Crece Más Drives 45% Sales Growth for Small Businesses with Facele and AWS

Microentrepreneurs are the backbone of local economies across Latin America. Yet many are held back by the demands of modern business. They may lack access to the kind of enterprise-level technology that larger corporations use to manage operations. They often rely on manual methods for tasks like managing inventory, sales, deliveries, and customer engagement. These processes are time-consuming, prone to error, and make it difficult to grow or scale a business beyond a certain point. Without access to the right technologies, microentrepreneurs struggle to tap into new markets, improve customer satisfaction, or respond to market trends in real time. Many simply can’t compete with what larger companies have to offer.

Patricia Sánchez, chief executive officer at Crece Más, recognized the growing challenges small businesses faced in Chile and Peru. “I realized small businesses could benefit from an affordable, accessible platform that offers technology typically reserved for larger enterprises,” Sánchez said. "It was always my dream to be able to provide these technological services for small businesses and empower their growth and efficiency." The goal of Crece Más was to create a solution that would help businesses manage inventory, sales, deliveries, and more, while also supporting their suppliers and customers. This would not only address operational inefficiencies but also enable microentrepreneurs to drive growth, improve decision-making, and compete at a higher level. Crece Más had a clear vision but lacked the resources to develop the necessary technological platform. Traditional funding options were limited, making it difficult for Crece Más to build a solution without external support. Microentrepreneurs are not typically seen as a high-revenue market, further complicating its ability to secure funding. With the right funding, however, Crece Más knew it could empower microentrepreneurs not just to survive but to thrive and expand, thus elevating the small business environment in the region.

That’s when Crece Más partnered with Facele and AWS to bring its vision to life. Facele, a Chilean business process technology company that typically works with larger enterprises, recognized the opportunity to extend its expertise to smaller businesses. With its knowledge of optimizing operations through technology, Facele helped Crece Más create a prototype and enter key competitions to secure crucial funding. Crece Más won several important awards, including the 2019 Latin America Tax Hackathon organized by the Chilean Internal Revenue Service and the Innóvate Peru Business Innovation Project. These successes validated the technical strength of the platform and provided the financial support to develop it further.

With the funding secured and using the scalable infrastructure of AWS, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Facele built a solution capable of handling the needs of small businesses. They can manage and track inventory, invoicing, and customer engagement all in one place. Amazon EC2 allows Crece Más to scale as the number of users and transactions grows, adjusting compute capacity based on real-time demand to keep the application responsive even during peak usage. This scalability is especially important for a platform serving multiple countries with different levels of user activity. In addition, small business owners can access real-time insights that were once out of reach. Data provided by Amazon QuickSight allows Crece Más to show customers which products are driving the most sales, better manage their stock, and make data-driven decisions that elevate their operations. They can engage more deeply and build loyalty that sets them apart from their competition. Facele integrated additional AWS services, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to support the platform’s data storage needs, so Crece Más can provide high performance and reliability. And with Amazon OpenSearch Service, microentrepreneurs can search through sales data, customer records, and inventory levels in real time. This near-instant access to information allows businesses to make faster decisions and boosts the value proposition of Crece Más.