Interview With Juan José Mora of Atlantia Search

One of the favorite parts of my role with GreenBook is helping early-stage companies, especially the winners of the Insight Innovation Startup Pitch Competition. Over the years some amazing companies have gotten a kickstart through the Competition, and this year’s winner of the Competition at IIeX NA, Atlantia Search, is no exception!

The company has bridged the gap between the existing insights automation platforms (the Zappi-like players) and custom-developed AI consultancies by creating a model where they on-demand build customized, business-issue specific solutions leveraging AI, ML, and automation then productize them by placing them into an online marketplace where anyone can access them. This provides massive cost efficiencies for users, near-infinite scalability as a business, and of course the speed and agility that businesses demand today. They are emerging as a significant and formidable player in Latin America and now, powered by the Competition win, are setting their sights on the rest of the world.

While others have done somewhat similar things in the past, Atlantia Search seems to have cracked the code to turn specialized custom development into a scalable platform that is accessible to an entire market, not just the original client. It really is a very cool play.

One of the perks of winning the Competition is an interview with the CEO for here on the GreenBook Blog (I actually consider interviewing them my perk, but shh…we won’t tell them that!) so in this interview, I chat with Co-founder and CEO JJ Mora about their journey, where they are now in this craziest of all years, and where they see themselves going in the future. In usual Lenny fashion, it is a rollicking interview, but it is also highly inspirational, informative, and insightful. I think you’ll get a lot out of it.

Here it is; enjoy!

 

 

 

Lenny Murphy: It’s good to have you done for our listeners…so JJ, tell us about Atlantia Search. Give us your story.

 

Juan José Mora: Atlantia Search is a startup, a technology startup, that happens to make market research. Or we are trying to, as many other startups, we are trying to change the industry but the fundamental way. So, what we’re trying to do is basically to provide a way of doing research easier, faster, and better than anything than anyone else. And we do it through two different approaches. The first approach is to automate the process of requesting and configuring and tracking that reset, and not just for one methodology, like online surveys that you have many solutions today.

But, in a multi-methodology framework so, even if you have a project that combines traditional methodologies (AI solution, SaaS solutions, or online service) you can track it and configure it and deliver by the platform. And, at the same time, providing a highly technological product that can fit the needs of the companies of today… So, it’s been a journey for us, since we started and we switched the business model, and we are building that with just one purpose. At the beginning of our company, we said our vision that is democratizing the access to specialized information but nowadays it sounds like a topic but when we started it was a really good thing to do and our vision is to democratize this access for specialized information and that means to deliver research for the small and medium companies.

 

Lenny Murphy: As we were chatting beforehand it’s also cool that you’ve had the classic startup journey of you started with one place and have evolved or pivoted… You entered the competition a few years ago with kind of your previous model which was more search-based, so how is that just from kind of an entrepreneurial standpoint?

Can you talk a little bit about that process of letting your baby grow on its own direction versus how you think it needed to be? What’s that been like for you?

 

Juan José Mora: As we approach our company always at a scale, and we always thought of ourselves as a global company, and when we started to see yearly growth or about 3x/2.5x per year we realized that was a time to change. It’s maybe cool to grow at that rate to an SME or a traditional SME that is not our ambition as a technological company. So, we decided to switch.

We started as a company that cloud source the process of doing secondary research and we were doing really fine at the beginning like 10x per year something like that and then we start to realize that the growth curve was starting to flatten and it was not because of what we were doing it was because of the business model and the complexities that it has…We built a tool for the researchers that basically do searches online, select the key sources online, post-processes through an AI, and then deliver to the researchers, to them to grab that information, and put it organized and in an understandable way for the customer. But even though the training process, finding the right people was a really complex thing to do.

So at the same time, our business was also growing but at a small rate and we started to realize that the customers were demanding also another type of products; like primary research more technological products and they were and they wanted it faster easier and cheaper and better and you know all what the customers always need and then we start to switch to this model. And two and a half years ago we decided to become this platform that now is the largest marketplace or consumer industry and grown also in the U.S. And Canada through some customers in other countries and now getting some customers in the U.S. too.

 

Lenny Murphy: Is you’re thinking that if you nail the ability to deliver at scale and quality in Latin America with that price compression in those markets that’s what’s going to drive your ability to differentiate yourselves in you know serving that customer base? is that you’re thinking?

 

Juan José Mora: Yeah, but we will have the two business lines because remember that today we have huge companies in our portfolios, Walmart and many others, that are switching to our products. But I think that we are different. The model automation processes today you have a small silo of products but it’s not so complete solutions for any specific need and specifically in big companies when you need a solution you don’t care too much about how is the combination of things that you need to have. You need an answer to a business question and if a solution can provide you that’s a specific solution you take it. But when the problem search for the automation that we have today with mono methodology products is that they don’t complete the cycle so they apport or they give a small shot of information in every specific part and at least what we’ve seen with the big companies is that we need a solution we need three or four products combined to give me the solution for the business questions that I have and that’s where we specialize today.

 That’s at least that’s one focus for us that is not going to miss because we have huge credibility now with some huge companies and they are driving our growth and we will be delivering better solutions for them. But on the other side, we can simplify automated solutions to give them to small and medium companies. That is as you say is a challenge, we realize… And in 23’/24’ we will probably be in the position to deliver products for small and medium companies and we are also here starting now the business model that we want to achieve with them.

Because for some problems this can be a subscription breaks a product very cheap that can deliver specific reports every month for them or other solutions but very compact for some of them. We are still figuring out that the main issue today also for the big companies is, “I want a complete solution and I want this complete solution to go across a company that can understand every step of the process and deliver me more insights that are embedded in this cross research that you are doing.” That’s where we specialize today and that’s the added value that we think we are delivering from for most of the companies.

 

Lenny Murphy: Are you building a comprehensive suite of solutions on both quant and qual yourself or are you looking at partnerships to address specific capabilities for your clients that would plug into your platform?

 

Juan José Mora: I think a little bit of both? And let me explain. What we do is we sit with our customers and we map a process. Imagine the process for developing products in a … company that wants to develop a new product. How does the process look like for them? We talked with several customers and several of our clients and tell them, “okay, explain how it worked for you.”

Then we came up with some ideas, and then we want to select some of these 20-30 ideas that we create. We select some for funneling to a more productive or a more deployment process and then we deploy them…that’s the way how we build our portfolio is attending a specific process like developing a campaign, developing a product, tracking a brand, etc. etc.. So that’s why we have a huge portfolio of products because we identify specific needs and friction points and the customer can just type, “oh I just want this product because my inflation point is really strong here” or “I want to buy the complete flow” or “I want to buy this specific product at the end” or “this couple of products at the end.”

That’s how we build our portfolio and which we’ve been given feedback by our customers that make a lot of sense in the process because these products are built with them literally. They test our products before and when we [build] the products, we test them with products that are already launched, etc. So, and that’s how we build the infrastructure for our products.

 

Lenny Murphy: So, you mentioned you guys are growing rapidly and I expect that this year in 2020 that that has probably accelerated pretty well, the year has been good for you. Is that a fair assessment?

 

Juan José Mora: Yeah. The first factor was really good the second quarter was we stayed at the same rate as last year. That was a surprise because we started, we thought that we were going to go down in the second quarter because everything is up and but in the third quarter it was it’s been amazing. Right now we are growing faster than ever before, not just because they are requesting faster or cheaper products is because we grow as a technological automated company and now that everything is digital, they are moving methodologies through digital processes even if they are physical interaction like our iPod product which is a testing product at home. We already have a product that can be delivered to the homes of the people testing it in life and trying the product, and it’s a more qualitative approach for this type of product and that is the development to their homes, and then we process all the information automatically also in the platform depending on the product we have products that are not automated at all we are working on that now but we can deliver it digitally which is an important part.

 

Lenny Murphy:  you know I talk to a lot of folks and advise lots of companies and you know have a good sense of everything’s going on in the industry. I’ve often thought that some of the greatest innovation for our space would come out of Latin America and there’s a few companies out there you know ECGlobal you know they’ve done they did some really cool stuff, Adriana and her team at Provokers but we haven’t seen the company really hit scale yet. I think you may be the one to break that trend.

The market is just primed for a flexible agile platform solution driven by client needs… Talking to your clients on what is the business issue that you need answered then how do we answer it best then how do we automate that process so that we can drive speed and cost efficiencies which is just you know it’s a smart way to do things so congratulations for whatever it’s worth… Anything else that you want to let the audience know about you, about the business? Why they need to pay attention to what you’re doing, and you know what’s the value of potentially working with you?

 

Juan José Mora: I think we synthesize a lot of things and we are switching now the platform in our website so it’s a good time in in the next month to visit our website at atlantiasearch.com to review the new products that we are going to launch and the automated processes because for the first time you will be able to track any methodology like an Amazon delivery product. I think that’s a pretty good thing to have in our industry and other than that is letting you know that we are really grateful and thankful for being part of the GreenBook community and recommend everyone to join you and to participate and read. I am a reader of your blog continuously so I like to try to keep updated every time I can. So, I recommend all the people to join you and to listening and read what you are delivering because it’s really nice.