Projects - Jose Carlos Lopez

The Mexican Lotería is a traditional and popular game, especially in the northern regions of Mexico, where families often gather to play together. My mother's family is from northern Mexico, and every time we visit them, our afternoons are filled with Lotería games with my aunts and cousins. One of my cousins, who shares my passion for technology, was likely inspired by these family gatherings to start developing a Lotería app. The primary feature of the app was to announce each card, a key function that Ricardo, my cousin, focused on when he first developed the mobile app.

After some time, Ricardo joined me at Kioru, and during one of our follow-up sessions, he shared the growththe iOS apphad experienced. He expressed interest in expanding the app to Android. When he mentioned that the app hadsurpassed10,000 users, I was intrigued and offered my help to develop the app using React Native. This way, we couldhave asingle codebase for both iOS and Android.

We kicked off the project in June 2024, and by July 15th, the app was live in the stores. It was a fantastic team effort. Ricardo had a clear vision of the features we needed to develop, and when I joined the project, I added functionalities like a game board so multiple people could play on their devices, not just the card announcement feature. Although we don’t consider ourselves top-notch technicians, we were able to develop the mobile app following best practices.

Since launching the Android version, the app has seen consistent user growth, and after just one month, we’ve reached over 500 users. We aim to hit 50,000 users soon, and we’re excited to keep adding more features, as we have an ambitious roadmap ahead.

Looking ahead, we see a huge potential market in the United States, where there are over 40 million Latinos. We believe this is a significant opportunity, and our business model is very straightforward. If we can reach just 10% of this market and offer a subscription service that removes ads for just one dollar a month, it would be an incredibly profitable venture.

If you’re interested in checking out the mobile app, you can visit this website: https://www.barajamexicana.com/

After successfully creating and implementing Saeko for several private schools in the region where I grew up and studied, I had the fortune of meeting with the director of CECyTEs, a subsystem of upper secondary education in Mexico with over 1,200 campuses and an active enrollment of more than half a million students. We discussed the challenges faced by public education and the need for systems that could assist in decision-making. While Saeko was already being tested daily by several schools in the region, I was not going to miss the opportunity to offer it to the public system, which represents 20% of Mexico's public upper secondary education.

The director trusted the vision I shared about centralizing all school processes into a single, nationwide platform. She granted me a meeting in December 2014. By February 2015, we had held several discussions with various states, and it was agreed to implement Saeko with the promise of issuing electronic certificates by July 2015. This was a significant challenge, as we not only needed to implement the tool to manage the administrative processes of the active student enrollment, but we also had to import all student history to issue certificates with final grades for all subjects over the last three years, the typical duration of upper secondary education in Mexico.

We conducted a nationwide training campaign, meeting in the capital of each state with school administration officials to implement Saeko. We traveled to more than 30 states, sometimes training groups of over 100 people in auditoriums. States like Michoacán, Tlaxcala, Querétaro, Baja California Sur, and Yucatán are still our clients today.

This project brought great benefits and personal satisfaction, as we met thousands of users and were delighted to hear that the platform was comprehensive and met all the needs of the schools for proper administration. Among the problems we solved was enabling the government to accurately track the number of campuses, the study programs being offered, and the active enrollment.

Saeko is a success company with a great team, check more info about Saeko here: https://www.saeko.io/