From sleepless nights to real traction: the abyss of building WITHMIA

August was a month of quiet study and invisible decisions, hours spent working out where this idea would live and how it would hold up robustly in the cloud, because we knew from the very beginning that the problem we were trying to solve was a critical one: 95% of small and medium businesses in Latin America operate manually and in fragments, losing between 30% and 40% of their sales opportunities simply by taking up to 24 hours to reply while relying on free tools like Excel and WhatsApp Business.

At first the project was just an internal initiative inside Atlantis Producciones, running on manual agents and n8n workflows, but we quickly realised that to scale it — and to democratise access to productive Artificial Intelligence — we needed something far bigger. That set the stage for a September that felt like giving the project a soul: defining the visual identity, the core concept and our motto “With you, With MIA”.

The abyss of October

Then October arrived, and with it a crushing reality check, looking straight at the sheer immensity of the cloud architecture and the “No-Code” design I had to build from scratch. It was an abyss moment, the kind where technical complexity makes you swallow hard and think that this is simply impossible for one person to pull off.

As a technical founder with a background in Economics and Psychology, the mental challenge was twofold: I had to program an infrastructure capable of connecting WhatsApp and Instagram with management tools like WooCommerce or Google Calendar with no human latency, and at the same time design a user experience so free of friction that any business owner could set it up on their own in under an hour.

The nights that define everything

If you ask me about one difficult night from that period, the truth is I remember every single one of them, because they turned into an endless cycle of pushing my body to its absolute limit, of hearing my own mind beg for rest and forcing myself to type for one more hour in the dark anyway, only to get up before dawn with heavy eyes and one single conviction: this code had to work.

That night-time frustration turned into the certainty that we had to draw a line and take the definitive risk, legally founding MIA MARKETING & INTELLIGENCE ARTIFICIAL SPA in July 2025 as a 100% technological, independent entity, with its own bank account, its own tax registration and a clear corporate purpose centred on developing AI solutions.

Real traction

And the real reward, the moment when the exhaustion vanished completely, arrived when our first real pilot customers started using the platform and told us they did not want just a generic bot, but an operational brain. We began issuing our first invoices, proving that companies were willing to invest in our affordable subscription model priced in Chilean pesos.

Seeing that real traction gave us the strength to present the model to mentors and university experts, who validated our financial plans and the scalability of the project, allowing us to put the platform under the live pressure of the market — taking it to the limit the way a chemist exposes a new element to extreme heat and cold to find out what it is made of.

The Golden Window

Today, seeing that WITHMIA is able to capture that 5-minute “Golden Window” that secures our customers’ sales, I know that every hour of sleep sacrificed was worth it: what we built is not just a piece of software, but a strategic ally that is transforming the way businesses operate.

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If you run a small or medium business and you are tired of losing opportunities because you cannot reply in time, let’s talk. Visit withmia.com and we will show you how we can centralise your operation and give you your time back.

And if you are a founder or a developer reading this, we would love to hear about your experience: what has been your biggest “technical abyss” while building your own product? Tell us in the comments.