The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.
Leverage Without Permission: How to Scale Without Capital or Connections
In 2019, freshly graduated in Peru, I started writing about startups without knowing anything. I had no connections, I had no capital, I had no experience. Only curiosity and a blog.
That content became Startupeable. The podcast opened doors that no resume would have opened: from Lima to Mexico City, and from there to Silicon Valley as an investor.
Iván Landabaso did exactly the same thing from Spain. He started by writing summaries of product books. Today, he is a partner at JME Ventures (one of the most important funds in his country), he has a newsletter with 10M+ impressions a year (Startup Riders), and a sales community that bills €150-200K a year (Revenue Squared).
The pattern is the same: if you have no network and no capital, you are left with two options for scaling: code or content.
The Playbook: Permission-Less Leverage
Naval Ravikant calls it “leverage without permission.” Traditional startups need outside capital and they need to hire people in order to scale. But there are two forms of leverage that do not require anyone to give you anything: code and content.
1. You Do Not Need to Be an Expert, Only a Public Learner
Iván started by making summaries of product books for himself. He was not an expert in anything.
“Do not write in order to extract. Write in order to contribute. If it serves you and it could be useful to the you of the past, publish it.”
The framework: you are a learner who shares what you learn. If it serves other people, great. If it does not, it served you.
2. Become a Valuable Node in Your Network
Iván does not see himself as an “influencer”. He sees himself as a node in a network of contacts. Your job is to make that node more powerful: connect people, curate information, and contribute perspectives.
Example: Rubén Dominguez and Guillermo De la Flor on LinkedIn put together the 50 best databases for finding your first investment ticket. They did not start by creating “original content”. They started by curating. Now they are enormous nodes in the ecosystem.
3. Content Attracts Luck
Working in public invites opportunities that would never arrive any other way. Iván’s role at JME came because a partner at the fund saw his content and wrote to him.
“You attract luck. Things happen to you that would not happen to you if you were not inviting it toward you.”
4. Monetize with Businesses, Not with Ads
Iván’s newsletter is not the business. It is the distribution. The real business is Revenue Square: a community at €30 a month for sales professionals in tech.
The flywheel: Newsletter → Audience → Paid community → Content gets recycled → More audience.
“If you are the number one salesperson of your company, and every CEO is, you are already selling in private. Why not sell in public?”
Iván goes into more detail on how to find your unfair advantage for creating content, why the sales profession is undervalued in the Spanish-speaking world, and how he delegated the operation of his community without losing quality.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation: → [Spotify] → [Apple Podcasts] → [YouTube]
Or Jump Straight to the Key Moments (YouTube):
[08:45] Content as leverage without permission for entrepreneurs
[13:20] The professional shame that holds founders and executives back from creating content
[17:50] The CEO as the first salesperson (and creator) of the company
****[29:40] How to record your customers as a content strategy
[31:20] Why “in-between” content does not work (only very pro or very homemade)
[33:00] How to build real businesses out of an audience
[35:20] The impossible role to hire: creator + business person
You can find Ivan on LinkedIn
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Follow Enzo Cavalie on X: @enzocavalie.