Recognizing the potential to create employment opportunities for instructors and increase our earnings, we founded ACVI and began promoting and offering a range of extracurricular activities, including swimming, hydro-aerobics, rumba, dancing, and toning within private residential buildings. By leveraging our expertise in SEO and digital marketing, we developed a platform that not only eliminates the need for users to go to a gym, saving them both time and money but also enables instructors to earn a higher salary.
As we embarked on a market study of the home services industry in Medellín, we quickly discovered a golden opportunity as well. Our keyword research revealed a void in the market for “at Home swimming classes”.
But as we delved deeper, we encountered two major obstacles standing in our way:
At first, we thought we had the upper hand. As alumni of some of the most prestigious universities in the city, we had connections that could provide us with access to these exclusive residential units. But as we soon learned, relying on our personal network alone would not be enough. We could not rely on having 200,000 friends to help us enter every residential unit in the city. If we wanted to grow our company and reach more customers, we needed to develop a new strategy.
We understood that to succeed in this market, we needed to think creatively and come up with a plan that would break through these barriers, no matter how daunting they may seem. With this goal in mind, we set out to find a new approach, one that would allow us to connect with potential customers and make our services accessible to everyone.
For our performance, taking into account the results of the market study and our own experience, was :
To manage the different groups that signed up for each service. We planned to established WhatsApp groups. All of this was done with the main goal of provide a high-end personalized service to each customer that comes to us, be it an individual, a pair or a group of babies, children, and adults.
On one hand, we were able to gain traction quickly, with more than 2 groups of swimming classes in over 30 residential units within the first 6 months of operation. We also hired 5 more teachers to keep up with demand. However, we quickly realized that we had not planned for scalability and profitability, an error we referred to as "learning with money."
As two engineering students, we found ourselves stretched thin, juggling our responsibilities as business owners with our studies and personal pursuits. We struggled to manage the various service groups for each residential unit, with a total of 60 groups of people to coordinate. Additionally, hiring employees in Colombia came with a high burden, and paying employees by the hour carried the added risk of their lack of responsibility for paying their own health insurance, which made it difficult to maintain good relationships and commitment from them.
We realized that in order to scale and be sustainable in the long-term, we needed to make a price restructuring that would take into account all administrative costs. We also needed to create a customer service area that would be in charge of managing customer groups by service and by unit, and be responsible for managing the teachers.
