7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building Latin America’s First Unicorn Exit

Most startup playbooks tell you to chase the obvious markets. But what if the path to unicorn status lies in the places everyone else ignores? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jason Radisson shared crucial go-to-market lessons from scaling 99 Taxis to a billion-dollar exit and building his current company, Movo.

1. Challenge Conventional Market Wisdom The strongest product-market fit often exists where others aren’t looking. As Jason explains, “The best product market fit, really, in the world. Ride sharing was in Latin America in particular in secondary cities.” These 3-5 million person cities created perfect conditions: abundant labor supply, infrastructure challenges, and an emerging middle class with disposable income.
2. Prioritize Capital Efficiency in Growth While many startups burn cash chasing growth, 99 Taxis proved efficiency and scale aren’t mutually exclusive. “We pride ourselves, were able to get to our first billion dollars of GMV having spent $50 million. So that’s a 20x ratio, which is to this day, one of the most efficient scale ups that’s ever been in the technology industry,” Jason notes. This came from being “very thoughtful and planful in terms of how you’re sort of rolling the service out.”
3. Focus on Core Value Creation Instead of chasing features, focus on fundamental improvements. At Movo, Jason emphasizes, “If you want to come up with win situations for workers and employers, the bottom line is you got to help people be more productive.” This clarity helps cut through market noise and drives adoption.
4. Target Early Adopters for Complex Products For enterprise products, mass marketing often falls flat. Movo succeeds by “working with early adopters on big problems. We’re not sort of out there just trying to do everything with Internet advertising or relying on cold calling or these kinds of things, but more kind of in the trenches deep with big blue chip companies working on big problems.”
5. Build for Strategic Priority Buyers Enterprise success requires targeting the right decision-makers. As Jason explains, “It isn’t the kind of thing that you can kind of do from. It’s got to be somewhere very high in the organization and a strategic priority for the company. And those are the only clients that we’re looking to work with.”
6. Leverage International Markets for Product Development Going international early can accelerate product maturity. Jason notes that “having gone abroad as early as we did, that allowed us to get hundreds of thousands of additional workers on our platform, which was just so helpful in terms of rounding out the tech, training our models, getting a very robust system across a number of dimensions.”
7. Position Technology as Transformation Frame your solution around fundamental market shifts. “If you look at the US, we’re in a situation of a declining workforce. We’ve got more people retiring than ever before. We’ve got fewer people entering the workforce,” Jason observes. This positioning helps buyers see your product as strategic rather than incremental.

These lessons challenge conventional wisdom about market selection, growth strategies, and enterprise sales. While most startups chase crowded markets with aggressive spending, Jason’s experience shows that success often comes from identifying structural opportunities and executing with discipline.

For B2B founders, the message is clear: don’t just follow the standard playbook. Look for markets where fundamental conditions create perfect storms of opportunity, build for core value creation, and focus on the buyers who see your solution as strategic rather than incremental.

Most importantly, remember that transformative impact often comes from solving basic problems well. As Jason puts it, “All of us who are out there building technology companies, we’re all having impact in our own ways…the transformative nature you can have on a city and on the lives of millions of people.”