Building in public from Bogotá isn't the same as building in public from San Francisco. I say that not as a complaint, but as an observation. The tools are the same (Twitter/X, GitHub, personal blogs). The ecosystem language is still English. But the context changes: the audience you serve, the timing, how the people already inside the bubble read you.
After a year pushing VantLabs from Colombia, with no team, no investors, no Y Combinator network, here are three things I learned.
1. Distance is asymmetry, not disadvantage
Being far from Silicon Valley means you don't catch the latest Twitter drama in real time. Good — that signal is noise 95% of the time. It means you can't drop in on a meetup any Tuesday for coffee with five founders. Bad — that one stings. But it also means you can think at your own pace, without the social pressure of "what's being done right now".
Distance is asymmetry: what you lose in instant network you gain in mental independence. The question isn't how to eliminate distance, but how to use it. The answer, for me, was to build products for my real market (Latin America) instead of trying to compete in the market where the noise is.
2. Building in public compresses learning
When your studio is one person, the main risk isn't technical. It's feedback: you can spend three months building something nobody wants and nobody warns you. The antidote, when you don't have a team, is publishing early and publishing specific.
By "specific" I mean: don't publish "I'm building a finance app". Publish "I'm choosing between two ways to handle debts in VantFi, here are the pros and cons of each". That second version gets useful replies. The first gets empty likes.
Building in public isn't marketing. It's a compressed feedback loop. If you use it as marketing — only polished stuff, only wins — it doesn't work. If you use it to think out loud, it does.
3. Patience is the most important muscle (and the hardest to train)
Startup narratives reward speed: "we launched in 4 weeks", "we went from 0 to 1,000 users in a month". That narrative is real for some categories. It is not real for almost anything a solo founder can build from Latin America.
VantLabs is one year old. It has two products, one in beta and one in MVP sprint 2. By Twitter standards, that's slow. By solo-founder-building-things-that-have-to-last standards, it's reasonable. The difference between those two standards is exactly the difference between what people tell in public and what people actually live.
Patience, for me, was learning not to compare my sprint 2 with someone else's "launched in 4 weeks" who had 12 engineers and a seed round. That comparison is unfair and, worse, useless. The useful comparison is with yourself from last month.
Why doing it this way is a privilege
I talk with a few Latin founders and almost all feel the same: pressure to move to the US, raise money, scale fast. That pressure is real, and many times it's the right decision. But it's also a decision that closes doors. Moving means, sooner or later, building products that no longer understand the local context.
Staying in Colombia and building from here is a conscious choice. It means accepting a different ceiling on some dimensions (available capital, international network, faster exits) in exchange for a higher ceiling on others (understanding the customer, hiring local talent affordably, living well on a modest runway). It's a trade-off, not a virtue. But it's a trade-off worth making if what you want to build is tied to this place.
VantLabs doesn't exist despite Colombia. It exists because of Colombia.