3 Lessons for Startups to Make Their Early Marketing Successful

LISBON, Portugal –– Juan Pablo Ortega, co-founder of global payment management company Yuno, joined Adweek on Web Summit’s Startup University stage to talk about how he turned Rappi, the food delivery company he founded, into a so-called unicorn startup that’s captured a larger market in Mexico than Uber Eats.

Ortega plans to replicate the success for his one-year-old payment management company Yuno, which last year raised a $10 million seed round to propel its growth in Colombia.

“We help [customers] be able to have more payment methods, increase approval rates and lower their costs,” Ortega told Adweek.

For B2C, guerilla marketing’s on the table

While at Rappi, Ortega’s conversion goal was straightforward: Convince consumers to use Rappi to place a food delivery order. He didn’t have a big budget, so he used guerrilla marketing tactics. New app users got free donuts and hamburgers, and Rappi grew fast.

“You’re basically finding a strategy that is going to become viral. Then people want to talk about it, so you don’t really have to spend millions of dollars in a Facebook campaign,” he said.

The target audience: B2B enterprise decision makers

Ortega’s goal is to attract enterprise business decision makers to Yuno—a strategy that requires a different approach than he took at consumer-facing Rappi.

“You have to find an idea, or something that you think people are going to share, [that] people want to talk about. That’s the base work of the B2C strategy,” he said.

Even though Yuno is still relatively small, Ortega made tweaks to the company messaging to make it more appealing to enterprise buyers who might otherwise overlook its value. He’s careful about how he describes the company.

“We started, for example, basically saying, ‘Okay, this is our startup from Columbia,’ compared to ‘This is a global payment orchestrator,’” Ortega explained. Shifting the messaging made a big difference with leads, he said.

For budget-constrained startups eager to build credibility with enterprise buyers, Ortega recommends paying close attention to wording and investing in PR strategy. Specifically, he recommends building direct relationships with reporters at news organizations his target buyers actually read.

You cannot build a product if you’re not in constant communication with the customer.

–– Juan Pablo Ortega, co-founder, Yuno

Key takeaways

Build a 1-1 relationship with media: Ortega recommends startups eschewing a PR agency if they don’t have the money. A PR consultant is a better option for founders eager to understand the basics. Learning how to do PR also works well, he said, given that journalists often prefer to liaise with founders and their customers directly, assuming they understand basic media relations.

Get intentional about messaging: Seeking press placements in target publications is important, but so is getting clear about company messaging. In the beginning, Ortega and his team were excited about the startup moniker, but the excitement faded when they found it held them back. “If you want to target a large company, they don’t want to work with a startup,” said Ortega.

First, a flawless product: Before increasing a marketing budget, it’s crucial to measure net promoter score (NPS), according to Ortega. Yuno measures NPS on roughly a bi-monthly basis, asking its users whether they’re likely to recommend Yuno.

“You cannot build a product if you’re not in constant communication with the customer,” he said.

He’s also incorporated a ratings system into his product, allowing website viewers or product users to rate how much, on a scale between one and five, they like the product and feature.

“Having that communication with the customers in the different parts of the journey is also really important,” Ortega said.

A good product, the founder asserted, is the first step younger startups should take, allowing word of mouth to impact growth. Before marketing teams role out an NPS measurement system, it’s impossible for them to know if they’re pouring money into advertising and disregarding the real reason customers aren’t converting.

“We have to make sure that we were executing correctly … that when people ordered something it was being delivered within a really short time, that the products were being delivered correctly,” he said.