I was that kid in the neighborhood that would buy things to sell, so. In Colombia, there were these trends. So like there was the Jojo trend or there was any particular trend. I would go and find a distributor, buy a hundred, two hundred of them, and I would sell them in my neighborhood. So since I was a small age, I was an entrepreneur. The only time that my mom got really mad was when I built an ice cream parlor in my house and we started having like lines of kids going to my house. And my mom was like, no, this is the limit. You can't just... built and take all the free space for your ice cream parlor. But then when I was like a teenager, I wanted to be a pilot and I started flying. I started doing flying lessons when I was like 15. I got my private pilot license when I was 17, became a commercial pilot when I was 18. So kind of switched from, from entrepreneur into going all in into aviation. I worked, I started working for airlines in the RAM, work for Spirit, JetBlue. Then moved into the corporate side, working for United. Then went into management consulting for a company that specializes in airlines called SeaBerry. And I was really happy just working with the airlines flying around the world, helping them with really big challenges and working with Airbus, with Etihad in Abu Dhabi, and then I met Simon and decided to quit my job in New York from one day to another one and move to Columbia the week after to start wrapping. And that's where. kind of the hardcore entrepreneurship started. There's a lot of things to unwrap here. So let me go back a little bit to your early days. We've interviewed so far more than 150 entrepreneurs on this podcast and all of them have started when they're young tinkering around. There's so many other people that tinker but never make it as an entrepreneur. What do you think are like key ingredients to look for someone who's gonna probably become a successful entrepreneur? I think it's resilient. Every entrepreneur has a failure story and to make it to a successful story you have to fail a lot. The entrepreneurs that you think failed were the ones that didn't have the resilience to keep going until they made it. I think that's the biggest thing. Entrepreneurship is extremely hard. It looks good on paper but when you're doing it, when you're working seven days a week... many times 20 hours per day because you need to solve something, because you need to make it happen. That's when you start realizing that it's not as sexy as it sounds. Behind all of the successes and happy stories, there are a lot of challenges, failures, and I think that's the difference between a successful entrepreneur and someone that decided to move on. Amazing. Thank you for sharing this. And the other question that I had is, you know, you had a successful career. Now, what made you switch to become an entrepreneur? Because it's a risky thing, right? It's this dilemma everyone has. Look, I always had that entrepreneurship. I wanted to start a company to change the world. At some point, I thought it was going to be an airline. And this opportunity to start rapidly with Simone was out of nowhere. I spoke to him on a Friday. He tells me, okay, you need to make a decision by Sunday. And it was a really hard two days trying to decide because it was a big change. It was like quitting my dream job. I was even in New York. Anything that you can think of, it was perfect. I had everything that I wanted. I was struggling. I was doing everything that I always dream of. I'm like, do I wanna leave this behind, move back to Columbia and start from zero? I'm extremely thankful for him to give me a short deadline. I think when you overthink things, you make the wrong decisions. You have to follow your gut and you have to go on that kind of first thing that comes to mind. And when you have two days to decide such a big thing, I went with the first thing that I felt. And I think it was that it was, I always wanted to start a company. I always wanted to create a company that has much more impact on myself. We have extremely limited time on earth. we have the choice whether to spend it doing things that we like or doing things that are going to have a greater impact. And I believe that entrepreneurship and creating companies have this multiplier effect and can have a real impact. In RAPI, when we started, you know, we're doing a few hundred orders. We went to millions of orders and we're starting to get into a magnitude that we're kind of disrupting the GDP of the countries that we operate in. We were increasing the average pay. that people were making compared to the regular jobs that they have. I think that's the real impact. Today with Youknow, we have created a technology that makes it really easy for companies to optimize their payments, to increase approval rates, to increase conversion in the checkout. And these are millions, billions of dollars are going back to the economy because it's making these companies a lot more efficient. And I think that's kind of how it all started. It started with this idea with this... kind of need to do something and to spend time in something that was greater than myself. Amazing. Thank you for sharing this as well. Let's start with Yunho. We don't want to go back to Rappi because this is your early, the new startup you're doing. I think Yunho has been born because of a problem you had in Rappi. Walk us through how you found out about this problem and then how you expanded it to a full-pronged company. Good, good. So in Rapia, as we expanded into Mexico, the number one problem was payments. People were able to pay. We had an approval rate of 50%. So basically, half of the payments were getting declined by the banks and there are many reasons for that what happened. Also, people wanted to pay with a local payment method and they couldn't. And this problem got bigger as we expanded into different countries. So living, you know... this problem in real life on how hard it was to do this integration on, even though we had local teams and domestic teams and actually internal teams, developing integration, developing technology, it was crazy how much effort we were putting into internal teams that were not adding any value because one of my engineers working on finding algorithms to deliver the burgers faster, but doing an integration into a provider in Brazil wasn't actually helping So as what Junodas, we solve all that complexity, that fragmentation. We have created a software that makes it extremely easy for large enterprises to connect locally to different payment methods, to increase approval rate by routing transactions into different providers. So for a user, you're asking yourself, how does this impact me? And I'm pretty sure it has happened to you that you're trying to buy something online. It takes you 30 minutes, 40 minutes to choose and you finally make the decision for that shoes that you want, for those jeans that you want. And you go to a checkout, you put your credit card information and you click next and it's a payment decline. I'm like, I have money, my car is working, I spent 40 minutes looking for this chair. Many people just abandon and leave. The average approval rate in countries like Mexico is like 70%. So like 30% of people are frustrated because they're not able to purchase what they want. We saw that issue. We solve that issue by creating technology that increases that approval rate and help companies make better decisions in terms of payments. Amazing. So who's your customer today? Who's your ideal customer? Is it the payment provider or is it the company? All of them. Look, we have partners like Dlocal, Mercado Pago, PayU, Stripe, etc. So our customers are the payment processors, but also the same. Our customers are the big merchants, merchants like McDonald's. like Indrive, like Avianca. So we are working with some of the largest companies in the world, helping them solve this issue as they operate in different geographies and they scale their e-commerce and operations in general. Amazing. So if we break this down a little bit to the context of the first 100, new startups, two years old. So how do you land big brands from maybe not day one, but later days, what was your tactics around getting first the provider to trust you and then getting the customer to say, yes, this is something I want to use? Look, we spent a lot of time creating the product. I dream about having a software like Yunoo for seven years and suffering and not being able to do what I wanted with Ruby because we didn't have the technology to do it. So for seven years, I thought about it. And then we took a lot of time to build an amazing software. And a software that was scalable, a software that had the infrastructure that was going to be able to support millions of payments per day. After we built all of that, it became easier. So when we went to customers and we started showing them how the product work, phases of people change. Because You came in and they're like, oh, orchestrator, and I'm like, oh, new company, kind of weird. But when we say, give me five minutes, let me show you what we have. And they're like, oh, you can turn on a payment method this way. Oh, you can route transactions this way. And the funny thing is that they always wanted to find something that we didn't have. So like, oh, can you do routing by bank? Yes, we can. Can you do X, Y, and Z? Can you have a report? And because we thought about it for so long, we had many of the features that we knew they were gonna ask for. So after they did 15 different questions, they were like, okay, this is complete. And then there was always one thing that we didn't have. We were like, don't worry, we can have it in three weeks. Let us come back and we'll show you. No, no, let's move forward. And I think that was that what helped us cause us big customer, that obsession into creating the best product and a product that we knew they wanted. So even though many times we talk to them and they say, oh, we don't want an orchestrator, but just showing you the product work. And... This is kind of like, if you're thinking about a tree, like this is kind of the tree itself, but below the tree you have roots. I think these roots are the theme we've built. We put together the best software engineers around the world, the best product people. And this team were the ones that were actually able to achieve in a record time to create a software and that was more robust and than companies that have been building orchestrators for 10, 15 years. So building the team. building a product that led us to those first closings. What channel worked best for you when it comes to acquisition? Was it Cold Outreach? Was it LinkedIn? Any tactics that you can share with us and have you streamlined your funnel? Look, it's a little more difficult and there is no secret sauce. The first 100 customers, if you try to find kind of that silver bullet work. you're going to do something online and you're going to get thousands of leads and you're going to close 10% and you're going to get it. It doesn't work that way. You first have to create a reputation and the reputation comes from having those first customers. So the first customers is a lot of networking. For me, it was talking to our investors and forcing them to do introductions to different people, was going to events, was understanding what were the companies that were struggling, how to get to them. When you go to an event, when you go to conferences, it's beyond that because it's understanding of where are these people going to be and just getting close to them and say, hi, I'm Juan Pablo and I'm building the best orchestrators here. It wasn't going to work. So how do you create that kind of personal connection? What do they like? What do they do? And it sounds kind of creepy, but it's the way sales are done and more in the enterprise level. So finding that decision maker, those decision makers, finding something in common that could be a friend, that could be... something that they like to do and that you can start a conversation with. The successful way to create that connection into the decision maker is to start with something personal. It's, oh, you see the soccer game. Yeah. Oh, they lost. Oh, do you like that team? No, I like the other team. Oh yeah. It's how they play. And then that's step one. When a founder comes to you and starts selling you something, you, it's like a human thing. You are immediately disconnected. You're like busy. But when you start with that human connection, you create a relationship. That's kind of how we're able to get to the decision makers and to the right person. Many times, I think multi-threading is extremely important. To close some of these customers, we had four different avenues. We were going through the developers and we were showing them ads of, you know, and talking about things that they wanted to hear. At the same time, we're talking with the decision makers and understanding kind of big level, what were their problems and how we were solving this with other customers. And at the beginning, if you don't have other customers, how we pretend we're going to solve it at some point, talking to the different teams and understanding like, okay, what are the tasks that is taking them a lot? And then showing them how we're building technology that is releasing that. And it all comes together. Someday they have an internal meeting and they're like, oh, I heard about this person. Oh, I heard about this person. Bring them in, we need to have a call on. And that's how we were able to close all the gates at the beginning. Amazing, thank you for sharing this. Knowing what you know today, what- channel or tactic would you avoid? You don't want to repeat that because it doesn't work. Look, this is a hard question because you need to iterate and you need to try many different things. But you have to be careful because many people think that if something didn't work that I shouldn't try it. But in sales, some things work for some customers and something works for others. The hard part here is that you have to iterate, that you have to keep trying the things that you think could work for one customer or the other. So how do you basically keep making mistakes? Because at some point, those mistakes are going to become successes on the things that we're working on. So it could be how we are generating maybe like a blog post and what is the content of that blog post? Should it be more technical? Should it be more general? And so we release one, we see how it does, we come back and we tweet a little bit and we added more and then we maybe see how maybe adding a video or something else may get better. And it's constantly, constantly trying new things. Today, in terms of sales, we have a hundred different projects and I'm not exaggerating, a hundred different things that we're doing to generate leads to close deals. And this could be something that the marketing team is working on. What is the second version of the website? What do we need to add to the website? Should we do A-B testing on the copies? Should we start doing posts? I have been putting a lot of effort into my LinkedIn. How can I reach more people so that I can, so that my LinkedIn can become also a channel to get new customers and new leads and the sales team is going. When we go to events, how should we approach the event? Should we do a stand? We shouldn't do a stand. We just had a... two-story amazing stand in Bangkok for Moni 2020 Asia, which is one of the landmark events in the world and also in the region. We over invested to see how it worked and how that could change the perception of the customers. There is no right or wrong. It just keeps trying. I wouldn't just dismiss ideas because they failed once. It makes a lot of sense. You know, at Rappi, it's a completely different model. Probably it's a B2C model. Here it's a B2B. What philosophy have you had to change in the way you approach customers between Rappi and then Yunoo? But in terms of acquisition? Correct, yes. Well, it's completely different. Rappi was a B2C. B2C is complicated, it's different. You do think, you're looking for a... 100,000 users in a month or in a week. So the numbers are more different. The channels are way different. We use Facebook ads, we use Google ads, we use programmatic ads. So it was more on a massive scale. In Juneau, it's all about connections, networking, interactions. flying to London next week and we're going to three or four events and he's going to a cocktail and targeting like who am I going to try to speak with, trying to get the guest list, getting ready, understanding like who is going, where are their background, what things do we have in common, okay this is a target list, how we talk to them, what opportunities have we seen. And many times I'm talking with somebody and I met them on Monday and we haven't talked about June 1 to Thursday because I have to wait for the right moment. So... how do we create that relationship? So if you look at it, it's 100% different. It doesn't really compare one way to the other one. If you ask me, I like more the B2B game. I think the B2B acquisition is a little more strategic. It's a lot more, it's these small things but they have a greater impact. And yeah, it's as much as, I'm not sure if it's as stressful as the wrapy one that you're looking numbers, you're refreshing a edge for understanding how many people are seeing your ads, are installing the app, are opening the app, are making an order. And it's a lot more, I would say analytics centric and number driven that just understanding if I'm able to meet that person that I need to meet, create a relationship and be able to pitch you know, by the last day of the conference. Makes a lot of sense. I think the key ingredient is patience because it's a longer sales cycle. You don't see feedback immediately. People might be busy. So that's something where people who are not patient probably would not be able to work because the B2C is you're seeing the dashboard, the screens, the conversion immediately and then on the spot. What is the principle that you live by that has served you well? Sorry to interrupt. I think that, Luca, at the beginning we didn't... So you have... these phonos and you have different metrics in the B2E. It's different but you have it. At the beginning, we thought we were not important, but we are actually completely changing that mindset and we're becoming extremely data-driven. Like, who was the last time we spoke with somebody? How long? How many days are taking us as we have the first conversation until we sign a contract, until they go live? So, Now we are getting to a point and we're getting to escalate in a company that it becomes extremely important to be data driven. We have a bigger sales team, we have a bigger goal, we have a bigger sales revenue as we get to double digit revenues, it becomes more important to make every meeting and every interaction count. We have AI systems that listen to the calls and create basically to-do lists that creates improvements. that tells the VDM, like, hey, in this call, you talk too much, you have to stop talking too much, or you're mentioning something, or you forgot to mention this. So we're getting to a point that all of these cool things that we used to do in that B2C world were kind of incorporating in a different way to the B2B games. So we're always the best as the salespeople and we're always ABC. Have you heard of ABC? Yeah, always B2B. Always B2B. Yeah. Correct. Before I jump to the other question, is there any tech stack or a combination of sales tech stack that you can recommend for founders who are just starting up? They don't have a lot of money. They're just starting up and they want to have the right tools to increase conversions. That's a hard question. We have to do so many different things. I don't have anything in mind that I will say, you need to use this. People ask me about CRM, like, should I use Hubstead? Should I use Salesforce? Who use Excel? And it can work fine. I think that as you scale, don't be afraid of using technology. So, I know many founders use Excel and it works for them, but for us, we actually started with a pipe drive, we went into HubSpot, we're now migrating to Salesforce. When you ask people, is this good or bad, half say it's the worst mistake they have made, half say this is the best thing they have done in their mind. So we took and we look at both sides of the... of the opinions and we decided to move forward with Salesforce as we scale where it's becoming a big, big theme and it's becoming a bigger challenge to scale to the 100 million ARR which we're going to get next. And you need these tools and you need to have this information and sometimes as you scale the products that you were using that work best doesn't work anymore. So I wouldn't, I don't think I have anything specific. Google is your best friend. talk to other entrepreneurs and test the different ones. Most of them offer like 15 day free trial. Test them, test them a week, test another week, another one. And you're gonna see what works best for your use case and for your business. Amazing, what's the principle that you live by that has served you well on your journey? Principle. There are many that come to mind, but I think, look, I think number one, honesty and integrity. I believe in karma. I think if you to meet people with integrity, if you're honest, everything is gonna come back to you. So I think that's the number one and most important thing to be completely honest. Makes a lot of sense, thank you for sharing this. One last question, Juan, what's next? Well, now we, so as we span into different regions today, we have an office in Singapore and we have salespeople in Singapore. We are growing in Europe, in the US, we're also. trying to understand if it makes sense to get into Asia, into the Middle East. We're also growing our team here in Latin America, in countries like Mexico. We have a lot of effort in Mexico, Brazil, and the rest of the countries. That's number one, and that's something that we keep doing. You get to a point, I just can't, that you have to create a lot of processes. And I love, I hate processes. I don't know, I completely hate processes. I think these are bureaucratic things that you don't need to do. But unfortunately, as you scale your company, have you have more people processes become the key to success. So creating playbooks and teaching your new wave of employees how they have to do everything becomes key to creating that repetitive process and always be closing. So that has been a big challenge, more than a big challenge, a lot of focus on the theme to creating processes, creating playbooks. creating training materials. Today we have a really robust onboarding. So when someone comes in the company in a couple of weeks, they are fluent in paymentology and then also in everything around UNO. I mean, in the product side, we have an amazing product and tech team that have been able to do hundreds and hundreds of integrations around the world. They have built... the most complex, more than complex, the more robust payment orchestrator in the world. And we don't say that. Our partners, Visa, MasterCard, payment processors, and customers are saying that. And we need to keep, we cannot lose that innovation cycle. We have to keep creating new products. We're trying to have every one or two weeks we're releasing something new. So it could be monitors, which are helping customer find out when a provider is having an issue and doing something automatically. or is a new table or a new graph in our inside section that is showing customers something that we were not showing before, but we're seeing that it's important for us to see, or is a new feature that they asked for where they can do bulk refunds through a CSV file. So keeping that cadence of innovation, keeping that cadence of shipping something new every week or every two weeks is extremely key. And it's very important to do it. Before I let you go, one last question. You said you're hiring the best dev and software developers. What's your favorite interview question? So I think the most, the one that I like the most is that if tomorrow someone is gonna write your biography, what will the title be? And people always are like, oh, wow, okay. And they think about it, and they come up with really clever answers. Thank you for sharing this interview question. I'll add it to my list of questions when I'm interviewing people. Juan, thank you very much for stopping by. Two more questions. Are you hiring and how can people reach you? We're definitely hiring a lot of people. So the best way to reach me, Juan at y.uno, this is going to take some time to reply. The fastest way is LinkedIn. So follow me on LinkedIn Juan Pablo Ortega. You know I'm there and I'm... a little bit more responsive on LinkedIn or email. And in UNO, you can go to our website, y.uno. You don't need that comma or anything. It's only four characters, y.uno. And we have all the different positions, open positions there. Thank you, Juan. We wish you the best of luck on your journey. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you for the invitation. It was a good discussion. Thank you so much for listening to the first 100. We hope it inspired you in your journey. 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