Alejandro Casas, Simetrik | The Challenges of Building a SaaS and the Path of a Technical Founder [Ep. 32]

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

Google Drive, Slack, and Zoom are some of the Software as a Service products, like Simetrik, that have become an indispensable part of how we work in recent years.

Paradoxically, there are still many companies with complex internal processes that depend on Microsoft Excel. The truth is that SaaS adoption is still small in Latin America.

That is why, today, we invited Alejandro Casas, CEO and cofounder of Simetrik, a Software as a Service financial automation tool for companies that depend on Excel. Simetrik has raised more than US $7 million from venture capital funds such as Cometa, Monashees, and Global Founders Capital.

Alejandro told us how he arrived at the idea for Simetrik after pivoting, what his challenges were in starting a SaaS product, and how his evolution from software developer to founder and CEO of a startup has been.

What You Can Learn Today

Challenges of founding a SaaS startup
B2B sales process
Founding with a technical profile

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Youtube Timestamps*

Pivot to SaaS

[1:14] - How did Alejandro get into the world of startups?
- From industrial engineering to systems engineering
- Launching projects onto the internet
[3:26] - What is Simetrik and what problem does it solve?
- Extraction, organization, reconciliation, and standardization of the information companies receive
- Automated financial control
[13:46] - The pivot from Ropeo to Simetrik
- Clothing E-commerce
- Learning from other Y Combinator founders
- Solving Rappi’s internal records problem
[19:15] - What was Simetrik’s first hypothesis and what was that MVP like?
- Data extraction with Amazon Web Service and manual SQL commands
[23:26] - How did Alejandro Casas convince companies to use Simetrik?
- Using the Rappi case as social proof
[25:42] - Main challenges of running a SaaS
- Not being biased by the past
- Understanding the person’s problem and shaping a productized, tangible solution
[30:02] - Sales process to corporations and lessons from the process
- The SaaS monetization model has a lot of depth
- Companies decide whether or not to buy based on the manufacturing cost of the SaaS
- Discovering companies’ willingess to pay

The Path from Developer to Founder of Simetrik

[37:20] - Alejandro’s transition from CTO to founder and CEO
- A clear decision from the start
- Taking advantage of the waves and learning about relevant trends
[40:26] - Advantages and disadvantages of being a technical founder
- Ability to communicate with more technical employees
[43:47] - How Alejandro allocates the effort needed to develop his strengths and weaknesses
- T-shaped professional profile: having global and specific knowledge
[46:16] - Tips for learning fast
- Removing your own barriers
- Jumping in to make bold hypotheses before learning
- Explaining it to another person or to yourself and pulling out a list of questions
- It is all about asking yourself the right questions
[49:00] - Recommendations for software developers who want to found a company, from experience at Simetrik
- Complementing software engineering with market engineering
- Market engineering has a depth equivalent to software engineering

Tweet Round

[50:44] -
- Recommended book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Lean Startup, Behind The Cloud, No Rules Rules
- Changes in the startup ecosystem: more technology in order to offer other solutions
- Founders to interview: Tiago Sada