Spending time with family was an essential part of Ulupreneur Roby Penacastro’s life growing up in Queretaro, Mexico. His parents were both entrepreneurs and ran businesses out of their home. The life of an entrepreneurial family was not without its ups and downs, but at an early age that spirit inspired him.
His first job out of school was at a tech startup in his hometown in Mexico doing SaaS logistics for e-commerce business. There, he met his now co-founder David Villa Canez.They stayed friends and believed that someday they would build something together.
Roby went on to work at several different startups and ended up at what he called his “dream job” at Google. But then the pandemic came, his parents lost their jobs, and Roby went back to Mexico to help them.
When things shut down during COVID, he pivoted into selling online courses in mixology. It was then he realized they needed a tool to better handle all the inquiries that were coming in through WhatsApp. And that’s where the idea for LeadSales came—it was initially an internal solution to scale the mixology business. They launched in 2020, bootstrapping most of their initial funding. Now they have $3.1M in annual recurring revenue and are in 20 countries.
2024 has been a big year for Leadsales. They were named as one of Forbes’ “30 Business Promises“, named by a top VC as one of most promising startups of 2024 in a Business Insider article and were featured on SharkTank Mexico, where they closed the best deal in the show’s history.
We spoke to Roby about LeadSales and his dreams for the company. He also told us in a short video his thoughts about why diversity is so important when hiring.
What is LeadSales?
It’s a CRM for WhatsApp and social media messages that helps businesses organize their chats into columns. Those columns can be for product questions, billing, deliveries, or just about any subject. From there, companies can use the columns for the best sales leads or for supporting current customers.
Why Leadsales…why now?
One of the things that I realized while I was working at Google is that the world is changing toward conversational commerce, which means people are starting to buy through messages—whether it’s text message or, in our case, WhatsApp. In China we know that people rely on the WeChat app to conduct commerce. We’re seeing this happening in Latin America, Brazil, Africa, Southeast Asia, and India. COVID accelerated the digitalization of small businesses, and the trend is growing exponentially. More people are demanding a quick response via message.
What are your dreams for Leadsales?
I believe that Leadsales can become the next Salesforce, the next HubSpot of its time. My dream in the next five years is to get so successful that we can actually build a Leadsales tower either in San Francisco or in Mexico, preferably in Mexico.
Now is the time to help small businesses grow their sales. Today we have 2,000 businesses, but I believe we can get to one million. When you put the numbers that are just in Latin America, there are more than 20 million that could use our platform.
