Hola! My name is Javi

I love making cool stuff.

My superpower is deploying autistic focus into things and obsessing over them until they're great.

Most of that focus has gone to startups over the past 12 years. I've built, scaled, and sold an AI company called PromptHero. I've created 20+ other startup-like projects from scratch. I've also made open source software with 300k+ downloads.

Now I'm trying to keep building online businesses while dealing with AI taking over my job. Subscribe to find out how that goes:

Some things I’ve built

3 of 40+

About

Professional overthinker

I'm just a Spanish guy making things with a laptop.

I design, code (well, now AI does), do marketing, etc. to bring ideas into products people use, and then I grow them.

I usually work alone. And I spend way too much time overthinking and overengineering. I'm trying to get better at that, though.

  • Built and sold PromptHero (makers of Openjourney) after scaling it to 4M+ users/mo from zero
  • Made 25+ open source projects (Ruby gems) with over 300k+ downloads
  • I've also created 40+ other projects, some featured in the The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Vox, Business Insider, Fast Company, etc.
Javi at his desk, pointing at a chart on his screen
Fig. 1 Me, pointing at a chart going up and to the right

Newsletter

I have no idea what I'm doing

Every guru and his mom and his dog say a personal website like this should have a newsletter.

I don't know how to run a newsletter. I've never ran one.

What I do know is how to build, launch, operate, and grow software products.

So if you're planning on running your own products yourself, I believe you could learn a great deal by reading the kind of things I write about.

I love writing.

I love AI as much as a straight man can love an era-defining technology, but I love something more than AI: writing. I do enjoy typing my words character by character like a caveman. I think it gives the writings a soul that can't be faked with AI, and I think people can tell when something is authentic and when something is not.

Be warned, though: I tend to be highly inconsistent with newsletter type of things. So you may only get an email every once in a while.

I will try my best to make the emails valuable to you, though.

Take your chance:

Blog

Kamal’s missing tutorial – how to deploy a Rails 8 app with Postgres to your VPS Rails 8 is out. And with it Kamal 2, the new default way of deploying Rails apps. But Kamal is hard for the uninitiated. This is a complete tutorial on how to get a Rails app fully in production using Kamal. Send this article to your friend who still thinks the cloud is a good idea You've been lied to. You don't need the cloud – you can just run servers and save 10x your AWS costs. It's not that difficult. How I exited the cloud You've been tricked into thinking servers are expensive and the cloud is the only solution. That's just not true. I migrated everything off the cloud into my own servers, and saved 10x by doing so. Is the American dream still alive? I unexpectedly won a green card in the green card lottery. As a consequence, I need to scratch my current life plans and move to the US on short notice. I've always had this vague desire to pursue the American dream, but now that it's really happening I can't stop thinking: why am I doing this again?