GoCarga: My First Startup Adventure and the Art of the Pitch

I still remember standing at the Expocamello 2014 event at the Pereira Chamber of Commerce, pitch notes half-memorized, trying to project confidence in front of the Red Nacional de Ángeles Inversionistas. We were 1 of 5 finalists selected from over 200 projects. My heart was somewhere between my throat and my stomach.

That was GoCarga. My first real shot at a startup. It didn’t survive. But what it taught me did.

---

Where It Started

It was late 2013. I was in my final semesters at Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira studying Systems Engineering — the kind of semester where you’re exhausted enough to think starting a company sounds like a good idea.

The team came together naturally. Alejandro Pinto was the spark. His dad, Gustavo, had been driving freight trucks across Colombia for over 20 years. Not a fleet. Not a company. Just him, his truck, and the road. And like thousands of independent transporters across the country, he knew the pain intimately: finish a delivery, and suddenly you’re stuck figuring out how to find cargo for the return trip. Empty trucks. Wasted fuel. Lost income.

Alejandro saw his dad live this problem every single day. That’s where GoCarga began — not in a business plan, but in a kitchen conversation.

We pulled in Julian Vinasco (Industrial Engineering), and Jose Miguel Beltran, a graphic designer. All of us from Pereira. All of us, frankly, figuring it out as we went.

---

The Problem Was Bigger Than We Thought

Once we started digging, the numbers were hard to ignore. Colombia’s freight industry: 192 million tons annually, 250,000 vehicles. And the matching — connecting companies that need to ship with truckers who have capacity — was happening through phone calls, middlemen, word of mouth. Thousands of Gustavos driving home empty because there was no better way to find cargo for the return trip.

The opportunity felt obvious: build the platform that connects them. In real time. Through the web.

That was GoCarga.

---

Apps.co and Eight Weeks in Cali

In early 2014, we applied to the 5th cohort of Apps.co — Colombia’s government startup program run by MinTIC. We got in.

For eight weeks, we were in Cali at Universidad ICESI, going through the Lean LaunchPad program. The government provided us with servers worth around $2,000 per month for a year, a domain, tools, and access to mentors who actually knew what they were talking about.

Our mentors — Ana Lucía Alzate and Andrés Felipe Millán — pushed us hard on something I hadn’t fully appreciated yet: get out of the building. Stop theorizing. Go talk to real people.

So we did. We interviewed over 80 transporters and more than 20 companies. And somewhere around interview 30 or 40, we stumbled onto something we hadn’t planned for: freight brokers — comisionistas in Spanish. These were the people who had been sitting in the middle of every cargo transaction, connecting supply with demand through personal networks and phone calls. They weren’t in our original business model. They turned out to be among the most critical stakeholders in the entire ecosystem.

That discovery changed how we thought about GoCarga. Not just as a platform that cuts out middlemen — but one that could serve all sides of a fragmented market.

---

The Platform We Built

GoCarga was a web platform where companies could post cargo shipment needs and independent transporters could find available loads matching their routes. Reduce empty trucks, reduce costs, make transparent what had always been informal.

We went through several prototypes. Each one a little closer to something real:

It wasn’t perfect. But it was real. And it was solving a real problem that real people experienced every single day.

---

Expocamello and the Angel Investor Stage

Later that year, Pereira’s Chamber of Commerce held the 10th edition of Expocamello — an entrepreneurship fair that draws projects from across the region. We submitted GoCarga and were selected as one of 5 to 6 finalists from a pool of over 200 projects.

We presented on stage to members of the Red Nacional de Ángeles Inversionistas, backed by Fundación Bavaria. Real investors. Real stakes. Real pressure. The slides from that pitch still exist somewhere in Google Drive.

Building our stand was one of the things I remember most fondly. It was our first one ever — we designed the banner, picked the colors, figured out the layout. We even had business cards made. Real ones, with everyone’s name and role. Looking at them now feels like a time capsule — four university students who gave themselves titles and printed them on cardstock.

When we saw it all printed and set up in the venue, it felt like GoCarga had become something real in a way that code on a screen never quite achieves.

I don’t have the words to fully describe what it feels like the first time you pitch your idea in that kind of environment. Everything you’ve built — every spreadsheet, every interview, every whiteboard session — compresses into 10 minutes where you either make someone believe or you don’t.

We had to make them believe.

We also participated in Ventures Colombia, another national entrepreneurship competition. Every event like this was another chance to refine the pitch, sharpen the story, and learn how to read a room full of people who’ve heard a hundred pitches before yours.

---

The Pitch Video

Around the same time, we recorded a pitch for Apps.co. If you want to see where we were at that moment — the product, the idea, the energy of four university students who actually thought they could fix Colombian freight logistics — this is it:

Watching it now, years later, I notice all the rough edges. The things I’d say differently. The slides I’d redesign. But I also see something I didn’t fully recognize then: we had a story. A real one. And we knew how to tell it.

---

What Happened After

We poured almost two years of energy into GoCarga. Two years of prototypes, interviews, pitches, late nights. We had a product with a great idea and a platform that worked. But the technology wasn’t everything — and we learned that the hard way.

The real problem was the network. GoCarga only worked if you had transporters and companies willing to use it and connect with each other. Without that critical mass of users, you could have the best platform in the world and it was worth nothing. And building that network turned out to be much harder than we imagined.

With the transporters, we hit a barrier we hadn’t seen coming: many of them were older adults who weren’t comfortable with technology. Convincing them to install an app, create a profile, trust a web platform — it was an uphill battle. And on the company side, getting even a single meeting with a logistics manager to pitch our idea was nearly impossible. We were four university students knocking on doors that didn’t open easily.

We never managed to build that network. We had no business experience, no industry contacts, and finding users was a real struggle. GoCarga didn’t continue as a commercial product. That’s the honest answer.

But we learned a tremendous amount in the process.

I’ve never thought of it as a failure. Not for a second.

---

The Skill That Stuck

Here’s what GoCarga actually gave me, and I don’t think I’ve said this out loud enough: it taught me how to pitch.

Not “pitch” in the sense of reading slides at someone. I mean the real thing — understanding your audience deeply enough to know what they care about, distilling a complex problem into a story that hits people before they’ve had time to think about why, and making someone believe in something that doesn’t fully exist yet.

That skill doesn’t stay in one box. It doesn’t expire when a startup winds down.

I apply this skill today in my technical talks: I always aim to tell a story, maintain a connection with the audience, and share an experience. I structure each talk as if it were a long pitch — and it has worked.

Every tech talk I’ve given at a conference or university — I’m pitching. Every DailyBot demo to a potential customer — I’m pitching. Every conversation where I explain why something matters — I’m pitching.

The format changes. The stakes change. The audience changes. But the core skill is the same one I built in those eight weeks in Cali, on that stage at Expocamello, and in front of that camera for YouTube.

GoCarga taught me that how you tell a story is often more important than how complete the thing you’ve built is. That’s not an excuse for building badly. It’s a recognition that great execution without communication goes unnoticed, and ideas poorly communicated die before they get the chance to become great execution.

I owe a lot to Alejandro, Julian Vinasco, and Jose Miguel. To the mentors who pushed us to test our assumptions in the real world. And to Apps.co and Fundación Bavaria for creating the spaces where university students from Pereira could actually stand in front of serious investors and be taken seriously.

Let’s keep building.

---

Resources

• Alejandro Pinto’s write-up on GoCarga — My co-founder’s perspective on the project
• Photos of our stand at Expocamello 2014 — GoCarga’s booth at the fair
• GoCarga pitch slides — Fundación Bavaria — The actual slides from our pitch to angel investors
• GoCarga on Facebook — The original page
• Apps.co — Colombia’s MinTIC startup program that backed us
• GoCarga on Twitter/X — Our original Twitter account
• Ventures Colombia — National entrepreneurship competition we participated in
• Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira — Where the team came from