Tag: data

Florence Frech, Leal: Bringing Data-Driven Customer Engagement to Latin America, Ep 114

You can now find the full show notes of the Crossing Borders podcast on LatamList.com’s new podcast section. I’ll still post the audio of the podcast on my blog and I’m planning to start writing more again on my blog, like I used to.

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Thanks for listening to Crossing Borders all these years! If you have any feedback or questions, please feel free to reach out here, or contact me on social media.

Outline of this episode:

  • [1:37] – About Leal
  • [3:11] – Customer engagement in LatAm
  • [6:33] – Growing up in El Salvador
  • [9:05] – Becoming an entrepreneur
  • [13:12] – Leaving a stable job
  • [15:04] – Florence’s inflection point
  • [17:52] – Understanding the problem first
  • [20:04] – The initial product
  • [22:25] – Leal’s use cases
  • [25:17] – Raising money 
  • [26:37] – Advice to other entrepreneurs
  • [29:31] – Books, blogs, & podcast recommendations
  • [32:00] – Advice to Florence’s younger self
  • [33:23] – What’s next for Leal?

Show notes on Latamlist.com.

Geoff Michener, dataPlor: Closing the Latin American Data Gap with Human Verified SME Data, Ep 105

Growing up in Denver, Colorado, Geoff Michener was interested in international trade and economics. During his undergrad, he got the opportunity to study abroad in Nicaragua and learn about foreign investment. There, he quickly fell in love with Latin America and promised himself that he would come back and do business in the future.

Geoff kept his promise and is now CEO and founder of dataPlor, a Magma portfolio company that provides quality data on small businesses in Latin America. He noticed that there was a huge information gap in the region where up to 75% of SMEs have no online presence. DataPlor’s team of “explorers” captures and validates data to build a database that provides enterprises with accurate information on small businesses.

In this episode, I sit down with Geoff to talk about the value dataPlor brings to large enterprises as well as the challenges of collecting data in Latin America compared to the US. We also discuss some of the lessons he’s learned from shutting down his first startup, and also some of his reflections on the future of data.

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