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Trackmob
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About the company
Trackmob built fundraising technology for the Brazilian nonprofit sector: a donor CRM, a recurring payment gateway, and lifecycle tools covering acquisition through retention. Bootstrapped and grown organically.
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I co-founded Trackmob and led product and design for eight years, from 2012 to 2020, taking it from a field-team app to the payments and CRM backbone that 400+ nonprofits ran on, including Greenpeace, MSF, WWF, and UNHCR. Over that time the platform processed more than R$650 million in donations. My role centered on product strategy and design, and as a co-founder extended into customer success, hiring, and culture. This is the long version, with the full context and the mechanics the short version leaves out.
When we started, reliable recurring donation billing did not exist in Brazil, and the nonprofit sector ran on tools that e-commerce had abandoned a decade earlier. We built the CRM, the payment gateway, and the lifecycle tools that made professional, recurring fundraising possible for organizations of every size, then rebuilt the entire architecture once it became the ceiling on our growth.
Context and problem
In the early 2010s, most Brazilian nonprofits managed donors in spreadsheets. Some had less than that, running on notebooks and memory. There was no structured donor control, no segmentation, no way to know who gave, how much, or since when. Organizations could not forecast beyond a few months, and some closed after losing a single major donor.
Underneath the disorganization sat a harder, structural problem: money. Reliable recurring donation billing did not exist in the country.
Monthly charges depended on CNAB files, a bank exchange format from the 1980s, fragile and poorly documented. Each bank required its own contract. Banks frequently blocked transactions automatically, reading repeated donation charges as fraud. For small organizations, recurring billing was inaccessible entirely. For large ones, it meant teams of three to five people doing nothing but managing bank charges and manually retrying the ones that failed.
The pain landed differently on four groups, and the product eventually had to serve all four at once.
Fundraising coordinators and their teams lost days generating CNAB files, handling errors, and retrying failed charges by hand. They had no reliable way to track a donor's journey or measure a campaign, and because so much knowledge lived in people's heads rather than in a system, high turnover meant that when someone left, their knowledge left too.
Executive leadership could not plan. Without predictable recurring revenue, they could not commit to hiring, expansion, or long-term projects. They needed real-time visibility into organizational health to show impact to boards and donors, and the data was not there. The recurring question was whether there would be enough revenue next month to keep operating.
Field fundraisers, the people signing up donors on the street, worked with paper and clipboards in any weather. A donor's full name, address, tax ID, and bank details were written by hand, carried around all day, then processed slowly. That cycle took more than seven days, with no real-time validation, so a single illegible digit meant a lost donor.
Donors gave money and then heard nothing. No history, no simple way to update an expired card, and rare communication about impact. Canceling was deliberately bureaucratic, because organizations feared that making it easy would raise churn. All of this in a country with high-profile nonprofit corruption scandals, so donors had real reasons to distrust and no way to verify anything themselves.
One problem sat under all four: no reliable, integrated system existed. The sector needed infrastructure built specifically for fundraising, donor lifecycle management, recurring billing that actually worked, transparency tools to rebuild trust, and financial sustainability for organizations of any size.
How I got to the product
I spent months inside the operation before I trusted myself to design for it. I interviewed fundraising teams, shadowed how orders and charges moved through an organization day to day, and studied how the most sophisticated NGOs worked, including ones abroad that had solved fragments of this problem.
Two conclusions came out of that immersion, and they set the direction for everything after.
First, the sector did not need a better version of what already existed. It needed infrastructure that did not exist at all. Copying Salesforce or Stripe would fail, because the Brazilian context, its banking bureaucracy, its still-maturing donation culture, its specific legislation, was different enough to break those imported models.
Second, the deepest pain was in the money: the recurring charge that failed, the donor lost in the gap between signing up and the first debit. That reframing set the sequence of the work. Fix the financial plumbing first, then build the experience on top of it. The job was less interface design and more structuring a system where none had existed.
WHAT I BUILT
The work grew from a core of CRM and billing, then expanded across the full donor lifecycle, and was finally rebuilt from the foundation up. Here is each piece and how it actually worked.
The pivot that started it
In 2012 we were building a field-maintenance work-order tool. Then Greenpeace approached us with a different problem: digitize face-to-face fundraising, the street sign-up process where canvassers stop people to enroll them as recurring donors.
At the time it was entirely paper. A canvasser stopped someone on the street and filled out a form by hand, full name, address, tax ID, bank details, sensitive data sitting exposed on a clipboard for the rest of the day. Those forms were collected once a week and shipped to a company that typed them into a system. Nothing validated the data along the way, so an illegible digit or a wrong account number surfaced only later, as a failed charge. And the donor was only billed on their chosen donation date, which could be weeks after they signed up. By the time the first charge finally ran, many had cooled off and changed their minds. Every step added delay, and every delay lost donors.
We adapted our field tool into an app that captured the data digitally, validated it on the spot, encrypted it, and initiated the first charge within minutes instead of weeks. Processing fell from more than seven days to under ten minutes. Conversion in the first six months rose by about 40%, and data-entry errors were effectively eliminated. That is when the real market came into focus: an entire sector running on tools from another era, waiting for someone who understood its specific needs.
The CRM, built for relationships, not deals
As new clients arrived, a larger problem surfaced. Most organizations had no structured control over their donors at all. The few large ones that used sales CRMs like Salesforce or Dynamics were fighting tools designed to close deals, not to sustain relationships that run for years. That was the core insight: a donor is not a lead you close, it is a relationship you keep alive.
I designed the CRM around that principle, on four pillars. A unified database held the full history of each donor, every donation, interaction, data change, and acquisition source in one place. Communication automation triggered welcome messages, anniversaries, reminders, and campaigns without manual work. Automatic segmentation grouped donors by behavior, seasonal givers, lapsed donors, donors who had upgraded, so organizations could act on patterns instead of guessing. And real-time dashboards showed base health, growth rate, churn, and revenue forecast, the numbers leadership had never been able to see before.
But the CRM could not deliver its real value until recurring billing actually worked. That was the bottleneck everything else waited on, and it pushed us to the hardest thing we built.
The payment gateway, the part nobody had solved
To process monthly donations, an organization had to hold contracts with each bank, exchange CNAB files, absorb automatic fraud blocks, and manually reprocess every failure. For small nonprofits it was simply out of reach. For large ones it consumed whole teams.
We saw no viable third-party option, so we built our own payment gateway, focused entirely on recurring donations. It took six months of bank negotiations, regulatory compliance for handling donor and transfer data, and an intelligent retry engine, the heart of the system, that decided the optimal timing, number of attempts, intervals, and messaging for each failed charge, since a card declined today might clear in three days with the right approach.
The first version was punishing. One error locked R$200,000 for three days. Another sent duplicate charges to donors. Each failure taught us something expensive, and we stabilized it slowly. Billing success rose from roughly 70% to roughly 92%. Small nonprofits ran recurring donations for the first time, and large organizations cut their charge-management teams in half.
The lifecycle tools
With a working core, we built tools across the rest of the donor journey. Each solved a distinct, concrete problem.
The landing-page generator let any organization build a donation page in under ten minutes. Before it, large NGOs paid thousands of reais and waited weeks for a custom form, and small ones often had nothing but a generic page. Data was captured in progressive steps, and any abandonment triggered a follow-up: leave at the payment step and you got a reminder, leave after only an email and you entered a nurturing flow. One organization tested fifteen variations of a single page and found that emotional appeals converted about 35% better than rational ones, the kind of test that used to cost days and thousands of reais. It became our most widely adopted product, hired even by organizations that ran their own CRMs, because nothing comparable existed in the market.
The peer-to-peer fundraising system was built when the pandemic cut off face-to-face fundraising overnight. It turned supporters into ambassadors, each with a personal landing page, social sharing, real-time tracking, and leaderboards. One nationwide NGO supporting children with special needs mobilized 100 volunteers as ambassadors who brought in 3,500 new donors in three months, at a cost per acquisition about 80% lower than paid campaigns, and with higher retention among donors who came through a friend's referral.
The direct-mail platform made a traditionally expensive channel accessible to mid-sized NGOs, the ones with fundraising budgets that could never absorb its upfront cost. Print shops had fixed setup costs that only paid off at large volumes, and database providers charged small buyers several times what they charged bulk buyers. We consolidated volume across organizations to cut database pricing by about 60%, coordinated printing and postage into a single flow so an NGO only had to supply the artwork, and fed responding donors straight back into the CRM with the source tagged for clean ROI tracking. A channel that had been exclusive to large organizations opened up, with about 70% less initial investment to test it.
The donor portal addressed trust directly. We built a place where donors could manage their own data, payment methods, and preferences, and follow the impact of their giving through milestones, beneficiary stories, and financial reports. Fundraising teams resisted hard, certain that making cancellation easy would raise churn. A pilot with three organizations proved the opposite: donors who used the portal showed meaningfully higher lifetime value, cancellation did not rise, and the portal's exit survey finally surfaced why donors left, turning years of guesswork into something organizations could act on. Transparency built trust.
Refactoring under pressure
By 2019 our monolithic architecture had become the ceiling. Changes in one module broke others unpredictably, deployments were risky, and scaling was getting harder. At the same time the ground was shifting: Pix, Brazil's instant-payment system, was launching, and LGPD, its data-protection law, was coming. We needed an agility the architecture could not give us.
The choice was to keep going and let innovation slow until we stagnated, or refactor to microservices while operations ran live and risk freezing the company for months. Not refactoring felt like a slow death, so we refactored, in three deliberate phases.
First, a unified data core: a central API that became the single source of truth, with every product reading and writing through it rather than touching its own database directly. Second, a gradual and selective migration, starting with the gateway and payment engine, which let organizations use our payment processing without adopting the full CRM, then separating other functions into smaller products, each validated in production for weeks before the next. Third, a controlled coexistence period where both architectures ran at once, new clients going straight into the new one and old clients migrated progressively, with the old system kept as a fallback for at least a month.
It took eight months and it was not clean. One poorly tested deploy froze billing for four hours on end-of-month processing day, affecting R$1.2 million in transactions, and the team reprocessed the failures by hand through the night. That mistake was on me. But we finished without stopping operations or losing a major client. New-feature development time dropped by around 60%, critical incidents fell by roughly 75%, and we integrated Pix in three weeks.
Leading beyond product
As a co-founder, I worked outside product too. I structured customer success with onboarding, training materials, and playbooks so service could scale without growing headcount at the same rate. I helped shape hiring and culture, keeping annual turnover below 12% in an industry where 20 to 30% is normal. And I took part in strategy and investment decisions, where we chose organic growth over aggressive venture funding, slower, but it kept our independence and our focus on the long term. I built and led a 12-person product team, and the company grew past 40 people, remote-first and documentation-heavy.
Results
Across its lifetime the platform processed more than R$650 million in donations and served over 400 organizations, from Greenpeace, MSF, WWF, and UNHCR down to small local NGOs.
The gateway raised billing success from about 70% to about 92% and gave small nonprofits access to recurring billing for the first time in Brazil. The F2F app cut street-signup processing from more than seven days to under ten minutes. On average, organizations grew new donation revenue by about 45% after adopting our products; we never ran a controlled test to isolate that, but across most cases the change between before and after was our products entering the process. The refactor, the least visible work of all, cut development time by around 60% and critical incidents by roughly 75%, and it is what let the platform keep growing instead of stalling.
What I learned
The architecture that takes you from zero to one rarely takes you from one to ten. For years I optimized features. The decision that actually defined whether we would scale or stall was structural, and it carried the highest risk and the least visible payoff. Knowing when to tear down what already works, and having the nerve to do it while the business runs on top of it, is its own skill. I learned it the expensive way.
Three other lessons held. Context beats best practices, because the right solution is the one that fits the specific reality in front of you, not the one that worked somewhere else. Transparency builds value rather than destroying it, which the donor portal proved against the team's own instincts. And impact requires sustainability: we worked with noble causes, but we built a profitable business, and that is what funded eight years of operation and growth.
I sold my stake in 2023, after eight years.
FACT SHEET
Role: Co-founder, Head of Product and Design
Period: 2012 to 2020
Context: Nonprofit fundraising technology, Brazil. Bootstrapped, grown organically.
Scope: Product strategy and design, donor CRM, recurring payment gateway, lifecycle tools (landing pages, peer-to-peer, direct mail, donor portal), microservices migration. Customer success, hiring, and culture as co-founder.
Team: Built and led a 12-person product team; company grew past 40 people.
Ways of working: Remote-first, documentation-heavy.
Domains and keywords: fintech, recurring billing, payment gateway, donor CRM, lifecycle marketing, segmentation, systems design, zero to one, microservices migration, Pix, LGPD, compliance.
Outcomes: R$650M+ processed; 400+ organizations; billing success ~70% to ~92%; F2F processing 7+ days to under 10 minutes; landing pages, P2P, direct mail, and donor portal across the lifecycle; development time down ~60% and critical incidents down ~75% after the refactor; first-ever recurring billing access for small nonprofits in Brazil.
