Who to sell to: the question 67 companies in Bogotá kept asking

The question we heard most often in Bogotá was who to sell to.

For a year we worked with 67 companies in Innovalab, the acceleration and incubation program run by the Bogotá Chamber of Commerce. There was a bit of everything, from a fintech with tens of thousands of customers to teams still putting together their first prototype, in sectors as different as digital health and the music industry.

With that much diversity you would expect different problems. What we found instead was that a good share of them were stuck on the same decision before they could talk seriously about growth or investment, and what happened once they made it says a lot about how to support companies at this stage.

Before the pitch and the funding, they had to decide who to sell to

The problem showed up in different guises. There were platforms that could not settle on whether they sold to companies or to individuals, and businesses with two ventures tangled under the same brand. Until that was resolved, working on the pitch or the metrics meant polishing a story that was going to change.

In at least eleven of the 67 companies that story really did change: they pivoted or redefined their value proposition within cycles of two to three months. For us that is the most valuable outcome of the program, and it does not show up on any dashboard.

One of the companies, whose product uses artificial intelligence to guide entrepreneurs on where to advertise, came in selling a membership to consumers and left targeting corporate clients, with a sales approach that was already getting traction.

Another, which builds technology for communication between deaf and hearing people, stopped serving several segments at once and focused on companies with an inclusion agenda. With that focus it got a large company to acknowledge it had the problem and open the door to a pilot, something that rarely happens when you are talking to everyone.

Companies outside software built with AI, and that brings a risk

Silent Art is a film production company from Bogotá, and Konvergenz is a music booking agency that connects Ibero-America with French-speaking territories. Neither sells technology, and both moved their websites forward with prototypes built with artificial intelligence. Silent Art's already works as a commercial catalog of its services. Not long ago, that meant hiring someone and waiting.

We saw the other side in a startup that had built a good part of its product on a visual AI prototyping tool. During mentoring it realized it depended on the tool too much and ended up migrating its development to code generation tools. Prototyping fast works, but a product tied to the tool it was born with can cost months when it is time to grow, and that conversation belongs to the mentor before it happens.

For others, the best advice we could give was not to build yet

While some companies were building faster than ever, in the incubator the useful advice was often the opposite.

We advised a software venture with three active users to sell before finishing the product and validate with a pilot of 10 to 20 users. A science-based project left with a certification roadmap instead of a development plan, because without health and quality validations it has nothing to sell. At an early stage, knowing what not to do can save more money than any tool.

Three-month revenue is a poor way to measure an acceleration program

Twelve companies reported revenue or sales at the start and at the end of their support, and in every one the number went up, in one case almost threefold. It would be easy to put that in the headline. We do not, because these are figures reported by the companies themselves, over a short period and with no comparison group, and on that basis you cannot attribute the growth to a two- or three-month program.

What can change in that time is clarity about the business model. Sales come later, once that decision is executed, which is why it makes more sense to measure that clarity at the end and ask about revenue again at six and twelve months.

You can also read what we learned working with 65 companies in Panama.