Carlos Ochoa | PaginaDos.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TeRento.mx
PaginaDos.com
The Deck
Lessons Learned

Knowing full well that there was a high risk of failure, in 2013 I turned down an offer for what would have been my dream job and joined by my co-founders @AlfieDelgado_ and @MarthzElena I officially became an entrepreneur.

I'll give you the spoilers now and tell you it didn't work out, but it was an incredible ride that taught me more about business and the web than I'd ever learned before, and along the way I had the privilege of meeting and learning from some of the most talented startup people in Mexico and the world.

Entrepreneurship | Distribution | Design | Branding | UX

This is where our story began. We wanted to provide people all over Mexico with a platform they could use to rent out all of the stuff they didn't use every day in order to earn money from tools or bikes or books they had laying around.

We developed the idea during a Startup Weekend in Guadalajara in the Spring of 2013, validating the idea as best as we could, and designing a pitch deck and a prototype over two and a half days. We called it TeRento.mx, "I'll rent you..."

Much to our surprise we won that Startup Weekend and met people like Andy and José Luis who would advise us over the next few months.

The chicken-and-egg problem affects all marketplaces. How do you build up demand if you have no supply? How do you build up supply if you have no demand? At first, we asked friends and family to put up stuff to rent, but we soon realized a much more efficient way to build up our community would be to ask our Twitter and Facebook followers what they wanted to rent, and then offer a reward to those who volunteered their stuff.

Jessica, an art student, needed an air compressor for a project, so we put out a call and received three offers. I picked one of the compressors up and delivered it to Jessica myself; she was ecstatic to be able to use a compressor without having to invest in owning one. That felt really good.

I made these custom illustrations and then posted them in local Facebook groups to search for the items our users had requested.

Tell us what you need, and we'll find it for you so you can rent more and buy less.

We want to sleep in your tent.
(looking for a 6-person tent)

Help a man make ice cream and he'll eat ice cream forever.
(for a user looking for an ice cream machine)

Building up inertia for TeRento.mx was harder than we ever imagined. After two months, we had very few users, and even fewer transactions under our belt. Our service offering was too broad, so we decided to focus on one single vertical instead of trying to provide our users with every single item they could possibly dream of.

We pivoted.

Our site eventually became the first used book marketplace in Mexico, helping students buy and sell their used textbooks for a fraction of what they'd have to pay for new books, but first we tried out the rental model with our users.

We learned that people don't trust each other with their stuff as much as we wished they did, that few of our users would bother uploading their books to rent them to other students, and that those who did upload their books wanted a way to insure them.

A recurring way to make money off their books wasn't making the cut, so we decided to move away from the rental model in favor of the tried-and-true buy/sell marketplace. We called it PaginaDos.com, Page Two.

As an MVP, we set up an e-commerce site on Tienda Nube, a sort of Shopify for Latin America. Users could sign up, upload their books for sale, and browse our community-fueled inventory. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.

This is a screenshot from one of the earlier versions of our site.

And this is what our landing page looked like towards the end.

We imagined a better Mexico with cheaper books.
Writing these was fun. I've tried to include links to context for those of you less familiar with Mexican culture and current events.

And we shared quotes from our favorite authors, poets and essayists, Spanish or not.

You can take a look at our pitch deck. We used variations of this deck to apply to many different programs and events and to pitch investors.

This particular version won us a free booth at The Summit in Dublin, Ireland, in the fall of 2013.

LESSONS LEARNED

We decided to close shop in the end. After 8 months of bootstrapping, our savings were running low and we'd unwittingly attached ourselves to a seasonal market: Textbooks. Our test cycles turned out to be much longer than we could afford, and tweaking our strategies between school terms was practically futile.