Accelerating Success: One Young Entrepreneur Turned a Second-Place Prize into a Million-Dollar Business

Rodrigo Maselli

EO’s Accelerator program, which is designed to help small businesses scale to $1 million in annual revenue, is celebrating its 20^th anniversary this year. More than 2,000 participants have graduated to full EO membership. To mark the occasion, we are sharing stories of EO members who have leveraged their time in the program to transform their businesses and accelerate their entrepreneurial journeys.

Rodrigo Maselli, the scion of a family that built a successful pharmaceutical company in Guatemala and who was long groomed to step into that business, could never shake an ambition to carve his own path. To create. To innovate. To build something all his own.

So, by 13, he began organizing poker tournaments at school, which nearly got him expelled. By 17, he founded a company that sought to help Guatemalan businesses navigate the complexities of the region’s exchange rates, but it floundered when he encountered regulatory issues.

Soon after, when one of his grandfather’s clients mentioned at a dinner that he needed help building call centers, Rodrigo volunteered his services. Despite having no experience, he ultimately landed the contract after scrambling to research and formulate a proposal. He kept the company afloat for nearly two years, pulling in roughly $300,000 in annual revenues, as he studied management at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala City.

Though he eventually closed the call-center company, Rodrigo was hooked. In 2015, he launched Tru, an influencer marketing agency. When a speaker visited one of his college classes and mentioned EO’s Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards (GSEA), the notion of earning recognition and prize money to advance his business seemed too good to pass up.

Rodrigo’s pitch was impressive enough that he reached EO Guatemala’s GSEA chapter finals—only to finish second. Despondent, he watched the winner receive a large novelty check, a trip to Macau to compete in the global finals, and a full-page story in the local newspaper.

“I got a little square on the bottom (of the page) with a quote,” he laughs now.

Rodrigo also received a check for his efforts, though it was not novelty sized. While $3,000 was no small sum for a college student managing a fledgling company, Rodrigo did not cash his second-place winnings.

Instead, it became a symbol of long-term ambition.

“I glued it to the wall,” Rodrigo remembers. “I said, ‘That check is not coming down until I am part of EO.’”

Getting from Point GSEA to Point B 

Not long after his GSEA experience, Rodrigo attended a local networking event: Tru was pulling in around $100,000 annually, but he confided in an EO member he met at the event that he was not sure how to catalyze rapid growth.

The member pointed him to EO’s Accelerator program, designed to help young businesses like Tru take flight. During coaching sessions through the ensuing year, Rodrigo’s perspective shifted from the more academic approach he had adopted in school to thinking holistically about the company.

“It actually pushes you to think about your business,” he says. “(In Accelerator), I was working on the business instead of working in the business.”

Rodrigo’s biggest innovation? Rather than linking his clients with major influencers, he targeted “micro influencers” with smaller but more engaged audiences.

Accelerator had spurred him to think more creatively, and the inspiration that would change his business emerged from what would have otherwise been a mundane moment.

One evening, he ordered a pizza and, on a lark, posted a photo of it on Snapchat. When, to his surprise, people started messaging him about the pizza, he made a point to respond to every single comment and point them to the restaurant.

Of the 80 or so people who had seen the post, 25 messaged him. Of those 25, one bought a pizza and, once it arrived, posted their own photo.

An idea immediately sparked to life: What if 1,000 everyday users each told 100 friends? Instead of one influencer reaching thousands passively, what if thousands of micro-influencers sparked one-to-one engagement?

Soon, he created WhatsApp groups of micro influencers, tracking them all via Excel spreadsheets. The volume eventually necessitated building his own platform to replace those rudimentary tools and, via an EO connection, he partnered with an advertising firm with customers looking for a platform and network of influencers like his.

He discovered that micro-influencer campaigns—targeting users with 1,000 to 10,000 followers—often yielded engagement rates 10 to 20 times higher than macro-influencer efforts.

In short order, Tru has grown to 13 employees and, by 2021, Rodrigo reached the $1 million annual revenue threshold for EO membership.

“It was bigger than just joining the organization,” Rodrigo says. “For me, that started my entrepreneurial journey. I wanted to reach that milestone.”

Rodrigo's efforts have garnered recognition as Tru has become
the largest online creator network in Latin America. 

Paying It Forward

Today, Rodrigo attends every event that EO Guatemala hosts. It boasts 140 members, most of whom are highly engaged, and he values the monthly opportunities to network and learn. He also gives back—coaching EO Accelerator participants and encouraging them to embrace the scars of startup life.

As for the second-place GSEA check? It is not on his office wall anymore. Once he became a full EO member, he quietly retired it. He may have never profited from that award money, but it held far more value to him as a symbol of his ambitions than as modest prize from a competition. Plus, he quips, even if he wanted to cash it now, “I believe it’s expired.”

Interested in participating in EO Accelerator? Learn more here.