On September 11, 2024, we printed our first shipping label in Honduras. Today, Honduras is boxful’s largest market by number of shipments and revenue. Nearly seven months later, on April 2, 2025, we launched operations in Guatemala, which is now our fastest-growing market.
In less than a year, we added two countries, reached $5M ARR, raised $1.9M, grew from 12 to more than 50 people, and, personally, I lived in three different countries.
Hi, I’m Juan Carlos, COO and co-founder of boxful, a startup based in El Salvador whose mission is to make eCommerce easier and more accessible for everyone. How are we doing it? Through an ecosystem of solutions that enables any entrepreneur to easily ship packages nationwide, fulfillment centers that streamline our clients’ operations, the first open Smart Locker network in the region, and productive financing for businesses looking to scale.
As founders of other startups, you know how the game works. You need to grow quickly, but today, unlike five years ago, you also need to grow intelligently and with profitability in mind. So, as Ansoff suggests in his product-market matrix, we decided to develop a new market with the services we already had before creating a new one.
At the end of July 2024, Salvador, our CEO, said, “By the end of August, we need to be in Honduras. We have one month. I think it’s doable.” Jaime, our CTO, looked like he was silently praying in binary. As for me, I was all laughs… until Salvador said that one of us would need to move to Honduras, and that person would be me.
Why Honduras and not Guatemala?
Because Honduras has two major cities, nearly double the population of El Salvador, and a market where our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) was significantly underserved, with poor logistics solutions and no strong fulfillment competitors. It was also cheaper.
That’s how Salvador and I started traveling twice a week to meet potential collaborators, advisors, entrepreneur friends, and to look for office space. That’s when we made our first strategic mistake. Let me give you some context: in El Salvador, 85% of our shipments came through our multi-courier platform (we never touched the packages; the couriers picked them up directly from the client’s address). With fulfillment, however, we store products, pick and pack orders, and generate shipping labels. The mistake was assuming Honduras would behave exactly the same way.
We rented an 8-square-meter space on the sixth floor of a building to use as a warehouse, and a 100-square-meter office on the fourteenth floor for the team. The plan was to bring over a few clients from El Salvador using our fulfillment service. That would give us an initial shipment volume to negotiate better rates with couriers and then grow the shipping platform from there.
Sixth-floor commercial unit, our first warehouse in Honduras.
January 2025 with the Honduras team.
Without going into too much detail, we launched a campaign targeting foreign sellers and offered a very compelling value proposition. Fulfillment grew exponentially. By the fourth month, the warehouse was overflowing with inventory. We bought racks, moved products into the office, and the team spent their entire workday inside what felt like a prison made of shelving units filled with Chinese products.
First lesson: nothing goes exactly as planned, but a plan is better than no plan.
Honduras office on the 14th floor before moving to the new warehouse.
The sales team improved their pitch, fulfillment clients kept coming in, shipment records were broken every day, and mentioning “quitting time” became forbidden. The team worked, went to the gym, and came back. Our marketing lead went from trade show to trade show, TikTok to TikTok. Everything was going great… until the next major problem arrived.
You see, 80% of our shipments are cash-on-delivery. In other words, the recipient pays in cash, the couriers transfer the collected funds to our bank accounts, and then we transfer the money to our clients. The problem was that, with fulfillment full of international clients, we had to pay them in U.S. dollars.
At first, El Salvador supported us by paying the international clients directly, but that caused us to accumulate millions of Honduran lempiras, which were rapidly losing value. Every day Salvador would ask me for dollars, but the bank would sell me very little—or none at all. Every call made me break into a cold sweat, but you put on a poker face and figure it out. The team and I tried everything to buy dollars. Here are a few examples:
- I got a credit card to buy crypto. Too expensive.
- Our Commercial Manager’s wife let us message her coworkers to buy their dollars. Not scalable.
- We considered buying gold and transporting it overland to El Salvador. It sounded risky, so I didn’t do it (haha).
- We offered employees at a call center in our building the chance to sell us their dollars in exchange for being entered into a drone raffle. Fun, but not scalable… and it made us look like the mafia.
Today, it’s no longer a problem, but here’s another lesson: sell first, then figure it out.
In a startup, the only thing that truly matters is selling. When we started onboarding international clients, we had no idea how we were going to pay them, but what mattered was getting them activated.
Everything we learned in Honduras has helped make Guatemala—despite facing its own challenges—feel less exhausting, less improvised, and able to grow faster than the other two countries.
My final piece of advice (and the most important one): build a great team.
That’s the key to the success of any company: surrounding yourself with committed people who are hungry to grow, who share your values, and who reject mediocrity. People with ambition, people who are better than you, who get excited about solving problems, and who see difficult and seemingly impossible challenges as something worth pursuing.
That’s the kind of talent we have at boxful. It’s not easy to find, but when someone like that joins your mission, your chances of success increase dramatically.
So, as always, I want to take this opportunity to thank the boxful team: the Salvadorans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, and the Argentine who are part of this adventure with us. You are the ones who make the impossible possible, who make our growth look “easy” when in reality it’s a monumental effort that we can only achieve because of you.
At Caricaco Ventures, we invest at least $200K in startups that are building solutions to change the world. Our mission is to put Central America and the Dominican Republic on the global venture capital map.
To date, we have backed 27 startups, including Boxful and other fast-growing companies across the region. If you’re building a great solution, we’d love to hear from you: caricaco.vc/aplicar/