AboutMe - I am Mike

ABOUT ME

My mission is to increase traffic, improve conversion rates, and Boost average profit per customer. In other words, my job is to create a growth plan to scale the right way.

But before explaining how this is done, I need to explain how I developed my skills.

My mission are Increase traffic, Improve conversion rates and Boost average profit per customer. In other words, to create growth plan to scale the right way.

But before how I do that, I need to tell you how I learned it.

In 2014, I left a great full time Master Degree (University of São Paulo) to create my own startup from scratch.

In 2 years we were accelerated by Startup Farm and Wayra Telefonica Ventures (Top Startup Program accelerators in South America) together with government support and we raised ~$100k USD in venture capital funding.

We were a small team. 2 founders and 2 co-founders.

That means we had to wear several hats at the same time.

I was the sales guy
the marketing guy
the finance guy
the product guy

In 2016 we failed.

I really didn’t realize how much I learned to build a Saas startup from scratch. i.e how to launch product, business model, how to validate ideas, how to find clients without no budget, digital marketing in a market no sexy and growth hacking. (by myself)

Lessons I might not have learned in $100k MBAs.

I was tired and 20 kilos overweight.

When The penny drops.

“wait a minute, I’m a marketer. I have to use my powers”.
I looked at my “Batman belt” and decided to use some weapons.

I took my Batarang ICP, my BatGrowth Framework and Bat-Darts outreach mail.

I literally looked at myself as a product and made my launch.

I defined my ICP – Who could hire me.
I created a list of prospects from scratch.
I created 4 blog posts using The Skyscraper Technique on the subjects my ICP wants to consume.
I connected with the founders and decision makers of each company I would prospect.
With each new post I mentioned the companies and founders and sent them to.
I connected with the investors of each company. I needed them to know of my existence.
I also created linkedin content to do social selling.

After 6 months I was hired by Aegro who had just done its series A round.

This is one of the techniques I use to launch a product without budget.

When I arrived at Aegro they were ready to grow. They had a validated product-market fit, had raised $858,394 from SP Ventures and AB Seed and they were building a marketing team. At that moment everything moved very fast. I was the 9th employee hire.

Again, I looked at my batman belt and took out my secret weapons.

Aegro provides SaaS for the agricultural production system encompassing financial, productivity, and commercial management.

If you are not familiar with the agricultural market, especially in Latin America. I’ll show you a graph.

The agribusiness market is the least digitized and back then only 4.7% of farmers use some type of management software. Which could be an opportunity or also a problem.

How to scale a startup in a low digitization market?

Aegro had already validated the product market fit, now we needed to validate the channel market fit.

Can we grow through the digital channel? At that moment we asked ourselves about it.

Even though the agribusiness market is a low digitization market, farmers were on the internet. At least a good part of them.

So it was time to go to my “Batcave” and start to develop the right growth plan to scale the right way.

And that’s my process inspired by Noah Kagan.

1. Research & Discovery

a) Customer Discovery

b) Industry & Competidor Analysis

i) Gaps & Opportunities

c) Unique Value proposition

2. Analytics & Infrastructure

a) SEO & Analysis

b) Analytics management & setup

c) Pick the right tools for the right moment

3. Strategy & Planning

a) Establish specific goals

b) Make your target list prior to launch

c) Find where your users hang out online

d) Test your messaging

e) Track everything

After 3 months we validate that content marketing would be the channel to attract and retain customers by creating and curating relevant and valuable content.

You can read my entire Case Study here.

I now had the confidence and experience to grow a business successfully

As a result of my work:

Traffic to the blog grew from 2k/month unique visitors to 100k/month in 12 months.
I created/produced 25% more sales leads resulting in 15% MRR growth month-over-month.
In 12 months the company increases 10x customers base.
Due to the rapid growth the VC Fund decided to follow on with an additional $1M investment.

Other experiences

At the end of 2018 I was recruited to be founder and CEO of a startup at Construtech Ventures Buider.

Construtech Ventures was a venture capital firm based in Florianópolis, Brazil. The firm used to invest in the contech, proptech, real estate and construction sectors.

As a CEO at Buldin I:

Collaborated in the restructuring of a business model;
Developed, implemented and measured the company marketing strategy, expanding business country-wide with less than one year of operation;
Manage a cross-functional team of 4 marketing analysts and graphic designers and more than 10 freelancers and contractors;
Personally oversee the paid media strategy for key accounts, managing more than $10k in paid advertisements;
Grew blog’s 20% traffic increase per month;
Grew sales of a product to 6 figures in 15 days by optimizing the sales funnel. You can read my Case Study here.

After 9 months in operation, the Fund decided to discontinue the project. And I decided to pursue my career as a growth marketing consultant.

So I joined the Agency Growth Team, the biggest Growth Hacking Agency in South America. As a Growth manager at Growth Team, I managed more than 10 clients. My main duties were:

Planned marketing initiatives and leveraged referral network to promote business development;
Met with current clients to assess needs and develop improvement plans;
Built deep relationships with business owners and distribution partner sales teams by employing industry expertise and knowledge, strategies and sales tactics;
Achieved established KPI for company, regional team and individual performance through teamwork and focus on customers.

In 2020 I decided to get back into business. While I was running my growth marketing agency I also created a new project. Agribase was a content startup that promoted online courses for farmers and agronomists in Latin America.

As a growth hacking consultant, I managed and created growth plans for a variety of startups including JetBov, Agrointeli, Brazsoft, Nagro, Knapik, and MyFarm among others. You can read all of my Case Studies here:
As a co-founder at Agribase, I orchestrated successful promotional bootstrapping strategies, boosting customer growth from 0 to 500 in 7 months with a ROAS of 500%. You can read this Case Study here:
I have also been successfully offering freelance digital marketing services to a variety of enterprises most recently in the Web 3 NFT space.

My expertise in the Growth Hacking space has been recognized widely and I have been invited to speak at several industry conferences and events.

Let me help your company capture more market share and grow intelligently

Whats are my next steps?

Growth is a long term goal and requires planning. You have to think about the big picture and what the long-term plan looks like. The only way to do this is by building trust with your customer. And you can do this by asking questions and understanding their needs.

I am constantly learning and adapting my skills to a rapidly changing environment

I will attend the Saastr conference in September 2022 and join the world’s Largest Business Software community. I like to learn from other entrepreneurs;
I plan to join Reforge and participate in their cohort-based programs.
I will continue to explore, learn and grow my growth marketing skills to provide state-of-the-art, best practices skills to my client’s needs.

Read here 15 reasons to hire me and understand more about my softskills

Interested in working with me?

Are you interested in collaborating or want to connect or chat? I’d love to hear from you!