Above: At Zubale, Monroy (left) and Campbell connect independent contractors with merchandising tasks. (photo by Rodrigo Ceballos)

Allison Campbell and Sebastian Monroy (both MBA 2018) met on their first day of classes at HBS. Members of Section B, they had something else in common: the same eyeglasses. They took a selfie. But it wasn’t until the second-year MBA course Entrepreneurial Finance that they discovered another similarity: Each was passionate about starting a business. “We got coffee in Spangler Grille one day after class and were there for two-and-a-half hours,” Campbell says.

Both had experience with retail in emerging markets: Monroy, who is Colombian, worked for Procter & Gamble in Mexico for seven years, while Campbell held a number of positions at Walmart, with stints in India and China (which was “like going 20 years into the future”). Campbell could see the rest of the world following China’s path. “It was an incredibly powerful wave that I wanted to ride—to build a digital business that would help people in emerging markets use their smartphones to connect to markets and improve their quality of life,” she says.

Today, as cofounders of Zubale, Campbell and Monroy can make that claim. Based in Mexico City, Zubale crowdsources the expensive and inefficient task of merchandising, using its app to connect independent contractors with major brands looking for the on-the-ground help needed to get their products out of the backroom, onto store shelves, and into the hands of consumers. Workers have three options for compensation: mobile phone credit, bank transfers, or digital gift cards for brands including Amazon, Netflix, Starbucks, and Uber.

The idea for Zubale evolved over time. One lightbulb moment came from Campbell’s independent study with Professor Tom Eisenmann; in it, she compared mobile money use in African countries with Latin America’s much slower adoption and discovered that while 85 percent of Mexico’s population owned a smartphone, only 30 percent had a bank account and 10 percent a credit card. Meanwhile, Campbell and Monroy were meeting weekly at the Harvard i-lab, still talking, still sharing ideas. They also traveled to Mexico City in October 2017 to meet alumni (“I think we had 25 meetings in five days,” Campbell says) and conduct focus groups with potential users, many of whom, it seemed, didn’t trust the concept of mobile money. But they also learned Mexicans loved their smartphones and wanted to earn more money, despite the hassle of two-hour job commutes. Given their backgrounds in retail, Campbell and Monroy focused on seven different industry use cases, including market research and product testing, before settling on merchandising—a $40 billion pain point for brands selling into the Latin American market.

A finalist in the alumni track of last spring’s New Venture Competition, Zubale (the name, roughly translated from Spanish, means “rise up”) now has a team of 45 and recently closed on $4.4 million in a second round of funding, with the goal of expanding into the Mexican market before moving on to Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, and Chile. In its first year, through word of mouth alone, users completed 170,000 tasks—work that in some cases covered unexpected medical costs or just put food on the table. “Our user stories fire me up on why we’re doing this,” says Campbell. Monroy agrees, citing the additional satisfaction of building a company culture. “We’re creating the place where I would like to work,” he says. “Having the decision-making power to design an environment for people to perform at their peak is an amazing experience.”

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