Cristian Sanchez-Aguilera

That did something to my head.

Until then, work felt like a role adults were assigned. After that payment, it looked more like a skill I could learn, sell, and get better at.

College lasted one semester. I would sit in lecture halls doing the math on how long the normal path was going to take, then go home and learn faster by trying to build things myself. I was impatient, probably more than I understood at the time. I wanted a skill I could carry into any business I eventually started.

I picked sales.

Nothing moves until someone says yes.

The next five months were the unglamorous part. I worked overnight freight at Home Depot, then knocked doors for roofing and windows. Hot days, ugly hours, three hours of sleep some nights. People decided what they thought of me before I finished the first sentence.

I crashed my car during that stretch and was back out knocking the following week. I wasn’t fearless. I just didn’t have a better plan to retreat to.

Then I heard about tech sales. It was the same basic test I had already been taking at people’s front doors: earn someone’s attention, understand what matters to them, and get them to take the next step. The difference was that the skill had a much higher ceiling.

Three weeks later, at 19, I broke into enterprise SaaS with no degree and no network.

Just reps.

Each company taught me a different version of how people buy. Varonis taught me enterprise discipline: long sales cycles, crowded buying committees, and how security teams think about risk. At Swap, I joined early enough that there was no finished playbook waiting for me. We had to find the message and the motion while running it. At DataSnipper, I sold audit automation to finance teams who did not want another tool. They wanted fewer hours in spreadsheets, which meant the pitch only worked if it sounded like their work.

While doing the job, I kept a running list of everything that made sellers slower than they needed to be: research scattered across tabs, repetitive admin work, missing context, and tools that behaved like separate islands.

Syntri came out of that list.

It has now crossed $5,000 in annual recurring revenue. That number is still small enough to keep me honest, but large enough to prove something important: people will pay for software built by someone who has actually done the work it is supposed to improve.

I still do that work.

Through Outbound Foundry, I cold call and run outbound for clients the old-fashioned way. Two clients have generated more than $6,000 in revenue for the business and over $40,000 in qualified pipeline for themselves.

I don’t treat the service work like an embarrassing phase I need to escape before I can call myself a real founder. It funds the software, keeps me close to buyers, and exposes weak assumptions fast.

You don’t get to build the tool if you stop doing the job.

Outflow came from an earlier version of me: 19, no degree, no map, trying to persuade someone to take a chance. Seven people have broken into tech sales through it so far.

Seven is not a huge number. It is also seven real people whose direction changed because something I built worked. That matters more to me than a dashboard full of sign-ups.

BLDR is newer. It is for operators who have ideas for software but feel locked out by the technical language surrounding it. I know what it is like to enter a field where everyone else seems to have been handed the dictionary. We are building the thing I would have wanted: a practical path from idea to working product without pretending the learning curve is not real.

I don’t want one impressive title.

I want a small group of businesses built around problems I had to live through before I understood them. Some will work. Some probably won’t. That is part of building anything real.

The standard is that they leave evidence behind: customers, commits, invoices, mistakes, and a GitHub graph that proves I didn’t just outline them.

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