Ruvo
Product and internal tooling intern, October 2025 to August 2026
Ruvo is a YC-backed fintech that gives Brazilians USD accounts and BRL to USD transfers over PIX. The team was about seven people. I joined part-time during school and went full-time for the summer, and during that time monthly volume grew from about $200K to $4M.
- Team
- ~7 people
- Monthly volume
- $200K to $4M
- Discovery calls
- ~100
- Companies scored
- 30,000+
How I got in
A Brazilian investor posted a video on LinkedIn asking which startup people would invest in. I answered Ruvo (it was still called Cacao). The CEO saw it and reached out. That's the whole story, and it's why I believe in reaching out directly.
What I did
Built the prospecting pipeline
The thing I'm proudest of. It took a 30 minute manual task down to seconds and became a tool the team used. It has its own page.
Turned sales calls into product decisions
I ran around 100 calls with people and companies. In the early days we didn't have a debit card, and almost everyone asked for one. It was a dealbreaker. I tracked it call by call and brought it to the team. Ruvo launched the card, which improved conversion and volume and opened a new revenue line.
Tested the product like a competitor would
I opened accounts at about seven competitors, went through each KYC and moved money in each to compare every step. Several didn't ask for proof of address and we did. After a careful compliance review, the team removed it, and KYC approval went from one or two hours to about 10 to 20 minutes. I also caught a mismatch between the exchange rate shown in the app and the one applied, which got fixed.
Made the case for developers
When we had to pick a market to double down on, the CEO wasn't convinced a startup should focus on one. I used the same data from the pipeline to show which sectors moved the most money abroad. Developers came out near the top: big annual volume, a growing number of new dev companies, and partners like accounting firms that could open the door. He agreed, I wrote the go-to-market plan, and developers became more than half of our customer base.
A Friday night deck
A large travel agency asked for a proposal deck we didn't have. At 10 pm on a Friday, the CEO, the product director, our sales lead and I built it together in about three hours. We closed the partnership.
What I learned
- What I build sells better than what I pitch. The best thing I did there wasn't outreach, it was the system.
- Describing the problem well is the real skill. AI can execute, but someone has to define the problem and the scope.
- Cutting scope is a product decision, not a compromise.