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Wabi was a Y Combinator S21 company that built a no-code storefront platform for creators in Latin America — think Kajabi or Teachable, but designed for the LATAM market. Founded by Oscar Rojas Guerrero, Gabriel Luque, and Javier Méndez, the company targeted fitness coaches as its initial wedge, offering branded landing pages, integrated payments, and subscriber-only content hosting. Its pitch framed the opportunity as "Shopify for the $15B creator economy in LATAM."[1]
Wabi failed because it was a second pivot built on a thin evidence base. The team entered a category already dominated by well-capitalized global incumbents — Kajabi, Hotmart, Teachable — with only $8K in GMV, a three-person team stretched across every function, and no follow-on funding to sustain a differentiation effort long enough to matter.
The company shut down quietly sometime in 2022, less than a year after the Wabi product launched. No public post-mortem was ever published. Oscar Rojas Guerrero went on to co-found Nara (YC W22), an AI customer support agent that was subsequently acquired.[2] Gabriel Luque transitioned to a software engineering role at Circle Medical, a UCSF Health Affiliate, exiting the founder track.[3]
The story of Wabi does not begin with Wabi. It begins with Bluu.
Bluu was a social commerce application built for first-time Colombian entrepreneurs — a "Meesho for LATAM" that let sellers move products to friends and acquaintances over social media without upfront inventory investment.[4] The product found genuine early traction: 35% compound monthly GMV growth, 9,000 products sold, 6,000 customers, and 2,000 products listed from Colombian suppliers that had never sold online before — all without paid marketing.[5] Forbes Colombia named Bluu one of the 100 best startups in the country in 2020.[6] Pioneer.app, the accelerator backed by Marc Andreessen and Patrick Collison, selected Bluu as a Pioneer.[7] Rockstart, one of the top five LATAM accelerators, chose Bluu from more than 2,000 applicants for a seed investment.[8]
By any early-stage measure, Bluu was working. Then the team entered Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch.[9]
During or after the YC batch, the founders concluded that Bluu's natural growth path led somewhere they did not want to go. As Oscar Rojas Guerrero explained: "We figured out insights from the market that made Bluu not viable and if there was a solution, it was more a logistics and operations startup and we realized we wanted t[o build something different]."[10] The Colombian social commerce model, to scale, required warehousing, last-mile delivery, and supplier operations — a capital-intensive infrastructure play the team had neither the appetite nor the resources to pursue.
The pivot to Wabi was a deliberate choice to stay in the consumer internet layer and move into creator tools. Gabriel Luque, who served as CTO, brought relevant domain context: his prior work at FLUVIP, an influencer marketing group, had given him direct exposure to how LATAM creators monetized their audiences.[11] The team identified fitness coaches as the initial wedge — a segment with clear monetization intent, a growing online audience post-COVID, and a relatively simple product need: a branded page, a payment link, and a place to host content.
The YC listing records the founding year as 2022, reflecting the Wabi product specifically.[12] Whether all three co-founders — Rojas Guerrero, Luque, and Javier Méndez — were simultaneously on the team throughout both Bluu and Wabi is not confirmed in public records. Méndez's background and role remain entirely undocumented.
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