Freelancer

I started freelancing while still at university. What began as a way to pay rent turned into a crash course in business, one client at a time. Five years later, I've worked on strategy, sales, UX, and engineering across SaaS, hardware, and digital services. The common thread: understanding what customers actually need versus what they say they need.

The Work

Freelancing taught me something that full-time roles can't. When you're the entire company, you learn every function fast. I've been on sales calls at 8am and debugging production at midnight. I've written proposals, negotiated contracts, managed scope creep, and dealt with clients who ghosted after three months of work.

The engagements fall into three buckets: strategic advisory for companies figuring out their positioning, hands-on development for teams that need to ship, and sales work that taught me what actually closes deals.

Strategic Advisory

Product and business consulting for early-stage companies. The work is less glamorous than it sounds. Mostly asking uncomfortable questions until we find what's actually blocking growth.

• Plume: IoT company with a data team that had infrastructure but no clear direction. They were collecting connectivity data from millions of devices but weren't sure what to do with it. I helped them identify use cases that actually mattered for the business, prioritize what to build first, and gave the data team a roadmap they could execute on.
• MDDSystems: Tiny startup that pivoted from hardware to consulting. Helped them figure out how to position the new business, who to target, and how to package their technical expertise into services companies would pay for.

Sales and Implementation

Most engineers never do sales. I think that's a mistake. Understanding what closes deals shapes how you build products. Features don't sell, outcomes do. The demo matters more than the architecture. Timing kills more deals than competition.

• Soluciones del Hard: Sold and delivered hardware solutions for industrial clients. Full cycle: prospecting, demos, negotiation, installation, and support. The product was commodity hardware, so differentiation was entirely about service and trust. I learned to sell on reliability, not specs.

UX Research and Development

For startups without a dedicated research function, I've run user interviews, usability tests, and competitive analysis. Then built what we learned. Researchers who don't build often miss implementation constraints. Builders who don't research often build the wrong thing. This work eventually became Landa, a studio I co-founded to offer these services more formally.

• User interviews: 50+ hours of customer conversations across different projects. The skill isn't asking questions, it's knowing when to shut up and let them talk.
• Full-stack development: APIs, databases, frontends. Complete products, not prototypes. Shipped in Python, TypeScript, React, and whatever the project required.
• Market research: Sizing opportunities, mapping competitors, finding differentiation angles. The unsexy work that prevents building something nobody wants.

Side Projects

Beyond client work, I build my own tools. No stakeholders, no timelines. Just problems I want to solve and technologies I want to learn. Some become useful products. All inform what I bring to consulting.

• Jarvis: AI agent for content creation and brand management. 20+ commands, skills, and subagents. Claude AI with API integrations. Connected to OpenMolt so it's always available. Works as a second brain, synced across devices.
• Trading Automation: Personal trading research platform with PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, and Airflow. Real-time feeds, historical analysis, 20+ backtested strategies. The constraints are different when your own money is on the line.
• Autonomous Robot: University robotics project. ML, deep learning, and classical algorithms with cameras and sensors. Runs on Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and simulators. Traffic signal detection hit 99.5% accuracy.
• Personal Portfolio: This site. Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, bilingual, dark mode. Built in 12 hours with AI-accelerated development. Lighthouse 95+.

What I Learned

Five years of freelancing taught me things that don't fit on a resume.

Scope creep is a relationship problem. The best statement of work won't save you from a client who keeps changing their mind. Learning to say no, and to fire clients who can't respect boundaries, took me three years and several painful projects.

The best marketing is doing good work for people who talk. I stopped cold outreach in year two. Every client since then came through referrals. Invest disproportionately in clients who have networks.

Generalists win in small markets, specialists in large ones. As a freelancer serving startups, being able to do strategy AND engineering AND sales made me more valuable than someone who only did one. At a large company, the opposite would be true.

Hourly billing is a trap. It punishes efficiency and rewards busywork. Switching to project-based pricing doubled my effective rate and made clients happier because they knew the cost upfront.

What I Bring

Having worked across strategy, sales, UX, and engineering means I understand constraints from every angle. I've watched features that took months to build get ignored because nobody asked the right questions upfront. I've seen simple MVPs close deals that polished products couldn't.

After enough projects, you start seeing the same mistakes before they happen. The startup building features nobody asked for. The enterprise deal that will die in procurement. The technical decision that will become tech debt in six months.

Technical choices and business choices are often the same decision viewed from different angles. I think about both.

Plans are worthless without execution. I optimize for getting things out the door, learning from real users, and iterating.

Working With Me

I take on 2-3 consulting engagements at a time, usually in AI/data architecture, product strategy, or full-stack development. If you're building something in these areas and need someone who can both think and ship, reach out.

For larger projects, I work with Landa, a studio I co-founded for startups that need design and development without the agency overhead.