About
A few years ago I was in Brazil, stuck in an Airbnb waiting for a flight I couldn't afford to move, with less than $80 in my bank account.
I wasn't a complete beginner. I'd been building things online for a while — content sites, SEO plays, affiliate projects. I thought I understood how the game worked. Then Google changed an algorithm and took most of it away in a few weeks. Revenue I'd spent a year building, gone. I hadn't noticed how fragile the whole thing was until it wasn't there anymore.
That stretch in Brazil gave me a lot of time to think. The obvious question: why did I keep building things that depended entirely on someone else's platform deciding I was worth keeping around?
I didn't have a good answer. So I started looking at different kinds of businesses. The kind that don't need Google's blessing or an algorithm's mood. The kind with real customers paying real money, month after month, for something they actually need.
What I found was that those businesses were everywhere. They just weren't interesting enough for anyone to write about. A guy cleaning commercial driveways. A service helping dentists respond to their Google reviews. Someone labeling industrial shelving for warehouse chains. None of them were on TechCrunch. All of them were making more money than most funded startups.
That's when the pattern became obvious. The most resilient businesses aren't the exciting ones. They're the ones serving a specific group of people with a problem they already know they have — and already pay to solve, just badly.
I'm 27, Spanish, and I've spent the last few years working from wherever I happen to be. I've built things that worked and many more that didn't. The ones that worked had one thing in common: they started with demand that already existed, not with an idea I found interesting.
Little Business Ideas is what I wish I'd had earlier. Every Friday, three real businesses — already operating, already invoicing — analyzed honestly. The model, the rough numbers, why it works, and whether there's still room for someone new to come in.
No funding required. No big team. No idea that needs to change the world.
Just businesses that work.