Discover Your Niche: How a Startup Found a Market to Serve
Welcome back to Generation Si! 👋👋🏼👋🏾 I wanted to share Part Two of my profile of Hector Garcia with you. In Part One, I introduced you to the founder and CEO of INMYTEAM, the tech solutions provider that focuses on home health care.
Now, you’ll learn about the first company Garcia founded in Cuba and the approach that’s brought him success in the home health care market.
Specifically, I'll share these lessons:
🌴An example of how the money will come, if you focus on building a following
🌴How helping a client become more efficient can help them become more effective
🌴The importance of testing your ideas early to increase your chances of getting outside funding
🌴Here's Part Two of Hector Garcia's entrepreneurial journey:
TRAIN YOURSELF TO RECOGNIZE OPPORTUNITY
It all started with postcards that featured the Backstreet Boys.
Remember those guys?
Backstreet Boys - Photo by Paul Bergen/Redferns via Getty Images
Well, Hector Garcia sure does.
Garcia’s mother taught Spanish to foreigners in Cuba.
One of those adult students was a woman who would bring postcards every year of the Backstreet Boys and other musicians and Hollywood types to Cuba and give them to Garcia.
Growing up in the ‘90s with no hope of a future in Cuba, Garcia saw an opportunity to sell the postcards.
Hector as a child in Cuba
The woman wouldn’t take any money for the postcards, but she did want Garcia to teach her the Spanish that young people spoke. She also asked if he could take her to the places where she could learn real Cuban culture.
So Garcia started his little side hustle selling the postcards to his classmates at school, as well as selling music he’d burned on his CD player.
BUILD THE FOLLOWING AND THE MONEY WILL COME
But it was another one of his mother’s Spanish class students, an entrepreneur named Johann Burkhard, that Garcia says showed him “how the world really works…” Together, they founded Cubisima.com.
It was an online real estate platform.
More than anything, Garcia remembers Burkhard telling him, “We need to get people to use the platform.”
He told Garcia to forget about the money they were making.
Instead, Burkhard said they should have a different focus.
Burkhard said to Garcia, “We need to get people to use it [the platform] to get the traffic.”
Well, they got the traffic, even in a country with extremely limited internet access.
Hector's home in Cuba
As Burkhard predicted, with the internet traffic, the money eventually followed.
He says the site generated around $3,000 a month. In Cuba, that was a lot of money at the time, especially since private businesses like theirs weren’t really permitted to operate during that period.
SOMETIMES, OPPORTUNITY FINDS YOU; DON'T IGNORE IT
Hector sees an opportunity in the home health care sector
Once Garcia was able to leave Cuba and make it to the U.S by way of Canada, he quickly realized there was another opportunity to use technology.
This time, he had his eyes set on the home health care sector.
The opportunity actually found him.
That’s when a friend who owned a home health care agency explained to Garcia how the business and industry worked.
Then the friend shared with Garcia the fundamental problem with his business.
He had a huge list of caregivers available who were 1099 contractors. His friend was trying to match the caregivers with patients who needed care, which became quite an undertaking.
You see, when a call for service came up, his friend’s employees were coordinating care the old-fashioned way.
Garcia says the employees would get “on the phone and try to call all these caregivers, one by one, and ask them if they are interested in [taking] that patient.”
He goes on to say, “Imagine when you have a company of… 600 patients? Doing that… every time you need service is crazy.”
IF POSSIBLE, OFFER POTENTIAL CLIENTS A MORE EFFICIENT WAY TO DO BUSINESS
But his friend didn’t know any better. So as the friend's business kept growing, he just kept hiring more people to make more calls.
That was until Garcia and his business partner, Ernesto Ferriol, created a simple app and website using a backend SMS platform to blast out to all the caregivers.
Men on an entrepreneurial mission: Hector with INMYTEAM co-founder, Ernesto Ferriol
The caregivers could then apply for the job via text message or the mobile app, if they installed it.
The referrals for more work came quickly.
Pretty soon, Garcia and Ferriol’s company, INMYTEAM, had five companies using their software solutions. That number is now up to 37.
One company wanted to expand on services by giving Garcia and Ferriol access to their schedules.
The two co-founders created a comprehensive solution to make sure only available caregivers were offered the work so that the caregivers couldn’t “double-book”, if you will, and take on extra patients, if they were already booked at the same time.
ANALYZE WHICH AREAS COMPETITORS MAY BE FORGETTING OR IGNORING
Garcia analyzed other competitors’ systems and realized the competition was not only using old technology, but “they were focusing only on the billing side of [the business].”
He says the competitors “weren’t focusing on their everyday operations.”
RELATIONSHIPS AND TRUST MATTER
Ernesto and Hector are not just founders, but also long-time friends
So Garcia and Ferriol seized on the opportunity and are committed to growing the business.
Garcia says of Ferriol, “He went to Canada, as well, with me. So we have been sharing a lot. And, you know, we are like brothers now. I trust him. He trusts me. So that’s one thing. And he’s very talented at programming and developing.”
Garcia says that being able to find a business partner like Ferriol is key.
FUNDING FYI: DOING THINGS IN THE RIGHT ORDER MATTERS
What Garcia has found challenging is the venture capital and angel investing world. He says he tried to get that type of funding in the beginning. But because he didn’t have any traction at the time, venture capitalists told him, “I love the idea. I love what you’re doing, but I will need 80% of your company.”
Garcia’s answer? “Okay, bye.”
And that’s a warning and a lesson to others on doing things in the proper order.
“Try to bootstrap your business. Try to bootstrap your idea. Try to make some assumptions and test them out. And, then, after you bootstrap that idea, then try to raise money.”
Note: Bootstrapping your business means raising the money to start your company from your own personal resources (ex. personal savings, friends, family, etc.) versus getting the money by using outside investors like venture capitalists or angel investors who want an ownership stake in your company in exchange for the funding.
SMALL BUSINESS SIZE=PERSONALIZED SERVICE
And that brings us back to the 37 clients INMYTEAM has been able to amass, so far. Garcia admits it’s a tiny number compared to competitors. But Garcia believes the company’s small size can give his team other advantages.
“We don’t have to answer to any big investor… We do what we think is right… We also move very fast.”
Garcia isn’t fazed by any challenges along the way. He attributes his dogged persistence back to growing up in Cuba.
Providing software solutions for home health care agencies is very different from selling Backstreet Boys postcards, especially postcards that he later learned could be found at the dollar store.
But Garcia sees a big future in home health care.
“I think we are in the right market.” And no matter the challenge, he’s of the mindset, “Let’s move forward.”
INSPIRATION FOR THIS ISSUE:
When you’re not a big company and are relatively new to the game, you have to offer different things to get on the board with clients.
But that’s exactly the advantage you have: you can offer personalized service. You can win over potential customers if you make them believe that you’ll give their account more attention and more services tailored specifically to their needs.
This is clearly how Garcia and Ferriol were able to gain the confidence of clients in the beginning.
Besides that, with so many companies trying to digitize their functions, I wanted to give you an inside look at how a company transformed its business digitally. Then, I wanted to give an example of how Latino tech entrepreneurs, Garcia and Ferriol, were able to build their own business by providing that service in a niche market.
We all learn from each other, so I hope a real-life example like this gives you all kinds of ideas on how you can benefit from this digital transformation our society is undergoing.
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🌴 Thank you for reading this issue of Generation Si! Looking forward to seeing you back here for more! #theskyisNOTthelimit 😻
The modern-day morning meeting: INMYTEAM's co-founders with their developers