In 2021, I swung for the fences, and I failed.
I failed. I failed. I failed.
I lost everything.
Perhaps it wasn’t the right time, or I simply wasn’t ready.
In April 2022, I got a job delivering food for Uber.
On a bicycle.
I couldn’t afford to buy or rent a car. The choice was either to deliver food on the bicycle, or don’t make the money I would need to have a roof over my head and food in my stomach.
It was a slow start to earning a living on the bicycle. Eventually, I was earning just enough to pay for a bed at a New York City hostel. One night at a time. I would ride the bicycle until 4-5am, make my way back to the hostel, pay for a night of housing, sleep, wake up, and get back on the bicycle around 5pm the next evening.
This was the first time I worked a job like this since delivering pizzas out of my white Honda hatchback during college.
Life on the bicycle made it hard to think about the future. I was on the go all the time. My phone notifications would constantly tell me to go pick up food, they would tell me where to bring that food, and meanwhile I was earning just enough to get by on a daily basis. It was hard to access parts of my mind that might allow me to come up with a solution to this challenge I was in.
I wasn’t sure how to transform myself out of the life and into something more.
Fortunately, in July of 2022, a friend reached out to check-in on me. We started to schedule calls throughout the weeks where he asked for my help with his work and he would ask me to talk about different parts of my life’s work. It was as if he was a gardener, I was the soil, and the potential within me were the seeds. Each meeting I could sense seeds germinating into sprouts which eventually peaked through the soil and before we knew it we had a beautiful garden blooming.
These conversations were tapping into my intrinsic motivation to fulfill my life purpose. For me, when this type of motivation is activated, it is strong.
I wasn’t sure what I would build next, but I felt ready to figure it out. I didn’t care that I had to ride the bike all day and night. I was ready to do whatever I needed to transcend that life into whatever was coming next.
For some reason, the idea of history repeating itself was something that came through for me.
I looked back on my history, and I could see that I had been in a similar scenario before. This was following a car accident in 2017. I was paralyzed from the waist down. They told me I would never walk again. I rejected this idea from the doctor. Within a few months, I ran seven miles, and I was ready to start my life over again.
Back then, it took me three months and $15,000 to build a new company and bring it to profitability before the seed capital ran out.
I looked at my bicycle, and I decided to work as hard as I possibly could to save enough money that would give me three months of time to incubate my next company.
By September 7, 2022 I had saved $3,000. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I moved to Germany to live with a friend rent-free for three months. This was an opportunity to build the rocket ship that I could launch into the next phase of my life.
Upon arriving to Germany, it took me about 2-3 weeks to get settled and into a new routine. I started going to the nearby coffee shop every morning. I wasn’t sure what was going to come through me, but I knew I needed to simply show up.
I began to express the next project on the paper in-front of me. Interestingly enough, it wasn’t necessarily a new project. Rather, it was the same work since 2009. This time it was more crystallized, and from a new perspective.
Within two months, I had a product and an experience ready to test with potential paying customers.
For the product, I created the next version of the software I prototyped over the last few years – this time, the software would be used for building, managing, and selling wellness villages.
For the experience, I created a monthly subscription to work alongside founders to support them in growing their ventures. My hope was to work with land owners to support them in growing their villages by using the software.
My intention was to continue learning from the 1:1 relationships with founders to gain a deeper understanding of their needs so that I could create features in the software targeted at relieving their pain points, or, perhaps eliminating the pain all together by transforming the entire process.
About 75 days into my three month incubator, I onboarded the first customer who signed up to pay for a monthly subscription. I had conversations in process with two other founders. I was invited by a fourth founder to work with him in person to open a new wellness center / vegan cafe in Costa Rica.
On November 13, 2022, I boarded my rocket ship and launched it into the next phase of my life. Fortunately, this next phase of my life did not involve delivering food to people while riding a bicycle. It involved working alongside founders who are establishing and growing ventures that make meaningful and authentic contributions to humanity.
I arrived to Costa Rica and jumped right into the founder’s life and work. We produced a series of events, farmer’s markets, and got the business off the ground.
The second day I was in Costa Rica, the founder brought me to a dinner where I was introduced to one of his investors, Svetlana. Svetlana and I worked closely on the project and began to build a 1:1 relationship. I sensed that Svetlana would make a good team mate and was wondering if she would join me in working together with the next founder.
By May 2023, I built a relationship with a founder who owned 96 hectares of raw land in Costa Rica. I was invited in to support him in bringing his vision for a village to life. I would eventually invite Svetlana into this project as my teammate.
Together, with the founders, we built a 10 person team and co-created a unique blueprint for building this particular village. We worked alongside the founder and his family on a daily basis for about six months. We learned a lot from this experience.
After we completed our work with this organization, we noticed there were many people who were buying raw land and trying to develop a village.
Svetlana and I have been working on a framing of the problem:
Humans are looking for a new way forward. There is a wave of people leaving the matrix to buy land and build villages to live more meaningful and harmonious lives. They don’t have the blueprint, technology, or leadership to be successful; and their ego can get in the way of receiving the help that is needed. They’re unsatisfied because they invest a lot of money and are not able to take it to the next level. We see this as a problem for village founders, and, actually, for founders at-large. We will begin this journey by working specifically with village founders.
More specifically, as Svetlana says,
“People buy land all the time. They buy land, they build some structures, bring their vans and Airstreams, put up some tents, build a few toilets and showers, maybe they get access to water, invite their friends, and then it kind of stops there. It all sounds nice and all, but many places lack the leadership, technology, and a blueprint for how to take these sacred pieces of land to the next level.”
As we look under the problem, we are learning that many of the challenges and opportunities founders face revolve around learning to get out of their own way, and to have the capacity to act with less ego. It’s about inviting other team members to be seen, take up space, and have real ownership in the company…more than just on paper.
Many founders have their need to be seen, and they don’t seem to understand how to satisfy their need to be seen while also creating space for the others to grow into their own unique brilliance. We believe this is how the culture of a great organization begins – from within the heart and soul of each founder and each teammate. It is not something that “we can figure out later”.
Another opportunity that is disguised as a problem: there are several different people and processes happening at the same time – an interconnected web of problems: the land owner, property managers, community managers, and visitors/renters use different processes and softwares to manage their experiences. We see these disconnected processes as an opportunity – Sagrada brings all these peoples and processes together into one place.
It starts here.
It starts from within.
We are solving these problems in three ways:
- Blueprint: 15 years of community research across North America resulted in a way – a roadmap – for designing and building villages.
- Technology: We transformed the Blueprint into an intelligent platform to streamline the inception, management, and liquidation of villages.
- Programs: We purchase land, manage the syndicate, and identify low-risk community development teams to establish and grow villages.
One of the ways our software can be helpful to founders: by automatically understanding where the founder is blind to their own ego, and continuously suggesting how to get out of their own way and avoid the potholes on the horizon as they architect, manage, and sell their villages.
Svetlana and I intend to lead by example. Here we are on our first piece of land in Costa Rica where we are developing our own village right now.
We will use this as an opportunity to build and sell our first village. We will also use this as an opportunity to improve our software which is designed to make it easier for community developers to build, manage, and sell villages.
Here’s the investor packet for more information on the project.
We do not know where we will end up in 5, 3, or 2 years. We do, however, know our customer from working with them for the last 15 years. We know the pain points and how they have evolved – many of which have continued to go unsolved, unrecognized, and seemingly dormant in the subconscious.
We also know the customer because we are the customer.
We are the founders who struggle with getting out of our own way. We are the founders who know what it’s like to lose everything because of our ego and be left to ride a bicycle working for Uber.
With ongoing data collected from founders like us combined with the hard lessons of our personal experiences, we believe it is our time to revolutionize the way founders build and sell villages, communities, and companies.