One of my most popular blog posts is my ecommerce case study from when some friends and I started an ecommerce business in 2012. It gets hundreds of people viewing it each month and leads to lots of questions on Twitter, LinkedIn, and my blog.
I covered how we decided to launch an ecommerce, how we picked a product, and how we validated the idea without spending lots of money out of pocket. My goal was to share how we see the market and how you can validate any business idea without spending months and thousands of dollars to do it.
So what did we sell and what was the store called? We sold condoms on La Condonería.
In this episode, we cover the original case study, along with changes since I wrote the original post in 2015 and Magma Partners’ view on ecommerce in the region.
I hope you enjoy this style of episode of Crossing Borders. Please give me feedback in the comments or on social media on whether you did. If enough people like it, I can go through other industries that are popular in Latin America.
Show Notes
- 02:02 → Why we decided to look at ecommerce
- 03:23 → How did e-commerce work in Chile in 2012?
- 03:59 → What we’ll cover in the podcast
- 04:45 → First Step: Research
- 05:12 → The 4 Phases of ecommerce markets
- 05:45 → Chile’s Phase in 2012 and now
- 06:41 → Step 2: What do we sell?
- 06:59 → 7 opportunities in E-commerce in Latam
- 07:40 → Discarded ecommerce ideas
- 09:16 → Selling commodity Products
- 09:51 → The 3 ecommerce Options that made sense
- 10:15 → Option 3, selling commodity products
- 10:46 → Step 3: What Product should we actually sell?
- 11:30 → Criteria to define the best products
- 15:28 → The product we chose
- 16:27 → Step 4: How we can validate without spending much time and a lot of money?
- 19:39 → Comment on payments in Latin America
- 19:58 → Step 5: Building the foundation
- 22:48 → What we’d done in the first 6 months of operations
- 23:13 → Step 6: New opportunities for scaling revenue
- 26:00 → Our ecommerce after 12 months
- 26:37 → What we learned from this whole process
- 27:39 → Ideas from our initial list that have been launched since 2012
- 28:54 → What did we learn about e-commerce in LatAm?
- 31:53 → Why we don’t invest in e-commerce at Magma Partners
- 32:53 → Trends in Latam e-commerce
- 34:18 → Podcast with one of the founders of Mercadoni
- 34:24 → Other Latin American Ecommerce Trends
Companies and People Mentioned
- Original Ecommerce Case Study
- Jumpseller – Shopify for Latin America
- Tiago Matos – Cofounder Jumpseller
- Mercadoni
- Rappi
- Cornershop
- Buscalibre
- Amazon
- Mercado Libre
- Movile
- Alibaba
- Jack Ma
- Linio
- Zappos