Start with a counterintuitive claim: the companies winning Latin America aren't the ones copying Silicon Valley. They're the ones that figured out when not to.
Carolina Samsing spent years at HubSpot building their Latin American expansion from scratch—back when the company had three clients in the region and "Experiment Bing Latam" was a line item in Salesforce. She watched the inbound marketing giant try to export its pull strategy to markets that didn't yet know what a marketing automation platform was. Nicolas Rojas built DAPTA as a global-first product from Colombia, raised $5.4 million from U.S. investors, and now serves 50,000 users—most of them in the States. Julian Nunez started Yuno after watching Rappi struggle to stitch together dozens of payment processors across countries, each with 30-40% decline rates.
What these operators discovered isn't that LATAM is "behind" or that Silicon Valley playbooks don't translate. It's that the vectors of growth are different. The channels that scale in San Francisco often don't scale in Mexico City—and the ones that do scale in São Paulo rarely get written up in Y Combinator case studies.
You Can't Inbound Your Way to Growth When No One Knows What You Sell
Carolina Samsing's first job at HubSpot was to figure out Latin America. The brief was simple: "Figure out Latam." Three clients. No playbook. No one on the team spoke Spanish except her.
HubSpot siempre decíamos que lo teníamos al final una estrategia más pull que push. La forma que descubrimos de crecer fue a través de agencias de marketing.
— Carolina Samsing, VP of Growth at Nowports
The inbound model—SEO, content, organic—worked beautifully in the U.S. because people were already searching for solutions. In LATAM, they weren't. The category didn't exist yet. Samsing's breakthrough was realizing that agencies were the vector. Marketing agencies in Chile, Mexico, and Colombia were already trusted advisors. They were the ones explaining what "marketing automation" even meant. So HubSpot partnered with them to penetrate new regions.
Fernando del Rio saw the same dynamic at Mercado Libre. When he joined, the company wasn't yet the "monstruo" it is today. It was still "donde venden pura cosa usada"—where people sell used stuff. The brand had to be built market by market, not through performance ads, but through a hybrid he calls "brandformance."
Tu competencia, por muy grande que sea, no puede atacar todo el mercado.
— Fernando del Rio, Chief Growth & Marketing Officer at Talisis
Del Rio's philosophy: your competition, no matter how big, can't attack the entire market. Find the gaps. Build brand in the niches they ignore. Then scale.
WhatsApp Isn't a "Channel"—It's the Operating System
If you're running growth in the U.S., WhatsApp is a footnote. In LATAM, it's the entire stack.
Fernando del Rio didn't just add WhatsApp as a support channel at Mercado Libre. He rebuilt the sales process around it. Inside sales, CRM integrations, AI-powered qualification—all piped through WhatsApp. Santiago Savinon at 99minutos took it further: he built an AI agent that qualifies leads automatically via WhatsApp, increasing conversion from lead to meeting by 400%.
Tus leads se enfrían antes de llegar a una reunión. Con Patagon AI, la calificación la hace automáticamente una IA por WhatsApp.
— Santiago Savinon, Chief Growth Officer at 99minutos
This isn't just a messaging preference. It's infrastructure. In the U.S., your growth stack is Segment + Amplitude + Iterable. In LATAM, it's WhatsApp + WhatsApp + WhatsApp. Email open rates are abysmal. SMS feels invasive. But a WhatsApp message from a business? That gets read.
Julian Nunez saw this firsthand at Rappi. Payment processors were country-specific. So were the methods. Pix in Brazil. PSE in Colombia. Wallets, buy-now-pay-later, cash on delivery. The complexity wasn't just technical—it was cultural. Yuno was born to solve that: one API to route payments through any provider, in any country, with any method.
Nos fuimos a Brasil, idéntica la historia. Y lo mismo en Argentina, en Chile, en todas partes. Todo nos llevó lentamente a eso, a necesitamos ser globales.
— Julian Nunez, Founder at Yuno
The Talent Game Is Inverted
In Silicon Valley, you hire fast and fire faster. In LATAM, hiring is slower, but the people you get often outperform their Bay Area counterparts—at a fraction of the cost.
Nicolas Rojas built ImaginApps, a software factory in Colombia, by realizing he could deliver the same quality as U.S. agencies for 70% less. He didn't compete on speed. He competed on cost efficiency and execution. That discipline became the foundation for DAPTA, where he now builds AI agents for non-technical users in the U.S.
Nosotros ya nos habíamos comprobado a nosotros mismos que podíamos construir productos globales con muy poco.
— Nicolas Rojas, Founder at DAPTA
Carolina Samsing calls out the American obsession with delivery: if a gringo says they'll deliver something Tuesday at 3 p.m., it arrives Tuesday at 3 p.m. No excuses. In LATAM, that rigor exists—but it's learned, not assumed. The flip side? Adaptability. LATAM operators are used to pivoting in unstable environments. Currency swings. Regulatory changes. Entire categories that didn't exist six months ago.
Startups die of overeating, not of starvation. O se mueren de comer mucho, no de comer poco.
— Carolina Samsing, VP of Growth at Nowports
Global-First Beats LATAM-First (Sometimes)
Here's where the story fractures.
Some of the most successful LATAM companies—Mercado Libre, Rappi, Nubank—built for LATAM first, then expanded. Others, like DAPTA and Yuno, built global products from day one and happen to be based in Bogotá or Mexico City.
Julian Nunez is explicit about this:
No hay muchos emprendedores, empresas en Latam que hayan salido a construir un producto global. Es muy raro. Yo estoy de acuerdo. Entonces, abrir ese camino creo que es retador y estamos viviendo ese reto.
— Julian Nunez, Founder at Yuno
Yuno didn't start by solving payment complexity for Colombia. It started by solving it globally—because that's where the margin is. The company processes tens of billions of dollars annually, most of it from clients outside LATAM. The product is built in Colombia. The market is everywhere.
Nicolas Rojas took the same bet. DAPTA's 50,000 users are primarily in the U.S. He raised capital exclusively from American investors in the last round. His insight: the best way to escape the "LATAM discount" in valuation and pricing is to not build a LATAM company at all.
Esta vez no quería ser el que implementaba, el que daba consultoría. Esta vez yo quería ser el que hacía una muy buena herramienta, que después le pagabas a alguien más para que te hiciera una consultoría para cómo usar la herramienta.
— Nicolas Rojas, Founder at DAPTA
But Pablo Moretti at Mercado Libre tells a different story. Mercado Libre is a LATAM company. It knows LATAM logistics, LATAM payment fragmentation, LATAM regulatory chaos. And now it's hunting Daily Active Users the way TikTok and Temu do—because it learned that the next wave of growth isn't just share of wallet. It's share of attention.
Nosotros veníamos siempre, lo que miramos, Amazon crece a partir del comercio de share of wallet de los usuarios. Y estamos viendo que los asiáticos lo plantearon desde otro lado, desde el generar la demanda desde el entretenimiento.
— Pablo Moretti, VP of Technology at Mercado Libre
Mercado Libre is now competing with ChatGPT for planned purchases and with Instagram Reels for unplanned ones. That's not a Silicon Valley playbook. That's a LATAM company learning from Asian platforms and out-executing everyone.
Where the Experts Disagree: Expand Early or Go Deep?
Ask these operators whether to expand regionally or go deep in one market, and you get opposite answers.
Julian Nunez says the market pulled Yuno into expansion. Rappi needed payment infrastructure in Mexico, then Brazil, then Argentina. Each country required new processors, new methods, new everything. The pain was multi-country from day one, so the solution had to be.
Sí, fue más pull del mercado y vos en lugar de decir o freno el crecimiento o voy all in en lo que hay que hacer y el mismo mercado te fue llevando.
— Julian Nunez, Founder at Yuno
But Santiago Savinon at 99minutos argues the opposite. His company moves 30 million packages a year and has grown 6x since 2020. The key wasn't expanding everywhere—it was adapting the product to each customer's specific use case.
El entender lo que buscaban esas empresas y adaptar nuestro flujo y nuestro proceso y nuestra tecnología para darles a su use case fue uno de los mayores logros que hemos tenido en los últimos años.
— Santiago Savinon, Chief Growth Officer at 99minutos
Savinon is obsessed with "autonomy metrics"—mapping every step of the sales process and using AI to eliminate friction. His bet: go deep on automation, eliminate excuses for the sales team, and let the product do the scaling.
Le quitas las excusas al vendedor, güey. Ya tienes un agente de AI programado que te va a resolver cualquier duda que quieras. Yo lo veo como darle al vendedor los poderes de un CEO.
— Santiago Savinon, Chief Growth Officer at 99minutos
The 80/20 Rule, LATAM Edition
Fernando del Rio lives by the 80/20 rule, but not the way you think. He doesn't mean focus on the top 20% of customers. He means operate for short, medium, and long term simultaneously—and accept that 80% of your bets will fail.
La filosofía del 80/20, pensando cómo operar para el corto, mediano y largo plazo.
— Fernando del Rio, Chief Growth & Marketing Officer at Talisis
Del Rio's career arc is a case study in this. He started in consumer packaged goods at PepsiCo—stable, predictable, manual-driven. Then Mercado Libre recruited him and he entered "clima extremo." Rapid pivots. 3 a.m. strategy changes. He rebuilt Linio's sales org with Salesforce, Twilio, WhatsApp for Business, and Einstein AI. The result: triple-digit growth and a top-three ranking in Mexican e-commerce after years of irrelevance.
Now he's in education at Talisis, running growth for everything from high schools to nursing programs. Same frameworks. Different category. His edge: knowing which 20% to focus on and which 80% to ignore.
What This Means for You
If you're building for LATAM, here's what matters:
1. Inbound doesn't work until the category exists. Partner with agencies, influencers, or trusted intermediaries who can explain what you do. Pull strategies require existing demand. If there's no demand, create it through push.
2. WhatsApp is not optional. It's not a "nice to have" channel. It's where your customers live. If your growth stack doesn't include WhatsApp automation, you're already behind.
3. Payment infrastructure is a competitive moat. Every country has different processors, methods, and decline rates. If you can abstract that complexity—like Yuno did—you unlock the entire region.
4. Talent is cheaper and often better. But you have to train for rigor. Adaptability is built-in. Execution discipline is not.
5. Decide early: LATAM-first or global-first. Both can work. But the playbook is different. LATAM-first means deep local knowledge and regional expansion. Global-first means building for the highest-margin markets and operating from LATAM for cost efficiency.
6. The next wave is attention, not just transactions. Mercado Libre learned this from TikTok and Temu. Daily Active Users matter as much as GMV now. If you're not competing for unplanned demand, you're leaving money on the table.
The companies that win in LATAM aren't the ones that copy Silicon Valley. They're the ones that know when to copy, when to adapt, and when to throw out the playbook entirely.