How one founder overcame the stress and isolation of his undocumented youth to create a company with $2.7 million in seed funding
CASHDROP founder Ruben Flores-Martinez said the hopelessness he experienced as a young undocumented immigrant later helped motivate the creation of CASHDROP, a mobile commerce app that lets users quickly set up personal storefronts with their phones.
The inspiration for CASHDROP came from two things: an unanswered need among small business owners for a user-friendly platform, and a weekly flea market that used to set up shop outside Flores-Martinez's childhood home in Guadalajara, Mexico. "It's fear," Flores-Martinez told Business Insider. "One hundred percent. You don't want to trust anybody. You don't trust anybody."
CASHDROP is entering a crowded space. Big names like Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace already help business owners design websites and facilitate online sales and shipping. But Flores-Martinez, who used to build online storefronts using some of those services, believes there's room in the market for CASHDROP's dead simple design. He said small businesses needed a more user-friendly app.
"So you have merchants from all over the city that would come and build these little tents with sticks and rags," Flores-Martinez said. "And then they would basically launch a business, and that was all of the infrastructure they needed." Flores-Martinez fell in love with computer science in high school and dreamed of pursuing a PhD. That path would have started with college.
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