I Was Hired to Crack the U.S. Market. I Turned Down the Mission — and Doubled Down on the Market Hiding in Our Data

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Listen to this post

Key Takeaways Read your own data honestly, then commit before your competitors update their assumptions.

The opening is hiding in the data you already have — the winners are the ones who see it and move before anyone else does.

When I was hired as CEO of Builderall, I inherited one mission: crack the U.S. market. The company had originally been built by a Brazilian team, and they believed an American CEO who spoke English without an accent was the missing piece to unlock the biggest market in the world. I took the job. Then I turned down the mission. Instead of pointing the company at the United States, I doubled down on Latin America.

That wasn’t a bet on my instincts. It was a bet on the data, and specifically on the difference between where the opportunity looked like it was and where it actually was. Every entrepreneur today is running some version of that same decision: an industry is shifting under you, AI is rewriting how your customers behave, and you’re being told to chase the market everyone else is chasing. The winners in this cycle will be the ones who look at the ground they’re already standing on, see the opening most people miss and commit to it while everyone else wanders.

If you’re looking to expand, scale into a new market, or find the blue ocean opportunity in your industry, here’s how I’ve learned to find that opening in mine. Four moves, in the order I’ve learned to run them.

1. Read your own data before you chase someone else’s story

You don’t need decades of industry experience to see an opportunity. You need the willingness to look at your own numbers and ask what they’re actually saying, not what you want them to say.

At Builderall, we had a growing U.S. customer base and had never spent a dollar to acquire those users. On the surface, that looked like a green light to invest heavily in the U.S. But when we studied who those American customers were, we found something different. They almost all had Spanish surnames. They clustered in South Florida, Texas and Southern California. They weren’t Americans discovering a Latin American product. They were Latin Americans who had moved north and stayed plugged into the ecosystem back home.

... continue reading