Startup Spotlight #123: Elenas
Elenas is building the first social commerce platform for consumer products ($260 billion USD market in relevant categories) in LATAM.
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I got the chance to speak with Zach Oschin, founder and CEO of Elenas, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Zach Oschin has spent his career launching and scaling high-growth startups around the world. Before founding Elenas, Oschin worked as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Polymath Ventures where he helped to lead new projects focused on consumer tech. Previously, Oschin worked in the United States, the Netherlands, and South Africa in communications, growth, and expansion roles for startups in the aerospace (XCOR Aerospace) and e-commerce sectors (Pargo). He studied at Georgetown University where he was named a top undergraduate entrepreneur.
Elenas, Latin America's top social commerce platform, enables entrepreneurial women to build their own online store and earn an extra income with the tools and products they need to get started. 11 million women across the region today sell $26B USD worth of beauty, home goods, and clothing products through a system of antiquated catalogs and door-to-door sales. Elenas provides a modern sales platform for these women to share and promote over 20,000 products over social media, manage clients and sales, and grow their business, without having to worry about product sourcing, delivery, or payment collection. In the past year, Elenas has empowered tens of thousands of women in Colombia to earn millions of dollars on the platform.
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Startup Spotlight: Elenas
Problem: Eleven million women across Latin America sell $30 billion worth of consumer goods products through a system of antiquated catalogs and door-to-door sales. This trust-based sales channel is vitally important for the region, but in its current form, limits earnings potential is operationally intense and puts the financial risk on the women who join.
Market: The Latin American market for lifestyle products (beauty, personal care, clothing, home goods) is $260 billion, with the direct sales market representing $30 billion and e-commerce at $9 billion. As the e-commerce share of the market grows alongside direct sales, Elenas plans to take on a potential market share of over $60 billion for social commerce.
Solution: Elenas is Latin America’s top social commerce platform, enabling entrepreneurial women to build their own online business and earn an extra income with the tools and products they need to get started. We enable our network of entrepreneurs to promote and sell over 20,000 products on social media, manage clients and sales, and grow their business, without having to worry about product sourcing, delivery, or payment collection.
Team: Our incredible 60+ person team is based in Bogotá, Colombia. We are proud that women represent the majority of employees across the company.
Recent Success:
Oschin: I am from the US, but have been working and living in Colombia for four years now. It is always a challenge when you are building in a geography and culture different from your own to raise capital from local investors, understand regulations, and build a network of other entrepreneurs who are dealing with the same problems you are. Being in that situation forces you to more actively make new connections, seek constant contact and feedback from your users, and understand that you always have more to learn.
Every day, my team and I are calling and WhatsApping our network of entrepreneurs to hear their stories and think about how we can build a better product and experience for them. By forcing ourselves to understand users who may be different than us, we have built a consistent feedback and product improvement cycle. We have built a network of global investors and advisors from Colombia, Mexico, India, the United States, and beyond who have helped us to get where we are today. This focus on understanding our local context while building a global network has helped us to grow over 25x in the past year and raise a $6M USD Series A to continue to expand across Latin America.
Recent Struggle:
Oschin: High-growth, venture-backed start-ups mostly started to emerge in Colombia over the past five years which means that it is a young but quickly developing sector of the economy. The Colombian government has identified that there are hundreds of thousands of new developers who will need to be trained in the coming years to meet up the talent demand in the market. With more capital flowing into the region every year there is tough competition for the product and development talent which currently exists.
We have had to work hard to foster and train the talent we have and to hire great developers, PMs, and operators from around the region. Scaling these teams has certainly not been easy, but by focusing on our mission to empower millions of women entrepreneurs around the region we have been able to attract incredible talent who is seeking to make an impact in the work they do every day.
Founder Advice:
Oschin: I always encourage other entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs to be to think beyond the boundaries of their own world and build solutions for people who might be different than themselves. Too often people only focus on building to solve for their own needs. While this definitely has worked for many founders, there is a whole world of opportunity out there to build in other countries or for different segments of the population who might not have access to the same resources. This pandemic has made the world a much smaller place in a lot of ways. You can hire, build, and launch anywhere in the world while working from home so why limit yourself to one country, city, or community?
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Oschin: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Daniela Espinosa, Founder of Kushki
Brynne McNulty Rojas, Founder of Habi
Courtney McColgan, Founder of Runa: Runa offers a complete cloud-based HR and payroll software solution designed and built for small to medium-sized companies in Latin America.
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