BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. Today we’re talking with Ismael Larrosa LaRosa, co-founder and CEO of Capacua, about turning bold ideas into groundbreaking digital projects. Let me try again. About turning bold ideas into groundbreaking digital products that drive growth. And our logo will roll, and I’ll do intros real fast here.
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Neidl, founder of Tethos. We’re a growth agency and for the last 20 plus years, we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, Legion and conversion. If you’re looking to grow, check out tethos.com slash podcast or drop growth in the comments and I’ll DM you. Today I’m really excited to explore how disruptive ideas and design thinking can fuel innovation with Ismail. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Capacua.
And they are a proudly disruptive UX focused custom product development agency that seems to, from what I can tell, transform complex challenges into intuitive user centered digital solutions. And I see that you’re highly experienced in blending design and agile methodologies and cutting edge technology. So that’s really interesting for me of like this, how do you blend creativity with actually systematizing and getting things done and focusing all that in growth.
And I hear that your products, really look to imbue them with a source of identity and soul. And I also hear you’re a Mad Men fan and you collect vintage advertising items. So tell me more.
Ismael Larrosa
yeah, when I was growing up, I wanted to be an admin. I went to college for graphic design and I love graphic design since I have memory. So I wanted to be an advertisement.
And then I started college and my first job was an advertising agency. I worked there for five months and then I got recruited into a consultancy company. The consultancy company is TCS, which is one of the largest global IT companies in the world.
And we were working on a project for PricewaterhouseCoopers. that was my way to get to New York for the first time. They invited me to come here to work on a project. I fell in love with New York and that’s how I ended up like working on tech. Because when I returned from the first trip in New York, I decided to build my own company.
I just started with what I knew at the time, which was branding and graphic design. And with graphic design websites, we started designing websites, but we didn’t have a team to develop them. And clients are asking us, hey, would you develop this as well? And we started developing websites and we started developing apps, mobile apps, web apps. And that’s how through the rabbit hole, everything started 15 years ago.
Jason Niedle
That’s perfect. You’re your own mad man now, Before I forget, did you have a golden nugget for us today?
Ismael Larrosa
Yeah.
Yeah, one of the things that I think we all shared as founders when we are building our companies is that it’s difficult to have a blueprint or guidance, right? And when I started this, you didn’t have many, many, many books that could help you.
So I found one through one of our collaborators and he went through the course of this subject in school with me and he recommended this book. The book is called Discipline in Entrepreneurship. And it’s an organized way of creating companies.
from napkin draft to all the way to operational. It’s 24 steps, right? So you can, it’s not linear, but it’s organized in a way that you can follow like a ladder. And it’s a professor that created this method. His name is Bill Ouellette and he’s from MIT.
Jason Niedle
Mm.
Ismael Larrosa
and
he teaches that course at MIT. I think, there is a book, right? So if you follow the book, it’s very organized and very practical, and you can follow those.
those steps on a way that you will feel at least that you have a blueprint or you have a map in order to move forward. So I think that’s very important for us. It’s called Discipline and Entrepreneurship by Bill Ouellet.
Jason Niedle
you tell me the name of the book again?
Disciplined entrepreneurship. It’s not often that I hear creatives saying, want more discipline and I want more logic in my world. But I actually feel that way for me because my job is creativity. And at the same time, I come from a philosophical background. So I struggle between like, where should we be rigid and have a structure? And then where should we be creative and be completely free? How does that?
Ismael Larrosa
I don’t think those are opposed though. I don’t think creativity is supposed to discipline. I think that from the outside things that look creative, I think there is a connection between creativity and spontaneity, which I don’t think those two correlate. And the problem with creativity is like you could be creative once, but if you don’t have a method that
you will end up there in once. You were creative once. For reasons that probably you don’t know, and probably you will keep on repeating that formula because you think that was the thing that made you creative on the first place.
Jason Niedle
Mm.
Ismael Larrosa
I believe in discipline as a way of freedom in the sense of if you are disciplined enough and you have a framework, then you can go outside the framework and get an extra oomph into, okay, this is an extra layer of spontaneity, right? But I truly believe that in order to be creative, you need to be very disciplined.
If you remember one of the famous quotes by Paulo Picasso, probably one of the most renowned creative painters of the 20th century, he started on a very classical form and then he started developing a more free form. But in order to allow himself to reach that free form, he had to go through a very disciplined and rigorous…
creative method, right? So it’s much more harder what he did at the end of his career than what he was doing at the beginning of it. But without discipline on being creative, I don’t think he will have achieved those levels of, again, creativity. So, yeah.
Jason Niedle
So how does that, so first of all, tell us a little bit about Kapakuah.
Ismael Larrosa
All right, we are a UX centered digital product development company. And that means that we go to clients and we understand what their needs are from a holistic perspective with their customer as a centerpiece of anything that we have to solve. And we attack those problems from
three angles, right? One is the design thinking angle. It’s like, how are we going to think about the user experience as a, I’ll say like experiential solution. That’s one. Then we have, okay, how are we going to support that experiential solution from a technological perspective? And the third aspect is, okay,
with all these efforts that we’re doing, it’s like, how do we get an ROI? How do we get a return of investment into the project that we’re doing, right? We never lose focus that we are doing something for someone that has to have a return. So we also include the business sense into product development. So those are the three main aspects of our practice.
Jason Niedle
Mmm.
So it’s this cool sense of humanity plus technology plus business.
Ismael Larrosa
Correct. Yes.
Jason Niedle
very interesting. And where do you see structure? Like we were talking about the structure actually facilitating creativity. How does that apply in Kapi’ikua?
Ismael Larrosa
Right, we follow what in the industry it’s called like Agile Scrum Process guided by design thinking. So we treat the project like an instructor organization and we follow every step the right
I’ll say it the right way, but on an organized way. So that will keep everyone accountable and it will keep a very good understanding in between all the stakeholders, our team and the client’s team. And how we build that bridge, we don’t build a bridge which is purely technical with…
jargons and all that. We just built a bridge that we both parties understand through designing.
assets, right? Our clients are always in control because they understand what we’re designing for them and everyone understands design, not everyone understands technology in the sense of coding and all that stuff. We want our clients to speak the same language we speak and everyone understands beauty, understands good solutions, intelligent solutions from a design perspective and that’s where we steer the conversation with the clients.
Jason Niedle
Is it fair to say, you said you design the assets, is it fair to say you kind of break it into smaller pieces that can also be managed when you’re talking about the assets?
Ismael Larrosa
Yeah, I’ll say that. Yeah. If you have a very, very large project, we subdivide that in different stages of where we are. So we are focusing on how we are fixing whatever business question we have to fix at the moment.
Jason Niedle
So your title is CEO, that can mean all sorts of things. What do you see at the heart of your role?
Ismael Larrosa
I’ll say it’s client relationship. That business sense that I was talking about, it’s most of the things I bring to the tables, like I play, I will say, at an architectural role of not the project, but the bigger picture of how what we’re doing affects the client from a business perspective. And try to find the…
most optimal output for them as a business, not just like, okay, this is going to be more beautiful or more elegant, or it’s going to perform faster than the competition, but all that, but also how we don’t lose sense of the business, right? And how we treat projects as a business.
Jason Niedle
So you’ve been doing this for 15 years. What stage would you call yourself in? Obviously, clearly beyond startup, but there’s a lot of startup thinking, I would imagine, in what you do.
Ismael Larrosa
Correct, yeah. We are not a startup. We haven’t been for, I would say, the last seven years or so of the company. I’ll say we are young but mature in the sense of the spirit is young, but the process, it’s matured. For example, one of our key features that we have is like we have a team that…
measures quality inside of Capicua. So we have a team measuring the quality that we are delivering for our clients. And we have a very high set of expectations of the quality that we are delivering. So yeah, I will say that we are young but mature. But again, I think the structural thing, we still have more layers and more ladders in order to be more
structure and more effective. I still believe that. But we have to do it without compromising the sense of freshness and the sense of being open to creating stuff on a novel way.
Jason Niedle
about what size is your team.
Ismael Larrosa
We’re over 100 people now.
Jason Niedle
Well,
what had to change in you as a CEO and leader when you went from that startup, you know, make everything happen phase to a team of over 100?
Like how did you have to grow and change as a leader?
Ismael Larrosa
A lot, yeah, a lot. So think about, I started as a graphic designer when we founded the company. And one of the things I did was I…
I started, I went back to college to do a master’s in business. Because back in that time, I felt like everything that we were doing or I was doing was more like intuitive, right? It was like leading from intuition, which is good. I won’t say it’s not. And when I got into college, people, friends of mine that had…
had a have a business they asked me what what did you get in business school you already have a business and the reason why i went to business school was
I have the intuition, but there are things that are not intuitive when you’re running a business. There are things that are counterintuitive. And if you don’t know those rules and you don’t know how the organism is working at the counterintuitive level, you will only have your, your guts, your, your way of doing stuff. And there are other ways of doing it. So it was my way of like trying to be much more analytical in my game on how we run the business.
And what helped me was to be a little bit more detached from the business. was the business when you are starting a business, you and the business are one symbiotic organism, right? It helped me to take a little bit of distance perspective in order to make better decisions. So that’s what happened. I will say over the last four or five years, my detachment and my
understanding of from a different perspective of where we are.
Jason Niedle
I think that’s a big leap a lot of people don’t make from an art, craft, either a designer or a chef or whatever to actually running a business. That’s an entirely new thing.
Ismael Larrosa
Correct, yes. Yeah, and it’s a whole set of skill sets that probably you are equipped with on a different maturity level, right? I think that…
you going through, I would say business school helped me a lot, but also using books like that help you guide your way into it. You will feel that you are more in control of your company and not the company’s in control of you. So you, it’s like riding a wild horse, right? At the very beginning, you are just doing whatever you can, but then you learn how to ride the horse the right way. And then you learn how to jump through rings of fire. But
Jason Niedle
Mm.
Ismael Larrosa
those are the things that come with, experience and you have to be very patient. You have to have a lot of pain tolerance. I think that it’s probably the most, the, the, the most needed skill is pain tolerance and discipline. you can do whatever you want with those, if you have those two, right. so yeah.
Jason Niedle
Just keep
walking through that ring of fire.
Ismael Larrosa
Yeah, just keep walking. Be disciplined. And at the end of the day, things do turn out to change. Sometimes they change on your favor. But if you are prepared and you’re disciplined, probably you will have an advantage when that time comes and when that situation comes. So be prepared.
Jason Niedle
So what’s your growth goal over the next 12 months and whatever your favorite metric is and what are you doing to make that happen?
Ismael Larrosa
Right. So we have been in ING5000 for the last two years. Hopefully we will make the list this year for a third year. We have been growing consistently. The last two years in the industry were not good and for sure that affected us as well. So my goal for 2025 is to double the revenue, which is kind of very ambitious, but I think we can do it.
So yeah, that’s my favorite goal, revenue, because if you’re doing your revenue numbers, then things are easier to handle.
Jason Niedle
And I mean, doubling after you’re 15 is pretty magical, right? That’s kind of amazing. What are the obstacles that hold you back or slow you down on that?
Ismael Larrosa
Right, one of the things that prevented us to double, we’ve been doubling our revenues since 2017 to 2022. 2022, 2023 were not good years for the industry. And one of the things we did over the last two years is diversify. We diversify our ICPs, we diversify where we’re getting our projects from.
So, and we also have created a sales team, a proper sales team in 2020, the end of 2023, beginning of 2024. And that’s helped us to drive more sales, right? And in 2025, we’re also seeing the fruits of those efforts that happened in last year.
So yeah, one of the things that I didn’t know because the tech industry when we started 2010 was like booming. It was like how the industry was affected by interest of the fed rate interests, which slowed everything down to a crawl. And that’s one of the things that I’ve learned.
Jason Niedle
Mmm.
Ismael Larrosa
probably I learned through when I was in business school. So it was like learning in real time how things that were not intuitive affects your business, right? So who will have known that probably a lot of people with a lot of knowledge in business management will have been able to forecast that affecting the Fed rates was going to affect the tech industry, which was one of the things that prevent us from achieving the result.
Jason Niedle
So external influences have really slowed down the growth factors. What’s working really well in sales and marketing these days for you to bring in new people that haven’t heard of you before?
Ismael Larrosa
That’s right.
So we are doing things that don’t scale. That’s a phrase. don’t know who coined that, but we have been doing things in the real world, hosting events, doing things in the real world. think it’s the main differentiator from us. We don’t do cold emailing and spamming people with.
whatever we offer, we don’t do that. Everything we do has a lot of purpose in it. I think people realize that we are not like anyone else, that help us set us apart. And I think that’s working for us because in a world where, in a sea of sameness, I think if we approach things differently and we are different, I think that it’s a value done itself, right? So.
Jason Niedle
You’ve
done a really good job of distinguishing yourself from the competition.
Ismael Larrosa
We are trying, I won’t say we have done a very good job. We are trying and not doing the same things everyone’s doing. And that I will say help us have the success that we have had over the last years.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
This is a funny thought, but a guest about a week ago, he was talking about himself as the UI slash UX of his company. He’s like, I’m the CEO. And I said, what’s your role? He’s like, I’m the UI UX. I’m like, I hadn’t really thought of the CEO in that way, but that makes sense in a startup phase, you know?
Ismael Larrosa
Yeah, totally makes sense.
Jason Niedle
I
thought that was interesting in your world. Are there any strategies to growth right now or lately that have surprised you in terms of either working better than you thought or failing when they used to work?
Ismael Larrosa
I think probably after 2022, the world changed. We were part of multiple, I’ll say, collectives of service companies like ours.
And those collectives help because for example, a client came and they received multiple quotes from different digital product development companies to develop their site, right? That stopped being useful. And we had very, very large contracts, very good clients, serious startups, white community startups.
coming from those types of platforms, but that stopped. yeah, I don’t think it’s going to come back.
Jason Niedle
Wow. I know I don’t have you for too much longer, so I’ll just give you a couple more questions here real fast. What should we know about AI and how can we use that to grow?
Ismael Larrosa
All right, AI, the word of the moment. First, I will say, don’t be afraid of AI. I think that’s important. At least this is my perspective. It’s one, you can have other perspectives. AI, it’s a tool. It’s not magical. We use AI to build software, to build solutions. It’s not magical for us.
It helps, it incrementally helps us create faster software with less errors.
but it’s not transformational. It’s in any point in time, it’s not on a development point where you are going to type like a magic wand that you will type, create me an app and it will create it for you. It’s not going to happen. And I don’t think anytime soon. And I don’t think even if we have that, I don’t think it will be a bad thing. It will be transformational, but I don’t think it’s going to be a bad thing. What I think will happen is,
regardless in which field you are, AI is going to force humans to be much more creative. And this is the creative world again. Machines are going, and this technology is going to create a baseline of acceptance that it’s higher to the normalcy right now. So AI is a normal distribution, right? It will give you like an average result.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Ismael Larrosa
But if everyone has access to an average result, how do you differentiate yourself from another person using the same machine that you are to get an average result? Humans don’t want average. They want something that is unique. That’s why we have so much passion for new, right? New song, new movie, new card, new technology. And that new part, and also AI is based on what happened in the past, not what…
will happen in future. It’s trained on data that it’s past data, right? Even though it’s almost in real time, how we can foresee a future where things are more creative. And creative in the sense of better than human. How can humans create experiences, I will go back to my field now, into creating technological products that are almost magical.
Jason Niedle
Mm-hmm.
Ismael Larrosa
And that will not happen with AI alone. There has to be a lot of input from a human to understand another human to create a bridge in the middle to connect with the emotions that the person needs. And machines will not be able to connect with emotions. They will be able to connect with ideas and thoughts, but emotion, I don’t think they will be able to craft. So I don’t know if I answered the question though.
Jason Niedle
No, that’s a powerful answer. I love that. So the world feels really chaotic right now. What are you looking ahead at? What trends do you see? How do we navigate this chaos? Like, how do we look ahead?
Ismael Larrosa
Yeah, I will just try to be on the AI side of life, right? Or the technology side of life. I’ll just wait. Wait and be patient of how things are going to turn out. I think that’s the most rational thing to do, right? I think people get overexcited about the possibilities of, I’m going to lose my job because of AI.
you will probably lose your job not because of AI necessarily, but because of other multiple reasons, including AI. AI is probably the last nail in the coffin, right? But it’s not just because of AI. I think this is a moment to reflect and think about what makes us happy, person, and what is our contribution to society.
And I think that’s where the value of everyone is. How I can contribute to society with something valuable. I think that’s, this is a moment to rethink ourselves and our societies, what we can bring to the table. I think that’s what I will say in terms of times of turmoil. think that could be the most rational thing to do.
Jason Niedle
What do we bring as humans to the table? It’s so important. I know you have a hard stop. This has been really, really fascinating for me. Where can our audiences find you?
Ismael Larrosa
You can find us at capikua.com. That’s C-A-P, like C-U-A dot com. And send us a message through there and we’ll respond to the RN. All right.
Jason Niedle
Perfect.
Ismail, thank you so much for being on Beyond Sass.
Ismael Larrosa
Thank you. Have a great day. Jason.
Jason Niedle
So I know you need to go, I’ll do my little outro after you go. I’ll send you an email, I’ll send you a preview copy of that episode and we’ll send you guys assets to use however you want. If you need anything, just hit me up and tell me what you need. All right, thank you so much, bye.
Ismael Larrosa
Perfect. Thank you, Jason. I had a great time. Bye bye.
Jason Niedle
So recording, yeah, okay.
Ismail, thank you for being on Beyond SAS. For leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, we drop episodes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you can find me, Jason Neidl, at tethos.com, t-e-t-h-o-s.com, where you can also grab our free report on how to grow your tech company. That’s at tethos.com slash podcast. Of course, please drop any questions for me or our future guests. Comments and feedback below. And if you found some value here, don’t forget to share this episode with a friend. We really appreciate that. Until next time, this is Beyond SAS.
Until next time, this is Beyond SAS.
