One Year Building KaiNext. Honestly.

I didn't plan KaiNext.

On April 17, 2025, I was let go from my job. A disagreement with the owner. My first time without work in four years. I didn't fully see it coming.

What I did have that day, fortunately, was a client. Weeks earlier I'd closed a deal for five million pesos with Patricio — a distant relative who distributes products to small stores and supermarkets in the Maule Region. His business moved millions a month. Everything managed in Excel. He'd been pushing hard for me to build him a system.

That same April 17th I made the decision: I wasn't going to look for a job right away. I was going to use unemployment insurance and build something of my own.

I called my father.

He's a certified public accountant, commercial engineer, thirty years advising companies. I told him what happened. He asked what I planned to do. I explained. He gave me a lecture on incorporating — that I could work with invoices, that forming a company made sense if I wanted to issue facturas, that the most efficient structure was a limited liability company between the two of us, with VAT-exempt invoices.

On April 21, 2025, we founded KaiNext Solutions Limitada. 90% me, 10% him. The office was registered in the back bedroom of my apartment in Puente Alto.

Fired on Monday. Company incorporated on Friday.

The client I almost walked away from

The next ninety days were the most intense of the year.

The Disrover system was the hardest project I've had. Not technically — inventory, sales, commissions, electronic invoicing, per-branch reports. I understood it fast and built it well. That part I can handle.

The hard part was the client.

Patricio is over fifty, didn't finish high school, and has total clarity about his business and zero clarity about how to communicate what he needs technologically. He'd send voice messages at six in the morning. Explain things in circles. Get angry and blame me for it. He haggled on price in the middle of the project.

There was a moment when I was about to tell him I wasn't continuing.

I didn't. I understood him. Brought him back to earth. Delivered the system. He paid.

That system runs in production today, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The arc with Patricio didn't end there. In February 2026, someone let me know disrover.com was redirecting to another site. I ran the forensic analysis, identified the entry point, patched it. In March it happened again — this time with the attacker still active, looking for new ways in. I migrated the entire infrastructure to a clean environment and left a sentinel running.

No incidents since.

Patricio hadn't wanted paid active support. That's his call. What I learned: when a client chooses not to contract protection, the problem doesn't disappear — it just changes who gets hit when it happens.

The second client came without marketing

Andro Ostoic is a software architect. We met at BancoEstado, where we were both architects. We'd worked together multiple times inside the bank and on external freelance projects. Together we'd built MiBE+, a mobile app for the bank.

When he found out I'd started KaiNext, he was in exactly the same situation: working at the bank while building his own company, ABCS PRO STUDIO. He'd landed the Art Santiago project — a mobile app. He handled everything: backend, web frontend, infrastructure, deployments. But he needed mobile hands and delegated that part to me.

KaiNext's second client. The product ended up live on the App Store and Play Store in August 2025.

It didn't come through LinkedIn. It didn't come through Google. It came because he already knew how I work. The reputation you built before having a company is the asset that doesn't appear on any balance sheet.

The job that lets me build without desperation

In July I applied to Thoughtworks. Not because I wanted to leave KaiNext — but because I wanted a stable base while I built. On August 4, 2025, I joined as Senior Consultant. Two days later I was on the LATAM Airlines infrastructure team.

KaiNext didn't stop. It continued in the margins of the day.

What I learn in the corporate and consulting world I apply at KaiNext. What I build at KaiNext makes me better at Thoughtworks. It's not sacrifice or postponement. It's a real and deliberate cycle.

The goal isn't to jump to KaiNext full time. The goal is for KaiNext to become a real additional income that someday matches or exceeds my salary, while keeping Thoughtworks. The 100% KaiNext scenario exists — but it requires KaiNext to justify it with numbers, not enthusiasm.

The direct consequence is that KaiNext grows more slowly. I know that and I accept it.

Tools I built for myself

From real problems I ran into during the year, I built AI tools. First they served me. Then I opened them on kainext.cl because that way I can scale without starting a new project from scratch each time.

In that process I integrated MercadoPago as a payment method. I validated it using my own CMR card, paying one thousand pesos for one credit. That payment was KaiNext's first real customer in that model. Technically, the first external payment hasn't arrived yet. It's honest to say it.

The tools today have four registered users. Two are me — an admin account and a normal one. The other two are people I trust who helped me test them.

What I take from the process: building something to solve your own problem and then opening it for others is the most honest way to make a product. I knew exactly what it solved and what it didn't, because I used it in real conditions before releasing it.

Killing something on time

During the year I cancelled a project before finishing it. The target user solved the problem on their own. Without a user, there's no point continuing to build.

It wasn't easy. I'd invested time. I'd thought about it. But continuing would have been momentum, not judgment.

What that freed up was what allowed me to see clearly what came next. Killing something at the right time isn't failure — it's the same discipline as building something right.

April 25th

On April 25, 2026, I reviewed KaiNext's financial statements with my father.

He pointed out something I hadn't seen: I wasn't properly leveraging the company's tax regime. We have the right regime — Pyme 14D number 3, 12.5% instead of the standard 27% — but I wasn't optimizing it. He explained it patiently.

I listened with embarrassment.

I'm an engineer. I work on the flight infrastructure of an airline. I didn't have my own company's tax regime loaded in my head.

Then he asked the question that reframed everything: how many companies do you think are in the same situation?

He didn't wait for me to answer. Almost all of them, he said. Companies with solid numbers, run by people working twelve-hour days, making decisions with partial information. The accountant doesn't talk to whoever manages the systems. The tech consultant doesn't read the balance sheet. The owner decides alone.

We moved into the longest conversation of the year. About the real gap in the Chilean market: accountants on one side, tech consultants on the other, and in the middle PyME founders making critical decisions with no one coordinating both worlds.

My father has thirty years in corporate finance, auditing, and taxation. I have ten years in platform engineering, cloud, and applied AI. That combination is what KaiNext can offer that neither side alone can.

KaiNext always had both parts — the financial and the technological, my father and me. The April 25th conversation wasn't a crisis. It was recognizing out loud something that had existed since day one.

KaiNext is one year old. Founded April 21, 2025. Not profitable yet.

It has a system running in active production for a real company. It has tools that work. It has a business model I genuinely believe is different in the Chilean market. It has two people with real experience in what we offer.

And it has everything I learned this year: how to manage a client who sends voice messages at six in the morning, how to run a forensic analysis after a hack, how to build a product that doesn't solve the right problem and try again, how to understand your own company's tax regime with a year's delay.

I started this year getting fired. I'm ending it building a firm with my father.

The second year starts now.