I built a Spanish-language podcast exploring work, careers, and unconventional professional paths.
Why it mattered: It became the trust layer, audience engine, and narrative foundation for everything that followed.
Outcome:
+190 episodes, made it to the most listened-to podcasts in its category in Argentina, top 5% most watched globally on Spotify, and the entry point to education products, community, and services.
Context: creative stagnation and a repeated question
The idea for the podcast came from a mix of boredom and clarity.
At the time, I was working in product for a tech company. Professionally, things were fine, but creatively, I felt flat. At the same time, I had just reached a point where I felt I had “figured out” the digital nomad lifestyle.
I had spent years working remotely, traveling, and living across countries. And the same questions kept coming back, from friends, family, and peers:
- Why are you traveling?
- Where are you living now?
- What do you actually do?
- How does that even work?
I realized something important: I had answers, but no shared language to explain them.
The visibility gap in Spanish
I’ve always consumed books and podcasts in English. Stories about work, careers, and experimentation were abundant there.
Shows like The Tim Ferriss Show normalize complexity, trade-offs, and unconventional paths. But in Spanish, that content barely existed.
Access wasn’t just about the internet or technology; it was about language.
To understand those stories, you had to be bilingual. That excluded a huge part of the Spanish-speaking market.
My hypothesis was simple and deliberately limited: If I tell real stories, in Spanish, about how people build unconventional professional lives, more people will feel allowed to imagine different paths.
A deliberately small experiment: 10 episodes
Together with a close friend who supported and encouraged me, I decided to try a 10-episode podcast. That was it.
The constraint mattered. It made the project feel possible.
The first guests were intentionally close:
- A friend who worked as a freelance illustrator while traveling the world
- An entrepreneur who tried many things before one finally worked, heavily leveraging content
- A founder who closed her company and moved to Europe with her partner to live as digital nomads in a van
Episode 10 was supposed to be my own story.
Reverse engineering the launch
Around the same time, I was invited to speak at Fuck Up Nights, digital nomads edition in Argentina. The talk included a live Q&A.
Together with my friend Jesi, who coached me for that talk, we set a concrete goal:
By the time I stepped on stage, three podcast episodes had to be live.
We reverse-engineered everything to reach that moment. That deadline forced execution.
When I came back to Argentina and the episodes were out, people responded positively. Friends liked it. People close to me shared it so I kept recording.
Learning by doing: production from zero
At the beginning, I did everything myself.
- I didn’t know how to edit audio
- I learned using Audacity
- I recorded with tools like Riverside or Zencastr
- I edited audio myself
- I saved the video files, even if I wasn’t using them yet
It was a creative project. I studied other podcasters I admired and adapted what made sense for a Spanish-speaking audience.
Right before launching, Tim Ferriss published an episode explaining how he runs his podcast. I took many of those best practices and applied them from day one.
Designing the podcast as a remote-first system
From the beginning, the podcast format was intentionally designed to be fully remote. I started the podcast while traveling, and I kept traveling while producing it.
Over time, I recorded episodes from:
- Spain
- Argentina
- Thailand
- Indonesia
- Turkey
- The United States, including Washington during my time at Georgetown
Often, that meant:
- Recording very early in the morning
- Or very late at night
- Managing large time zone differences
Guests were also distributed globally, which made a remote-first format not just convenient but necessary.
From the start, I treated the podcast like an engineering problem.
That meant:
- Always having a backlog of potential guests
- Keeping a long list of stories worth telling
- Recording episodes in advance
- Avoiding last-minute publishing
- Building buffers
- Publishing consistently
Initially, episodes were biweekly. The moment someone asked why there wasn’t a new episode on Tuesday, I switched to weekly. Consistency became the growth strategy.
Guest sourcing as a long-term system
Finding guests was never about cold outreach only. I tried everything: direct invitations, introductions, and in-person conversations while traveling
Some examples that stand out:
- Meeting Cal Newport in Washington and later recording from Argentina
- Six months of pre-production to bring Edith Eger to the podcast
- Interviewing Isela Costantini, a conversation I consider a milestone
- Landing in Madrid after a long flight, going directly to a conference, meeting the hosts of Se Regalan Dudas, and later bringing Paulina Herrera to the show
Many episodes exist because of being present, following up, being clear about the intention of the conversation, and being persistent without being transactional
People said yes because they understood what the podcast was trying to do.
Improving 1 percent at a time
My goal was never to create “the episode that changes everything”.
The goal was to improve 1 percent every time.
- Better questions
- Better listening
- Better structure
- Better pacing
By episode 15, I delegated editing so I could focus on recording and conversations.
From that point on, my job was to:
- book guests
- prepare interviews
- record
- keep the system running
Early growth sprint: press, timing, and unexpected validation
Very early in the podcast, I decided to run a short growth sprint.
I didn’t know much about distribution yet, but I did know one thing: if this project was going to work, it needed to reach beyond my immediate circle.
One of my first guests, Mia Guastavino, asked a simple question: “Why don’t you try getting press?”
I reached out to a journalist from Infobae, someone I had been in contact with before, and pitched the podcast itself as the story.
The timing could not have been more chaotic.
I was about to leave for six months in Indonesia, which meant a completely different time zone. I was traveling that same weekend. On Friday, I had my last recording before the trip, an interview with Pablo González from El Gato y la Caja.
That same day:
- I was buying a suitcase
- Walking my dog
- Running across the city
- Preparing for the recording
- Mentally already leaving the country
In the middle of all that, the journalist called.
I took the interview while walking through the city:
- Dog on one hand
- Suitcase on the other
- Headphones on
- Raising my voice to compete with traffic noise
- Explaining the podcast and why it existed
I finished the call and left for Indonesia.
The moment everything shifted
A few days later, already in Indonesia, I received a message from someone I didn’t know: “Great article.” I had no idea what they were talking about. Then I saw it.
The Infobae article had been published.
Because of the time difference, it was night for me, while Argentina was just waking up. As the morning progressed, my phone started exploding.
That single piece of press:
- Dramatically increased the audience
- Pushed the podcast into national rankings in Argentina
- Took it from “niche experiment” to “something people were talking about”
When I realized this could become a company
After that wave, messages started arriving that changed how I saw the project.
People wrote to tell me:
- They had quit their jobs after listening to the podcast
- They had bought plane tickets
- They had finally acted on ideas they had postponed for years
One story stayed with me in particular.
A listener wanted to become a digital nomad and travel, but the pandemic put that dream on hold. Later, they didn’t pursue it because their partner was a doctor.
The partner started listening to the podcast while working in the hospital.
He decided to quit.
They got married.
They sent me a photo of their wedding.
They moved to Australia together.
That was the moment I understood something fundamental: This was moving people emotionally.
That realization gave me permission to think bigger. It’s also the moment when the idea of building a company behind the podcast stopped feeling abstract.
The stories expanded with the audience
As the podcast grew, so did the range of stories:
- Entrepreneurs explaining why they shut down their companies
- Authors discussing the ideas behind their books
- Professionals demystifying industries like HR and recruiting
- Deep conversations about decision-making, failure, and change
At episode 50, Agustína Irureta interviewed me so the audience could understand who was behind the questions.
Experimentation and iteration
Not everything worked.
We tested:
- 10-minute highlight mashups of past episodes
- Different clipping formats
- Distribution experiments
Some formats underperformed and were dropped.
We adapted as platforms changed:
- Video was always uploaded to YouTube, but never YouTube-first
- When Spotify launched native video, we experimented with video podcasting there
- That didn’t meaningfully improve performance and created friction
In 2025, I was invited to record seven episodes at Spotify studios, focused on the future of work. It was a new format and a significant operational challenge.
Spotify successes
The Spotify Buenos Aires challenge
One of the most operationally challenging moments came when I was invited to record seven episodes at Spotify studios in Buenos Aires.
The constraints were tight:
- Very little advance notice
- Seven different one-hour slots
- Spread across three days
- Fixed schedules, no flexible blocks
- January recording window, peak vacation season in Argentina
This meant that in 48 hours, I had to:
- Select seven guests
- Ensure all were physically in Buenos Aires
- Make sure they were strong speakers
- Ideally people I already knew and trusted
- Ensure all conversations fit under one thematic umbrella: the world of work
- Build a schedule that worked like Tetris, with zero margin for failure
And I had to do all of this while knowing:
- If someone canceled, there was no backup slot
- If someone didn’t show up, the episode was lost
We filled the grid.
One of the most memorable moments was recording with Gabriel Marco Longo.
He was coming directly from the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. He landed at Ezeiza, went home to shower, and came straight to the studio
If his flight had been delayed, there was no plan B.
The episode happened anyway.
That experience reinforced something I had learned over time: Preparation and relationships matter more than perfect conditions.
Key performance indicators
KPI 1: Episodes published
- KPI value: 190+ episodes
- KPI description: Long-form conversations published consistently over multiple years
KPI 2: Publishing cadence
- KPI value: Weekly
- KPI description: Continuous weekly release without breaks once the cadence was established
KPI 3: Geographic reach
- KPI value: Global
- KPI description: Guests and listeners across Latin America, Europe, and the United States
KPI 4: Content leverage
- KPI value: Multiple downstream products
- KPI description: Podcast as the origin of memberships, courses, newsletters, and B2B services
KPI 5: Audience trust signals
- KPI value: High inbound engagement
- KPI description: Direct messages, career decisions, resignations, relocations, and referrals attributed to the podcast
Conclusion
The podcast was the first experiment, and the most foundational one.
It wasn’t optimized for monetization.
It was optimized for meaning, visibility, and trust.
Without the podcast:
- there would be no audience
- no education products
- no community
- no services
This case study matters because it explains why all the others were even possible.