I build products people actually use
Hi, I'm Hector. Over fifteen years I've gone from designing for a hundred small businesses to running product for platforms that move real trucks, real concrete orders, and real dinners. Along the way I founded a delivery company during the pandemic and sold it. The thread through all of it is the same: take a messy, real-world problem and turn it into something a person opens without thinking twice.
Three products, one obsession
Each of these started the same way: a moment in daily life where the existing software quietly fails people, and a hunch that the fix was structural, not cosmetic. Two are in active build, one is still in the notebook.
the pantry one is live, ask me for a beta inviteYummster
A cooking app for Mexico and LATAM that answers "what can I cook tonight?" from what's already in your kitchen, and keeps the pantry honest as a byproduct of cooking.
Read the case study → Validation stageScentsay
A personal fragrance engine that learns how you actually wear your collection and recommends by weather and occasion. Deliberately unbuilt until the market says yes.
Read the case study → In the workshopTinkTink
The next one. Early enough that saying more would be making things up, and I don't do that.
Peek anyway →A few things I've learned the hard way
Evidence before code. One of my products has a rule written into its charter: no build until a survey of real users in real communities clears a response threshold. The cheapest feature is the one you never had to build.
Deterministic where it matters. When I designed allergen handling for a food product, it never touched the recommendation model. Hard filters run first, fail closed, every time. Machine learning is for taste. Safety is for rules.
Adoption is the metric. Shipping is the easy part. At a global industrial company I took an internal platform from 40% to 85% adoption in a year, mostly by sitting with the people who refused to use it and finding out why they were right.
Open to the right conversation
Accepting hard problemsI split my time between building my own products and senior product work with teams that own hard problems: marketplaces, logistics, fintech, recommendation systems. If any of that sounds like your world, I'd genuinely enjoy hearing about it.