Build the infrastructure, not the product
The play I'm interested in this week comes from Marina de Empresas, and it applies to anyone trying to build something for the long run: when you control the infrastructure, you control the game.
Marina isn't an incubator. It's a school (EDEM), an accelerator (Lanzadera) and a fund (Angels) physically stuck together. A founder walks in at 18 for the degree, validates their idea at 22, and gets a cheque at 24. All under the same roof, with the same philosophy and the same owner.
This is first-principles thinking applied to building an ecosystem: what does a founder need? Training, mentorship, capital and community. What do most players offer? One of the four. What does Roig do? All four, integrated, owning the whole stack.
Translated for whoever is building their business right now: stop competing in the layer where everyone competes. Go down one layer. If you sell courses, build the community. If you have a community, build the tool. If you have a tool, build the distribution channel. The real value is in owning the layer everyone else rents.
What I learned
My lesson this week comes from watching the difference between building a business and building a machine.
A business depends on you every single day. A machine runs even if you disappear for two weeks. And the only way to go from one to the other is designing systems before you need them, not once you're already drowning.
My view: most founders (me included, plenty of times) fall in love with the sprint and hate the maintenance. But the businesses that last 40 years (look at Seat, still fighting) and the ecosystems like Roig's are built the other way round: operational boredom, repeatable processes, people who know what to do without being told.
It's less sexy than launching. And it's what separates those selling smoke from those selling a company.
On the radar
- The Ministry of Industry says it has "zero doubts" about the future of the Seat brand but rules out taking a stake. Translation: we back you with our mouth, not our wallet. The classic.
- Alain Afflelou hires a new CMO to "drive growth". Every time a brand swaps its CMO to "grow", the problem is almost never the CMO.
- BNP Paribas AM appoints a CEO in Spain after passing 22 billion under management. First you grow, then you reorganise. The other way round doesn't work, whatever the consultants sell you.
- Threats against executives rise amid a crisis of confidence in companies and AI. Building in public is fashionable right up until you build something somebody doesn't like. Careful with exposure without purpose.
The actionable advice
Today, take your product or service and draw it on a sheet of paper as a value chain: what happens before they hire you, what happens while you work, what happens afterwards. Mark in red the layers you do NOT control and that your customer has to solve with another supplier. That's your next product line, your next integration or your next acquisition. That's the growth that doesn't depend on pushing more leads into the funnel.
Behind VIVIO
The Marina de Empresas story resonates a lot with how I think about VIVIO. Influencer marketing has been a fragmented layer for years: agencies on one side, discovery tools on another, contracts on another, measurement on another. Each little piece owned by a different player, and the client pays four times over.
My bet with VIVIO is the opposite: integrate the stack. Discovery, contracting, execution and measurement living in the same place. Not because it looks good in a pitch, but because when you control all four layers, the data one generates feeds the next, and that's where the real advantage appears — the one the guy next door can't copy with a Notion and enthusiasm.
The principle I apply: if your product is a feature inside someone else's flow, sooner or later they eat you. Be the flow.
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