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A Monterrey founder paid a Pakistani dev team $15,000 to build an email-capture SDK for mobile apps and sold exactly one licence at $300 a year; the $20,000 pivot that fixed a leak people could actually feel sold licences off a single webinar — and then the money ran out
"My first platform didn't solve a problem. It was interesting or useful to have, but people had no pain they'd pay to fix — so I got one customer." The pivot addressed a leak the buyer could feel: leads arriving from Facebook and dying in a spreadsheet. Same codebase, same integrations, and it actually sold.
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Jorge Díaz hosts a Spanish-language podcast about software as a service and used episode 52 to do a postmortem on his own first attempt, from 2015 and 2016, recorded around 2021. He came in with an asset most first-time SaaS founders do not have: a prior mobile app called OneApp — a free-app-a-day recommendation app, once $5 and later free — which had built an email list of 55,000 people and made money from in-app advertising and affiliate programmes, including Apple's. That experience made him, in his words, an evangelist for email marketing as the most profitable digital channel, and it produced the idea for his first product: an SDK that app developers could drop into their apps to show a landing page and capture subscriber emails, connected straight into CRMs. He paid a development team in Pakistan — who were also equity partners rather than paid contractors — $15,000 to build it. Then he took it to a startup accelerator in Monterrey, which told him that if he validated or sold the product they might help and introduce investors, for 6% of the company. So he went and sold a licence: one, at $300 a year, to an entrepreneur in England running a fictional stock-market game app. Nothing came of the accelerator. He then pivoted, spending another $20,000 to reuse the same CRM integrations for an entirely different market, launched in 2016, sold licences off a single webinar, and then ran out of money. The developers, being partners rather than employees, lost interest when the money stopped. The product is gone — he tells listeners not to bother visiting the domain because there is nothing there.
There was no channel, only an errand. After paying a development team in Pakistan $15,000 to build the email-capture SDK, Jorge Diaz took it to a Monterrey accelerator, which told him that if he validated or sold the product they might help and introduce investors in exchange for 6%.
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Data credibility: Founder telling his own failure story in Spanish on his own podcast, recorded around 2021 about events in 2015 and 2016 — so the figures are recollections five to six years after the fact, with screen recordings of the old product shown but no financial dashboards. Founder-stated and unaudited: $15,000 to build the mobile SDK, $20,000 to build the Facebook Lead Ads connector, about $35,000 in total; exactly one licence sold for the first product at $300/year to an app developer in England whose app then collected about 30 leads a day; pricing of $29/month, $99/year and a $199 one-time lifetime licence for the second; a prior app (OneApp) with an email list of 55,000 subscribers monetised via in-app ads and affiliate programmes; developers based in Pakistan who were equity partners; and a Monterrey accelerator offering help and investor introductions for 6% conditional on validation. ⚠️ The unit count for product 2's sales is genuinely unclear: the relevant passage moves between "if you sell 10, which was my case," a count-off of "1, 2, 3, 4, 5," and "only 25 licences at $200," and the auto-captions garble it further, so we have reported the ambiguity rather than pick a number. ⚠️ The product name is unreliable. The Spanish auto-captions render it as "lead léger" four times and also as "lis léger," "liz léger," "lite léger," "lit léger," "lit leyera," "lee player" and "iplayer"; we read it as LeadLedger (with the second product as LeadLedger Connect) but this should be verified before publication. Competitor figures are his research as presented on his own old investor slides, not independently checked: LeadsBridge displaying 4,000+ customers on its website in 2016, and ConnectLeads launching in November 2015 with $1.5M in sales of which roughly $500,000 went to affiliate partners. A third competitor's name is unrecoverable from the captions. Not disclosed: total revenue for either product, customer count for product 2, monthly server costs, or the terms of the developers' equity.
The first dollar was $300, paid once a year, by a single app developer in England who dropped the SDK into a fictional stock-market game so it could open with a landing page offering financial tips. That app went on to collect about 30 leads a day, which made it the one genuine proof point either product produced.
It never turned, and the competitive slide he built for investors explains why in one number.
The quiet stretch ran roughly a year, from the 2015 launch into the 2016 pivot, and the signal during it was unusually clear: one licence, $300, nothing else. What he did with that signal was right, and late.
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