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Building a business in Latin America is not for amateurs—especially in Brazil. There is so much bureaucracy and so little incentive that many entrepreneurs end up giving up on launching their startup before it even exists.

Others, however, are inspired by successful cases abroad and insist on establishing their businesses and their dreams, making the Latin American startup market grow even more. The problem lies in a constant suspicion—especially from international media outlets specialized in the topic—that there is no real innovation here: a large share of good companies would be copies of what already worked elsewhere.

That’s the reflection TechCrunch, one of the biggest startup blogs in the world, brought recently: in this article they ask whether businesses from Latin America are truly disruptive or if they just reap the rewards of North American companies that went further.

In a process they call “tropicalization”, they analyze business models that worked in the United States and were, apparently, replicated by entrepreneurs in South America.

Some examples mentioned early in the text are Mercado Livre, which would be a copy of eBay; OLX, which has a very similar delivery to the famous Craigslist; and Desapegar, which can be compared with the pioneer Expedia.

Some attributes that make them consider Latin American startups more replicators than innovators are the similarity of business nature, monetization, and the certainty that, with a proven successful business model, those startups can attract more investment.

Is that true?

Innovation vs. Copy

In some parts of the text, the TechCrunch team states that there is no impediment for a “copy” startup to be considered innovative—after all, even if the inspiration already exists in another company, successful startups adapted markets, demands, and communication approaches.

However, the “disruptive” label wouldn’t apply to the names cited at the beginning of the article, because they didn’t invent the market—they rode on the success of the market abroad.

Not every Brazilian startup (or startup from other South American countries) is on the radar of this “copy investigation”, but it’s worth remembering that many of them do lose touch and timing due to very striking traits of our entrepreneurial culture.

Speaking specifically about Brazil, a country where the dream of entrepreneurship is increasingly present, many people get anxious to launch their products and services quickly with an absolute certainty of success—and forget basic points required to achieve good results, something that doesn’t happen as often abroad.

While startups in other countries spend time developing MVPs (minimum viable products) to test their idea and invest in specialized companies to build the software they will use, many Brazilian entrepreneurs don’t follow the same path. Instead of testing the initial idea, they either spend too much time developing software on their own or can’t reach a satisfactory project by the end of the day.

These mistakes are so common that they can lead startups to replicate—sometimes without bad intentions—the business models they see elsewhere. After all, building an Uber can’t be that hard, right? Then, besides becoming less famous versions of their inspirational muses, they fail to deliver what their ideal audience actually wants or needs.

Needless to say, that’s a recipe for failure.

So, is there innovation in Latin America?

Of course there is! And many companies from here are setting examples for people abroad, making other countries want, desire, and copy some business models developed in Latin America. A classic example is EasyTaxi, which, besides being exported to many countries, inspired the creation of many other apps for taxi ordering in Brazil and abroad.

Still, there’s no point suffering or getting offended by posts like TechCrunch’s when our innovation market is still new and incipient compared to the United States and Northern Europe.

What we can do to change that reality is to bet on ideas that are increasingly “testable” before being launched and, of course, software that is up to the challenges it proposes to solve.

In that case, you can count on X-Apps so your company can be recognized and admired for originality—and for all its potential to be useful for users.