That's the name of the game
From SF to LatAm, founders are following the same mantra: speed. Here’s why. Better yet, how.
✨ Welcome to the newsletter for LatAm founders building good sh*t.
Did someone forward this to you? You must be up to something, huh?
Sorry but…
You don’t have time to wait.
Not for the perfect co-founder.
Neither for the prettiest product.
Much less for that maybe-check.
Why? Because your competition is building and growing faster than ever. With AI, startups now ship and land with smaller, less capitalized teams.
We saw this up close on our recent visit to San Francisco, and now keep seeing it across the most promising founding teams in LatAm.
Ok Latitud but how do I keep up like for real?
We broke it down with someone who’s been there: Strike’s Santiago Rosenblatt.
We backed Strike at the pre-seed, then watched it grow from a bold idea to a global cybersecurity player. All the way to supporting 100+ companies (think Mercado Libre, Santander) and raising a $13.5M Series A led by Fintech Collective.
And as a hacker before it was cool… Santi is the perfect founder to show you that the best defense is a good offense. 😎👇
Validate now, even before you code
What’s your first step?
❌ Asking ChatGPT to spit out some lines of code.
✅ Doing the very human work of actually talking to people.
Santi learned from previous companies that speed is also not wasting time creating something that doesn’t really resonate with your market.
Here’s the discovery playbook he adopted for Strike:
Make a list of the right people to talk to. Dozens of them.
Every week, slide into their DMs and aim for three meetings.
Present the problem and the solution.
Now ask them: what’s something we’re doing wrong?
“Validate as cheaply and as intensely as you can. With this strategy, all it required of me was having a nice meeting, lunch, or dinner with them. I would come back home with lots of insights.”
Santi focused on these discovery chats from March to September 2020 — and came out with a roadmap that made the first lines of code feel obvious.
Grow by showing
V0 in hand, Santi finally entered sales mode. But when a client who seemed guaranteed backed out, he saw he’d also have to hack product pitching.
That customer gave up because they thought using Strike meant going through the same painful, time-consuming process of cybersecurity testing they knew… every single week.
Santi realized that he wasn’t really showing the solution. As soon as he walked them through the platform and its automated testing, they truly understood the product. And loved it. They’ve since been loyal customers of Strike.
The startup would later expand its demo-led sales approach. In 2023, they started offering trial implementations, aka Proofs of Value (PoVs).
The result? Better, faster sales.
Our sales cycles usually took 6 months. With PoVs, it dropped to 3.8 months, and we saw conversion rates close to 90%. Understand what businesses are really trying to solve, and show the value you can bring as fast as you can.
This was just the beginning for Strike. In our chat, Santi also shared:
How to keep getting ahead of the curve, AI adoption included
His learnings on fundraising, from pre-seed to Series A
The one advice he’d share with other startup founders 👀
Hot News Ahoy!
🎁 Wrapping it up in style
We got 1,000+ fellowship applications and saw the future of LatAm startups. We thought you'd like to know too. Here’s our first Latitud Wrapped. A teaser? AI isn’t hype, it's the new baseline: 2/5 pre-founders are already ideating with it.
💬 Hack the chat
LatAm loves WhatsApp, and we won’t take no for an answer. So this is a call to all developers, product thinkers, or UI Experts in Buenos Aires: if you’re building for this 3B+ user ecosystem, join The First WhatsApp Hackathon on June 7th and bring the change you wanna see. 🟢
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