Diego Hurtado's Playbook for Purposeful Entrepreneurship

Hey, how are you doing, Stephen? Thank you for having me here. Obviously, as you say, you know, my name is Diego. I’m from Bogota, Colombia. I moved here 13 years ago, 14 years ago to Florida. Then I moved to New York. I was a professional player for about seven years. Then I started a brand called Diaza Sportswear, which mostly does apparel for soccer teams and any sport, basically. But we focus our marketing and everything on soccer. And right now we have e-commerce which is booming.

Yeah. I started not in marketing. I started in a hybrid, multiple hats role at a small consulting/data analytics shop, which later got acquired by a much larger consultancy during my time there. But during that time, I wore sales, marketing, biz dev, growth, and solutions engineering, multiple hats all at once. From there, I pivoted into growth marketing afterward, which solidified my marketing pathway. After that, I joined a company called Smsara, which makes fleet management hardware and software for logistics companies. I was a growth Marketing Manager there and transitioned into being a Growth Product Manager where I was building internal tooling for our go-to-market teams. Then I missed more focused marketing, so I pivoted back into marketing where now I’m at Raptor Maps That’s brilliant.

No, basically what inspired me was the need of doing something, right? I was a soccer player, you know, professional. But when I was playing, the professional level was kind of shaky. It wasn’t like a long contract. It was only like, you know, six month contracts. I even signed for a team for a three month contract. And, you know, money wasn’t that good. So I started realizing I had to do something, you know, as I got older.

I started realizing I needed to do something new, right? So the passion for soccer was always there, but then I had another passion on the side, which was clothing. And I guess that comes from my mom and my background, which is my whole family used to work for other brands, used to make apparel. And I used to be at home, sitting down, making designs, and they used to make it happen.

So I think it was a natural thing that I didn’t discover back then, but when it was the need for doing something else, I just put one and two together and I started creating uniforms, soccer uniforms for local teams, for Sunday league teams. And then it became something fun. It became a journey that I started selling more and more. I was always a salesman that I give you. I was always selling stuff, trying to find the next bug, trying to like, how do I get the next dollar? But then when I found my passion, soccer, and then the brand, the clothing, it kind of connected, right? So both passions in one were essential to start creating what it is today.

No, I mean, the main target of the soccer teams and people that play the sport. But we also have other lines, you know, casual lines and we have a line called the Asaflex, which is, you know, very cool because it’s for anybody, right? Anybody that really wants to be out there, play any kind of sport, you know, go to the gym and stuff like that is for this type of people, right?

So the brand became from only soccer players, only field players to now being by anybody, right? Because if you want to go to the gym, you want to push yourself, you want to commit to selling yourself to somebody, something else, this is the line for you. And the ASSA has built to that, to that aspect. So those are basically your targets.

I mean, we started something that you don’t see in the market so often and it’s customized clothing, right? Custom uniforms are something very difficult for all their brands to get, you know? We have built a system where even with the current growth, we still can make custom uniforms, make a difference and put anybody’s culture behind a jersey. And that’s exactly what we want to represent as our differentiation from other brands, right?

Also,brands right now are, you know, kind of just the same thing over and over. I think one brand replicates the other brand, right? For us, it’s more like we go more aggressive. You know, we go to the minds of soccer players. We go to the minds of teams, of owners. We live this game. You know, it’s not just that I’m a corporate guy. No, I’m a soccer player that knows the leagues, that knows the game, knows the locker room. So I think that makes us special, especially because I have people in my team that also play the sport, as a player professionally. So we know what we talk about. And that makes a huge difference when you approach any client, any family member, as we call it.

Right now, our best selling products, you could say uniforms, jerseys, shorts, socks, but we also sell a lot of jerseys for fans. We have created these e-commerce hubs where teams that never had access to sending their jersey to their fans, to their family, now have access to it. We gave access to them. We actually make them money because we gave them royalties back because we’re a trademark brand. So we have to kind of reward those that let us work with their brands as well. So it has become an ecosystem where everybody can make money, but other than the money is more about, you know, putting your brand out there, putting your team out there on people that you never could have access to before.

I mean, I say, you know, fear. Fear is one of those things that you always think about, that you always feel every step of the way, every time you go one step ahead is that constant fear, right? What if it doesn’t work? What if I fail? You know, so I had to start training my mind to think differently, you know, because I come from a background where everybody has fear.

Everybody has fear, everybody comes from, you know, like, this, we’re like, hey, don’t say anything, don’t bring anything. This is who we are. That’s it. That’s all we could be. So I come from that, right? And to change to who I am today, it was tough. It was difficult mentally because I had to break those chains and become very confident, become very resilient, you know, stop listening to the wrong voices. And that was one of the hardest things that I went through, you know?

And then another one I’ll say, you know, building a team, a team that believes in you, that believes in your vision, that believes in the brand or whatever you do is hard, you know, but once you get it, once you work for them, you know, like I tell them, like they don’t work for me, like I work for them all the time. So if you put that into your mind, then you build a team that will help you to grow the brand.

No, right now we just focus on growth. We’re trying to get with the best teams that are out there. Currently we are talking to professional teams from all around the globe. We just signed in Italy, a very huge team, professional. We went to talk to sign with one in Spain. South America is a big target. I’m Colombian. I got a lot of reach over there.

But here in the United States, which is our home, we also want to reach the professional level. Obviously MLS is out of reach because they have a contract with another provider for like 10 years. But there’s five more leagues that we can get into that are very, very tough. And yeah, that’s our goal, getting into these leagues, getting a national team, and going to the world cup with the national team. And those are big ambitions that we have on the table and that we’re going to definitely accomplish.

In e-commerce, we were, but we had to kind of stop some of the places. Let’s say Brazil. There were a lot of people buying from Brazil, but some of the custom people don’t. Some of the countries are very tough to get into. Brazil was holding the packages. It wasn’t even our fault. Or the e-commerce platform, it was just the country. They hold up the packages so the customers get angry. They don’t get their stuff.

So if they ask for a refund, we will never get this stuff back. So we had to stop with some of the countries, but we still sell around the globe, anywhere in Europe. South America is a little bit tougher, but yeah, we could definitely sell anywhere.

Totally. Transparently, that’s more driven by our product team than from the marketing side. Ho, however, we work closely with the product team to understand how our customers are using the mobile app. It’s built with technicians and actual users in mind. But then we always find that they’re doing creative stuff with the app and how they’re using it. I think in that situation, my job is how to educate our customers about the power of our mobile app and what others are doing using our mobile app. The second is, that I truly think that we need to make sure all of our solutions, again, go back to our mantra of all these emerging solutions around AI and robotics need to help people do good work and make their lives easier. Part of my job is also bringing that technician to focus to the forefront and saying, We’re building solutions to make the people who go and fix the issues and build these farms for them to be able to do it more efficiently and more safely. How do I tell the market that this is a big focus of ours? We’re building robotics-related solutions. We’re building a whole suite of solutions that make it easier for people to scale up their operations.

Inefficiencies scale just as much as efficiency scale. How do we take all of that inefficiency out? That’s what we’re trying to do. And that’s what the marketing is trying to tell that story and bring that narrative to the market.

No, no, we have retail, we have inventory, we do a lot of stock.

Well, the most successful, I could say, you know, partnered up with big names like we have this player. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him, but his name is Ronaldo. He’s an icon, you know, he’s a legend. So, you know, having him wear Diaza, it was an incredible journey for us. It was a deal that kind of took us off and people started seeing it was different, right? When you make deals like this, people start realizing how serious we are, how hungry we are for success and having the confidence of people like Ronaldo and his team, right? Because it’s not just him, it’s his whole crew talking to them every day, being with them every day, at least during the event.

It was a learning curve for us, having Diaza all around the stadium, seeing it was not just Ronaldo, it was other people, other big artists from South America, from Argentina, from anywhere, you know, wearing Diaza, it was a huge moment for us. And you can see it now, you know, because the growth has been through the roof after we made that deal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a great deal, man. It was out of nowhere, to be honest. You know, just networking. We knew some of the guys from there. We knew somebody who was close to him. And then we got to put the deal in 20 days, which was a mission, but we did it and everything paid off, man.

Yeah, I mean, you can say that. Yeah, definitely. You know, I think if you have a product, obviously you want eyes, right? You want everybody to get there. You want brand awareness. And in order for that to happen, sometimes you have to really, you know, balance, what do I want? Money or, you know, eyes? What do I want? You know, the brand awareness or a big cut, you know, like all those things you gotta realize that at the beginning is just like putting the product out there.

You know, it doesn’t matter who is wearing it or what is wearing it, you know, but just put eyes on the brand and that’s what we did for the first three years then the two years you started, you know getting more complex and not every deal is a good deal, you know, and then and then you you escalate and then you see like, okay now we can target, you know, like high people I got in then I was gonna target on our deal,but it happened, you know, so that was a good point for us I was winning, its a goal that I call it like a goal. So yeah, I mean, it happened and we took care of it, you know.

I’ll say you always got to find the reason why you’re doing it, right? If you’re doing it just for money, I’ll say don’t even start. It’s a very difficult field. It’s something that you’re probably going to make a few bucks starting because a lot of people get passionate behind it because they start making some jerseys and they start selling it. And it’s a new thing. So everybody started like, give me one, give me one.
But when that phase is over, then, if you haven’t built a brand, if you haven’t built a concept behind it, you know, if you just have built just the product, the product will die, you know, what is standing, where it keeps going is the message behind it, right? Who is behind it? The story behind it. It’s a quote that I read, I forgot about who it is, it’s not what you sell, you know, it’s why you sell it for. So it’s that, you know, I’ll tell anybody that wants to get in this business, find the purpose behind what you’re selling, right? What protocol is in the message behind it, right? And then from that, it starts, you know, brand awareness. Don’t focus on the money. Don’t focus on numbers because numbers will not look good for the first three years. Even if it’s gonna look down, you know, like you’re gonna have some losses.

But if you stay focused, if you keep going and you see that its building, you know, building brick by brick, I think you could be successful, you know, in any field, it doesn’t have to be sport, it doesn’t have to be uniforms, you know, like polos, you know, this and that. And also, you got to know about your stuff, you know, you got to understand that you got to enter the field that you really know about, right? If you don’t know anything about soccer, right? Like don’t enter soccer because there’s a million people in this business, you know, so you have to enter the market that you’re really good about. Or even if you don’t know, you know, get the knowledge first, go study on your own, you know, anywhere.

Right now, the internet is huge. Go learn right about where you want to enter. And then with all the information, with all the data, then you can go and present your project, present your brand. And if you keep doing discipline and hard work, it will take off, man.

No, Stephen, thank you man. Thank you for the time. It’s always nice to share these stories for people out there listening and that they need to hear something from a real person, I call it, because big brands, huge brands are, it goes through too many phases that sometimes the message gets diverse. So it’s good for people to hear.