Lluís Cañadell, Treinta | Growing to 1 Million Users in a Year [Ep. 44]

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

We all know a small shop, a hardware store, or a food stall that keeps its business accounts with pencil and paper. You only have to step out to the corner from your house. Ironically, these same micro-business owners are frequent users of apps such as Whatsapp or Facebook. Faced with this situation, Treinta was born, an application that lets small businesses, merchants, and founders digitize, monitor, and grow the finances of their business.

Today we have as our guest its CEO and cofounder, Lluís Cañadell. Despite the low technology adoption of micro-businesses, Lluís and the Treinta team managed to reach more than one million users across Latin America in a little over 1 year. And, to date, Treinta has raised almost 15 million dollars from venture capital funds such as Luxor Capital Group, Goodwater Capital, and FJ Labs.

Lluís told us about the challenges of building a product for an audience that is not very tech-savvy, and how Treinta has shaped its business model and its user acquisition channels around those challenges. We also talked about why software is a great tool for creating a relationship with your customers and obtaining data that was not available before, in order to finally offer them financial services.

What You Can Learn Today

User adoption strategies
Measuring Product-Market Fit
The balance between growth and sustainability

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Youtube Timestamps*

Market Insights

[1:28] - How did Lluís get into the world of startups?
- The goal of having his own business
- The pandemic as a great opportunity
- Confidence to start a company thanks to previous experiences and lessons
[2:52] - What is Treinta?
- An app that helps businesses in Latin America digitize and become more efficient
- Growth of 100 times in just one year
[4:30] - What were the insights they had at Treinta that explain the explosive growth they have had in so little time?
- One third of Latin America not digitized
- Disruption from the pandemic
- Adoption of the smartphone
- 4 months iterating on the product without launching it

Adoption and Product Market Fit at Treinta

[7:55] - How much have they had to “educate” their users? What have been the main technology adoption challenges they have found?
- A very smooth transition from their current solution to the app
- Progressive adoption by the part of the market that has not yet adopted Treinta
- Word of mouth as a strategy for acquiring users
[10:08] - How have they solved these challenges, and how is that reflected in the design of their product and communication?
- Great disorganization: not knowing exactly how much they earn
- An incredibly low recovery rate on fiado credit
- Lack of analysis of the inventory record
- Adoption of digital sales and payments
[12:47] - Why did they choose to offer their application for free instead of charging?
- Most users have low net income at the end of the month
- Making money by helping them earn more versus charging them directly
[14:07] - How did they make the decision to offer the Treinta application for free?
- The hypothesis that the free app had enormous potential
- Validation from testing it with users
[15:12] - Does not charging affect the “quality” of users that Treinta attracts?
- A strategy aimed at users with greater retention potential
- The goal of reaching every micro-business owner
- Network effect of users who never end up paying
[16:37] - How do they measure Product-Market Fit?
- Analysis of the platform
- Retention, engagement, recommendation rate, NPS
- Product-Market Fit in free products
[18:19] - How do they see the adoption of more Treinta features inside users’ businesses?
- Features that do not apply to every business
- A focus on users being able to easily use the features they do need

Growth and Treinta’s Business Model

[20:23] - What has the go-to-market strategy been, and which channels have they used to reach one million users in a little over a year?
- Word of mouth, digital marketing, paid ads on social networks
- Testing strategies until reaching a desired CAC
[21:51] - What has the experience with offline channels been like, considering the users?
- Tests on radio and in the press
- A sales force
[23:38] - What lessons have they learned about which channels work better or worse for acquiring micro-business owners?
- Everything we know can change at any moment
- Appealing to the feeling of staying on paper while the world moves toward digital
- Investment in platforms according to a review of the results
[26:19] - How do they balance growth versus other “quality” metrics such as cash burn or user retention?
- Clarity on the company’s milestones
- A change in growth strategy
- An LTV range higher than the CAC
- Choosing slower growth that is not so costly
[29:38] - Why do you consider Treinta better positioned to offer fintech services such as Treinta Shop or Treinta Pagos versus other financial service providers?
- A good relationship and the trust of users
- Leveraging the app to acquire customers for fintech services
- Credit assessment of users with data from the app
- Identifying good and bad candidates and adjusting the cost of credit
[33:35] - Treinta’s long-term vision
- Becoming a Super App
- An all-in-one operating system for micro-business owners

Tweet Round

[35:07] -
- Recommended book: Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success, by Tom Eisenmann
- Changes in the Latin American startup ecosystem: more founders with different backgrounds
- Founders to interview: Man Hei Lou, of Treinta, Fabián Gómez, of Frubana, Daniel Vallejo, of Addi

Episode Mentions

You can follow Lluís on LinkedIn.

Founders to interview: Man Hei Lou, of Treinta, Fabián Gómez, of Frubana, Daniel Vallejo, of Addi

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