From Zero to One
Juan Pablo Guerrero Romo
Leading to 300% bootstrapping growth since year one
I started as a Product Designer and worked my way to CEO. Took XTEACH from early idea to a fast-growing, bootstrapped startup with 300% YoY growth. Led product, strategy, and LATAM expansion, building and scaling our first product, reducing churn below 1%, and tripling MRR. Secured clients like KPMG, Adidas, Adecco, and Bankinter. Opened a new revenue stream by enabling micro-influencers to monetize content and helped bring online education to hundreds of thousands.
A short story about this adventure seems impossible to tell; full of learnings, experiences, and great people.
After months on Artline, I had the opportunity to bring to life a new product for XTEACH, a bootstrapping company. With some benchmarking and a deep dive into the e-learning industry, I came up with the first wireframes that emerged as an MVP for XCHOOL.
The fact that I had to change hats all the time pushed me to build systems allowing the team to be empowered, autonomous, and efficient, always pursuing the same goals.
Sometimes I watered office plants, but mostly I pushed our products and business evolution, built culture, and took care of financing and sales. My learnings and challenges were enormous, starting with the definition of business, marketing, and product strategies to develop a vision to grow thanks to our sales.
We had the opportunity to bring on board some big corporates such as KPMG, Bankinter, Soriana, Adidas, Capsa, Telefónica, BBVA... We also opened a new revenue stream that allowed micro-influencers to monetize their content by selling courses to thousands of people. And, of course, we had the fortune to have invaluable support from partners like ENSIA, Leverad, and others during this endeavor.
XTEACH was growing rapidly, making product vision and lifecycle management crucial. I first focused on building a solid team to develop products iteratively and agilely. Once the foundation was laid, we concentrated on defining and improving our key metrics, reducing churn to less than 1% and exponentially increasing our MRR, with growth ratios of up to 2 and 3 times.
Listening to our customers, prioritizing, innovating, researching, testing, and iterating were essential parts of my daily routine. We built a decision-making model where data and customers were always at the center of driving innovation.
Developed and led the implementation of OKRs, aligning the entire team towards common goals that drove company growth and fostered a solid and collaborative culture.
Thanks to close relationships with our customers and the support of the Customer Success team, we identified and eliminated friction points, increasing LTV and reducing churn to less than 1%.
Identifying market opportunities and optimizing current solutions was key to improving customer acquisition, leading to exponential increases in our MRR. Redefining our pricing strategy, which resulted in a significant increase in ARR and higher customer retention.
I defined and laid the groundwork for our first design system and principles. Thanks to empathy, close relationships with our clients, and A/B testing, we created a unique and memorable experience in our products.
Continuous improvement and iterative development were part of our DNA.
Five years passed by, and I felt the need of facing new challenges. I was eager to learn from a new company, on a different stage, in a new industry, with more financing and a bigger team. Luckily, PrivacyCloud appeared in my way.
I could talk for hours about all the good practices we learned and designed to build our products, but maybe it's easy if we just take a coffee 😉.
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Posted Apr 14, 2025
From zero to a bootstrapped startup with 300% YoY growth. Led product, strategy, and expansion to helped bring online education to hundreds of thousands.
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Timeline
May 1, 2014 - Aug 31, 2019
Clients
XTEACH
