Building Is Easier

I can take an idea to an MVP in days. Selling it took me years to learn. And I'm still learning.

I can build an MVP in less than a week.

I've done it more than once. Studently went from idea to MVP in less than three weeks. Hoosling's MVP was designed in Figma and live on WordPress in less than seven days. In one weekend hackathon, I built a full-stack app for a former NASA employee and got paid $6,000 for three days.

Building is not my problem.

Selling is.

And I think it's the problem of almost every technical founder I know. We hide in the part we're good at, and we call it "working on the product."

This post is about how I learned that the hard way. More than once.

$100 a month

My first client was the owner of a shopping center with more than 50 stores.

I was 16. I had learned WordPress in less than two weeks. I built him an e-commerce site.

I charged $100 a month.

For a shopping center with more than 50 stores.

Why so little? Fear. And not knowing better. I had no idea what my work was worth, and I was scared that if I asked for more, he'd say no.

That $100 changed my life. It paid for Platzi, and Platzi is where I learned almost everything. But looking back, it was also my first sales lesson, and I failed it.

I built something valuable and sold it like it was worthless.

First lesson: you can build a great product and still lose the deal by selling it scared. Price is part of the product.

Hoosling: we could do everything except the one thing

A year later, I was building Hoosling, a crypto fundraising platform for Latin America.

We had the full skill set. Or so we thought.

We knew how to validate. I was doing real UX interviews.

We knew how to design. System design in Figma.

We knew how to prototype. MVP in less than seven days.

We knew how to code. Six months later, the full product.

We even got interest from VCs. Around $60K to $80K.

And it still died. Because we didn't know how to sell. Not to users, not to investors, not to anyone.

If I'm honest, the deeper reason was ego. I believed that if the product was good enough, it would sell itself. That selling was something you did when the product wasn't good enough.

That belief cost me my first startup.

Second lesson: a product that "sells itself" is almost always a story founders tell to avoid selling.

Why building feels easier

I've thought a lot about why I always ran toward building and away from selling.

Here's what I think.

Building gives you control. The code compiles or it doesn't. The design looks good or it doesn't. You can work alone at 2 a.m. and see progress.

Selling gives you rejection. You depend on another person. You can do everything right and still hear no. And every no feels personal.

Building also feels productive. You can spend a week on a feature and feel like you worked hard. You did. But if nobody buys it, that week was a very expensive hobby.

There's another trap I see in my own profile. I have Figma designs with almost 30K downloads. An npm library, Monako, with around 1K weekly downloads.

Those numbers feel great.

But downloads are not sales. Free stuff gets used. That doesn't mean anyone would pay for it.

Third lesson: building feels like progress because it's under your control. Selling is the progress that actually counts.

Finding people who knew

After Hoosling, I did something I'm still proud of. I admitted I didn't know how to sell, and I went looking for people who did.

Alexander Guevara, a former VP at Open English, became my mentor.

I got 1:1 coaching from a VP of Sales at WeWork. The focus was simple: stop hiding in the product. Sell.

It connects to a sentence I've repeated for years: if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.

When it came to building, I was often the smartest person in my room. When it came to selling, I was the least experienced. So that's the room I needed to be in.

And I still do it. In 2026 I took a sales course. I looked for a mentor in go-to-market and product development, and I'm working with Nicholas DeMarinis.

If I'm scared of something, I compensate with knowledge. Selling scared me. So I studied it.

Fourth lesson: your weakest skill deserves your best mentors.

The first time I sold well

The first time selling really worked for me, the product was me.

At 19, I got fired. I went to Chile, came back, and made a list of 30 startups on a board.

I emailed 29 of them.

The 30th had no email. So I visited the founder's LinkedIn profile. He saw the notification and contacted me the next day.

I passed the technical tests. But I know the tests weren't the reason I got the job. I sold myself. I told the story of what I could build, not just what I knew.

I tripled my salary.

That's when it clicked. Selling isn't lying. Selling isn't pushing. Selling is helping someone see the value you already know is there. If I could do that for myself, I could do it for a product.

What selling looks like now

Today, my role at Rosvelt is evangelist, go-to-market, sales and development.

Notice the order. Development is last.

That's not because building doesn't matter. It does. I still believe speed comes from structure, not magic: a clear backlog, AI tools, strict code rules. With that, I can build fast.

But because I can build fast, building is no longer the bottleneck. Selling is.

So I try to sell before I build. My validation process is simple:

1. Validate the problem. Talk to around five people who really suffer it. One-on-one conversations, not surveys. Why do they suffer it? Would they pay to solve it? How much?

1. Validate the market. Build the product without code. A landing page with clear images and explanations. Add a real payment method. Bring traffic. Count everyone who tries to pay, then show them an error or "out of stock" at checkout.

1. Set a threshold. At least 10 people with real purchase intent. If not, iterate.

1. Then build.

This is just selling in disguise. If nobody tries to pay for something that doesn't exist yet, they won't pay for it when it does.

It also filters out what I call disguised first-world sufferings: real problems that nobody would pay to solve. They feel important. They're not businesses.

Fifth lesson: sell first, build second. If you can't sell the landing page, you won't sell the app.

People help you sell

One more thing I learned: you don't sell alone.

My girlfriend helped me close key contracts. Not as a sales rep. As someone who believed in what I was doing and pushed me to go after it when I was hesitating.

A lot of my best opportunities came from "a contact who has a contact." That's selling too. It's not cold calls. It's relationships, built over time, that open doors.

Sixth lesson: your network sells for you when you're not in the room. Take care of it.

I'm still learning

I'd love to end this by saying I mastered sales. I haven't.

It's literally on my to-do list for 2026: practice sales and marketing. It's still there.

But the difference between me at 16 and me now is that I don't hide anymore. I know building is my comfort zone. I know selling is where the business is.

The 16-year-old who charged $100 a month thought the hard part was learning WordPress.

It wasn't. WordPress took two weeks.

Learning to ask for what my work is worth? That's taken six years.

Building is easier. That's exactly why it's not enough.