What's the problem?

I was making a good amount of money, like a senior developer from Texas, from bed with my girlfriend, living near Fortuna, a paradise in Costa Rica. Spending a tiny fraction of that every month on home and food. A luxury, right? I had saved enough in my country to live at least two years doing nothing.

I was excited to start something, so at the end of December 2025 I decided to prepare to go to Silicon Valley, get inspired, and come back with an idea. The first problem: looking for ideas. Why an idea?

I didn’t really understand the concept of “problem.” Anyone would say, how do you not get something so basic? I just didn’t see the weight of it in what I wanted to build.

I quit my contracts at the start of 2026. In February I flew with my current cofounder, then just my friend, and my girlfriend to Santa Clara. We took an Uber to San Francisco and stayed in an Airbnb down south. I remember I didn’t know Little Caesars, and there was one right in front of the Airbnb. We didn’t miss the chance to eat as much pizza as we could.

Silicon Valley

In those 15 days in Silicon Valley we understood a lot. Among other things, that we could develop fast enough with AI, but we asked ourselves: can we hand this to agents? We looked online for hackathons to build a prototype of an autonomous agent and started with Codara. Codara was the codename we gave to the idea of a terminal with multiple autonomous agents that would write code, open PRs on GitHub, review themselves, and merge. My friend had to stay at the Airbnb for meetings, so my girlfriend and I took the train to Santa Clara.

I started the terminal. Hours of writing code and then we had a prototype. I remember not submitting the product or any form. I went with the idea of finishing something, and that’s what we did. Back at the Airbnb I showed it to my friend and he immediately started thinking of more ideas and more features it could have. He took the prototype and started developing it deeper, because he’s more technical and nerdier than me.

We stayed another week in Santa Clara. We were supposed to meet an investor, but he had to fly to Chicago. At the same time a friend was looking for $5M, his business had hit $1M ARR, so he grabbed his backpack and came to SF looking for investment.

Back to Costa Rica

When we flew back to Costa Rica we had a clear idea and a blurry vision of the problem. We knew we could sell this product as a way to save on developers, so with a bit of local outreach we had 3 angel investment opportunities. I met with the 3, even though I wanted to avoid it and focus on the product. I also hoped to get enough money to fund at least the first year.

We even got interest from some investors. They saw the story and the solution. I later realized we had raised interest the same way a lot of founders do: with a good narrative and a product that looked promising, not because we had deeply understood a painful problem.

Talking to the investors we left a verbal agreement with one of them. Yes, verbal. It wasn’t the best decision, but it worked later to keep developing the conversation. After a few months of talk the investor decided to start putting money into lawyers, since we already had an LLC in the US and wanted to bring him in. My initial idea was to have 2 companies: one with the intellectual property of the product and another with the sales and investment system. The investor later introduced us to a possible enterprise lead at some WeWork offices, then started covering certain lawyers and product development. At this point we had no paper agreement, which was one of the incredible mistakes I learned from.

In words we left an $80,000 agreement, enough to keep the company for at least a year. We had clients who trusted me personally and I moved them to our product easily, so we were profitable from day 1.

The Investment

After many discussions our partner looked for more mentorship, because there’s no other way to say it, he saw us as inexperienced in what we were doing. That mentorship ended up with us having a “big dream but a bigger company can do it better,” the typical comment that some bigger company would do it better. It didn’t help. A few months later after more conversations he decided to cut the investment in half, so I simply decided to tell him NO and let him go.

Not because the money wasn’t enough as a first investment, but because I knew this would keep happening later. Do I regret the decision? No. I wasn’t sure, and if I’m not sure of a decision, the answer is simply no. Aiming for the moon means sometimes saying no to the money on the table. If you’re not sure, taking it can cost you more than the cash.

The Contractor

In that time before the No, we had an ex-Google contractor helping us deploy the app, because it had a complex setup with virtual machines. The first weeks he did the job well. Then it started to degrade and he gave bad estimates. We paid him until he finished. The result didn’t leave us proud. The excuse was “we didn’t have anyone else.” That’s the decision we didn’t make. If it doesn’t work, you stop it.

Eight Months Later

After months we kept developing the product and features. We started running out of funds after 8 months. Thanks to our clients we covered the application costs, but it was also very expensive because we were chasing perfection.

After 8 months of development and a product still not good enough, it starts burning the founders, and that wasn’t happening. We saw money coming in but also going out. It looked like a hole with no exit that wasn’t growing. I didn’t want to look for more clients because the current ones were complaining about things, and we didn’t have the development flow fast enough to cover the needs, which was ironic, because we were trying to solve that. But at that moment we didn’t understand it.

Part of the problem was perfectionism and the feeling that we needed more “experience” before we could move. But the only experience that really matters is knowing how to sell, knowing how to build, and knowing how to make people believe in you — employees, clients, banks, investors. Everything else is just learning by doing.

We decided then to separate by phases. We left a good product so we could go to market with it, and we focused on getting a good amount of first users, enough to understand retention and the problem, because we had built a solution and it was hard to look for its counterpart, the problem.

We started with what we wanted to build, not with what someone needed. Products like Airbnb didn’t exist before someone created a hypothesis, talked to users, and iterated. That’s where the real experience comes from. Looking for investment is often a distraction compared to talking to users and understanding the problem deeply.

We spread ourselves across features instead of concentrating on one phase. We kept the contractor because “we didn’t have anyone else.” We fell in love with the product and that’s why the hole didn’t close.

The rest is just making mistakes faster than others and knowing how to iterate better. Later I told a friend who was already scaling that I didn’t want to push harder or raise more money while the product wasn’t solid enough. Reputation matters more than the next check.

| This blog is a reflection of the book Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution.