I was 12 the first time I remember selling something on purpose.
Magazines and books to neighbors.
There was no pitch deck. No landing page. No CRM. I did not know what a founder was, and I definitely did not think I was building a business.
I only understood something much simpler:
I had something another person might want.
I could ask.
They could say yes or no.
And if they said yes, value moved in both directions.
That was enough to make me curious.
A couple of years later, around 14, it was burned CDs and MP3 music.
Then, around 16 or 17, ornamental plants for doctors’ and lawyers’ offices.
By 17 or 18, I was developing and selling websites.
Looking back, it is tempting to turn that sequence into a very clean origin story.
“He was always an entrepreneur.”
“He always knew.”
“He was destined to become a founder.”
I do not think that is true.
At least, that is not how it felt from inside the story.
I did not have a grand theory about entrepreneurship.
I did not know the language I use today: product, distribution, customer acquisition, positioning, iteration, product-market fit.
I just kept returning to the same set of questions without knowing they had names.
Who might want this?
Why would they pay for it?
How do I reach them?
What happens when they say no?
What do I change the next time?
Those questions have followed me much longer than the title “founder.”
Years later, the projects became more serious and the systems became more complicated.
Mobile Ease.
Then years inside Amazon and AWS, where I learned what operating at scale feels like from the inside.
GoFeria and GoPass.
Smarter Elections.
EcoTours EV CR.
And today, LuVelle.
Some things worked.
Some did not.
Some became something different from what I imagined.
Some taught me more after they ended than while I was building them.
That is the part I am interested in documenting now.
Because founder stories have a problem.
Most of them are told after we know the ending.
Once a company succeeds, gets funded, shuts down, gets acquired, pivots, or becomes something meaningful, hindsight starts cleaning the story.
The wrong turns become “strategy.”
The doubts become “conviction.”
The lucky moments become “vision.”
The messy decisions suddenly look inevitable.
But they were not inevitable when they happened.
That is what I want As a Founder to preserve.
Not just what worked.
What it felt like before I knew whether it would work.
The decisions made with incomplete information.
The ideas I was too attached to.
The experiments that looked promising and went nowhere.
The small signals that changed my mind.
The moments when money, time, family, energy, market reality and ambition collided.
The difference between what I believed on Monday and what the evidence forced me to admit by Friday.
I am building LuVelle now.
I have a thesis about what it can become.
I have reasons to believe the problem matters.
I can build the product.
I can test the workflows.
I can talk to providers.
I can make decisions.
But I cannot honestly tell you how the story ends.
Neither can anyone else.
And that is exactly why I think this is the right moment to start writing.
Not after certainty.
Before it.
Maybe one day I will look back at these notes and see the early shape of something that became much bigger.
Maybe I will see a list of assumptions I got wrong.
Probably both.
Either outcome is useful if the record is honest.
So this series will not be a collection of founder commandments.
I am not interested in pretending every experience contains a universal lesson.
Sometimes the lesson is simply that I did not know enough.
Sometimes the market was telling me something and I was too stubborn to hear it.
Sometimes the idea was good and the timing was bad.
Sometimes I executed poorly.
Sometimes something worked for reasons I did not fully understand until later.
Those are founder stories too.
When I was 12, selling magazines and books to neighbors, I did not know I was building a business.
I was simply trying something and watching what happened.
Maybe building has always been a little like that.
You act before you have the complete map.
You make an offer.
You listen to the answer.
You adjust.
And eventually, if you keep going long enough, the identity catches up with the behavior.
This is where As a Founder starts.
Not with a success story.
With the first transaction I can remember — and with a story that is still being written.
If you are building something before you know how it ends, welcome.
I will be back in two weeks.
— Andrés