How Latin American Startups Can Make Their Own User Data Their Growth Superpower

Investors are increasingly cautious, not only when it comes to funding, but also when contributing to the growth of startups through personalized support. So, what can founders do about it? 

Global investment has plummeted in the last quarter, reaching $81 billion, down by $90 billion compared to the previous year. With fewer and smaller investments on the table, some regions are receiving less funding than others. For Latin American startups, an already underrepresented ecosystem, funding closed at $250 million, down from $1.2 billion the previous quarter.

The LatAm startup ecosystem’s current decline in capital availability means that the region’s economy will digitize and mature at a much slower pace. This makes it increasingly difficult for LatAm founders to compete with multiple markets in different regions and can delay positive impact on their country’s technological and financial development. 

Yet, this doesn’t necessarily represent a setback for founders in the region, but more of an opportunity to analyze their product’s health and recalibrate their pitching strategy. Better harnessing user data can help startups determine their best path forward, showing that they're adopting resilient and well-informed growth strategies. 

Product-led growth to increase revenue—and funding

Analyzing product usage data is an effective way to measure a platform’s success, providing clear insights into how well a product fits and meets a market’s needs. For early-stage startups, however, it can be harder to leverage this data as most young startups don’t have a data science team or professional support to make the most out of their data. Often, leaders are led by vanity metrics or those that lack depth, such as revenue and user numbers as opposed to those that track interactions, retention rates, and overall usage. 

However, tools such as Breadcrumbs aid and guide startups in tracking product usage to increase revenue by cross-selling and upselling. After all, customers who are already familiar with a platform or brand are more likely to complete a purchase than those who haven’t heard of it yet. Breadcrumbs, a contact scoring tool, allows teams to determine the variables with a cross or upsell potential and then connects with a company’s CRM and notifies each time a customer meets the set criteria. Not only does the platform help reduce the guesswork but it saves teams time and automates sales processes, helping founders highlight greater potential and growth to interested parties. 

TheVentureCity, a global venture capital fund that has made hundreds of investments in recent years, has launched an analytics tool with its team of former founders turned investors, to support global startups with scaling in a sustainable way. Enter Growth Scanner, a free platform that provides startups with a personalized analysis of their product health, user behaviors, and key metrics such as customer retention and ROI. For this, TheVentureCity's data team analyzes at least six months of data from each startup (data that is not shared with third parties). These numbers are transformed into detailed reports highlighting the strengths and weaknesses, retention/return ratios, and growth percentages, among others. 

SimpliRoute, a Chilean last-mile delivery startup whose Series A was run by TheVentureCity is among one of the first startups to leverage Growth Scanner to understand their user’s behavior. By segmenting their data by location, size, and acquisition channel, they were able to observe how their success was starting to replicate in other markets such as Colombia and Mexico at the same, or faster rates. These insights helped SimpliRoute identify where to allocate their resources and what countries or areas of growth needed reassessing. 

And finally, AIM, an analytics tool that gathers specific growth metrics across different departments allows teams to keep track of any key alternating variables and then build forecasts with greater precision. This way, founders and team leaders can work with more accuracy and improve their decision-making process, with an always-on forecasting platform guiding their next moves. 

Accelerating LatAm’s VC Landscape

VC support towards LatAm’s startup ecosystem is paramount to building a strong global economy due to the region’s continuous innovation and productivity growth. Aside from funding, investors can advise founders and support their deployment based on key data that helps guarantee and maintain sustainable growth, aiming to scale their solutions worldwide. 

LatAm’s founders’ resilience is unmatched and the increasing adoption of tech solutions is a clear indicator of greater potential in the region and businesses’ willingness to adapt to the current digitization era. Early-stage startup data analytics tools help fuel investments and attract greater partnerships that consequently help the population uplift its quality of life. By showing well-informed data-based business strategies local founders and interested VCs are paving the way toward sustainable growth.