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LISBON, Portugal –– Juan Pablo Ortega, co-founder of global payment management company Yuno, joined Adweek on Web Summit’s Startup University stage to talk about how he turned Rappi, the food delivery company he founded, into a so-called unicorn startup that’s captured a larger market in Mexico than Uber Eats.
Ortega plans to replicate the success for his one-year-old payment management company Yuno, which last year raised a $10 million seed round to propel its growth in Colombia.
“We help [customers] be able to have more payment methods, increase approval rates and lower their costs,” Ortega told Adweek.
For B2C, guerilla marketing’s on the table
While at Rappi, Ortega’s conversion goal was straightforward: Convince consumers to use Rappi to place a food delivery order. He didn’t have a big budget, so he used guerrilla marketing tactics. New app users got free donuts and hamburgers, and Rappi grew fast.
“You’re basically finding a strategy that is going to become viral. Then people want to talk about it, so you don’t really have to spend millions of dollars in a Facebook campaign,” he said.
The target audience: B2B enterprise decision makers
Ortega’s goal is to attract enterprise business decision makers to Yuno—a strategy that requires a different approach than he took at consumer-facing Rappi.
“You have to find an idea, or something that you think people are going to share, [that] people want to talk about. That’s the base work of the B2C strategy,” he said.
Even though Yuno is still relatively small, Ortega made tweaks to the company messaging to make it more appealing to enterprise buyers who might otherwise overlook its value. He’s careful about how he describes the company.
“We started, for example, basically saying, ‘Okay, this is our startup from Columbia,’ compared to ‘This is a global payment orchestrator,’” Ortega explained. Shifting the messaging made a big difference with leads, he said.
For budget-constrained startups eager to build credibility with enterprise buyers, Ortega recommends paying close attention to wording and investing in PR strategy. Specifically, he recommends building direct relationships with reporters at news organizations his target buyers actually read.
You cannot build a product if you’re not in constant communication with the customer.
–– Juan Pablo Ortega, co-founder, Yuno
Key takeaways
Build a 1-1 relationship with media: Ortega recommends startups eschewing a PR agency if they don’t have the money. A PR consultant is a better option for founders eager to understand the basics. Learning how to do PR also works well, he said, given that journalists often prefer to liaise with founders and their customers directly, assuming they understand basic media relations.
