Ribeirão Preto, an in-person course on installing solar panels. A clay-tile roof built on the ground — it wasn’t even a real roof. And there I was, looking at it, thinking: I studied 250 hours for this?
I had just founded the first solar energy company in João Monlevade. Six certification modules at Blue Sol. Scores between 92% and 100%. And all it took was a training roof sitting flat on the ground for me to realize that heights were not for me. Not one meter up. Not even a fake one.
That question — asked in front of a training roof that wasn’t even real — created everything that came after. If I wasn’t going up on roofs, what was I going to do with 250 hours of solar energy, a technical degree and 12 years of experience in web and marketing?
The answer came months later, when the partners joined: a marketplace. Not selling and installing panels — building the platform where other people sell and install.
Every pivot in my career followed that pattern: a problem that looked like a loss turned into the best investment I ever made. Fear of heights turned into a marketplace. A dead startup turned into a steady client base. Three universities with no degree turned into 800 hours of problems solved. Not because I’m resilient — because my operating model gains from error.
If you’re a technical founder running a lean team, this story is probably yours too.
The AMD K6 and the world before Stack Overflow
In 1998 I was 11 years old and had the only computer in the neighborhood. AMD K6, 4GB hard drive, Windows 98. People paid me to format their theses to ABNT standards (Brazil’s national standards body). I charged R$ 1.00 per page. Typing and formatting. At 11.
It wasn’t a calling. It was what I knew how to do with what I had.
At 15, a technical course in computing. At 17, freelancing in design and web. In 2004 it was Internet Explorer 6, where everything broke. There was no Stack Overflow in Portuguese. When I got stuck on an error, I read the English documentation — as best I could — and tested until it worked.
I got into UFES for Graphic Design and transferred to UEMG in 2007. In 2010, I joined Zavala Propaganda — where I built Aneethun’s website and the English and Spanish sites for Bio Extratus. Brand internationalization for a cosmetics company from Minas Gerais, back when “responsive website” was still a novelty.
DENATRAN, the police officers and the hacked devices
In 2012, GCT in Belo Horizonte. Traffic Management and Control. My job title: IT assistant. My actual work: QA on the certification of the first electronic ticketing device approved by DENATRAN (Brazil’s national traffic department) in the country.
An electronic device that replaces the paper pad an officer uses to write tickets. Every field, every flow, every validation had to work perfectly — because if it didn’t, DENATRAN wouldn’t approve it. And if they didn’t approve it, the whole project was dead.
I was there in person for the federal audit. There’s always something that needs adjusting in the heat of an audit like that. The programmer was good. We passed.
After that, 16 cities across Brazil training teams. Salvador, Uberlândia, Governador Valadares, Feira de Santana, Teófilo Otoni. Each city with different hardware and people who didn’t want to use the system. Military police, municipal guards and traffic officers who sometimes preferred the paper pad to the technology.
And the problem nobody saw coming: the officers hacked the devices. They installed WhatsApp, games and personal apps on equipment meant exclusively for issuing traffic citations. We had to implement blocking tools.
I implemented remote support — and that changed the operation. Dozens of devices a week, between maintenance and new ones to configure. What used to take days started taking hours. What sometimes left a professional in Bahia without equipment for a week was now resolved the same day.
What I learned at GCT doesn’t fit on a certificate: debugging under pressure with the federal government in the room, and training people who don’t want to learn.
Oak: 200 partners, 50 power plants, and a law that changed everything
After the roof in Ribeirão Preto, the pivot to a marketplace created Oak Energia — the first renewable energy marketplace in Brazil. Not just solar: photovoltaics, micro hydroelectric plants, biodigesters, vertical-axis wind turbines.
200 installer companies registered as partners. 50 power plants sold and approved through the platform in cities all over Brazil. A YouTube channel with weekly content. 3 editions of the Feira de Sustentabilidade do Médio Piracicaba (a regional sustainability trade fair). The idea was very well received wherever we talked about it — in Brazil or abroad. We never saw anything like it.
I took Fórmula de Lançamento (a Brazilian product-launch course) because I needed traction. SEBRAE Fast Motion (SEBRAE is Brazil’s small-business support agency) invited us into their accelerator. Conversations with investors. In parallel, I got into UFOP for Computer Engineering — first place overall. Five semesters juggling university and the startup. I stopped during the pandemic. I never went back.
The partners and I had agreed on a 5-year horizon. And, like so many startups, we didn’t become a unicorn.
The meeting
Long sales cycles. Slow approvals. And ANEEL (Brazil’s electricity regulator) revised the rules on self-generated energy. The legal uncertainty froze the entire sector.
It wasn’t a dramatic day. It was a meeting between partners. We looked at the numbers, at the 5-year horizon we had agreed on, at the regulatory picture. And we decided each of us would go his own way.
Six years. 200 partners. 50 power plants. 3 trade fairs. A YouTube channel that still exists today as a memento. And the company idle, ready to be restarted if someone wants to buy it.
Most people look at that paragraph and see failure. I look at it and see this: I lost the company, but I didn’t lose a single capability. I knew how to build a platform. I knew how to close R$ 300,000 deals over WhatsApp, without ever meeting the client in person — and with a client who was never in a good mood. I knew how to organize 200 partners who had never met each other. And I knew how to start over.
The cost of the mistake was 6 years. What I learned from the mistake built everything that came after in weeks. That isn’t resilience — resilience is taking the hit. This is gaining from the hit.
The cemetery that arrived before the name
The transition was immediate. The first client came through a referral — a cemetery — before the company even had a new name.
Think about what that means. A cemetery trusts its digital operation to someone who has just shut down a startup. They didn’t know me personally. Someone referred me. And the system I built had to work when a grieving family decided to pay an installment on a Sunday night. No margin. No “let’s see if it works.” If the portal failed, the family went home without resolving what they came to resolve.
That’s the level of trust that holds up what we do. And the level of consequence that has shaped the whole operation ever since.
Juliana — an international relations specialist with a graduate degree in Economic Engineering — gradually took over management, content and strategy. She isn’t a designer who became a CEO. She’s someone who understood that strategic content is what sustains a client base over the long term.
By the time we chose the name “Evolutiva Negócios Digitais,” the agency had already been running for months. The clients came before the name.
What we do and why it works
Two founders. A steady client base for 4 years. Our clients are cemeteries, currency exchange houses and e-commerce stores.
The cemetery’s 24/7 payment portal, with omnichannel support and on-call teams, has to work all the time. If it fails, the grieving family isn’t served when they need it, and the people who need these services urgently can’t use them.
The exchange house’s chatbot has to quote the right rate. If it fails, the client gets a made-up number and loses money.
The e-commerce fraud screening has to get it right. If it gets it wrong, a legitimate customer is blocked and never comes back.
If the system fails, we lose the client. We have no layer of protection, no legal department, no investor covering the loss. That’s what makes us reliable — the skin in the game is real.
Three layers hold up the operation:
Scrum adapted for a portfolio. A weekly sprint covering every client. A binary target of 5 items — either it passed or it didn’t. One single big thing per day. Three hands per card: whoever did it doesn’t verify it, whoever verified it doesn’t move it. 7 completed sprints, a retrospective every Friday.
Sovereign AI. Language models running on our own infrastructure — zero cost per query. This isn’t “we use ChatGPT.” It’s: we have a server with models that know each client’s business. The cemetery’s chatbot schedules visits. The exchange house’s answers rate questions with real data. The salon’s knows the history of 82,000 appointments over the last 15 years. When the AI vendor tripled its price — and that has already happened three times since 2023 — our clients didn’t feel it.
260 problems solved and documented. Every problem becomes a reusable procedure. Every error becomes a documented trap. Production deploys went from 45 min to 8. The monthly report, from 4h to 40 min. The base grows every week — compound interest applied to operations.
I’m publishing these numbers because it took me 6 years to find them — and nobody should need that long.
The numbers that don’t fit on a diploma
3 universities: UFES, UEMG, UFOP. No degree. First place overall in Computer Engineering.
800 hours of courses and training with certification from 12 issuers. From Google Ads to photovoltaic solar energy. From UX Research to advanced negotiation.
Formal credentials are fragile — they lose value when the market changes. The ability to solve new problems is antifragile — it gains value when the market changes.
The 250h of solar looked useless. Until I needed to model a R$ 50,000 investment. The 444h at Alura looked like a “beginner course.” Until I needed to build an entire system on my own.
For anyone who recognizes themselves here
If you run a lean team and the bottleneck is time, not talent — the way out isn’t hiring more people. It’s multiplying what each person resolves.
Four years with a steady client base. Two founders. Zero clients lost to technical failure.
Full list of every course: evolutivanegociosdigitais.com.br/certificados-joao-vitor/
I serve 4 steady clients. If you want to talk about sovereign AI, adapted Scrum or how to operate with a lean team before my calendar fills up — send me a message on LinkedIn.