Build for global from day one
The Spanish trap: you start by validating in your city, you scale to your country, and by the time you want to go abroad, your product, your team and your head are all wired for a market of 47 million people.
My view: if your project can't work in English from minute zero, you have a structural problem, not a translation problem.
How to apply it this week:
Write the landing page in English first and then translate it into Spanish, not the other way round. It changes where you put your focus by default.
When you design pricing, think in dollars. If your product only makes sense at 9 euros because "the Spanish market won't pay more", you have a market problem, not a pricing problem.
Hire (or work with) at least one person outside your country in the first few months. Break the cultural bubble before it becomes a problem.
ACS and Santander don't dominate because they're Spanish. They dominate because they stopped behaving like Spanish companies decades ago.
What I learned
Confusing "lifestyle" with "company" is the quietest trap in entrepreneurship.
A business that lets you live well can be wonderful. But if you call it a startup, if you raise capital and if you promise returns, then you're playing a different game. And that game demands ambition, systems and brutal honesty with yourself.
My take: ask yourself every quarter whether you're really building a company or whether you've built yourself a job with a nice website. Both options are valid. Lying to yourself about which one you're playing is not.
On the radar
- Revolut targets 8 million customers in Spain and launches private banking. While the traditional banks debate whether to open branches on Saturdays, Revolut is already eating the whole cake.
- Santander buys Webster for 10.5 billion to strengthen its bet on the United States. Translation: European regulation squeezes so hard that even Spanish banks would rather play in the yard next door.
- ACS Group tops the global construction ranking for the eighth time in a decade. A reminder that Spanish companies CAN dominate the world. You just have to leave Spain.
- Cybersecurity stops being a cost and becomes an innovation enabler for 99% of companies. Anyone still treating it as a cost has already lost. Anyone using it to sell faster has won.
The actionable advice
Take your main website right now and review it as if you were a New York investor who doesn't speak Spanish. Is it clear what you do? Are prices in a global currency? Can you buy the product without a Spanish ID number? If something breaks, fix it this week. Not next quarter. This week.
Behind VIVIO
The influencer marketing sector has the same problem as Spanish startups: it thinks too locally.
Most platforms and agencies still operate with national market logic. Creators from the country, brands from the country, campaigns in the country. And yet a creator in Barcelona with an audience across Latin America is worth exponentially more than one with an audience only in Madrid.
My rule building VIVIO: any product decision that closes doors to markets outside Spain gets discarded. Full stop. Even if it looks more efficient in the short term. Even if the local market is what pays the bills today. The ceiling of a Spain-only influencer marketing platform is too low for the effort it takes to build one.
This is a version of what I send every week, unfiltered, in my newsletter "Eso no fue suerte". If you want the rest, subscribe for free.