News

Launching a Regional Company in Latin America with Amazon and Mercadolibre

Published

4 years ago

02/11/2021

We talked to Juan Pablo Degiovanni, CEO and founder of Crystalzoom on how to maximize the benefits of advertising with a campaign adapted to your budget and objectives and here is what he said about it.

Table of Contents

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Juan Pablo Degiovanni: Luckily, no friend or family member had COVID, being Latin America quite hit by the virus.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Crystalzoom.

Juan Pablo Degiovanni: The truth is that I have founded companies almost from the beginning of my working life. I have always loved the challenge of being an entrepreneur, being my first technology company at age 21, then it was acquired by a French group that was listed on the French stock exchange. Later I founded a second company, a technology company that a Mexican group later acquired. My third company was mobile advertising, which was also acquired, this time by a group of Argentine companies.

My current company, Crystalzoom, was launched last year with 2 more partners to disrupt how the millions of sellers on Amazon and Mercadolibre sell with advertising.

How does Crystalzoom innovate?

Juan Pablo Degiovanni: We use big data and machine learning to predict which of the hundreds of products that the sellers of these marketplaces have (Amazon / Mercadolibre) is the one with the most potential to advertise, and we do it automatically (the seller, our client, has to do absolutely nothing, we do everything for him). Does how we disrupt advertising on Marketplaces.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Juan Pablo Degiovanni: Only in the case of Mercadolibre in the region, more than 2 million Sellers were added to its platform last year, which generated an incredible boom to sell online.

In addition to the fact that these sellers need tools to boost their sales, it sincerely gave us great traction.

Think, with all that a seller has to deal with to sell on Amazon / Mercdolibre, who wants to learn about advertising? What if there was a platform that does it for him?

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Juan Pablo Degiovanni: The truth is, we had a year of growth in terms of business, but we also had to adapt to the new culture proposed by COVID.

We had the offices closed, which creates difficulties for everyone in how to continue working in the best possible way.

In my opinion, what we lost the most was the “culture” of the company, since human interaction is fundamental for this, something that from a distance is much more complicated.

If you add to that that we launched very recently, it makes us have to work very hard so that new people (many of us do not know them physically!) understand our culture.

What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?

Juan Pablo Degiovanni: We work with several tools, from Trello, Zoom, Google packages, Teams, but I insist that the most important thing is to be able to have calls and physical contact with at least part of the teams.

We try to have the teams have regular meetings, but it also depends a lot on the policies of each country and its restrictions.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Juan Pablo Degiovanni: In Latin America, we are for now the only company dedicated to promoting the advertising of sellers in Amazon and Mercadolibre, something that in the USA and Europe already exist several companies.

Indeed this 2021, new competitors will arrive; for now, we move very fast to win the largest possible market.

Your final thoughts?

Juan Pablo Degiovanni: Although COVID brought many company closings and unemployment, I believe that those of us who are in the eCommerce industry like us have a great responsibility to be able to rebuild the industry in general, generate jobs, provide quality services, and help the economy returns where it should be.