Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Why did Matt join your company?

Diego Gomes: We were growing and delivering good results with marketing our products. Our product was evolving and was generating leads, but we were struggling with learning sales. Our founders and the whole team was not familiar in that area.

I was personally leading sales, and I decided to study as hard as I could. I started filing forms on every company that I knew that had a great sales force to try to learn how they were selling. I was doing that for Oracle, Zendesk, Salesforce, and HubSpot.

I wasn’t looking to buying anything with the limited resources I had. I got in touch with HubSpot. Matt called me and sold me $10,000 worth of products in an upfront deal. I wasn’t in the market to buy, but Matt somehow got me to buy. I knew right then that this guy was really good at what he does.

I was happy that I learned a lot from that experience, but I realized that I needed to get my capital back on this investment. He became a close mentor, and he provided coaching to me and my team. It started as a commercial relationship that later became a friendship.

In 2017, I went to the US, and I asked him if I could stay at his house for the HubSpot conference. I had only one goal at that time and that was recruiting Matt to my team. I needed to convince his wife to move to Brazil and leave their life in Boston to join a startup company. It was challenging.

I got a “Try before you buy” deal from her. They were going to come to Brazil for a month to get to know the company and experience life in Brazil, and on the last day, they were going to decide if they were staying and joining or leaving. Successfully, it was the beginning of a fruitful relationship.

Sramana Mitra: What role did Matt have at HubSpot?

Diego Gomes: He was working the inside sales team for Latin America. 

Sramana Mitra: He was an individual salesperson for HubSpot?

Diego Gomes: Yes, he had previous management experiences in other companies, but in Hubspot he was an individual sales representative. 

Sramana Mitra: Matt moved and made a big difference in putting together a scalable sales process?

Diego Gomez: Yes, he is the fourth co-founder. He has been with us for a long time, and he always delivers consistent results.  

Sramana Mitra: He lives in Belo Horizonte, Brazil?

Diego Gomez: At the moment, he is living in Belo Horizonte, but he is moving back to the US to our office there.

Sramana Mitra: This happened in 2018?

Diego Gomez: It was earlier in 2017.

Sramana Mitra: That was a big lever. What happens next? What is the major inflection point after that? 

Diego Gomez: The next step for us is nailing and cracking the code on enterprise sales. We noticed that we were starting to bring great brands in Mexico and Brazil. We’re working with those brands in Portuguese and Spanish. That brought some good revenue growth. I think around $8 to $12 million.

It’s an area that we are still learning a lot but we are always making a lot of progress. Last year we made an acquisition in the US. We were looking for a company with a similar characteristic that already had the talent network for us to enter the market. ScribbleLive fit the bill. They have operations in both US and Canada. 

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping a Marketplace from Brazil: Diego Gomes, CEO of Rock Content
1 2 3 4 5 6