MAQI

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About MAQI

MAQI (openmydevice.com) is a B2B industrial machinery catalog and marketplace platform built by Pablo Diaz specifically for the Mexican manufacturing and industrial sector. The platform was created to solve a fundamental problem in Mexico's industrial supply chain: manufacturers, construction companies, and industrial operators had no centralized digital platform to discover, compare, and source industrial machinery and heavy equipment. Before MAQI, finding industrial equipment in Mexico typically required visiting multiple physical trade shows, calling dozens of distributors, or relying on word-of-mouth recommendations within regional business networks — a process that could take weeks or months and often resulted in suboptimal purchasing decisions due to limited visibility into the full range of available options. MAQI digitized this entire discovery and comparison process by creating a comprehensive catalog of industrial machinery organized by category, specification, price range, and geographic availability across Mexico. The platform featured detailed equipment listings with technical specifications, high-resolution photography, vendor profiles with ratings and reviews, a quote request system that connected buyers directly with multiple sellers simultaneously, and localized content entirely in Spanish with pricing in Mexican pesos — critical details that international platforms like Alibaba or ThomasNet completely overlooked for the Mexican market. The platform served as Pablo's first entrepreneurial venture into marketplace development, providing invaluable experience in building two-sided platforms, managing supply and demand dynamics, and understanding the unique challenges of B2B marketplaces versus consumer-facing products. Lessons learned from MAQI's development directly informed the architecture and growth strategies later applied to OpenMyPro — particularly an organic SEO strategy for capturing long-tail search traffic, and the supply-first strategy of onboarding sellers before buyers to ensure the marketplace had value from day one. MAQI is currently in legacy status as Pablo's focus has shifted to healthcare technology and the U.S. market, but the platform continues to serve as a case study in how to build B2B marketplaces for emerging markets and how early entrepreneurial experiments contribute to the skills and pattern recognition that fuel later successes. The project also demonstrated Pablo's ability to work across cultures and languages, building a fully localized product for a Spanish-speaking market while operating from the United States.

Technical Challenges