How all this started

I won’t pretend I know what I am doing here, nor will I pretend that I don’t either. I have always been in a strange place in between. My curiosity brings me to weird places, but then never forces me to go THAT deep. Maybe it’s the ADHD, maybe I am just an idiot, we will never know. The case is that I ended up adapting my life to who I am, which I think makes a lot of sense, and found my strengths and a career in being good at many things but maybe not that GREAT at any of them (better than average at several, though).

It’s important to lay some groundwork, not because I think anyone needs it, but because I know I did, and it would be unfair to skip. I like to think all the dots connect when looking back, and while I think this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, well, it’s kinda true.

My internet affair started a long time ago, I was already in ICQ when I was 11 at my mom’s office (we did not have internet at home). I would later sell that 6-digit ICQ account for 2K several years later. I started building crappy sites when I was 14, blogs built on Blogger with custom themes, all pretty much basic HTML and a lot of images. I got a readership in my super emo blog even then. Did ugly websites for the school competitions, won them all. The websites weren’t great; the competition was very poor. I guess having a nemesis would have helped my development lol, or maybe just being a white boy… Again, we will never know.

When I discovered WordPress, I think I was 17? I could do more cringe things with that than blogger, so of course I was full-ride on. There was no nice hosting with WordPress pre-installed, so I had to figure out what FTP was, change the wp-config, and do silly shit like that. I learnt to work on localhost and deploy things. I wasn’t clever enough, so it took some failures. No, I don’t want to frame my story as if I were some sort of genius who solved a problem at 15, because, again, I am not. There were people building groundbreaking shit; I was there, sharing music lyrics on a blog and downloading CDs from Napster, one song per day. But… I was exposed to all that in a very strange, mediocre way many people never have.

Fast forward to when I started Uni, and as I have always said, I stopped learning (how sad does that sound). Please do not mistake my words; I do not mean to say university is useless. It was for me, not the whole world. I picked the right career at the wrong time, an ex-boyfriend saw me doing my silly little sites and pointed out that maybe design was my thing (he was learning to be a developer, I was bad at math, so I suppose his guess was as good as mine).

Turns out that kind of design was not my thing. I guess there were other pressing matters in my mental health, too, that did not help out, like, I don’t know, for example, being an illegal immigrant without the right to work until I was 21, surviving on 300€ a month. I tried for 3 years, then I quit, and it took me several more years to regain my ability to do things again, both online and offline.

I ended up doing an immigration 2.0, and as soon as I got my passport, I left Spain for the UK. Since for once I did not have to worry about paying my bills every month I started thinking again and I started a blog (yes, again, I see there is a theme, look at me here and now…), this time was a travel blog, cause I left it all and went to roam the world with 500€ per month and the idea was to not have my mom and dad worried. And that’s how unpocodesur.com was born.

Then one day in Peru I did a guide to how to do Machu Picchu on your own, because I was broke and could not pay for a train and I did not find the info anywhere else, and then I saw many people were broke and my info was actually being read by others than my grandma (who actually could not care less how many hours it took me to walk from A to B).

Well, that blog got me my “First job in tech,” or at least got me the audacity to apply. I started working as an intern at Delivery Hero, getting paid 600€ per month, and completed immigration 3.0 to move to Berlin. Mind you, I was 26 by then. I now mentor people who are heads of something at 26, which is somehow funny.

Many other things happened, but I ended up quitting after a couple of years, built my own marketing agency as a freelancer, and, most importantly, built a life out of that silly little blog. With paid collabs and affiliates, I got to 4-5K per month. When the blog started making about 500€ a month, I decided not to take on more clients with the agency and dedicate myself to it full-time. I designed and maintained the site and the socials on my own, and I am proud of every bit of it. It’s still alive, it still gives money… but I have simply changed.

Since those early years, I always thought I should have learned to code properly, and, to be fair, I did, to some extent. I built dozens of websites, learned HTML, CSS, a bit of PHP, built my own custom WordPress themes, worked with databases, learned SQL, and somewhere along the way, mastered Tech SEO. I made a choice and chose the other side: Design and Marketing, basically distribution. That also showed up in a 100K monthly readers blog, a 6,000-person newsletter, 17K on Instagram, and 1 million views on Pinterest.

It was glorious, my learnings paid off, and I was living the life. But then, COVID hit. So no more travel, which made me rethink my whole life. Thanks to my agency experience, I managed to score a very well-paid job, this time at the top of the food chain as Director of Marketing at a remote company, and I have been back in “corporate” ever since.

It has been great, and I will not dare to compare it to uni, because since then I have learnt tons, and I have also gotten paid, what a beautiful convo. But there is something I sometimes miss. That spark. The one you get when you’re learning to do something completely by yourself with no clarity on what comes next… and I think I found it again.

When I tried to “Vibe code” last year, the results were very mediocre; my expectations may not have been aligned. Whatever I did, I could have done it better with WordPress at the time, and it was also visually questionable. It felt a bit off; it was like telling a bad designer what I wanted to do when I could have done it myself better. And then the 8th of March happened, and lovable ran a promotion and I gave it a second try… and I guess technology has changed so much in a year that this time this blew my mind in a way it had not for a very long time.

You don’t really have to choose anymore. Building takes now only a small fraction of the time it did… so I do not have to dedicate my full time to it. The barrier to building an MVP has almost disappeared, and the hard part has always been what comes after: getting people to actually see and use it. I’ve been doing that part for years (and honestly, I haven’t fully figured that either; I doubt anyone has). So here I am again.

I’m pretty tired of the idea that everything needs a business model before it’s allowed to exist. I prefer to think of it as a learning investment, which is exactly how I’ve always approached things. See, nothing I did had a “how will I monetize this” attached to it; it just came by, and hey, I’m doing more than fine. I have a full-time job that I genuinely love, and instead of going back to playing World of Warcraft (the expansion is out, save us all), I’m gonna spend my nights on this, on building again, building for the version of me that I am now.

Will something useful come out of this? for sure. Will something profitable come out of this? unsure. But I will share the journey and the numbers with you, so we can all laugh at my questionable mistakes or choices, and maybe, just maybe, someone see something I missed and help out.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

So what are the next steps?

I HAVE TONS of ideas, nothing groundbreaking, nothing super new, just probably very niche that before were simply a waste of time to produce. Some of them I have had for years (and now they are too late, but I will build them no matter what, just to make space in my head and remove them, a bit of a brain dump).

I am honestly tired of “just marketing,” so this might give me the high I need to continue with my life. I do not intend to push this or spam people. I hate that. If something grows great, if something does not, then it was probably not worth it. If none of it is, also great, I will be using them by myself.

I will be testing and sharing, but nothing will be forced.

My goal?

Releasing something once a month for at least a year. (I might move to once every two since I have limited hours to dedicate to this) But the main goal is to learn… and hell, to share it, which, apparently, is the only thing my 12 y.o. and I have in common.

Wanna join?

I will share one newsletter every two weeks, and it will be personal. I will share some information here, but more details are in there: numbers, errors, learning, links, guides, and stuff I have used. I don’t care if it’s just me and my grandma or many more.

Join the newsletter!