The frustration of seeking economic stability and the ambition to generate solutions that really work for Argentine SMEs helped motivate a project that was very clear from the beginning. Neuroproject is a company founded by Nicolás Amatulli and Azul Vila in 2017 when they were only 22 and 21 years old. Today they are strongly consolidated in the market providing solutions to all types of Argentine SMEs. We interviewed Nicolás:
How did the company come about? Since when have they been doing this?
I come from an entrepreneurial family, I learned to sell from a very young age and I grew up getting to know different companies and institutions from the inside, seeing their business models and organizations from the inside. Neuroproject was not very planned, I simply started out of a need to want to grow in life being able to offer effective and real solutions to Argentine SMEs, I couldn’t get good jobs, so you believe me. We started with Azul in 2017, when we were 21 and 22 years old, from the barbecue area of my parents’ house, I had passed a series of distance certifications in Neuromarketing and Consumer Psychology, with specializations in Neuroadvertising and Neurosales at the Business & Innovation Institute of America. While Azul had been received with honors as a Superior Hotel Technician. We wanted to exploit our knowledge but in Argentina this type of studies is not given great value even with a dependency relationship, I tried to meet in several job interviews for medium and large companies but I never succeeded. For example, I did not pass job interviews to work in the sports company of “the pipe”, nor in an automobile dealership that has “two arrows up” in the logo, and other jobs that would have fascinated me. But looking at the path we have taken, I do not regret where I am, quite the contrary, in fact today we are suppliers of several of these companies that I dreamed of being an employee. So mission more than accomplished.
They were very young, did the customers trust them?
Many clients from when we started still are today and we laugh with them at a white lie I used to tell when I started. To introduce myself, I pretended to be an employee of a marketing company called Neuroproject that had recently arrived in the neighborhood to expand in the area. Because of my age, they did not believe that I was the owner, much less all the production and growth that we were having with my partner and the size of the business that we already had. If I told them right away what my real routine was like and how we worked, they used to have a prejudice already formed before showing them what we offered and how. We always fulfill an order, we never had to make returns due to problems, even today we care a lot about solving problems internally without affecting the service we provide to our customers. Responsibility seems key to me as a company policy, due to a matter of respect for a business that trusts us in neither more nor less delegating such a central column as the Marketing of your business.
How was the process until today?
Easy, it wasn’t (laughs). I felt in a race against time with myself, I was always a very anxious person for my personal goals and I couldn’t wait to become independent. In 2017, with my partner, we began offering market studies and graphic printing products such as brochures, flyers and posters to SMEs, neighborhood businesses and shopping centers. It was excellent for us, whoever had rented us the printer couldn’t believe the amount we sold, we even sent flyers and brochures abroad, something that was still not used. I would get up very early, leave my parents at their jobs and take their car to walk endless businesses door to door offering our services until noon, in the afternoon we would produce orders until late at night. We offered them with the added value that the design was made by us using knowledge of Neuromarketing, I do not have statistical measurements of the real results that this gave, but the clients told us that they were doing better and they asked us for more and more.
As of 2018 we began to sell “Leads” (they are contacts of potential customers who leave their data when they see an advertisement and are interested in receiving advice) at the request of a 0km Dealer, we did not know how to do it, but we accepted the challenge! It became the ideal product for sales teams with a pioneering Know How created by us that greatly lowers the cost of the product while maintaining the same quality against the competition, to this day it continues to be one of our main products and which stands out for us as a company. Not having known how it was done traditionally allowed us to create our own system and it actually managed to be better. Today we are suppliers of practically all 0km automotive brands and we produce an average of 20,000 Leads per month.
At the beginning of 2022 we launched our range of services for social networks and aimed at all types of business/company, where we offer tailor-made packages for each case based on a logic focused on achieving results for each type of business. A lot can be sold on social networks, if they are used well and the marketing team is allowed enough freedom to advertise.
What do you think is the most important thing a company should consider when hiring them?
I think it is key to be open to changes, to allow the freedom to make the strategies that we believe are necessary. Sometimes it is not easy for SMEs to delegate trust to an external team, and it is understandable. Even more so when we propose our strategies that are not very traditional and disruptive to what is done in general in marketing. That is why it is a more traditional job in those cases where we try to combine our strategies with the advertising culture that our client already had, in this way we seek to generate synergy.
What products and services do you provide to the public?
We have a very wide range of services, which are coupled to each different need of each SME. But basically we start from 4 foundations of services:
Management of social networks.
Lead/Data Generation (inquiries from potential customers).
Development of Web Pages.
Development of CRM software.
What do you consider when putting together a marketing proposal?
Advice and presentation of the proposal is free.
Once we hear the reason for your query, first of all we analyze the desirable expectations that you want as objectives and we seek to understand how willing you are to the tools and techniques that we can apply to achieve them.
With this we present a series of different packages that vary in price and what is included. This instance is left to the client’s decision what he considers optimal to start with. Once the service has started, there will always be follow-up on our part in its evolution and new proposals or changes may even arise in it that will further personalize the service based on the results, analysis and changes that we are observing in practice together with the person in charge of the business.
What makes them stand out?
Understand that we live in Argentina (laughs). They teach us that marketing strategies in general are designed to generate visible and noticeable results from the 6th month onwards, more or less, which is partly true, but we cannot accept that luxury in Argentina. Minimum 6 months of continuous investment for an Argentine SME is too uncertain. To counteract this, we have a system that is not common to the rest, we focus more on the results in the search for potential customers rather than on the visual or “artistic” of an advertisement. Thus, in the first months we seek to massively promote the products before the brand (in marketing we call it outbound), we try to extract the most juice possible using all the possible tools at our disposal, we have a very experienced and own Know How in this sense. At the same time, and with a more “calm” and planned process, we generate techniques to further promote the brand and be better known, something that naturally takes more time to notice its results in comparison (in marketing we call it inbound), this is achieved with good photographs, videos, graphic design and creativity with the objective always focused on generating a “community” of potential regular customers who already know your brand. In this way we generate a balance in planning seriously in the short, medium and long term. Our services are very complete and varied to apply in each case.
Challenges and goals for the future?
Today we manage a network of more than 100 SMEs in Argentina and we have a team with more than 15 providers specially trained by Neuroproject who provide us with the necessary tools and products for our services, we teach them what we need and we turn them into our providers. By 2024 we plan to double these results. As well as launching our 3.0 version of our web platform, with many more useful tools and services for SMEs. We also incorporate the use of artificial intelligence into our practices and with very good results indeed. So we propose to continue professionalizing ourselves from a technological perspective, being at the forefront of what is coming in business in terms of what we know already works in the world.
Contact information:
Neuroproject Argentina SRL
Instagram: @neuroproject
Advice: +549 11 5875 3069 // +549 11 5875 3050
Offices: Vélez Sarsfield 4184, 1st floor, Munro, Vicente López.
Website: neuroproject.com.ar
by CEDOC