The Beginning
In June 2023, I noticed a friend's post in a Facebook group, Expats in Buenos Aires. She was looking for a list of holistic practitioners around the area.
I don't have more information than that, but it picked up my interest because I just finished developing a personal tool to scrap data from google maps for specific companies. (E.g. The tool could gather all barbers in a specific city).
By the way, the reason I was originally in the group was because 13 years ago I fell in love with an Argentinian girl in a hostel in San Francisco. And I dreamt of discovering her country one day.
I took her Facebook post and sent her tarot reading people in Buenos Aires. There were a couple of hundred. I sent her a screenshot and an excel sheet asking her if this is what she was looking for.
We ended up catching up for 2 hours, she told me about her project and where she was with it. She was looking for a technical person with a spiritual background. She told me about the different offers she received and asked for my opinion.
That same night, I couldn't sleep, my mind was thriving with ideas about designing a quick platform for her project.
We ended up chatting the day after, and I told her that I was interested in designing her project idea with it. Her in Argentina, and me in France.
Our idea was to design a platform where people could sell their spiritual services directly online (Treatwell, or doctolib equivalent).
Our unique value was to sell to travelers at a much-discounted price from the US or EU prices.
Writing this, I see so many mistakes that today appear as obvious.
As I take upon the technical side. I have many ideas about how to design the platform, and it seems that you can find some kind of "big template" with such functionalities to shoot an MVP. So I am pretty confident that I can deliver something quickly (AHAHAHAH).
The Move to Argentina
In August, so 3 months after that phone call, we have a business coach stepping in and saying, the project seems really interesting but you guys are crazy starting in 2 countries at once is just insane.
It was decided I was going to move to Argentina.
At the beginning of my journey in Argentina, I realize that it's quite the cultural change, and there is so much I need to learn about the country. That things DO NOT work as they do in Europe, or the US, or in China which are all the continents I lived in. And that humbly I had lots to learn, adding to it the language.
Considering the apparent ease to get a platform that would be sufficient to get an MVP. We decided to hire someone to do the first MVP of the platform giving me room to adapt to this new environment.
We are in September, in one month, we will have the first version of the platform. During that time, I started learning about how to get money, the blue dollar, Western Union, how to feed myself, empanadas, the city Cordoba, Spanish, going to international events, meeting people, getting to institution such as the French chamber of commerce, or the amazing and still close to my heart while far away people from @digital nomads in Cordoba.
End of October, I am getting the hang of living in Argentina and truly loving it. I am teaching cybersecurity classes online to engineering schools in France. (I had to teach at 2 or 3am the entire year.). The rest of the time, I am either working on the project or enjoying my new life.
The Waiting Game
But ... We are still waiting for the platform delivery. And at the end of October we don't have anything to work with. I am still learning Spanish, but I am there yet to be able to talk to people fluently, so it's challenging for me to help with talking to spiritual practitioners to sell my platform (that I don't have).
So in the meantime, I am trying to navigate the economical situation of Argentina, meeting with a financial expert from an Australian friend who manages an English schools here. And I understand that the situation to send and receive money here, is actually quite challenging and figuring out how to pay the spiritual practitioners from external money sources.
I am skipping all the details and the ways around we found for now. Because in December, all the tables might turn, considering it was the presidential election. And Trump friend was enlisted to be president and had radical plans to change Argentina's economy. It was good to spend time understanding the problems but honestly at that point, our best selfish hope was for Milei to get elected and hope that he would change his country currency to dollar. He was elected, but as of today this issue is still pending.
I am 3 months in the country, while I love the country in so many ways, the project complexity is increasing further and further the more we move forward with it. And we are still not earning a peso, and even less euros.
The Platform Arrives
End of November, we finally received the platform, hoorayyyy! We fought hard to get it, it was time to discover our baby. The platform that would enable us to test our product, allowing us to do our product validation. It's HEREEEEE!
And ...
It ...
Sucks ...
Our 3 months going back and forth, by the end of it, I realized that the developer would not be able to deliver the expected product. We asked for functionalities that after 3 reviews were still not matching our expectations.
To be honest, it's quite an emotional journey, to trust someone with whom you get along (3 months going back and forth) until you realize that they won't be able to deliver.
I was skeptical about the one-month deadline. I started getting worried after the second month. And I asked for the delivery the third month because I was hoping that at least I could take what's working and do the modifications myself.
Except that it's profoundly bad. And I blame myself, I should have looked more into the technology they chose. And upon reception, I realize the truth... I will have to redo everything from scratch.
Building from Scratch
At that time, we are living in a village in the mountains, our connection is okay ish but while I can create the platform, backups take forever. So I take chances, I back up the latest updates once a day before going to bed. If something crashes, I lose roughly a day of work.
It happened a couple of times, with once at the last minute before going to bed.
I ended up going back to the city, my colleague is going back to Europe for the Christmas vacations. The current need was to get a working MVP, so I knew what I was about to do for my Christmas vacations. I realize the project is more demanding that I expected, the selected technology fairly limited. And I end up running a big project on a platform not adapted to it. With some custom plugins, lots of hours of work and many days spent in the cave developing.
One of the biggest challenges was implementing our selected business model. Our example was treatwell, we found their business model super smart and the fairest of all in our situation. Simply put: On your first order you pay X% to practitioner "A" on our platform, then for all your next bookings with practitioner "A" you won't have any platform fees.
We end up having an okay-ish platform. Honestly, it is not the most amazing platform, but good enough for product validation.
(Getting a decent product required at least 6 months for me to code everything, which I would not spend without making sure the product was worth it - we were not talking about vibe coding at that time).
Testing the Waters
By mid-January, my teammate is calling practitioners to register on the website, and I fix the bugs they encounter. And boy! That was a lot of work, people in Argentina have a completely different experience with technology than us in Europe. Old laptop, outdated versions, bad internet connections, old phones. (Any web developers can probably cry internally with me)
Anyway we navigate our first registrations of practitioners, and it's bumpy but we are finally making progress.
We are in February, I worked 16h to 20h/day for roughly 2 months straight, hopefully I didn't have to teach that much as it was the holiday period for most of it.
My family is coming to visit, so I am going to take 2 weeks more or less off, managing only the emergencies.
And that's when ... It happened.
During my two weeks off I receive a call from my partner. She was desperate. She just spent 3 hours on the phone with a practitioner trying to register it on the platform.
I need to say that I put 2 tutorial videos:
- The first one was a 4min long video to register on the platform
- The second one was 10 min long to register your products on the platform
And my partner just spent 3 hours to try and fail registering this particular practitioner.
She was not the first one to register, and we had couple of successful experiences there.
But this is when I realized the cultural differences. People in Argentina, specifically people involved in spiritual practices are disconnected to technology.
On top of their outdated computers, using the platform meant changing their entire way of working.
And the truth is, it's entirely our fault. People are not good with changes in general.
Technology adoption takes time.
And we were facing this reality.
We ended up doing the registration for her, asking her questions and creating her account by hand on our side.
Having a rough pool of 20 spiritual practitioners registered on the platform.
It was now time to validate the product, we had posters in all the hostel/hotel of the city where we launched our product.
While we introduced the project to everyone.
I revisited the hostels afterwards, asking questions about the poster. And no one could tell me what it was about.
I asked many questions, and the people at the front desk of the various places had no clue what was the project about.
Even at our friendliest hostel where we stayed for many weeks. The owner congratulated me many times on the platform. But hostel staff change every month.
I asked many travelers if they did the QR code, and many did not, and the few that did were just happy to know the person of the owner of the poster in the toilets. But no one really cared about it.
I tried to sell the services to people, explaining to them what it was about.
And I could not manage to make a sell.
Realizing the product validation did not pass.
Facing Failure
It took us a couple more months of trying and so on to face reality. We failed.
I am so used to failing by now, but it was the first time I was putting all my energy into such a project, it was the first time failing with someone, it was also the first time failing involving people.
Most of them were following the project since the beginning. And facing reality was really difficult.
We took some distance with my partner on the project. I think we had to deal separately with the grief of this project.
When dealing with your emotions related to this, you realize the pain of investing so many hours for nothing. And deep down, you want to overcome it quickly and move on to the next step. But it's not that easy, and I believe you need time to reflect on it.
While you see the lessons learned directly, integrating what they all mean takes time. Trust me I wish it did not.
Today, one year after starting facing the truth. We needed couple more month to decide to kill the project completely.
It's currently floating in the www space, slowly decaying at wandaura.com until the end of the domain name.
Lessons and Side Quests
Looking back, I have learned so much from so many different angles.
I learned about the power of networking, and having people supporting you in your adventure.
I learned that people are too nice, and will not tell you if your project is crap. You need to figure it out by yourself.
No one will be as involved as you are. And you need to realize that what seem obvious and amazing to you, sometimes appear only as such to you.
There is a huge difference between people telling you they would be interested in buying and people actually giving you the money for it.
While going for an adventure, there will be a lot of side quests.
Among these side quests:
I got interviewed for one of the biggest radio channel of Argentina
I had the chance to give a talk about well beingness, and the difference between logical intelligence and emotional intelligence bringing a respiration exercise for digital nomads in Cordoba in front of 200 people in Spanish. Funny story, my sister and I ended up kissing the mayor of the city while leaving the conference. (People are usually more friendly over there, and many people in the audience came to share a couple of words with me, kissing me while saying goodbye.) While friendlier, I don't think you kiss the mayor. Well I didn't know who he was until after I left.
I had the opportunity to meet other foreign entrepreneurs in Argentina. And I understood the depth of this country economy.
I learned how big tech companies are interacting and outsourcing with this continent in general.
I met with a hacker group for a kayaking journey.
I saw places with my eyes that I could not even imagine existing in my wildest dream.
I had many asados
I participated in village parties as if I was with my own family
I took a couple of tango classes
I learned how to make empanadas
And I am skipping you all the details about the spiritual journey that could be a book in itself.
But in my resume, you will only read the line: Cyber security teacher - remote.
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