Meet Juan Etchegaray | Creative & Entrepreneur

We had the good fortune of connecting with Juan Etchegaray and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Juan, how has your background shaped the person you are today?
Messi and Ginóbili are Argentines. And they got so far, precisely because they are Argentineans. Here the court is always sloped, in bad condition, with holes. But your passion leads you to face all these adversities.

My country used to be one of the richest countries in Latin America, but for almost 20 years we have been stuck in a left-wing populism that, by seeking equality, managed to make the best talents and the best companies go to other countries.

Today Argentina has an annual inflation rate of 114%, a ban on the purchase of dollars, constant devaluations, 40% poverty and the highest tax burden in the continent. It is difficult to dream about the future when you lose a lot of energy fighting against the present.

But at the same time, these adverse conditions prepare you to be able to fight any crisis. To stop being afraid of failure, because here it is much easier to fail. Entrepreneurs are not only project leaders: for a long time we are almost everything. We work with 8 arms like an octopus. We are one of the countries with less access to private credit in the world (8% of GDP), that is why entrepreneurs do not have too many resources to hire staff in our beginnings, so we are the ones who have to learn accounting, digital marketing, photography, logistics, and we are even the ones who paint our offices. I think that helped me to have a broad profile, in which I can collaborate in any project from creativity, but based on other areas.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Grow is an educational platform for digital professionals. I believe the EdTech industry is booming and will continue to grow in the coming years. But what is an industry today, when I started 12 years ago was nothing. I went to college and graduated as an economist, but a few months later I took some creative courses and started working as a trainee at DDB advertising agency, earning enough to pay for my lunch. Nobody around me understood how I had a university degree and chose to work in something else. To me, they were wrong. That rebelliousness led me to dive into the world of education.
In 2017, I founded one of the first digital marketing schools in my country, without really knowing what such a school should look like. It was something new, so we had to create our own rules. The growth was fast, we started recruiting better and better teachers to innovate with courses focused on entrepreneurs and professionals. Our next step was to move to a huge headquarters, but we got the key on March 1, 2020. Bad year to bet on face-to-face education, but very good for online education. Suddenly the market was full of competitors. Marketing and advertising professionals started to offer their courses through Zoom. Those who were already teaching, launched their own academies. In addition to all this, in Argentina we had one of the longest quarantines in the world and we did not have access to credit to compensate for the drop in sales. Then, we lost our ability to innovate and started to fight for survival. We left our offices and started teaching only live courses. It was two years that we had to fight together with my wife to keep the project alive, even though it was not really making money. 9 months ago, sadly I gave up and started the road to close my company. We stopped teaching live courses and started selling those recordings to raise money. Suddenly, sales exploded! So I decided to give the project a new chance and rethink the business model.
Today I am launching an educational platform with careers and courses on demand for digital professionals. We are again defining our rules and challenging traditional education. Our new courses combine great teachers, with creativity in audiovisual production, with live activities, with direct feedback from teachers, with discord communities and with job offers for students. We talk to companies and research about the needs of each of the digital jobs, and we design permanently updated content to help our students receive all the necessary information to have a career in a few months. This comes from a personal rebellion: I was told that to be somebody in life you had to go to college and get your degree. This time I did something different. Also today.
I no longer have anything to lose and am betting everything on my new vision. If it goes wrong, I start from scratch another project. If it works out for me, I will look for investors to expand my idea to all of Latin America.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I live in Buenos Aires, a beautiful city and very tourist friendly. The first thing I would do, I would tell you that there is a ridiculous capital control and that if you change your dollars in the black market you will have twice as much money to spend as if you did it with a credit card, this is because the official exchange rate is AR$250 per dollar, and the unofficial rate is AR$500. Wow, nice welcome knowing that your money is worth twice as much. I would start by taking you to understand our passion for everything. We would go to the Boca Juniors stadium, Diego Maradona’s club. There we would watch a game in the stands. I bet you’ll never see so much passion.
For lunch we would go to Don Julio Grill (the 2023 winner of the World’s 101 Best Steak Restaurants). There we would eat Argentinean Asado and Choripán.
In the afternoon we would go to different local artisan fairs and in the evening we would end up at a Tango show. I’m not going to lie to you, my generation doesn’t listen to tango anymore, so you’re going to an event made for tourists.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
When you pursue a passion and you are willing to go forward, you will always need people to help you believe that things are worth it. My life has had many abrupt changes, the kind that are hard to make, and all those times I had friends who I told about what I wanted to do and they helped me to have the strength to encourage me and make it happen. If I have to name one person, I name Geraldine, my wife. We have been together for 9 years and she has seen me dream things that I later accomplished. She has seen me cry because I didn’t know how to solve a crisis in my business. I had stage fright, and it was she who helped me in the process to gain confidence, and so that I wouldn’t get nervous she accompanied me to give talks to 10 people, then 50, then 100, then 300, then she accompanied me to television. I would never be what I am without her. I believe that couples are teams in life in which the two seek to help each other to go far, maybe that’s why I was moved by the movie La La Land.

Website: growescuela.com (my company) / juanetch.com (my portfolio in english)

Instagram: @juanetch

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juanetch/

Twitter: @juanetch

Facebook: @juanetch

Other: I’m a TikToker too!! (78k Followers). @juanetch