Alright, this one’s a good one.
It’s not the story of my life, but there were some pretty great moments.
The Spark
Javi—my best friend—and I already had some name recognition in the online literature world thanks to Sttorybox.
At one of those startup events, a kind of entrepreneurship guru with semi-fame approached us. He had a bit of a success story, made it to the media, etc., etc. (Later on, I’d find out he was a total con artist). So this guy comes up to us and says:
—I’ve discovered a format that’s killing it in the US and Canada—chat stories.
Chat stories are like novels in chat format. Super addictive, because it feels like you’re reading messages between characters. And to reveal the next messages, you have to tap. Almost like the TikTok of literature. Instant literary dopamine.
So we team up with this guy—let’s call him “A”—a super nice film producer, Javi, and me, to start a company around this concept, but with Spanish-language content, targeting Spain and Latin America.
The idea was to recruit a few writers with a solid following, have them create stories in chat format, and see what happened.
The build
Javi, as always, built the backend. And I started designing. We called it Leemur app.
As it happened, I ended up designing the MVP while backpacking through Israel. I spent a few days in a hostel in Tel Aviv designing the main screens. It was basically a kind of Netflix where the content was chat conversations. Not the wildest UX challenge ever, but it had to be done right.
Allow me to pause here to share something completely unrelated to design, startups, or any of that. There was a guy at the hostel who was basically the Argentine version of Peter Griffin. In the dorm room with eight beds, he ended up sleeping in the bunk below mine. The whole bed frame shook whenever he moved. But the worst part? At night, the guy was a freaking fart machine. Every gas release echoed through the room. I swear I’m not exaggerating. It was disgusting. Everyone was shocked.
He actually got kicked out of the hostel for being a disruptive farter. First and only time in my life I’ve seen that happen. Wild.
Anyway—after a few days of designing and coordinating with the guy helping us with the Android app, we launched the MVP. A simple, super easy-to-use app.
And it blew up. Downloads, virality. I was really starting to enjoy designing.
Soon after we launched the MVP, we were contacted by Grupo Planeta—one of the biggest publishers in Spain and LATAM.
They dropped half a million euros on us, just like that, and brought in people from their Editorial, Marketing, and other teams to support.
That kicked off a year of evolving the product, bringing in high-profile national and international writers—some with pretty serious awards—and building the best chat story app in Spanish, with some genuinely great content.
One of the fun things about having a big corporation like Planeta join your cap table is that you start living random moments that feel like scenes from The Office. I remember a day when we went to their Barcelona office for a brand workshop or something.
There were two marketing experts from Grupo Planeta, “A”, someone from the editorial team, and me. During one of the sessions, “A” acted like some kind of guru, leading the session with a weird little ethnic puppet we had to hold and “greet” in order to speak. Obviously, no one gave a damn, and we just talked like normal people.
Another time, we had to say what the brand, Leemur, made us think of. One of the marketing guys, sounding totally hungover, goes:
—Cocaine!
Lol. Like I said—The Office. The only thing missing was a CPR training session.
All stories aside, what I was designing once again had huge impact on users. For the second time, I got to take a concept from 0 to 1, straight from my head to the phones of hundreds of thousands of people.
How could I not love being a designer?
The Cracks
That said, Leemur’s story is deeply tied to “A”, the con artist I mentioned earlier. From the beginning, there was tension between Javi and “A”, which ended with Javi leaving the project.
We’d pay a steep technical price for that later.
Later on, after the money from Grupo Planeta came in, “A” gave himself a rather ridiculous salary—completely out of proportion to everyone else and to the stage we were in.
And then came one of the wildest moments: he called a meeting with the startup’s co-founders and asked us to sign over our shares so he could have control and supposedly apply for a grant.
Obviously, that didn’t happen. But despite the product’s success, I was already starting to think about stepping away—happy with everything we’d achieved.
And that’s how I ended up crossing paths with Jobandtalent, one of Spain’s best-known unicorns.
You can read that story here.
V.