Isaac Correa · Madrid

What selling taught me that building never did

My first sale was seven dollars, on the last day of 2022. Everything I run today starts there, and most of what I know about products I learned on calls, not at a desk.

Seven dollars is a real number

People treat a first sale as a formality. It is not. Seven dollars means one stranger, somewhere, decided that a thing I made was worth more than the money in their pocket. Nothing I had built before had ever been tested that way. Every product opinion I hold now traces back to that test, and to the two years of repeating it.

I sold while I studied

For the next two years I sold while I studied. Between December 2022 and November 2024 I delivered three hundred Looker Studio dashboards for clients, one commission at a time, and collected 103 verified client reviews. The clients were in the United States, in Europe, in South America and in Korea. Small businesses, and companies of considerable size.

At the busiest, five meetings a day. Not five calls: five conversations where somebody explains their business to you and you have to understand it well enough to be useful by the end of the hour.

The lesson

Here is the part I would tell anyone starting. In three hundred jobs, almost nobody asked me for a chart. They asked me a question about their own business and hoped a chart would answer it. The ones who left happiest were not the ones with the prettiest dashboards. They were the ones who could finally say a sentence out loud about their own company and know it was true.

That is why the interpretation goes next to the chart. A number nobody can read is not information, it is decoration, and I had to sell three hundred times before I stopped confusing the two.

The prices went up

The prices went up as the work got better. I am not going to put figures on that, because the figures are not the point and they would be the only thing anyone remembered. The point is the direction, and the reason for it: I stopped selling a file and started selling the answer.

What it turned into

Out of those three hundred commissions came Kodalogic, founded in Madrid in September 2024: six finished dashboards, distilled from what repeated in all of them, with the interpretation written next to each chart. And out of the habit of asking what a business actually needed to know came Hellomatik, founded on 28 July 2025, and the method we published with a DOI.

Isaac Correa, Madrid. ORCID 0009-0003-0657-4419.

Read more

The Looker Studio years — the work itself: the jobs, the catalogue, and the fifty-eight posts.

Press kit — bios you can paste, photographs, and every fact with its source.

The timeline — every date with the place you can check it.

Photographs — the pictures that exist of him, free to reuse with attribution.

How I work on a product — the order I trust, and the two months spent screen by screen.
Your company already has rules — what happens in the first week of automating a business.
From a seven-dollar dashboard to Hellomatik — the whole story with its dates.
How we build a company’s ontology — the method, published with a DOI.
The questions people ask, answered — short answers, each with a source.