Over here at Dash Latam, we are pushing hard every day. No one here is resting on their laurels, tho sometimes we pass out for a few minutes or take a weekend off to decompress.
Here is where we are at in our different markets.
Colombia is growing. We are shifting gears to focus more on consumer adoption. This will mean the tracker at http://tracker.pagacondash.com/ should move more but we may see merchant numbers grow more slowly.
Merchants require a dedicated educational effort so we are now hiring someone to lead that because we have not been doing an adequate job here. We are forming a couple different new teams of people who will be constantly in the street as well as hiring a few new people for coordination posts in consumer adoption in Medellín as we continue to experiment to discover what actually works to achieve consumer adoption, which is more challenging than merchant adoption.
That said, over the last 28 days, we have a documented average of 34 tx per day, perhaps 80% of which are incentivized through basic educational “Dash Invites” events. We have developed an improved format for Dash Invites events and are able to ensure a complete introduction to Dash of 80 people in 80 minutes.
In Colombia, we are active in the Medellín metro area, in Cúcuta and Bucaramanga. We have previously been active in Pereira and Bogotá but have struggled to keep good people in those cities.
In Lima, Peru, we now have 16 merchants. Our leader there, Miguel, is progressing. We will have the first consumer adoption event in Peru later this week. We are training a second person for Lima right now that we hope can start within a few weeks and solidify our progress there.
In Sao Paulo, Brazil, we lost our representatives and progress stalled with the 5 merchants we have there but we are now interviewing candidates to start up again.
In Guatemala City, we have our first 2 merchants but are hitting a sticking point and are working with our representative on the ground to get through it.
In Madrid, Spain, the team is holding regular events to sell Dash as a remittance and has had a number of successful sales but is having trouble getting people to the events, and we are working on new strategies to remedy this.
In Venezuela, we have verified hundreds of merchants and added a good number of new basic necessities merchants mostly in Caracas, some of whom have added combos to our selection of combo remittances. We are adding new representatives in multiple Venezuelan cities in order to salvage as many merchant relationships as possible. We have also added new merchants and have run 2 consumer adoption events. We will be running additional consumer adoption events soon and are interviewing candidates to coordinate consumer adoption across Venezuela. Operating in Venezuela is challenging but we have a good team there and things are progressing.
We are active in the following Venezuelan cities: Caracas, Valencia, San Cristóbal, Maracaibo. We are training new representatives for multiple additional cities.
Overall, we need to systematize all of our activities more. We need more leaders.
We lack technical talent. There are a lot of opportunities we could exploit but we are focused on the basics: merchants, consumers, transactions.
We remain excited about what we are going to do over the next few months.
