Below you’ll find a list of companies I started over the years (reverse chronological order) and their current status.

AZpop (Co-founded in 2019 – Still going)

AZpop is a mobile app that works like Yellow Pages for WhatsApp (starting with the Brazilian market). Our growth rate was above 10% a week for much of our first year, allowing us to reach 1 million downloads in the period.

We are currently operating in 300 Brazilian cities and plan to expand to most of the country by the end of 2020 and internationally by 2021.

InstaDelivery (Founded in 2018)

In Brazil (much like other parts of the world) the online delivery market is dominated by a couple of players (iFood and UberEats), and those mobile applications charge hefty fees from restaurants while keeping the customers for themselves. We built InstaDelivery to solve this problem, providing an online menu for restaurants/stores so that they can keep their customers and avoid paying huge fees per order.

We charge a monthly fee for using our platform and currently more than 2000 stores in Brazil use it.

Botware (Founded in 2016 – Sold Brand/Website in 2020)

I have always been fascinated about the challenge of making computers understand and talk/write back to humans. When Facebook announced its chatbot API for Messenger I started playing around with bots and created Botware to offer chatbot development services to companies. For example, I created a bot prototype for Decolar.com (largest travel website in South America) that could send quotations and hot deals for users.

As an entrepreneur, I am much more fond of products than services, because products are scalable. That is why I tried to create products out of the chatbots, and the most popular one was a delivery bot that could take orders from clients. This product spun-off a company called InstaDelivery, and in 2020 I sold the Botware brand/website to HeyPink.com (another chatbot developer in Brazil).

SmartShop.com.br (Co-founded in 2015 – Closed in 2016)

The market for second-hand smartphones is growing quite fast around the world, and in this market having a company acting as middleman is beneficial, because someone needs to verify the precedence of the phones (to make sure they are not stolen, for instance), to revise and make sure they are fully functional, and to offer a guarantee to the new buyers. Gazelle.com is having a lot of success with this model in the US, having bought and sold over a million devices already.

Along with my co-founder I decided to replicate this model in Brazil, calling our company SmartShop.com.br. We had some competitors, but all of them operated online exclusively. We were the first company to adopt an hybrid approach, where we had a website and physical stores as well. We believed that having physical stores was essential to reach the Brazilian customer, as he prefers to touch the good he is about to buy, especially second-hand ones. Our revenues were pretty good, but the profit margin was terrible. After realizing that we would not be able to revert that, we decided to close the company late in 2016.

Kubic Technology (Co-founded in 2011 – Sold the Brand/Website in 2015)

Back in 2011 the market for mobile app development was booming, and I figured that it could be both interesting and profitable to jump in. I asked my brother (who is also a programmer) to co-found the company with me, and together we started Kubic Technology. I was in charge of the Android and backend development, and he was in charge of the iOS development. We also had a designer and a marketer working with us.

Over the years we developed projects for restaurants, banks and other organizations. It was a nice experience, but after a while we weren’t having fun anymore developing for other people, as we wanted to focus on our own projects. That is why we decided to sell the brand and website in 2015, and my brother went on to work at Facebook.

Online Profits (Founded in 2006 – Still Going)

The Internet and the Web always fascinated me. The concept that anyone can publish content that will be instantly available to the whole world is just inspiring! That is why I decided to build a couple of blogs and websites back in 2005. Initially it was just a hobby, but after a while I discovered Google AdSense and started making some money. I made $100 or so during my first month. It wasn’t much, but certainly enough to get me excited!

After a while I was working full time with my websites, and Online Profits LLC is the umbrella company over them. Over the years I built, bought and sold over 30 different websites, and over 150 million people visited those sites. I also worked with several revenue sources, from AdSense to affiliate marketing and selling digital products. The company is still going, managing a couple of websites that I never sold. Each website has its own content editor, so I simply need to manage the servers and the finances, which takes a couple of hours per week or so.