I Almost Broke

I lost €250,000 in two years. Every penny I had saved over 15 years of consulting. Gone. Let me tell you exactly what happened.

The Setup

For almost 15 years, I was the guy companies called when they needed to transform. Digital transformations. Product organizations. Scaling teams from 10 to 1,000.

I worked with Nokia, Samsung, governments. I wrote 5 books. I spoke at conferences. I built a reputation.

From the outside, I had made it.

But something was missing. I was always building for other people. Helping other companies scale. Watching other founders take the risks while I played it safe with consulting contracts.

I kept telling myself: "Someday I'll build my own thing."

Someday never came.

The First Taste

In 2020, I got a call from Ahmed at STC Pay in Saudi Arabia. They needed help scaling their organization.

I went. Six months of intense work helping a digital bank align hundreds of people. It was everything I was good at.

Then COVID hit. I returned to Europe.

But Saudi Arabia stayed in my head. The energy. The ambition. The ecosystem that was being built from scratch.

For three years, I kept thinking about going back.

The Decision

October 2023. I finally did it.

I returned to Saudi Arabia with my books, my frameworks, my 15 years of experience. Ready to do what I'd always done—help big organizations transform.

The plan was simple: Land consulting contracts with large companies. Do the corporate playbook I knew inside out.

The reality was brutal.

The entire country had pivoted to startups. Vision 2030 had transformed the ecosystem. Nobody wanted digital transformation consultants anymore. They wanted startup mentors, accelerator programs, venture capital.

Everything I had planned was wrong for this market.

The Fall

Over the next months, I watched my savings disappear.

Business setup costs. Living expenses. Marketing that didn't work. Pivots that went nowhere.

€250,000. Gone.

I was 45 years old. In a foreign country. With no network that could help. Starting from zero.

And here's the part that really broke me:

I reached out to hundreds of people I'd met during my career. Colleagues. Clients. "Friends" from conferences.

One hand.

That's how many people actually helped.

One hand is enough to count everyone who showed up when I was down.

When you lose everything, you see exactly who is with you and who turns their back.

The Darkness

I won't pretend I handled it well.

There were nights I couldn't sleep. Mornings I didn't want to get up. The voice in my head asking: "What's the point? You're 45. You failed. It's over."

I had no safety net. No fallback plan. No one to call at 3am.

Just me and the consequences of my decisions.

The Shift

But something strange happened in that darkness.

When you strip away everything—the reputation, the money, the network—you're left with just yourself.

And for the first time in my life, I actually listened.

I connected with myself in a way I never had. I stopped running. I stopped performing. I started asking: What do I actually want? What am I actually good at? What problem do I actually care about solving?

The answers that came were different from anything I'd planned.

The Clarity

Working in the Saudi startup ecosystem, I'd seen the same problems everywhere. Three players. Three problems. All disconnected.

Startups were drowning in 15+ tools that didn't talk to each other. Notion for strategy. HubSpot for CRM. QuickBooks for finance. Carta for cap table. Founders spent more time copying data between apps than running their companies. Fragmented tools = fragmented data = no intelligence.

Accelerators were fighting over 30 local startups while global talent went undiscovered. 66% had deal flow problems. The next breakout fintech in Lagos, the next agritech in São Paulo—they didn't even know these programs existed.

Investors were limited by their networks. 1% conversion rate, fighting over the same deals with 50,000 other VCs. Missing 99% of global talent because deal flow depended on warm intros and geography.

Lagos fintech solving 200M unbanked. São Paulo agritech feeding 400M people. Cairo healthtech innovations. All going undiscovered because the ecosystem was disconnected.

They were all solving pieces of the same puzzle—alone.

What if all three connected? What if startups operated on a platform that generated real data? What if accelerators could discover global talent? What if investors could find deals based on actual traction, not pitch decks?

The intelligence would flow. Merit would win over geography.

Someone needed to build this.

The Gift

My mum bought me a Claude Max subscription.

€170 per month. That's all I had.

She believed in me when I didn't believe in myself.

And that subscription changed everything.

I discovered I could build. Not just consult about building. Actually build.

I'd always known how to code—it was part of my background. But I'd never used it to build my own products. Always for others.

AI gave me leverage I'd never had before.

The Build

January 2025. I started building.

Not consulting. Not advising. Building.

I had the SCALEUP methodology from mentoring startups. I knew what founders needed. I had Claude Max. I had nothing to lose.

11 months later:

• 679 database tables
• 2M+ lines of code
• 10 integrated products
• ~€2,000 total tool cost
• A platform that would cost over €2M to build with a traditional team

All solo. All with AI.

I built the intelligence layer I wished existed when I was helping founders—a platform where startups operate, accelerators curate, and investors discover. Three players. One ecosystem. Intelligence for all.

It's called FIKR Space.

The Lesson

Here's what losing everything taught me:

The only real safety net is the ability to build.

Not your savings. Not your network. Not your resume. Not your reputation.

Your ability to create something from nothing.

Because when everything else is stripped away—and it can be, faster than you think—the only thing that remains is what you can build with your own hands.

I spent 15 years building safety nets that weren't real. Consulting contracts that could disappear. Relationships that evaporated when I needed them. A reputation that meant nothing when I couldn't pay rent.

The real safety net is skills. The ability to build. To create. To ship.

What's Next

I'm not writing this to complain. I'm writing this because I know some of you are where I was.

Maybe you're stuck in a job that's killing you.
Maybe you have an idea but no technical co-founder.
Maybe you're watching others build while you wait for permission.
Maybe you've already hit rock bottom and don't know what's next.

Here's what I want you to know:

You can build. Not someday. Now.

AI has changed the game completely. The ability to create software is no longer locked behind years of training, expensive teams, or venture capital.

If you can think clearly about what you want to build, you can build it.

I'm going to show you how.

This year, I'm documenting everything. The frameworks. The methodology. The failures. The breakthroughs. How I went from a €170/month Claude subscription to building what would cost €2M with a traditional team.

Not the highlight reel. The actual system.

Because if I can do this at 45, starting from zero in a foreign country with nothing but a gift from my mum—so can you.

Sometimes you need to lose everything to find what you're supposed to build.

I almost broke.

But I didn't.

And neither will you.

— Luis Gonçalves
Dark Entrepreneur