Nobody in my family ran a business, so I learned at night

I made my first website at 12.

Nobody had asked me for it. Nobody was going to pay for it.

Let me explain.

In my family, nobody ran a business. Nobody talked about invoices at dinner, or margins, or clients who pay late. Not because it was a secret. It just wasn't part of the house.

So when I got curious about how websites were made, there was nobody to ask. No uncle in tech. No neighbour with an agency. Just a computer, a connection and a lot of night.

I learned with free online courses. Jesús Conde's, mostly. If you learned to code in Spanish back then, you probably know the name. If not, picture a patient man explaining things on video to thousands of people he'd never meet. One of them was me.

At night. Because the day was for school, and the night was for what actually interested me.

Learning with nobody to copy

People talk a lot about role models. Find a mentor. Surround yourself with people who've done it before.

Good advice. When you have them.

When you don't, you learn differently. More slowly, I think. You make mistakes someone could have warned you about in thirty seconds. You reinvent wheels. You spend a whole evening on something that, it turns out, already had a button.

But you also learn something nobody can teach you: to keep going without anyone telling you you're on the right track.

When nobody shows you the way, you get very good at not needing to be shown.

That habit has been more useful to me than any technical skill. Languages change. Frameworks come and go. The habit of sitting down at night with a problem and not getting up until it makes sense stays.

The part nobody mentions

Now the honest bit.

Learning alone also gives you blind spots. I could build things, sure. But nobody taught me how to price them, how to say no, how to read a contract, or what a business actually is beyond "someone pays you for something".

That came later. Also alone. Also, quite often, at night.

And I suspect that's why, years later, when Yeray and I started Foxnice with 300 euros and nobody else's money, it didn't feel like such a big leap. We had no investors to ask and no contacts to call. But I'd never had them. It was the same thing as at 12, just with invoices.

I'm not romanticising it. If I'd had someone to ask, I'd have asked. Many times.

But I've stopped seeing it as a disadvantage. It's simply how I learned. And how I learned is, more or less, how I still work: one problem, one screen, and nobody waiting to approve it.

So if you're reading this at 1 a.m. with a tutorial open and nobody around who understands what you're doing: good. Carry on.

Your first website won't be good. Nobody's is.

But at 12, nobody had asked me for mine either. That's still my favourite kind of start.

P.S. If you're wondering whether that first site is still online somewhere: I really hope not.