Jaime Arrieta, Buk | Starting, Growing and Funding a B2B SaaS [Ep. 75]

The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.

Software as a Service is one of the most developed startup sectors in the United States. In Latin America, by contrast, there are still few startups that have reached significant scale, especially serving local customers and corporates.

Today we spoke with Jaime Arrieta, CEO and cofounder of Buk, a Chilean Software as a Service company whose end-to-end people management solution is used by more than 4 thousand companies and 400 thousand workers to date.

Buk was founded in 2017 and, without outside capital, was able to reach millions of dollars in sales before raising its first investment round in 2021 from funds such as Softbank and Greenoaks Capital, in a Series A of 50 million dollars.

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Youtube Timestamps*

[1:25] - How Was Buk’s MVP Created?

• How did Jaime arrive in the fascinating world of startups?
• How did the idea for Buk come about?
• Why did Buk’s MVP focus on offering payroll settlement solutions?
• How did the Buk team get its first customer, and how did they work together?
• When does Jaime consider it the right moment to build a B2B sales team?

[18:03] - Go to Market and Buk’s Expansion

• Why did Buk focus, at the start, on companies with 100 employees on average?
• How is negotiating with an SME different from negotiating with a corporate?
• What was Buk’s launch and sales strategy in Mexico?
• Why is the Software as a Service sector so underdeveloped in Latin America?

[31:55] - Bootstrapping and Financing

• Why did Buk decide not to raise capital at the start, and how was it able to compete without much money?
• What are Jaime’s recommendations for founders looking to raise capital in the SaaS sector?
• Taking into account the current state of the venture capital industry, is Buk better prepared to face this situation because it has not raised as much capital?

[42:00] - Tweet Round

• Book recommended by Jaime
• Changes Jaime would like to see in Latin America’s startup ecosystem
• Founder Jaime recommends interviewing

Episode Mentions

You can find Jaime on LinkedIn

Recommended book: La Casa de los Espíritus, by Isabel Allende

Founder to interview: Álvaro Silberstein, of Wheel the World (Listen to the episode with Álvaro here)

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