Every beginning has its end—or its transformation—and that’s the case for Torrenegra Organization. Two weeks ago, after more than 500 days (1 year and 5 months), we decided to stop operating all our programs. In this post I’ll share what we learned along the way.

Why share this?

I’ve always found it very strange that most founders are super protective of information about their businesses for fear of revealing something sensitive, when I can assure you that, if you look closely, most companies die because of one of these factors:

  1. Timing. The market evolved, but the company didn’t.
  2. Voluntary self-inflicted shutdown.
  3. Cofounder issues.

If companies rarely die because a competitor kicked them out of the market, then it feels odd—and frankly silly—that the mistakes and learnings others could share remain private, and people keep making the same ones over and over.

In an ecosystem where everyone shares only pretty news, content that reflects day-to-day reality—plain, ordinary content—rarely ends up being authentic.

I hope this post helps and, even more, encourages others to share their learnings.

Before we continue

  • This post only reflects my perspective; Alexander encouraged me to share it publicly, but it doesn’t necessarily represent both our views.

The decision in a nutshell

We don’t believe the company can scale at least 10× with Latin America as the market. Therefore, bluntly, the best decision is to shut it down and focus on something else.

  1. Torrenegra Organization launched in 2024. It was born—and remained—a bootstrapped company.
  2. We had revenue from one recurring line (Scale) and two one-offs (Launch and Talks). This helped us reach a fluctuating monthly revenue between a minimum of USD 10,000 and a maximum of USD 25,000.
  3. After different experiments—and despite strong cohort retention in Scale and high NPS in Launch—attracting more companies was hard even with over 3 million annual organic impressions on our content.
  4. Ultimately, we decided to shut down the programs because, from our perspective, a company generating USD 150,000 to 250,000 in annual revenue is tiny.

We don’t think the effort is worth the return on two fronts: number of people impacted and financial return for the company.

Takeaways you can use

I’ll also say: we made a ton of tactical mistakes running Torrenegra Organization. There are so many that I’ll focus on what I hope provides the most value.

1. Know when enough is enough

For us, shutting down wasn’t dramatic at all: we were in our monthly board meeting asking ourselves whether, after this much time, we felt a big shift was coming that would radically change revenue.

The answer was no.

On the other hand, since 2023 I’ve spoken with many founders and leaders of entrepreneurship programs around the world (lately more in Latin America) to learn about their revenues. To my surprise, compared with them—and given our time in market—we were doing much better. More than a relief, this worried me: if Torrenegra Organization, with USD 20,000 in monthly sales, was to some extent an outlier, then the market is, bluntly, a shitty market.

We were navigating a market with naturally high constraints that didn’t align with what we expected.

2. Businesses are—and should be—cold

Something I haven’t personally struggled with (so far), but I get why it’s hard, is the attachment we develop to a company: all the hours invested, the recognition it brings sometimes, the commitments to the people you hired, your customers, etc.

So we often postpone shutting a company down simply because we don’t want to feel that sense of failure or defeat.

While I do believe that with any experiment you should pour in all your time and thought to make it work, I also believe that if you left everything on the field and it still didn’t work, you feel different—and it lets you be colder.

This decision was backed by improving cohort retention, but not necessarily improving returns.

3. It’s okay to let revenue go

Letting customers go and turning down revenue is really hard, even when you know it won’t take your company where you want to go. We accepted companies we knew didn’t fit: their expectations weren’t ones we could meet.

The result? We over-invested time trying to turn unhappy customers into happy ones—resources (mostly time) we could have used to make the right customers even happier and to find more with a similar profile.

Given the low ceiling we later saw in the market, this also led us to call it. Bluntly: if today’s programs distract us from chasing bigger opportunities, why do it?

4. Always have shutdown break-even cash so you can close anytime without legal headaches

Many people think shutting a company down for financial reasons means having 0 pesos in the bank. That’s the worst thing you can do—especially if you have active customers and employees.

Shutting down isn’t cheap, especially once you have steady revenue.

In our case, for example, because Scale was a subscription, someone could pay USD 2,950 today for a membership, but that doesn’t mean that money is available to spend. If we shut down in a month, we’d owe a pro-rated refund for the remaining 11 months.

With Melissa’s help, we always kept in mind—and in the bank—the money to be able to shut the company down at break-even, accounting for closure costs and refunds.

For us, that meant refunds and bills totaling USD 20,000 which, had we been sloppy and used that cash for other things, would be debt today.

That’s why deciding to shut down and executing it within a week is extremely simple—and, personally, lets me sleep well.

5. What I saw in the companies in the program

Many of these takeaways resonate with me because I faced them at some point—or still do. But I also saw them in the companies.

5.1 Your company is a reflection of you—and what you tolerate

We all have truths we don’t like to hear; they make us uncomfortable. In my experience, that happens when someone tells you something that’s true. As we say in Mexico, “what rubs you the wrong way hits close to home.”

An early-stage company (under 100 employees) largely reflects the founding team.

The speed, ambition, and learning cadence of your company are set by its founders; that will show in the talent you attract.

The biggest challenge I saw is founders setting a low ceiling for their company, which makes it hard to attract great talent and leaves the team with an even lower ceiling.

5.2 Latin America’s sin: thinking an SME is a consolidated company

Obviously, it’s very different to compare Latin America with the U.S. or Europe. While billing between USD 500,000 and 1M in LatAm is a real milestone—that’s already considered a mid-sized company.

As a reference, in the U.S., a company billing under USD 10M is considered small, and mid-sized goes up to USD 50M or less.

In LatAm, that would probably be called a “corporate.”

More than terminology or revenue, the risk of this classification is thinking that a company billing, say, USD 500k should adopt “best practices” similar to a more established company. It makes no sense.

Something I only internalized in the last few months: some founders who joined the program arrived with the expectation of “professionalizing” their company; by that they meant implementing processes and a more rigid structure.

Not bad—operating in chaos, like most of us start, won’t take you far. But swinging to the other extreme—rigid processes and quarterly or annual goals when your revenue is at that level—kills a key advantage: speed of execution.

5.3 Every business is—and should be seen as—an experiment

There are very specific things—legal, financial, technological—that are binary: they must be done a certain way or they’re wrong.

But the most important things—acquisition channels, the right price, leadership—after years of talking to hundreds of people, I’m convinced: nobody has the “true” answers.

The best way to find “the truth” for your company, given:

  • The timing when you execute.
  • The team executing.
  • The geography where you execute.

Is to experiment constantly.

And sometimes, when a company is billing USD 20k, 30k, or 100k per month, it starts to feel “stable” and—connected to the point above—believes that, as an “established company,” early-stage style experimentation no longer applies.

Like a fund’s Portfolio Manager, you should constantly be running experiments.

But don’t make the mistake of “experimenting” without a methodology. Otherwise you’re just making bets and indulging in wishful thinking.

That’s why it’s essential to define at least these three things for each experiment:

  • Start and end date.
  • Success metric.
  • Required resources.

5.4 Not knowing how to give feedback or set expectations for their teams

I didn’t expect this to become part of our value proposition, but since early 2025 more founders told us their leadership teams—and teams in general— weren’t performing well.

When we spoke with their teams, we asked:

  • What metric is used to measure your performance to know if your work is good or bad? Most of the time, there wasn’t one.
  • How often do you formally receive feedback? Most of the time, you didn’t.
  • How is your career path within the company charted? Most of the time, it wasn’t.

The first time I founded, in 2022, they told me: as a friend you’re incredible; as a professional you work insanely hard and know a ton; as a boss, you’re a shitty one. I’d never felt so lost in a place.

And yes, it’s easy to jump to: “They’re not the right person; I need someone more senior.” I did that too.

But if that’s happening, it’s because you didn’t set expectations clearly.

For this I recommend doing a Tour of Duty, one of the most practical things I saw Alexander implement.

6. Not raising prices

I’ve written about this before, so I won’t expand much. If your product or service improves, why aren’t you charging more? You can read more about it here.

7. Staying boxed into your home country as your market

Yes, it’s a simplistic take. But something I couldn’t wrap my head around is why so many people complain about the country where they operate:

  • They haggle your price to the max.
  • Payment terms are horrible.
  • Sales cycles are endless.

Yet when you ask: what have you tried to diversify your revenue geographically? Most have no answer.

To be clear, those three bullets happen across Latin America, so moving from selling in Bolivia to selling in Colombia or Mexico isn’t magic.

The issue is most people don’t speak English to even consider an international market and, leaving cultural differences aside (yes, another simplistic take), when you ask: how much time are you spending learning English and at least trying to open a new market? Again, most have no answer.

Latin America is a huge market, with lots of problems to solve and great opportunities to build.

But one thing deeply ingrained in our culture is that, for some reason, it doesn’t even cross our minds to try selling internationally to non-Spanish-speaking countries.

9. Cofounder agreements

When things go well, great. Wait until they go a bit south and, if you didn’t sign anything, you’ll have lots of headaches.

In short, if you’re starting a company with someone:

  • Get aligned on the best-case scenario for everyone before you start, where you want to take the company, and the moments when you’d definitely step away (an accident, a big-company offer, etc.).
  • Sign a vesting agreement. The norm is 4-year vesting with a 1-year cliff. My take: it should be 6-year vesting with a 2-year cliff.
  • Include share repurchase clauses. If a cofounder leaves, at what value will shares be bought back? Lump sum or monthly payments?
  • Make sure IP is owned by the company, not an individual.

These four points could have saved many people a lot of headaches.

10. There’s no magic, just numerical discipline

Many times I felt uneasy for not having an answer to help someone in the program—especially around sales.

I spoke with dozens of sales leaders and studied the topic through videos and podcasts. I used ChatGPT to bounce ideas, giving it lots of context about my challenges.

And while what I learned—and the lived experience of many mentors and creators—is extremely valuable, I felt nobody was telling me anything earth-shattering, even founders I respect who’ve achieved things I’m still far from.

I was missing the hardest part: applying it not for a day or two, but daily.

Just like when you look for a diet to lose weight fast and, after one day yes and one day no, you can falsely say: “the diet doesn’t work.”

We all know you need a daily habit, an obsession (in sales) with continuous improvement:

  • How many people am I prospecting?
  • How many am I getting to a meeting?
  • Why did they accept the meeting?
  • What problems does this person have that actually matter?
  • Can my solution really help? Why? What benefit would it bring?
  • What part of the call could I improve?
  • Why did they reject my offer?
  • Why did they accept my offer?
  • What’s the perceived benefit among my current customers?

And so on. Again, I’m not talking about asking these questions sometimes; I’m talking about obsessively improving every day.

That kind of obsession is something you rarely find in a team.