Camilo's Flashcards Final
Why applying to YCombinator after 5 years
Since we’re evolving our vision to pretty much a new company and will rebrand soon, we figured we apply and you would see us as an early-stage company, but with the advantage that we have several years of customer learnings, a large customer base and millions of dollars in sales for it to be an attractive investment opportunity for YC.
What problem are you solving?
Vendor discoverability, ordering and streamlined procurement.
- Vendor discoverability: the supply is very descentralized and hard to know which vendors are reliable
- Ordering/B2B payments: most vendors that Companies are using are SMEs, which have very inneficient processes and little/to no tech
- Centralization for efficiency and consistency: with companies having to use so many different vendors it becomes so difficult to get consistent service and also it is very inneficient for finance to process so many different invoices, where they could instead do one with CaterSpot.
Introduction of ourselves
Hi I’m Camilo from Colombia, I’m CaterSpot’s CEO and I oversee sales, partnerships and HR.
Hi I’m Amanda from Canada, I’m the COO. I oversee Product, Marketing and Finance.
We’ve known each other for 10 years and have built 2 tech startups together, and we were also part of the management team for foodpanda, a b2c food delivery platform by Rocket Internet in Latam.
What’s an impressive thing you have done?
In our first year we made a lot of mistakes and the business almost ran out of money. We had the last $1k in the bank, had just retrenched into life support, but never gave up, we focused relentlessly on adding value to the customer profitably and managed to turn the company around within 6 months.
Tell us something surprising that you have done?
let go of an experienced and valuable COO, because he was too emotional and became toxic for our company culture
Tell us something surprising that has happened.
We were always concerned with the b2c food delivery giants that would come and compete with us, and yes for years they have had their own B2B vertical, but they have no idea how to get market share. Corporates still prefer to use us.
Tell us about a tough problem you solved?
On-time order delivery. In our first 6 months of operation, we were delivering only 60% on-time, we knew that consistent on-time delivery was critical for corporate clients, we put a lot of effort to solve this and on-time delivery has been 93% consistently for the last 4 years.
What’s the biggest mistake you have made?
Spent too much money on marketing on year 1, before we had any product market fit. We thought we could force it and it almost killed us.
What’s the worst thing that has happened?
- running out of money (ended up being the best thing)
- 2 failed acqusition deals
What’s the funniest thing that has happened to you?
- renting a 1-person office and fitting a10 people team there
What obstacles you will face and how you will overcome them?
What problems/hurdles are you anticipating?
The biggest obstacle for our business is covid - offices being closed, uncertainty over future of workplace. We will follow this progress closely and just like we’ve done, we’ve been adjusting our offering and platform to adjust to the new normal
Why will you suceed?
- we understand and care about the customer
- huge market, first mover advantage
- sustainable business model that makes money
- team with 5 years of learnings and expertise in the space
Why did you pick this idea to work on?
Why did you choose this idea?
For the past 5 years we focused on our B2B food marketplace, but we always noticed that our customers were spending on other areas to get things done for their teams. The b2b super app vision is just a natural evolution of our business to further retain and capture the wallet of the customer.
Why are you uniquely qualified to work on this?
we’ve spent 5 years working on the problem and speaking to so many customers, we have so many learnings and expertise now
Why do you want to dedicate your life to working on this?
- problem and product excites us
- there’s so much to do / solve / make (for our customers, our vendors, new areas to develop)
- needed globally and doesn’t exist yet
Why did your team get together?
Amanda and I met 10 years ago in Argentina, when we were both doing our inteernships. Then we worked together and foodpanda, a 2bc food delivery company in Latam and then moved to Asia to launch a C2C mobile marketplace. We can probably read our minds by now, but yes, we decided to stick together to launch CaterSpot because we complement each other skills very well.
How did your team meet?
We met 10 years ago and became friends while we were both doing internships in Argentina
