"Where are you going next?"
"Where are you going next?", my aunt asked with a tone of excitement a couple of weeks ago.
"We're thinking Japan", I answered.
Around 6 years ago on a Tuesday, I very formally invited my then-girlfriend to dinner on Friday. "There's something important I want to propose to you", was the only thing I said in anticipation, inadvertently making her think about that kind of proposal.
Having sat down at the table and unable to hold it in me, I said: "Let's move to Rome".
In Mexico City there's a neighborhood called La Roma, which you may know through Cuarón's movie. I was living in La Condesa and she with her grandmother somewhere else in this enormous city. She thought I meant moving in together to La Roma.
"No, no. I mean Rome, Italy."
Without missing a beat she said: "Let's do it". (One of the many reasons why I ended up marrying her).
We quit our jobs and moved there for 6 months, having the time of our lives and causing a profound shift in our identities. But more on that later.
The thing is we got kind of addicted to this slow traveling. Spending 3-6 months in the same place. Soaking up the everyday life of a foreign city. Living like a local. Then coming back to our "base", Mexico City, for the rest of the year. Yes, sort of like a digital nomad but before it was cool. We've done it in New York, Oaxaca, Russia, Rio, Buenos Aires... and now Japan is next.
"Wow! I've never been to Japan. I would love to do what you guys do…", my aunt answered.
Which is a pretty common response, and causes an immediate, small wave of guilt in me.
To wash it off, I usually answer with "You know, you could do it too".
And I mean it.
I often think of how all this started and what led me to that proposal. The previously mentioned Tuesday, I got a morning phone call from the last boss I had. He started yelling, cursing at me on why we hadn’t reached the outlandish goals we set for the quarter. He wasn’t wrong, it was my responsibility by being in charge of the marketing and sales division, but the over-the-top aggression and yelling was too much.
Hanging up the phone, shaking with a mix of anger and shame, a thought popped up in my mind: “You don’t have to put up with this. You’re up for more”. It wasn’t the first time I felt this way and I’d already been toying with the idea of starting an online business and traveling.
This was just the tipping point. But I couldn’t quit today and run away from my problems just because my boss hurt my millennial feelings.
By the end of the day a plan had formed: I will leave this job having accomplished everything I was hired for and then we’ll move to Rome, all in the course of the next 6 months. That’s when I texted my girlfriend to have dinner, setting the plan in motion.
In hindsight, it was a Whiplash-y move with unintended consequences.
Fear and uncertainty definitely set in over the next few days, making us question if we should really leave this relatively comfortable setting for the unknown. But then we thought: What’s the worst that could happen?
Like, really. "Well, worst-case scenario, we run out of money and come back to Mexico. Either to our old jobs or to our parent's house.” Yes, a failure. Something we wouldn’t recover from? I don’t think so.
Even with those reassuring thoughts in mind we still needed a way to support ourselves. Impulsive as he was, my boss had also given me good advice: “If you learn the skills to sell online, you’re set for life.” which I’d taken to heart for the last year.
Coupled with my previous background in building failed but lean startups, we began testing ideas. Low-cost, fast.
The first idea was The Barman Handbook. A combo of an ebook on how to become a cocktail maker with a physical cocktail mixer. Set up a landing page, launched some Facebook campaigns. We didn’t even write out the ebook before launching, I figured we’d pull an all-nighter making it after we got the first sale.
Which we never did. Lots of clicks, no-one buying. Did some tweaking, launched again. Nothing. We then tried selling some self-massaging products. Same story.
On to the next idea. And the next.
Nothing was working and the deadline was coming. By now we’re 3 months in since we decided on the plan, with 3 more months to go.
Because we had already burned the boats. We’d bought our plane tickets before we quit our jobs or told our families, let alone having an alternate income, setting a firm deadline that sent us a clear message: you either make everything in your power to accomplish it, or you lose something big.
On a Sunday, eating a torta de chilaquiles (picture the most carb-dense mexican food there is: tortilla chips, salsa, cheese and breaded chicken inside a baguette), struggling to find our next move, my girlfriend came up with a meta-idea: “why don’t we sell what you already know?” I immediately saw it: a digital marketing agency. We finished the tortas and got to it.
We trimmed down the offer to a recurring service designing Facebook content posts for SMEs. Launched a quick Mexico-wide campaign on Facebook. Got a bunch of leads and started cold-calling them. A week later in our 7th call we closed our first client: a school in León, coincidentally my home town. It took a bit of bluffing and using a WeWork address, but we delivered on the service. In hindsight, we learned that services and recurring are keywords to keep in mind. Low operating costs, and you sell it once and get paid many times.
Fast-forward 3 months and we now had 4 clients when we got on the plane to Rome, having successfully left our jobs.
We kept working on the business from Europe and it kept growing, but earning in pesos and spending in euros eventually caught up with us, and we strongly considered packing up and heading home. But we didn't stop.
Contrary to how risk-averse I’ve always been with money, I’d recently heard a quote that wouldn’t leave my mind: “Instead of spending time thinking how to cut down costs, spend it thinking in ways to make more money”. We did exactly that: we 3X the ad spending to get more leads. We thought of more things to sell to current clients. We developed and executed new, alternate income ideas. All while still eating neapolitan pizzas and ordering aperol spritz, not compromising on anything and anywhere we wanted to go.
It worked. Not flawlessly, we did get some credit card debt that we eventually paid off.
But the upside? Well, where should I start… There’s not a week that goes by where we don't mention an inside joke from that trip, or remember something we ate there.
With changes, ups and downs, Matrioshka is still thriving.
And most of all, the change in the wiring of our brains for achieving something crazy we really wanted hasn’t left us.
And you,
What do you really want?
Buy the plane ticket.
Call the person.
Push the red button.
Take action.
damn, rereading this months later really hit differently, Oscar