From gasoline corporations to attorneys, service-based companies and suppliers are a cornerstone in any economic system. Latin America’s service business employs an estimated 60 p.c of the area’s inhabitants. However even a well-established enterprise sector is just not with out its challenges. Jennifer Reyna, CEO and co-founder of the enterprise platform Waddi, has seen firsthand how complicated processes can hinder a small enterprise’ success.
“Small companies are shedding as much as $1.6 trillion a 12 months because of poor customer support, together with receiving companies on time, appointment conflicts, or worth change,” she explains. Together with co-founder Jesús Ochoa Bojórquez, Reyna launched Okboy in 2021 to attach householders to one of the best dwelling service suppliers.
Lower than two years later, the duo based Waddi as a approach to empower service business suppliers to offer higher service and experiences to their Latin American prospects. The 2 manufacturers served as a approach to revolutionize the service business from each side.
Reyna started her entrepreneurial journey virtually a decade earlier than, constructing start-up manufacturers within the healthcare and repair industries. It was her work on Gaszen, an IoT model for gasoline suppliers, and Okboy, a family service supplier market, that Reyna pinpointed a singular drawback plaguing Latin American householders.
“I might pitch to U.S.-based traders, they usually had been at all times shocked on the challenges that individual business confronted in Latin America—like, that’s the way it works? And I might say sure, that’s the way it’s been eternally,” she explains, recalling her quite a few conversations about Latin America’s service business.
However challenges like well timed service, crucial tools, and fulfilling work orders weren’t restricted to the gasoline business. Reyna noticed the complexities companies confronted firsthand, restricted by the precise expertise and instruments to handle their day-to-day operations.
She factors out, “These small companies and entrepreneurs simply didn’t have the expertise and instruments at hand to really present the extent of service their shoppers wanted.”
Whereas Waddi is constructed as an all-in-one expertise answer for service-based companies, the corporate’s potential comes from the group constructing it. Co-founders Reyna and Ochoa Bojórquez first related in 2021, with a shared imaginative and prescient that operating a service-based enterprise needs to be simply as straightforward as hiring one.
Earlier than his work with Reyna, Ochoa Bojórquez spent over 5 years as a software program developer. His work with multidisciplinary applied sciences, together with knowledge science and superior enterprise intelligence, would turn into the inspiration of Waddi’s technical design and improvement. Ochoa Bojórquez served because the model’s chief expertise officer (CTO) earlier than his premature passing in 2023.
“Jesus was a terrific engineer, however he was additionally such a terrific instructor. I keep in mind him connecting with our interns at 9 p.m. simply to assist them end a venture or reply a query,” Reyna recollects.
Ochoa Bojórquez helped instill a development mindset in his group, main with a service-minded method to serving to others be one of the best variations of themselves. Reyna says, “He believed in individuals, irrespective of the place they got here from. He trusted that somebody with a terrific angle and need to maneuver their life ahead…they might execute on that. To have him as my co-founder was a terrific honor.”
Jhoset Camacho, the model’s co-founder and chief product officer (CPO), has performed a pivotal function for the reason that firm’s launch in March 23. Camacho labored alongside Reyna and Ochoa Bojórquez at Okboy and, in line with Reyna, was a major supply of inspiration for transitioning the group’s focus to service suppliers. He spent the previous seven years within the start-up world, serving to set up and develop transformative manufacturers throughout the healthcare tech, EdTech, and customer support industries.
Waddi’s management group additionally contains Carlos López. Beforehand, López labored as an engineer for corporations corresponding to CT Worldwide and Telmex, Mexico’s largest telecommunications firm. Now, he’s stepping as much as lead Waddi’s expertise efforts as the corporate’s CTO. Presently headquartered in Mexico Metropolis, the corporate at the moment employs 17 group members.
In the case of making enterprise higher for service-based entrepreneurs, Reyna believes in reasonably priced expertise that helps small companies assist their prospects. Study extra about how Waddi is revolutionizing how Latin American service suppliers do enterprise at waddi.io.
