The email arrived simply, without punctuation, without formality and in capital letters. But it completely changed the destiny of Asaas, one of the main financial and operational management platforms for companies in Brazil.
“It was a plumber who had sent the email. He was very direct: ‘How do I install this Asaas on my cell phone and on my computer? I have 100 bills per month and I want to charge my customers. Thank you'”, recalled Diego Contezini, co-founder of Asaas, during an interview with From Zero to Top.
Until that moment, brothers Diego and Piero Contezini believed they were building a solution for software companies. They had spent three years developing a complex product, aimed at programmers and technical integrations. The problem was that nobody bought it.
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“Customers tried it and didn’t buy it”, remembers Diego. “The money would run out in a few months.”
It was at that moment that the founders realized they were looking at the wrong market. The real Brazil — “Brazil with an S”, as Diego defines it — desperately needed simple tools to bill clients and manage money.
“More than half of the people who tried to buy Asaas were like Paulo, the plumber who sent us the email. They are very simple people and no one until then had solved their problem”, says Diego.
The discovery became the key to fintech. Thus, what would later become Asaas was born in Joinville, a company that became one of the main financial and operational platforms in the country, with more than 260 thousand customers, billions transacted and expected to reach R$1 billion in revenue in 2026.
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But to get to today’s product, it took courage back then. Internally, the old software gained a symbolic nickname: Frankenstein. The decision would have to be radical and throw away practically everything that had already been built.
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“Everything we built over three years of software no longer made sense,” says Diego. “It’s taking more work to keep redoing and changing than to genuinely build something for him,” he recalls.
The solution came during the call “Basic Summer Camp”when the company’s eight employees spent a month working together at the founders’ mother’s house, in Joinville. “With great sadness, we said: ‘Let’s kill Frankenstein’”, Diego recalled with good humor.
In January 2014, the new version of Asaas was born: a platform designed for small Brazilian entrepreneurs who were unfamiliar with technology. .
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The software started to prioritize extreme simplicity. The objective was for any entrepreneur to be able to issue charges alone, without a bank manager, complicated installation or technical training.
The movement ended up creating one of the fastest growing fintechs in the country, with 100% remote operation, billion-dollar profits and investors like SoftBank. The Contezini brothers transformed the billing bureaucracy, which took up to 18 days a month, into something that can now be resolved in a few minutes a day
But Diego insists that the biggest difference continues to be understanding who the market ignored.
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“Brazil is made up of simple people. When you manage to do something genuinely easy, you act both with the simple and even better for those who are qualified.”
To find out more details about Asaas, see the full episode on . The program is available in its podcast version on the main streaming platforms such as , , , and
About From Zero to Top
The Do Zero ao Topo podcast is a production of InfoMoney and brings, every week, the stories of prominent women and men in the Brazilian market to tell their story, sharing the biggest challenges faced along the way and the main strategies used in building the business.
