I Was Hired to Crack the U.S. Market. I Turned Down the Mission — and Doubled Down on the Market Hiding in Our Data

When I was hired as CEO of Builderall, I inherited one mission: crack the U.S. market. The company had originally been built by a Brazilian team, and they believed an American CEO who spoke English without an accent was the missing piece to unlock the biggest market in the world. I took the job. Then I turned down the mission. Instead of pointing the company at the United States, I doubled down on Latin America.

That wasn’t a bet on my instincts. It was a bet on the data, and specifically on the difference between where the opportunity looked like it was and where it actually was. Every entrepreneur today is running some version of that same decision: an industry is shifting under you, AI is rewriting how your customers behave, and you’re being told to chase the market everyone else is chasing. The winners in this cycle will be the ones who look at the ground they’re already standing on, see the opening most people miss and commit to it while everyone else wanders.

If you’re looking to expand, scale into a new market, or find the blue ocean opportunity in your industry, here’s how I’ve learned to find that opening in mine. Four moves, in the order I’ve learned to run them.

1. Read your own data before you chase someone else’s story

You don’t need decades of industry experience to see an opportunity. You need the willingness to look at your own numbers and ask what they’re actually saying, not what you want them to say.

At Builderall, we had a growing U.S. customer base and had never spent a dollar to acquire those users. On the surface, that looked like a green light to invest heavily in the U.S. But when we studied who those American customers were, we found something different. They almost all had Spanish surnames. They clustered in South Florida, Texas and Southern California. They weren’t Americans discovering a Latin American product. They were Latin Americans who had moved north and stayed plugged into the ecosystem back home.

The sign flipped. What looked like early U.S. traction was actually proof that Latin American marketing was already winning U.S. customers as a downstream effect. The right move wasn’t to enter the U.S. It was to go deeper into Latin America, and let the U.S. footprint compound as a byproduct.

The muscle you’re building is asking what your data actually says versus what you wish it would say. Most people project the story they want onto the numbers. The opening tends to be hiding in the story they didn’t expect.

2. Watch for the macro shift that rewrites a market

The richest openings appear right after something fundamental changes. When the ground moves, whoever notices first has a window before everyone else recalibrates.

Years before I joined Builderall, I worked in a role targeting Latin America and the region’s problems were structural. Most people didn’t have bank accounts. Credit cards were rare. Internet access was unreliable. Then a compressed few years rewrote all of it.

According to a 2023 Mastercard study conducted with Americas Market Intelligence, the share of Latin American consumers without an account at any financial institution dropped from 45% in 2019 to 21% in 2023. The World Bank’s Global Findex recorded a 19% jump in financial inclusion across the region between 2017 and 2021, the largest gain anywhere in the world during that window. Internet penetration climbed from 43% in 2012 to 78% in 2022.

It wasn’t the same market anymore. It had quietly become a new one, and most competitors were still running strategies built for the old one. That’s the pattern to look for. Wherever human behavior changes dramatically and quickly, an opening is forming. AI is doing this right now to nearly every industry that touches content, coding or customer support. The job is to notice the shift before your competitors update their assumptions.

3. Refuse to fight the strongest opponent

Once you’ve spotted the opening, the next question is who else is already there and whether you can beat them.

Going after the U.S. market meant going head-to-head with Wix and Squarespace. According to Wix’s 2024 annual report filed with the SEC, Wix alone spent $175.6 million on advertising in 2024. Roughly $14.6 million every month, from one competitor, before you count Squarespace or anyone else with a marketing budget aimed at the same buyer. Meeting that head-on with our resources was never going to work.

In soccer, you don’t try to break the defensive line where it’s thickest. You look for the seam. The goal on the other end is the same regardless of where you cross through. Business is the same. There’s no bonus for beating the strongest defender. There’s only a penalty for trying.

4. Protect your core, and resist adjacency hubris

This is the move most operators get wrong, and the one that quietly undid the U.S. plan for me.

Being excellent at one thing doesn’t guarantee that every adjacent move will work. And the true cost of the new bet is rarely just the money spent pursuing it. It’s the attention, investment and organizational energy pulled away from what made the company excellent in the first place.

Nike is a case study playing out in real time. The company remains the global leader in athletic footwear, but over several years it aggressively prioritized direct-to-consumer sales while reducing its dependence on the wholesale partners that had helped build its reach and cultural relevance. The strategy didn’t fail in isolation. Nike also faced product, competitive and regional challenges during the same period. But the channel shift proved costly. According to Nike’s fiscal 2025 annual report, revenue fell 10% year over year, from $51.4 billion to $46.3 billion, while Nike Direct revenue declined 13%. By mid-2026, the stock had fallen to its lowest level in more than 11 years.

Nike is now working to restore balance. In fiscal 2026, wholesale revenue grew 6% to $27.5 billion, while Nike Direct declined another 6% to $17.7 billion. The company is rebuilding retailer relationships and reinvesting in the broader marketplace it had previously deemphasized.

Even a company as dominant as Nike can’t redirect attention from a core strength without consequences. When evaluating a new opportunity, the honest question isn’t “can we win over there?” It’s “what will pursuing it cause us to neglect here?” When “here” is where more than 90% of your customers, revenue or competitive advantage currently lives, the burden of proof for the adjacent bet should be extremely high.

That was exactly the choice at Builderall. A parallel vertical (the U.S.) versus going deeper into a core (Latin America) where more than 90% of our customer base already lived and where the ground was finally solid enough to compound. I chose depth. Then I chose specific countries inside that continent as beachheads instead of blanketing all of it at once.

Making it real: test wide, commit narrow, let the numbers decide

We didn’t start with Mexico, Colombia and Peru specifically. We blanketed Spanish-speaking Latin America, ran small structured tests across the board and let the strongest markets bubble up from the data.

The mechanics that made this work are simple. Set your guardrails before you enter anything. Define your KPIs. Run small focus-grouped tests. Put a time horizon on the experiment up front so you don’t slide into testing forever.

That last one is where most entrepreneurs get stuck. Between the ages of 18 and 27, I started roughly 22 businesses. Not all of them were serious, but enough of them were that I learned the lesson the hard way: at some point you have to stop ideating and start operating. Testing is a phase, not a lifestyle. If your test is running past its own deadline, either the test is broken or you’re avoiding the decision the test was supposed to make for you.

The way out is to let the numbers be the boss. Set your win metric from your unit economics: what it costs to acquire a customer, what it costs to deliver, what you make. Decide the exact number a market has to hit to count as a win. The moment it hits, the decision is made for you. You’re not the boss. The numbers are.

Macro disruption isn’t going away. The operators who thrive in this cycle will be the ones who read their own data honestly, notice the shift before their competitors do, refuse the fights they can’t win, protect the core they’ve already built, and commit while everyone else is still wandering.

I was hired to chase the crowded market. I went the other direction. That decision has shaped how I think about growth strategy ever since. Find the seam in the line, drive hard into it, and the same logic will work for you.

When I was hired as CEO of Builderall, I inherited one mission: crack the U.S. market. The company had originally been built by a Brazilian team, and they believed an American CEO who spoke English without an accent was the missing piece to unlock the biggest market in the world. I took the job. Then I turned down the mission. Instead of pointing the company at the United States, I doubled down on Latin America.

That wasn’t a bet on my instincts. It was a bet on the data, and specifically on the difference between where the opportunity looked like it was and where it actually was. Every entrepreneur today is running some version of that same decision: an industry is shifting under you, AI is rewriting how your customers behave, and you’re being told to chase the market everyone else is chasing. The winners in this cycle will be the ones who look at the ground they’re already standing on, see the opening most people miss and commit to it while everyone else wanders.

If you’re looking to expand, scale into a new market, or find the blue ocean opportunity in your industry, here’s how I’ve learned to find that opening in mine. Four moves, in the order I’ve learned to run them.