Cristian Tala, PagoFácil | Returning 30X to Your Investors: MVPs, Efficiency and Talent

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

This week we had Cristian Tala, founder and former CEO of PagoFacil, an online payments fintech that in 2021 was acquired by Evo Payments for 20 million dollars.

Cristian started Pago Fácil as a weekend project to solve a personal problem: getting paid online was a headache… and, along the way, he discovered that thousands of other companies had the same problem.

At the time of the acquisition, Pago Facil was billing 10 million dollars in sales and 3 million in profit, and it generated a return of more than 30 times the capital of its initial investors.

Youtube Timestamps*

[3:01] - Preparing to Start a Company

It is uncommon to see software engineers do an MBA. In retrospect, it was the right decision for Cristian, because it gave him the ideal environment to start working on PagoFacil.

Why did Cristian decide to do an MBA? What is the value of an MBA for an engineer?

Before becoming a founder, Cristian was an angel investor, and he has said he learned more from his failures as an investor.

What were those main lessons of Cristian’s that later served him as a founder?

[13:13] - Starting to Build

Cristian was so determined that the solution should exist that he could not keep waiting. During the four years in between, he helped other founders connect e-commerce and sell online while he refined his idea.

PagoFacil started with a fairly rough and incomplete MVP that reached dozens of customers. It seems that demand, despite the roughness, is a sign of market fit in itself.

What has Cristian learned about how to make a good MVP? How rough can it be? Has the minimum bar changed in recent years?
What are the most common mistakes founders make when building their MVP?

When Cristian got a first group of customers using your product, whether it was free or not.

What was the right way to incorporate customer feedback into your product?

Cristian said he likes fast iterations, especially when you are testing new things and you have to validate with customers.

What kinds of questions were they asked? How often were they shown an iteration of the product?

[50:46] - Raising Capital

Cristian comments: “I do not invest at the idea stage. Someone who shows up without a product strikes me as a lack of respect.”

This is because Cristian has spoken with many founders who come to him to raise capital without an MVP.

With what Cristian knows today, how does he recommend that other founders think about the right moment and the right reasons to go out and raise capital?

Today, especially with AI tools, it seems a team can do 3, 5, or 7 times more than before.

How does Crisitan advise founders on how much capital to raise?

[53:26] - A Founder’s Life

Cristian has said that the relationship that lasted the longest during the 3 years of PagoFacil was 3 weeks.

Many founders have been working 5, 10, or more years on their company. I think that extreme is not viable over the long term.

What has Cristian learned or reflected on about life balance when you start a company?

At the end of 2020, Cristian suffered a pulmonary embolism and ended up hospitalized. During that time, while he was in the ICU, he kept working.

To what extent was the lack of balance related to team decisions or skills such as delegating and managing people? How would Cristian advise founders today so they avoid reaching those extremes?

The advice that used to be given in this Ecosystem is very different from the advice given today.

What are some of the ideas or pieces of advice about how to build a business that Cristian has questioned the most in recent years?