Building Not Drifting Owning My Time (Part 1)

I’m 33, middle class in Brazil, with a good house, a car, and a couple of loans to pay every month. I’m not rich — I mean, I have a beautiful family, and that makes me rich. My life is comfortable, but I want more. To get there, I need to challenge myself. Why? Because I have a wife and a daughter I love, and I want to make sure they’re safe. To do that, I have to be the owner of my time.

For the last decade, I’ve been playing the same game, running in circles. It’s time to change that. I want to make more. I want my dreams to come true while I’m alive.

As I wrote in my last post, Perspectives Through a Limited Lens, I’m not the winner I’d like to be. I know what it takes to get there, but I never believed in myself because “good enough” felt fine. It’s not fine anymore. People depend on me. I love being helpful. I love being a father, a husband, and the oldest son.

So how will I change the way I play this game? I have a couple of ideas. I’m a software engineer; it’s been my work for the last decade. The obvious starting point is to build something people want — software that creates real value.

It’s not as simple as it sounds. I’ve tried many times and failed. Honestly, most of the time I gave up at the first sign of doubt. I didn’t believe I could do it, which is wild because I’ve accomplished so many things in my life, and yet I still doubted my potential.

With that said, let’s get straight to the point. Here are some of the businesses I’m building:

• CodaSignal: My software studio. I’ll use a decade of experience working with startups and medium-sized companies, plus tools that speed up software development. This is how we’ll work at CodaSignal:

  1. Discover the smallest version worth shipping and align on scope.
  2. Design key screens and validate risky parts first with a quick prototype.
  3. Build on a weekly demo rhythm with clear acceptance and change paths.
  4. Launch safely with monitoring, rollback, and a steady improvement cadence.
     At CodaSignal, I’ll act as CTO and guide the team I work with, most of them are old friends. I’m not doing this alone.

• Yamless.io: The most complex idea I’m building. I started in May 2025, and I’m not even 30% through the MVP. If you’re building a mobile or web app, you’ll eventually need CI/CD, usually configured with a YAML file. That file controls the flows you need to build and ship the app. It can be a pain, especially if you’re not DevOps, and costs can get high depending on the platform and how often you deploy. Yamless will give you everything you need for a fixed price, and you can even use your own hardware to improve the experience. I haven’t validated the idea with the audience yet, and building this kind of software takes a lot of knowledge and money. I’ve already spent months on it. I hope to see some people join the waitlist.

• CodaRelink: An alternative to the now-dead Firebase Dynamic Links. I feel a bit bad about this one because I had the chance to build it before FDL shut down, but I didn’t pay attention. Anyway, it’s live and working, and I’ll promote it. I hope to get some subscriptions. I’ll probably change the name; I don’t like it anymore.

So, here are my goals

• Bills baseline
  Cover my monthly costs with product revenue by Mar 31, 2026.

• CodaRelink
  100 paid subscriptions at R$39/m = R$3,900 MRR by Jan 31, 2026.
  Leading indicators: 10 trials/week, 30% trial→paid, <5% monthly churn.

• CodaSignal (services to fund product runway)
  2 active retainers at R$15k/m each by Dec 15, 2025.
  Pipeline: 6 qualified leads/mo, 2 proposals/mo, 1 closed deal/mo.

• Yamless
  MVP live by Feb 28, 2026.
  500 waitlist emails and 30 design-partner interviews by Jan 31, 2026.
  Success gate: 5 teams running real builds in week 1 of private beta.

• Time ownership
  20 focused hours/week on my products (tracked), every week for 12 weeks.

This is the first post in this journey. Every Monday, I’ll share what I’ve done during the week and weekend, the struggles, the costs, and as much as I can. Here on my blog, I’ll try to avoid too many technical details because I want this to be accessible to everyone. See you next time.