Seth Cassel and Anton Diego started EveryMundo the same way they are leading it 10 years later; by having fun, staying open-minded, and seeking opportunities.

Dinner with the Boss(es)

As a graduate of the University of Michigan, it’s safe to say that Anton Diego is an intelligent individual. So, when his wife said he had to make a good impression at her friend’s dinner, he correctly understood it as the threat it was. Despite trying his best, Anton was immediately shooed aside by his wife, relegated to exchanging pleasantries with the other husband, Seth Cassel.

“They sat us apart. They were like, you guys should talk because, I don’t know, you’re both like, business nerds or something.”
– Anton Diego

It was true. Anton was building EveryMundo alone while recent Harvard MBA graduate Seth was freelance writing business plans for up and coming startups.

Since 2006, EveryMundo has been Anton’s one-man enterprise. He had every intention of going to graduate school to finish his master’s in structural engineering when he was introduced to the world of digital marketing through a friend’s project. What had been a side-hustle to make ends meet turned into a passion with a promising future- if he could just figure out how to scale the business.

Seth on the other hand had quickly become disenchanted after graduating. The short-sighted visions of the people he was freelancing for didn’t speak to the way he wanted to do business. Seth was interested in starting something honest that he could build with his own two hands. So when Anton told him about EveryMundo, his ears perked up.

“It was a very different mindset than what I had been exposed to in my prior work with startups, small businesses, et cetera. Everyone else wanted to build an empire rather than just getting from one to two, to three, to four.”
– Seth Cassel

The dinner quickly became a strategizing session for EveryMundo. One thing was certain between the two, EveryMundo had potential.

Growing Pains

After some time hustling to get any company to hire EveryMundo, Anton and Seth had proven themselves scrappy, hard-working upstarts. They found reasonable success jumping on opportunities to service the SEO and marketing needs of small US businesses trying to reach the Spanish-speaking market, but they needed to grow.

They agreed early on that a marketing service agency wouldn’t be the endgame for the company. From the start they envisioned using the digital marketing skills they developed at EveryMundo to build a different business and market it themselves. But there was never a master plan to get there, just headstrong energy and hard work.

While trying to maintain normal operations at EveryMundo, they adopted a “spray ‘n pray” approach to website development. Any type of website would work, so long as it used EveryMundo’s marketing technology. They began to rapidly produce multilingual websites in the hopes that one of them would explode by tapping into the underserved multilingual internet users. With EveryMundo’s daily operations still a priority, there was no way for them to develop these websites with the quality they needed.

“It wasn’t high-integrity content. That was a big shock to us, the realization that we were, in some ways, taking steps back”
– Seth Cassel

It wasn’t long before Google stopped paying them for these websites because they didn’t meet quality standards for ad revenue. The reality that things needed to change was not lost on the duo. Fortunately, staying open-minded was their forte.

Opportunity is Everywhere

Anton and Seth were still trying to launch their own marketing-backed websites when EveryMundo, their bread and butter, finally took off. They were working with an airline when they realized that EveryMundo’s unique technology was particularly suited to solve the digital marketing needs of the airline industry. With a little work on the scalability of the product, EveryMundo had potential to meet the needs of companies from the entire transportation industry. But, would the drastic change be worth it? Would they be narrowing their potential client pool?

The prospect of pivoting your entire business model is enough to shake the knees of most young entrepreneurs. But being the industrious individuals that they are, every ounce of concern was matched by excitement and curiosity. What they needed was a mentor who had been there before and could guide them. The pair looked to the Endeavor community and beyond for this life-changing advice.

“Being around other entrepreneurs, even over a casual dinner, forces you to think in the longer term”.
– Seth Cassel

Any concerns that pivoting towards the transportation industry would limit their exposure were quickly expelled when they spoke to other Endeavor Entrepreneurs.

“We were told that if we concentrated [on the transportation industry], the world would open for EveryMundo. And it did.”
–  Anton Diego

New Horizons

It wasn’t an overnight process but by 2017 EveryMundo had made the pivot to an airline-focused digital marketing service. They did this at a time when Miami’s tech sector was still a distant dream to many, and they did so with integrity, courage, and hunger. They sunsetted all clients that weren’t tangential to their new direction and they scaled their traffic acquisition software for the transportation industry as soon as they could.

“We’re going to go and we’re going to rebuild this properly and we’re going to do it for the long haul.”
–  Anton Diego

Over the next few years, Seth and Anton realized the dream for EveryMundo they had always envisioned. The company was maintaining the forward-thinking, hard-working and adaptable culture that Seth and Anton had ingrained from the start, all while expanding rapidly and making a mark on their industry. By 2021, EveryMundo was in a completely different playing field. After scaling EveryMundo for their new industry specialization, the team finally saw the explosion they always knew their service was capable of. Seth and Anton’s small team of part-timers had grown to over 140 employees representing 70 airlines.

“We were growing and with that came challenges, of course. But you realize as a leader that every new challenge is a luxury, especially those that make you stop and consider the big picture”
– Seth Cassel

EveryMundo had been approached for acquisition multiple times but Seth and Anton, still very much enthused with building their brand by hand, were not interested. Selling EveryMundo and potentially losing their vision, culture, and freedom to define their process wasn’t an option. It would take PROS, a provider of SaaS solutions for optimizing shopping and selling experiences, to turn the heads of the Endeavor Entrepreneurs. Aided by the decades of experience in personalized customer engagement that PROS brought, the growth potential for the airline breakouts would be tremendous. The joint vision was so well aligned with what Seth and Anton had in mind that it was a match too perfect to ignore, and in 2021 EveryMundo was acquired by PROS.

Two years after the acquisition, Seth and Anton are still hard at work building EveryMundo to the potential they know it has. Their collaboration with PROS has once again opened the world for EveryMundo and with that has come growth on a level the pair couldn’t imagine years ago.

“Demand transparency and be patient. Learning to work with another company on this level can be jarring because now there is a shared vision and so many more considerations. If the alignment is there it’s like a whole new level”. – Anton Diego

Seth and Anton now find themselves on the other side of the conversation at Endeavor Entrepreneur meetups. They love sharing their experiences growing as entrepreneurs for the next generation of founders. For the future, Anton and Seth plan to continue to lead EveryMundo as they always have: by being motivated, staying flexible, and enjoying every second.