Rutazo
No truck should travel empty. Argentina's freight platform.
I'm Agustín, solo technical founder of Rutazo. I built it alone in ~4 months, bootstrapped on about $1k/month, and it's been live for 6.
The pitch is simple: over 90% of goods in Argentina move by truck, and 25–40% of those trucks drive empty. Rutazo connects cargo with truckers so fewer of them run home empty.
The honest numbers so far, $0 spent on ads:
~+1500 signups (900 carriers, 600 shippers)
100 auctions posted, 12 deals actually closed
$352 GMV
81% cancellation rate 😬
That cancellation rate is the number that keeps me up at night, and chasing it taught me the most important thing I've learned: I was building for the wrong segment. I started aiming at grain/commodity freight — turns out prices there are set top-down by big exporters, so a reverse-auction is dead on arrival. My B2B shippers behave completely differently (and far better) than one-off individuals.
So I'm repositioning: instead of an all-in-one platform competing with the big fleet-focused players, Rutazo is becoming the trust layer + free simple tools for the small independent trucker (1–5 trucks) and the messy cargo nobody else wants — livestock, machinery, vehicles. Free tools as the hook, a small fee only when a deal closes.
Doing it all alone (dev, marketing, support, community) is the hard part, and I'm figuring out what to let go of.
My question for you: for those who've run a two-sided marketplace early on — what actually moved the needle on cancellation / liquidity when you were still tiny? Did you fix it with product, with hand-holding ops, or by narrowing your niche hard?
1 Comment
The part I'd pay the most attention to isn't the 81% cancellation rate—it's that it revealed a segmentation problem rather than an execution problem.
A marketplace can look broken when it's actually matching the wrong behaviors. Finding a segment where both sides naturally complete transactions is often a bigger milestone than improving the marketplace mechanics themselves.