A doomsday cult. ☠️

A 100-day kidnapping with a $15-million-dollar ransom. 🥷

A family’s bitter fight for control of a 50-year-old business empire. 💰

No, this isn’t the premise for the newest HBO drama—

It’s the astonishing life story of your friendly neighborhood software developer.

No shit.

🍻 THE DRUNK BUSINESS ADVICE 

👉 If you want to outpace fear, you better learn to love the climb.

👉 Losers worship titles. Winners worship timing.

And now — the story behind why this advice matters. 👇️ 

What happens when a doomsday cult meets a financial crisis?

Late at night, and well out of earshot of his family, a 10-year-old Jesus Vargas would climb under his bed with a secret handheld radio that he kept hidden from everyone he knew.

No, he didn’t use it to listen to forbidden music, or raunchy late-night DJ’s—

He simply wanted to hear the news.

It was his only connection to the outside world. 😔 

—

Jesus led an enviable life until his mom found… well… Jesus (Christ). 

• He came from a traditional upper-class Mexico City family. 

• His father owned a successful business, and had many investments. 

• And his maternal grandfather owned one of the biggest companies in Mexico.

But when his mother got wrapped up in what can most concisely be described as a religious doomsday cult, little Jesus was ripped away from the life he knew, and thrust into a completely isolated existence.

He was pulled out of kindergarten and homeschooled using a white-washed evangelical curriculum straight out of a Texas megachurch. 

Jesus couldn’t play with his cousins, watch TV, or even listen to music. He and his sister sat in silence every day, completing their schoolwork in separate rooms — and patiently awaiting the rapture like good little kool-aid drinkers.

And if they dared behave like, ya know, normal kids, the lashings were relentless. Discipline was a core principle of their faith.

But hey. At least they were rich. 🤷 Until…

In December of 1994, the Mexican government sharply devalued the peso, thrusting the country into a financial crisis.

Jesus’s father lost his business — and all of his investments.

Cut off from the rest of their family, and their entire support system, (like cults tend to do), they were left to fend for themselves.

“We survived on rice and beans,” Jesus told me. “We couldn’t even afford dog food. We fed our dog tortillas.”

His father was forced to chase a job opportunity, and moved the family 800 miles away to Yucatán. His mother doubled-down on her religion.

Jesus was trapped.

Grandpa was sort of a big deal

Let’s go back in time for a moment…

In 1961 Jesus’s maternal grandfather, Jorge Espinosa Mireles started a small business called Printaform, which produced office stationery.

He strategically grew their product line in the 1970s to include more complex office equipment like calculators, cash registers, and other tech devices.

Fueled by Mexico's tech-forward public policies, Jorge soon led Printaform into the cutthroat personal computer race of the 1980s. 👊

He opened a specialized manufacturing plant, secured over 5,000 distributors, and soon found himself beating out competitors like Apple and IBM on Mexican soil. 🤯

Jorge is even credited with developing the world’s first portable computer, the Printaform Columbia, long before laptops became a mainstay.

Recognizing Printaform’s dominance of the Mexican computer market, Bill Gates approached Jorge for a partnership between Microsoft and Printaform—

And a deal was easily reached.

After that, all Printaform computers were sold pre-loaded with the Microsoft Windows operating system — in Spanish. 👊

Jorge’s success was widely recognized throughout Mexico, which you would probably imagine to be a good thing—

But his popularity carried sinister consequences.

On May 20, 1992, Jorge was kidnapped by members of a clandestine guerrilla group, who demanded a $15 million USD ransom for his safe return.

Jesus’s family had to get grandpa back — so after 100 days of captivity, they paid the ransom.

To add insult to injury, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was instituted shortly thereafter, eliminating trade barriers between the US and Mexico, and squashing Printaform’s competitive advantage.

As quickly as Jorge had grown to dominate the Mexican computer market, he was knocked out of the tech industry entirely.

Tough break. 😞

WordPress and The Rapture

Jesus felt his grip on stability loosen even more as he entered his teens.

• He had witnessed his father lose his money.

• He had witnessed his grandfather lose his computer business — and nearly lose his life.

• And now, his mother was certain that the rapture was upon them.

Jesus was 13 years old when his pastor predicted the precise date and time that true believers would ascend into eternal life with Christ, leaving the rest of Earth to devolve into anarchy and chaos—

Which –spoiler alert– didn’t happen. 🤦

But while Jesus’s mother’s faith was unwavering, he did receive a new privilege—

30-minutes of supervised dial-up internet use per day.

Jesus immediately showed traits of his grandfather’s insatiable tech curiosity, and innovative thinking. 

Even with his extremely limited access to the internet, he helped translate WordPress to Spanish back when it was just a scrappy little open-source project.

And soon enough, Jesus turned 18 — and was finally free. 

He raced back to Mexico City for college, and threw himself into an International Business degree.

If Succession took place in Mexico, it would probably look like this 👇

While studying (and doing a little well-deserved partying 🍻), Jesus received an unexpected invitation from his grandfather.

Jorge invited Jesus to come work for the family business.

While it had long fallen from the tech behemoth status it once held, Printaform returned to its office supplies roots, and remained a formidable company—

Where none of Jesus’s cousins had ever been invited to work.

He was the only one.

And over the next few years, Jesus clearly demonstrated why he deserved to be there. 

🕦 He stayed at the office until midnight most nights, researching ways to scale and modernize their operation.

💰 He opened new factories, introduced new product lines, and got those products into Walmart, CVS, Office Max, and Office Depot.

👷 And he doubled the company’s headcount to meet the soaring demand that he poured his soul into generating.

Because of Jesus, Printaform was the strongest it had been since before his grandfather’s ruthless kidnapping. 

And he absolutely loved every minute of it. Every accomplishment drove him to work even harder, and commit more of himself to rebuilding his grandfather’s empire.

But he had some valid concerns—

His aunts and uncles also worked for the company, and did jack shit. They resented Jesus’s work ethic, and the high income it afforded him (Jesus shrewdly negotiated commission on all the new deals he was bringing in).

And his grandfather was in his 80s. 

So what would happen when his grandfather… died?

He knew his family would screw him. He knew they would take the company, and bleed it dry. So he asked his grandfather for some assurance that he would be left in charge.

He didn’t receive that assurance. ❌ 

So he made the hardest decision of his entire life. 😔 

Goodbye, family legacy. Hello, scrappy startups.

After leaving his grandfather’s company, Jesus experimented with all sorts of businesses. 

Whether he was selling fiberoptic cable networks to 5-star resorts, or installing solar panels all over the Mexican Caribbean, he was hustling relentlessly with a singular vision:

To stay ahead of the trends. 📈

Jesus thought back to the early days of WordPress, when he bore witness to the birth of a technology that would eventually grow to power 40% of the internet.

He didn’t recognize the importance of it then, so he missed out on a huge opportunity — but he knew what to look for now.

And he wasn’t going to miss the next one.

He found that opportunity one day in 2019 while browsing Product Hunt, when a little tool caught his eye with a wild tagline:

👉 “Build an app from a Google Sheet — for free.”

He gave it a tinker, and quickly realized that this was the WordPress-like opportunity he had been waiting for—

• Simple enough to get started

• Powerful enough to solve big problems

• And unexplored enough that he could quickly become THE expert

The tool was called Glide, and Jesus was obsessed. He committed himself to mastering it, and jumped on the community forums to answer everyone’s questions… literally.

Jesus personally responded to every single question Glide users posted.

In mere months, he became such a well-established expert in the technology, that Glide approached Jesus with a proposal—

A Fortune 500 company had contacted them after spending $100k+ over the course of a year with an offshore software development agency to create a (pretty damn basic) manufacturing inventory tracking system.

The software development agency still hadn’t been able to deliver a working product — and they wondered if Glide could work for them.

Jesus jumped on a quick call with a rep from the Fortune 500 company to better understand what they were looking to do, and immediately knew how to solve their problem using Glide.

It was a Friday afternoon, and the conversation went like this:

• Jesus: “Yes, I can absolutely build that.”

• Rep: “How much is this going to cost?”

• Jesus: “Three hundred.”

• Rep: “Three hundred thousand?”

• Jesus: “No – three hundred dollars.”

• Rep: “What?! How long will it take?”

• Jesus: “I can have it ready by Monday.”

Jesus got to work, and delivered on his promise. The company was dumbstruck by how quickly, cheaply, and perfectly Jesus got the job done for them.

Recognizing the outsized opportunity, Jesus said “adiós” to Mexico, moved to the US, and LowCode Agency was born.

Losers worship titles. Winners worship timing.

The launch of LowCode coincided with the pandemic. Everyone was stuck at home, incubating “brilliant” ideas for apps — but with no clue how to build them.

Jesus was just the guy to help.

He hired one developer, and between the two of them, LowCode built an astonishing 180 apps for clients in 2020. 🤯

Jesus quickly expanded LowCode’s tech stack to include other platforms like Bubble and FlutterFlow, and hired nearly 40 talented people.

And while his aunts and uncles battle each other for scraps of his grandfather’s once great company (which has shrunk significantly since Jesus left), LowCode just keeps growing.

The demand for low-cost/high-impact tech solutions hasn’t slowed.

Now a committed husband and father, Jesus feels a profoundly heavy weight of responsibility—

His father and his grandfather lost everything. The same could happen to him at any moment. 😓

For Jesus, complacency = failure.

I’m honored to welcome Jesus Vargas as Drunk Business Advice’s first official sponsorship partner! He’s a helluva guy with a helluva story — and he’s become a helluva friend over the last few years. ♥️

Each week, Jesus will be answering your tech questions, so submit a question here, or hop on a discovery call if you want to learn more about LowCode Agency.

Cheers! 🍻

-Kristin :-)

And don’t forget, this newsletter is FREE because of Jesus Vargas, and his team at LowCode — so show ‘em some love!

Follow @lowcodeagency Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, and YouTube.

Whether you need help building an MVP, creating software to run your business, or even just a badass website, I highly recommend the savvy team over at LowCode!