From Zero to Startup: How I Accidentally Started Building Something People Actually Use
Everything started by inertia. There was no grand master plan, no disruptive vision that woke me up at 3 AM. I was in my fourth year of Industrial Design Engineering, and I had just landed a collaboration scholarship to develop something that now seems crazy: building a drone from scratch - programming, design, manufacturing, everything.
I spent my days between classes, the workshop, and learning to program PID systems to get two motors to self-calibrate on a test bench. It was 2020, the world was changing, and I had no idea I was about to embark on a journey that would take me from being a student obsessed with mechanics to co-founding and becoming CTO/CPO of a startup.
The Unexpected Turn: From Drone to Ventilator
Then COVID hit. The drone project stopped dead, but the department decided to pivot to something urgent: developing an automatic ventilator. We didn’t make it in time to help, but we finished the prototype. The professors decided to present it to Spinoff, the University of Málaga’s entrepreneurship competition.
That project didn't go anywhere commercially, but it opened the door to the entrepreneurial ecosystem for me. Sometimes “failures” are the best springboards.
The Voice Post-it Idea
The following year, while pursuing my master’s in Mechatronics Engineering, I received an email about SUP (Startup Programme). I convinced my friend Dani Garrido and my classmate (now business partner) Álvaro Arrescurrenaga to sign up with an idea that seemed obvious to me:
“When I study, I have to make post-its, but they’re too short and I can’t write everything. It would be great to have a voice post-it.”
That simple. That naive. That’s how it all started. We called the project Voicit - combining “Voice” and “Post-it.” From day one, the name captured exactly what we wanted to build.
The Advice That Changed Everything
Our mentor, Nacho Sánchez, told us something that was key: “If you want to win the competition, you have to switch to software.”
At that moment I didn’t fully understand why, but he was right. Hardware has enormous barriers to entry, long development cycles, and for students without capital, it was practically impossible.
That was our first lesson about timing and resources.
The Pivots: Each One a Lesson
The curious thing is that no pivot was painful. We quickly understood that we needed to make them for the company to make sense:
- Voice post-it → Too niche
- Online interview transcription → Too general
- HR focus → The sweet spot
At Spinoff we met Ramón Rubio and Álvaro Villacorta, who pushed us towards Demium, an incubator. They invested 100k€ and we hired our first programmer and a marketing person.
We built the first version of an application to transcribe online interviews. This was pre-ChatGPT, when automatic transcription wasn’t yet commoditized.
The Stack: Pragmatism Over Perfection
As CTO, my philosophy has always been use what works:
- Existing transcription APIs (why reinvent the wheel)
- When the time came, we integrated OpenAI APIs to generate reports
- My background in industrial engineering + 9 months as a product designer allowed me to take care of UX/UI from the beginning
Lesson learned: Users don’t fall in love with your tech stack, they fall in love with you solving their problem.
Lanzadera and Real Focus
We entered Lanzadera, Juan Roig’s accelerator, which also invested in us. But the decisive moment came in 2024, when one of our early prospects told us:
“Hey, now I really do need a Voicit.”
He had seen the real pain in creating personnel selection reports. We finally had real focus.
Current Reality: 2.5k MRR and Climbing
Today we have about 50 clients with 2-2.5k€ MRR. Sounds modest, right? But every euro represents a real problem solved for someone real.
The biggest obstacle now is selling the product in its current state to companies that give us enough MRR. It’s the classic problem: do you improve the product or go out and sell more of what you have?
As CTO/CPO, I feel comfortable in this dual role because I touch business, clients, product… My engineering background allows me to move between all these areas without losing the technical thread.
The Human Side: Team and Learnings
We’re now the 2 partners and one intern. We’ve been up to 4 when we raised the round, but we had to make difficult changes. Managing a team is as important as managing the product.
We’ve had more interns and another employee for a while. Each experience has taught us something about leadership, culture, and sustainability.
The Three Lessons That Have Marked Me Most
If I could go back and talk to my “me” from when we started at SUP, I’d tell him three things:
1. There’s no point marketing something that doesn’t exist
Don’t invest in marketing if you don’t have anything. Sounds obvious, but it’s easy to fall into the trap of wanting to make noise before having substance.
2. Focus, focus, focus
Clarity in what you do, why you do it, and for whom. Dispersion is the silent enemy of startups.
3. Business is the most important thing
If there’s no business, don’t seek investment. Reduce costs, validate the model, find real traction. It’s not worth losing months chasing investment that will only give you one or two more months of life without having solved the fundamental.
What’s Next?
We’re still in the trenches, fighting to grow, learning every day. Entrepreneurship isn’t the glamorous roller coaster they sell at conferences. It’s more like my drone project: many hours in the workshop, constant adjustments, and the satisfaction of seeing that, little by little, things start to work.
Voicit is helping HR teams create better selection reports. Every day we solve real problems for real people. And that, frankly, feels pretty good.
If you’re thinking about entrepreneurship, if you have questions about product or technology, or simply want to chat about startups without filters, don’t hesitate to contact me. Entrepreneurship is better done in community.
Do you have a startup story? I’d love to hear it - the successful ones and those still in process.