Marketing & Growth

Pedro Urrets

I enjoy building things and making them scale.

For eight years I’ve been building and growing businesses: my own events company, a sales team selling prefab homes, growth for a YC surf startup and, most recently, Humand (YC W22), where I was hired to build marketing from zero. Three and a half years later I was leading a ~60-person global team and inbound was the #1 acquisition channel, while Humand grew from ~60 to 1,500+ customers in 51 countries and closed the largest Series A in LATAM history. Now I’m looking for the next business to grow.

See the Humand story Get in touch

Spanish native English C1 Portuguese basic

Business Administration · UCC

01 · The main story

Humand

Head of Marketing · YC W22 · B2B SaaS · March 2023 – August 2026

The starting point

Humand brought me in to build marketing from zero. When I joined, there was only a website and a lead-to-sales flow that leaked at almost every step. No team, no social media, no real sales materials, no presence anywhere.

My mission

Turn that into a real marketing function and an inbound engine that could feed the company's growth. Fast, and doing a lot with very little. At the same time, hire and lead the team that would run it, support the company's expansion into new markets, and connect marketing with every other area of a business that was changing every month.

Three and a half years later

1 → ~60

People on the team I built and led

Across 11 verticals, two continents and multiple time zones

English
Spanish
Portuguese

Acquisition channel

Shortest sales cycle
Best win rate

Countries with active customers

6 → 51

30 activated through inbound

~60 → 1,500+

Customers

40+ industries

2M+ users on the platform

Largest Series A in LATAM history

Feb 2026 · co-led by Kaszek and Goodwater Capital

USD 66M

Here's what that took.

Building a function while everything moved

Building the team was only part of it. I was building an entire function while the company around it kept changing shape: new countries, a growing product, new business stages, and new, more ambitious goals every quarter.

When the company moved faster than the team

In hypergrowth, the company never waited for the marketing team to be ready. New markets opened and the product expanded before we had the people to support them.

And marketing wasn't only generating demand: it ran across the whole company. Sales, BDRs, CX and Product were growing and changing too, and every change landed on our table as new materials, processes and priorities.

So my challenge was doing it all at once: making sure marketing gave every other team the best support it could, covering roles we hadn't filled yet, recruiting and growing results, while giving my own team order and clarity in the middle of it.

Redesigning the area, again and again

Every stage needed a different version of the team. Each time we grew, I rebuilt how the area worked (goals, processes, workflows and reporting) so that more people meant more output, not more chaos.

And nothing grew in isolation. When something started working, its impact spread: growing Product Marketing meant more demand on Design and Multimedia, and opening a new country touched every vertical at once. Every decision I made about one team was really a decision about the whole area.

Building leaders

Growing from one person to ~60 meant making decisions that don't show up in any dashboard: who becomes a manager, when someone is ready to lead, and sometimes choosing one person over another.

My focus was building leaders, not just filling roles. I trained managers to recruit and run their own hiring, followed them closely through it, and helped them through their first leadership challenges. Beyond the leads, I wanted every person on the team to work with autonomy: clear goals, clear ownership, systems that worked, and a clear north in the middle of hypergrowth chaos, always pushing to get better at what they owned. I was learning and growing alongside them.

Culture under pressure

Hypergrowth is demanding by definition. That's exactly why I cared so much about the culture inside the team.

For me, taking care of the company's growth and taking care of the people were the same job: transparency, respect and motivation, a team that enjoyed the work, grew with it and built real friendships along the way.

Zero voluntary turnover in three and a half years. In a context like that, it's the result I'm proudest of.

Turned inbound into the #1 acquisition channel

Inbound was a marginal channel when I joined, there was no playbook to follow, and I don't believe in one-size-fits-all playbooks anyway. What I built instead was a way to find out fast what worked, so we could double down on it, and what didn't, so it wouldn't eat budget or time. That turned inbound into the company's main source of new customers: pipeline grew 42× and closed-won customers 21×.

#1: Win rate & shortest sales cycle of any channel
~USD 4M: ARR generated through inbound
+85–400%: YoY growth, depending on the year
~55×: Validated inbound demos per quarter (22 → 1,207)

Some learnings along the way

One of the first things I learned: each segment and industry worked differently. SMB, Enterprise and Large Enterprise had different sales processes, different buyers and responded to different formats. What convinced a 200-person company didn't convince a 20,000-person one, and every country added another layer: what brought demos from mid-size companies in Mexico didn't necessarily work for the same kind of company in Brazil.

Some things were non-negotiable for a B2B company: a website that converted, a strong presence on LinkedIn, success stories that proved the product worked, and a lead-to-customer process optimized at every stage. Everything else we had to discover: paid channels, new social networks, events, online and offline experiments, growth hacks. Each one had to be tested, analyzed, and then either scaled and optimized or killed fast. That was how we made the most of our budget and our people's time: grow what worked, cut what didn't, and keep room to test what came next.

A channel that generates a lot of demos isn't necessarily a good channel. Volume can fool you. So I tracked what happened after the lead came in: how many became real opportunities, how many closed, and how fast they moved through the pipeline. Some channels brought fewer demos but converted better and faster, and that changed where we invested. The question was never just "how many demos?", but "how many customers, and how fast?"

Budget wasn't the only limited resource. The team's time was too, and in some markets we were much smaller than our competitors, in both budget and channel presence. So every call I made weighed three things: what a channel returned, what it cost us in money and people, and where we could actually compete. We benchmarked constantly to pick our battles. What earned its place got more budget and people. What didn't got cut.

Global expansion

When I joined, Humand operated mainly in Argentina and Mexico. By the time I left it was active in 51 countries across 4 regions (HISPAM, Brazil, North America and EMEA), and inbound alone activated 30 of them.

Opening a market is not translating a campaign. Each region came with its own culture, buying behavior and channels: what worked in Mexico didn't automatically work in Brazil, the US or Europe. Some markets needed events and traditional marketing to build trust; others responded to digital from day one.

Every new market also landed on the team: new languages, new time zones, budget split across more fronts, the same people stretched thinner. I learned to open markets with a lean setup, prove traction, and only then add people and budget. And to pause or close a market when the numbers said so, a decision as important as opening one.

None of it came with a playbook, and this isn't one either. These are some of the questions I learned to ask, market by market, before deciding whether to open a country or not.

What does it really cost here?

Every market has two price tags.

The actions

The direct investment that goes into the budget plan: channels, campaigns, PR, events and media. And prices change a lot by country: a PR agency in the US costs many times what one costs in Mexico, and far more than one in Argentina.

Impact on the team

Harder to see, but just as real: new hires to run the market, hours spent coordinating agencies and partners when work is outsourced, and the time and focus of the people who have to own it, pulled away from other countries, channels and markets.

A market could look cheap on the media plan and still be expensive for the team.

What are we optimizing for?

The most important market on paper isn't always the one the company needs right now. A market can be very attractive in revenue per customer, but every goal also comes with a timeframe, a volume expectation and a budget.

If the goal is speed and volume: Pipeline velocity matters most: how fast new demand turns into revenue. Growing fast in a market with no presence, no references and a new language can cost far more than it looks, in money and in time to penetrate. Closer markets let us reuse resources, face fewer barriers and competitors, and get more impact from the same budget, faster.
If the goal is revenue per customer: Bigger, more expensive markets where each customer is worth more can make sense, as long as the company is willing to invest for longer before seeing volume.

Be clear on the goal, the timeframe and how much the company is willing to invest, before choosing the country.

Who are we up against, and how do they buy?

Before entering a market, we had to understand how it worked, even culturally. The same message, sales approach or strategy rarely works the same way everywhere.

Who would we compete against, and who was best positioned?
How high was the barrier to entry?
How did companies there buy products like ours?
What would it take to win, and how much would it change the way we already sell?

Example

Humand was an all-in-one platform with around 30 modules. In much of Latin America, one provider that solved most things well and saved money was a strong argument. In the US, companies were used to a specialized vendor for each function, often well-funded players that were hard to displace.

Benchmarking competitors and how they sold told us early whether our approach made sense. Skipping that step meant risking a full launch, with the whole team behind it, on something that wouldn't work.

The same product could be the obvious choice in one market and a hard sell in another.

What will it take to show up properly?

Opening a country goes far beyond running ads there. When we looked at France, for example, the questions piled up:

Could our sales team actually work with French customers, in their language?
Would our current materials work there, or did we need new ones?
Did any of our customers carry weight in France as social proof?
How would it change our social media strategy, and our website?
Who would review every piece of content, so we sounded native and not like an AI translation?

These are just two basic examples, out of everything that comes with entering a new country:

A new social profile in French

Someone to manage it and plan the content, Design to create the pieces, Multimedia for the videos, and someone tracking the metrics. And what works in Spanish can't just be translated and pasted: it needs its own content, week after week.

Social
Design
Multimedia
Data

The website

Translating text and images, and showing customer logos relevant to each visitor's country, is just the surface. Product videos need translating too. Lead routing needs new rules so French leads reach the right AEs and BDRs, which means changing internal workflows and coordinating with RevOps. Plus the impact on SEO, and much more.

Web
Design
Multimedia
SEO
RevOps

Each of these tasks stacks up across many roles, and much of it only becomes visible once you've already started.

Showing up properly in a new country was a project in itself, and most of its weight landed on the team.

Is the rest of the company ready?

Generating demand was only half of it. Before opening a market, the rest of the company had to be ready to deliver on it, not just in headcount, but in how things worked, so customers never ran into surprises. A few examples, out of many:

Sales: Enough reps who spoke the language and knew the market, and leads routed to the right person from the first click. A booking link that sends a new-market lead to an AE from another region is friction before the first call even happens.
Product: Ready for local requirements, and a team that knew them. A labor law, for example, could change how a module had to work, and Sales needed to know that before the demo, not after.
Customer Experience: Enough people to support customers after the sale, in their language and with the context of their market.

Demand that reaches an unprepared company is demand you lose, or worse, customers you disappoint.

How much of what we have travels there?

Reputation doesn't travel evenly, and neither does what already works.

Worked: Media coverage and well-known customers in Argentina resonated in Uruguay.
Worked: A presence in the US carried weight in Mexico.
Backfired: Walking into the US leading with Latin American customers cost credibility instead of building it.

Example: paid media

Running French ads to a quickly translated landing page won't perform like what already works at home. Everything has to be adapted, and kept adapted. Those costs rarely show up before you commit, and they can end up meaning a new team, new hires and far more budget.

Before every market: how much of what already works for us (customers, press, brand, channels) carries over, and what will it take to rebuild the rest?

Is it worth the opportunity cost?

Not “is this a good market?”, but “is it better than the alternatives?”

A good market isn't only one where we can generate demand. It's one where we can make the best use of our resources to grow as fast as possible. Every market competed for the same limited budget, team time and focus, so each one had to be weighed against everything above: what it costs, what we're optimizing for, who we'd face, what it takes to show up, whether the company is ready, and how much of what we have carries over.

Where we were tiny compared to the competition, winning meant a huge effort for an uncertain return. Sometimes the smarter move was another country, or growing deeper where we already had traction.

Knowing when to say no was as important as knowing where to go.

Marketing and Sales: a loop, not a funnel

Generating demand was only the start. The real work was a loop: understand the market, generate demand and follow every lead through the pipeline, learning as much from the deals that stalled as from the ones that closed. We looked for patterns as deals moved through the CRM, understood what was working and why the rest wasn't, and kept adjusting. All of it was powered by a constant, two-way flow of feedback between Marketing and Sales.

Step 01

Start from what the market says

We started with what we had: our own market research and everything the sales specialist in that market could tell us. With that, we built our first hypotheses and launched the demand generation and market entry strategy, writing down every hypothesis we wanted to validate along the way.

Step 02

Launch, and watch the CRM react

Once demand started flowing, we tracked it everywhere: Google Analytics and the metrics inside each ad platform. But the CRM was our source of truth. Each platform tells its own version of the story; the CRM showed what actually happened to those leads in the pipeline. Which ads, contents and channels generated leads, and how did each audience respond? Every campaign was also a test. And for the leads that reached a demo, we looked at which ones didn't move forward, why, and what they had in common.

Step 03

Follow the lead, not the volume

Then we followed what happened inside the pipeline: which industries and segments moved faster, converted better and brought more return. Sometimes the data exposed a trap: segments with lots of leads but weak conversion were getting most of our attention, because our marketing spoke more directly to them, while others that converted better were being overlooked. Seeing that changed where we invested.

Step 04

Find where deals stall, and why

Good leads could still fall through. Sometimes response times weren't fast enough, the message in the first call wasn't the right one, or reps didn't have the materials they needed at that stage. HubSpot was my control panel to spot it, and the fix went straight in: a new workflow, a routing rule, a follow-up sequence or the missing sales material.

Step 05

Listen to every deal, won or lost

For a long time, our view of customers came from two places: what Sales reported back, and what the Success team saw after implementation, like which modules customers actually used. Both were useful, but limited. Sales feedback depended on reps finding time to write it down, and Success data only covered the companies that bought, leaving out everyone who didn't.

So my team built AI Sales Insights. Every first demo was recorded, transcribed and linked to its deal in HubSpot, with segment, country and industry. For the first time we could listen at volume, to the deals we won and the ones we lost. For lost deals: why they stalled and which frictions kept repeating. For won deals: why they came to us, what questions they arrived with and how they found us. Across all of them: which competitors came up, which modules prospects asked about most, and how much revenue was tied to each. The same insights were useful for Product too.

Step 06

Turn insights into strategy

Everything we learned in the previous steps fed straight back into the marketing strategy: where to invest, which segments and markets to focus on, what to say, and which channels to scale or cut. And it wasn't a one-off planning exercise. It happened constantly: every turn of the loop sharpened our metrics, our results, how we used the budget and where the strategy was headed. Then it started again.

Marketing at the center of the company

In a company growing this fast, marketing sits in the middle of everything. A big part of my job was connecting it with every other team.

And every one of those teams was in hypergrowth too, many of them split by region (HISPAM, Brazil, EMEA and North America), each with its own timing, concerns and needs. So my job went beyond running marketing's own workflows: every time we opened a new area inside marketing, I had to design how it would work with the rest of the company, and keep reviewing it as everything changed.

What that meant in practice

Reviewing not just marketing's internal workflows, but how each area of marketing worked with every other team.
Anticipating what other teams would need from marketing, before they asked for it.
Building those needs into the budget, the hiring plan and the goals for every quarter.
Spotting and solving bottlenecks between teams, constantly.

All while hitting our own inbound and expansion goals, with limited resources and a team still being hired.

This is only part of the story

Having built every area of marketing from scratch, I saw each one grow from zero. What's on this page is only part of what that taught me.

How each area grew: its processes, and how it worked with the rest of marketing and beyond.
Projects that worked, and projects that didn't.
Problems that got us stuck, and how we got through them.
How every company decision rippled through the team at each stage.
Things I'd now do differently, or in a different order.

There's a lot more behind every section. Happy to go deeper in a conversation.

Let's talk

02 · Experience

Before Humand

Before Humand, the same pattern at a smaller scale: start from zero and make it grow.

Jan 2022 – Feb 2023

Growth Marketer

Hokali · YC W22 · Sports tech

I worked on growth for a marketplace that connected travelers with surf instructors across 4 coastal US markets: San Francisco, San Diego, LA and Hawaii. It was my first hands-on experience with the US market, touching a bit of everything: SEO, landing pages, paid ads, social, content and constant experiments.

My first YC startup, and where my path into tech began.

Mar 2020 – Dec 2020

Sales Manager

Vilahouse

A company selling prefab homes. I started as a salesperson and was a top performer, and at 22 I was promoted to lead a team of 10. Within 2 months, it was the company's top-performing team.

What a good lead looks like from the other side of the table, something I've used in marketing ever since.

Aug 2018 – Sep 2019

Founder

Mood · Event production

My first company, built from zero. In under a year, I scaled it from 50-person events to productions for 3,000 attendees, with sponsors like Budweiser, Absolut and Branca.

That I like building things from scratch and making them grow.

03 · Contact

Let's build something.

Book a 30-minute call, or reach me directly.

purretszavalia@gmail.com LinkedIn