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Reasons Why To Invest In Mexico vs North America
Mexico is very concentrated in real estate. It’s one of the founding growth powers for the economy and a reason why to invest in Mexico. You can see so much residential construction in the main cities around you in Monterrey, Guadalajara, Mexico City, the three main cities that just keep on growing.
We are a developing country, there’s a lot of money and a lot of investment in real estate, and that will continue to grow.
I grew up in Monterrey and when I was little, you could buy a house maybe for 1 or 2 million pesos. Right now there’s no way. You need at least 7 or 8 million pesos, so it’s growing and growing.
You’ll see a lot of developments, especially Monterrey, where it’s really close to the US. There’s a lot of tendencies as the city grows. Very similar to the US and very similar to Texas.
What Are Constraints of Building a SaaS & Investing In Mexico?
One of the biggest constraint I see, with my little experience in venture capital is we don’t have that same mentality as a Silicon Valley, where you can see the potential in a product, a potential growth in users, and investors that are in the US, maybe would say this is going to be a goldmine, let’s invest in this startup right away.
Here in Mexico I have revenue, I have users and they just ask how much revenue do you have? How much are your costs? They want you to have a very profitable company, and I’m like “What?! I’m a start up, I don’t have to be profitable, right now. I’m profitable, but I don’t have to be.”
There’s just that thing of the old school mentality, the old school financial system, or it’s too much risk for them right now but I think it’s gonna evolve. But eventually, I can see us at Kiperfy growing to other countries and probably going to the US to try to meet some of our investors.
What Are Constraints Around Hiring Talent in Mexico?
I’m a very unusual CEO. I don’t hire specifically on talent, I hire on personality and productivity and a lot of our team is based on people that are trying to be better for their family or are trying to pay their tuition. I got a scholarship all my life and I know the struggles of not having money and looking for opportunities.
Even if you don’t have the diploma, you don’t have the skills right now, you can develop them. So I try to look for that type of people. People that are willing to do anything, anything to grow and learn, and then position themselves to get more value and of course, more income.
Here in Mexico, there’s an advantage that we have a lot of diversity and you can see people from all over Mexico here trying to better themselves and have better opportunities. We continually are looking for talent, or people that want to grow and if we see an opportunity you can join our team. We will have an internship of three months and everything like that to see if it works.
Right now we have about 20 people, and we plan to continue to grow it.
As An International SaaS Provider, How Do You Target Multiple Markets?
Here in Mexico, there’s a great difference between provinces, small cities or a big cities. There’s a lot of difference between the property manager using that technology. For example, people that want something specific like printing reports, they want to print financial statements. Why print it when you can use on your app? They don’t understand yet that they don’t have to print it out, like in the old times.
In other countries, for example in Colombia, they are very used to depending on the city like Bogota, we have a couple of breaks there, they’re very used to apps, they’re very used to technology. You can see that they are very willing to use and adapt a mobile phone and maybe they want some kind of language that is expressed for their regional users and that’s very easy for us. You can register and get providing just select your country and you have specific words or specific modules that you can use in your country.
But the main goal of property management is the same, so you can have the same solution. For example, one of our greatest boundaries in our countries are charging with a credit card, and paying your rent through a bank in another country. There’s a regulation there, and you’ll have to pay some taxes, but we solve it as the community grows.
So when we start in a new country, it depends on how many users, how many properties and then I travel there and did everything around it so we can change and just keep it going.
Roadmap, New Solutions and Opportunities for Kiperfy
There are a lot of opportunities around our solution.
I came up with seven new revenue streams around Kiperfy and all of them could be profitable in one time, even analytics around our users, commercial services around our users. There are a lot of opportunities but everything takes time, everything takes money. So it depends on how much capital we have. I also created a pitch deck and I have more or less about $1.5 million where we would be looking in to raising investment capital for next year.
Opportunities for SaaS Solutions in The Real Estate Industry
I think there are a lot. The whole rental industry around Airbnb, around renting for a minimum space or minimum time, or a visit. There’s so much opportunity here and reasons why to invest in Mexico, you can create a service around it very easily.
Another one around prop tech, every process, even financial control around the building process. It’s very antiquated. It’s almost written by hand, and you won’t believe it, living in 2021. The construction prioject are like millions of dollar constructions, they still use these old methods.
So there’s a lot of opportunity around properties around prop tech, and not just in Mexico, in Latin America. For example, I was in Peru, and everybody in Peru said they wanted to come to Mexico.
It’s like Mexico is the greatest, the best technology country. That was like what we look at the US as being one of the leaders, but everybody down our country wants to come to Mexico. So there’s a lot of opportunity, and I think it’s only going to get faster. There’s always going to be a new solution, that’s not going stop.
About Mau Lamas
Mau Lamas is the Founder and CEO at Kiperfy, a property management app and SaaS solution bringing transparency, security communication and financial control to the space. Mau is a Mexican Entrepreneur that moved to Mexico City to officially start the company in 2017, where they are now the leading property management solution in Mexico.
Mau also the creator of the Entrepreneur’s club UltraFounder, creating a podcast and networking platform between founders, universities and companies.
He also created the Foundation: MásVida, helping homeless people reintegrate with their communities through Physical, Emotional, and Economical evaluations. Check out the full podcast interview with Mau Lamas on SaaS District here.
