2026-07-29 08:00:00
It’s been five months since my last entry. I’ve been busy, but I guess that’s life. I’ve really wanted to write, and I’ve done a lot of it privately. So, I’m going to try again to pick up this habit of writing in public.
I’m writing these lines in Sofia. A while back I launched my first two projects: Picmal and Cozy. I’ve made some money along the way. I even got an offer to sell Picmal for five figures. But it’s not enough to live on right now. Even though it isn’t easy, I have a strong desire to continue trying. I want to stay in the game. I enjoy working on my projects daily. Over the past five months, I’ve learned a lot. So I’d like to share here an unordered list of things I’ve been learning during this time. Not all of these will be true, but they feel true for me now. They can help those of you who are in a similar place. Without further ado, here’s the list:
A one-time payment may not be the best option for your business, even though it benefits your users.
Look for healthy markets. You want ones where it’s not winner-takes-all. Aim for a few competitors—about 10 is ideal—but make sure no single player takes most of the profits.
Finding the right distribution channel is more important than the idea itself. The point is that you need a channel to show the product through. If you don’t have that, it doesn’t make sense to build it.
This is pretty obvious, but I still made the mistake again and again. Once you’ve built the first version of the product, spend 80% of your time on marketing. Engage with customers. Discover the channels that suit your ideal audience. Then, aim to be present in many locations. Take your time with it, but focus on this.
Do the short-term and the long-term at the same time. Short term, share your project in directories. Appear in many places. Contact potential users to ask about the project and how to improve it. Long term is SEO and GEO so you show up in search, building a brand around your project and creating an audience. Don’t wait for one or the other. Start doing both the moment you get some traction and see potential in your project.
To grow a B2C product, social media is likely your most effective option. Go viral and all that bullshit. If you’re going B2B, start by talking to at least 10 potential customers. This will help you find out if their pain points are real or in your head.
Entrepreneurship is wild, even for small apps like mine. You experience frequent fluctuations; the market around you changes, requiring you to adapt. Views on my projects are dropping for no clear reason—AI? I need to find a solution since this is one of my main selling channels. The bigger you get, the wilder it becomes, I suppose.
If this doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean you’re shit. The normal outcome is that nothing works. If you make some money, you’re already in the top 1% of people trying to build a business. You have to keep trying. Or not. You can give up and go do other things, enjoy your life in a different way.
That’s it for now. I’m going to write more about this topic in the next posts, and I’m also picking the People More Interesting Than Me series back up. I’ve already reached out to a few people for the next interviews.
2026-02-07 08:00:00
On these rainy days, I’m reading two books. They’re shaping me in surprising ways. They also express feelings I already have.
One of them is Anna Karenina.
I see a clear reflection of myself in Levin.
Konstantin Dmitrich Levin is a landowner. He spends much of the novel in an existential crisis. He could live off his wealth or take an important role in Moscow. He chooses neither. That life feels wrong to him.
He rejects the modern world. He keeps asking the same question: what is the point of living?
Levin represents a quiet kind of vitalism. His wisdom does not come from ideas or debates. It comes from physical work. During harvest season, when he joins the peasants in the fields, he finds peace. While working, he stops thinking. He stops searching for answers because he no longer needs them.
The other book I am reading is Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Tolstoy and Nietzsche were contemporaries. They likely never read each other. They both shared something important: a strong rejection of rational modern life. They preferred a life guided by the body, not the mind.
But they looked in opposite directions.
Nietzsche looked upward, toward the overman, toward the creation of new values. Toward saying yes to life in all its cruelty and beauty. His vitalism was aristocratic, heroic, and vertical.
Levin gazed down at the land. He sought humility and aimed to dissolve his ego through work and family. His vitalism was rural, horizontal, and grounded.
Yet both say the same thing in different ways.
You can only live through action, never through pure thought. You do not need permission. You do not need justification. What you live is who you are; nothing more.
Modern culture twists this message.
It suggests that being authentic means knowing yourself. It treats you like a fixed object, as if you don’t change over time.
That is the trap.
Because if you are always evolving, there is always more work to do. Always another layer to dig into. And as Byung-Chul Han puts it:
Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting laborer in his or her own enterprise. People are now masters and slaves in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.
You exploit yourself because it is never enough; because you are never ready.
Kierkegaard saw this coming in the nineteenth century. He called it despair: infinite reflection that paralyzes you.
His answer was not more analysis; it was the opposite: the leap of faith.
You commit to a way of living, to a decision. You stop weighing options without considering logic. You jump without a safety net. You suspend judgment and move forward.
Real vitalism, for me, lies between Nietzsche and Levin.
Nietzsche tells you to stop feeling like a victim. Don’t blame your circumstances. Instead, act according to your desires.
Levin encourages you to stay humble. Know your limits, appreciate small things, and live simply.
In chaotic times, focusing on living feels right. Concentrate on what you can control. Take that leap of faith. Let life flow again.
No rush. No self-exploitation. Just movement.
Life doesn’t wait. Through action, you become who you are.
Everything else is just suffering.
2026-01-30 08:00:00
The other day I was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and I stopped at this line:
That everyone has the right to learn to read corrupts in the long run not only writing but also thinking itself.
Nietzsche saw something early on. When a skill becomes universal, the craft behind it often erodes. Not the result, but the way. The relationship between effort and mastery starts to weaken.
It made me think about AI.
With AI, everything becomes more accessible. When you write a message or a letter to someone you love, or when you build an app or make a film, speed increases. But something important slips away: the bond between the creator and their creation.
That struggle between wanting to create and actually creating used to be important. It was part of learning. Part of ownership. You struggled, failed, tried again, and through that process, the idea became yours. When creation becomes instant and disposable, what remains of that bond? What does it even mean to make something anymore?
And that is where the real risk appears.
Not that machines will replace us, but that we will start creating without care. That we will outsource not only execution, but intention. That we will become operators of tools rather than participants in the act of making. Everything polished. Everything correct. The room felt empty, lacking any signs of life.
Yet this loss carries its own answer.
In the film Her, most communication happens through AI. Still, Theodore’s job is to write letters by hand for other people. Why would anyone pay for that when a machine can do it faster and better?
In a world focused on efficiency, people start to crave the opposite. They want the imperfect, the human touch, and the sense that someone real is present.
That is the line I hope we do not cross.
The need for the human. The imperfect. The crafted. Not because it is more efficient, but because without it, we risk forgetting what matters at all.
2026-01-20 08:00:00
About a week ago, Picmal reached 200 users.
For some people, that number might feel small. For others, it’s big. For me, it’s symbolic.
At 15, I started a forum. I was curious and bored. It combined two things I loved: football and video games. I called it Futbolgame. Not very original.
I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t think about growth, positioning, or marketing. I wanted to build something. Somehow, that forum passed 200 registered users, even without a clear reason.
What surprised me most was not the number itself but everything that came with it.
I started learning Photoshop because some users wanted banners for their profiles. I met new people for the first time. We spent hours discussing various topics, with a focus on football. The forum wasn’t huge, but it gave me something special. It sparked my curiosity, grew stronger, and brought me joy as I made something special for a few people.
Looking back, I realize how easy it is to overcomplicate things now. We obsess over names, branding, positioning, and storytelling. We try to make everything perfect before it even exists. And often, that’s exactly what kills the idea.
Back then, I had no strategy, no expectations. I made things, learned along the way, and enjoyed the process.
And honestly, that’s still what matters most.
If you enjoy creating, the rest is secondary. You never know if something will turn into a living until you make an attempt. And you cannot force yourself to care about an idea because it sounds good on paper. Real interest does not come from an idea bank; it starts with real curiosity. You want to understand a problem and spend time with it.
That is where the best things come from.
I am not in a position to give advice, but if there is one thing, it is this: create if you feel the urge to create. Follow what truly inspires you. Try things. Express yourself.
In a world where everything is measured, optimized, and packaged, seeing someone do something honestly and without pretending is rare. Maybe it makes less money. Maybe it never becomes a business. But your soul does not run on revenue.
If we spent less time chasing what seems profitable and more time exploring what truly interests us, we would probably see better ideas, more originality, and work that actually means something.
2025-12-29 08:00:00
As 2025 comes to an end, I realize I have written less in this newsletter than I would have liked. Maybe my sometimes extreme perfectionism has held me back. Partly because I felt I had nothing worth sharing, and partly because what I wrote did not feel good enough.
I think this is a feeling we all experience at times, whether when writing or when trying to express ourselves in general. But the point of this newsletter is not to deliver something polished. It is more a way to talk about what happens to me, how I feel about it, and how I interpret it, while I try to make a living from this whole entrepreneurship thing.
So I guess I should think less and do more. I have applied that advice to other areas of my life, but not here. And 2026 feels like a good moment to start.
When I say I have not been writing here, I really mean it. I did not even write to say that I launched an app. Picmal is my first 100% native Mac app, and by not overthinking things and simply shipping something that was useful to me, I ended up discovering that it is useful to others too.
I am close to reaching 200 paying users. From the outside, especially when you see so many companies making millions every year, that number might seem tiny. For me, it feels huge. It is proof to myself that I can build things that are genuinely useful to other people.
So yes, the same idea again: think less and do more. By pure algorithmic coincidence, this YouTube channel found me. Elisha talks a lot about how his life started to improve once he stopped overthinking and began acting more, referring to it with the term _retardmaxx_.
I guess he is right. And since my newsletter is called nonsense, maybe I should start honoring that name a bit more.
Last year, when I wrote my year review, I mentioned something I have been doing since 2021. I take the photos I shot during the year and go through them month by month, writing down what I was doing and small anecdotes from those moments. It is my way of keeping those experiences alive.
Last year I changed that dynamic a bit. Instead, I started answering a set of forty questions. I liked the idea because everything becomes much more concrete, while the goal stays the same: to preserve those small moments you lived during the year so that when you come back to them later, once they are no longer fresh, they are still there waiting for you. Almost like a freezer for memories.
I added one more thing to this ritual last year, borrowed from my friend Marynes. At the end of the year, she always creates a vision board with things she wants to do in the following year. If you are a visual person, having this present throughout the year helps a lot. With a single glance, it reminds you of what you want for the year, and of the ambitions or aspirations you have for the future.
It felt like a much healthier way to approach next year’s goals. Not as another checklist or yet another work project to deal with, but rather as a gentle reminder of what we want to prioritize, both in the coming year and beyond.
Beyond Picmal, I have a few apps planned for next year. Some of the problems I want to solve:
All of them will share one thing: AI as a quiet assistant, not as the main character. I believe AI works best when it supports your thinking, not when it replaces it. A subtle layer that helps you move faster, not one that takes over your ideas or decisions.
I will share what I learn along the way here. The wins and the failures.
There are also some questions I have been sitting with, and that I want to explore more deeply:
I do not have answers yet. But I think writing is a good way to find them.
So, bye 2025. A year where I learned, again, that the best way to move forward is to stop waiting for things to feel ready. The only way of learning is by friction.
I would love to hear from you. What are your end of year rituals? Any offline places or online corners you discovered this year that I should know about? And what are you planning for 2026?
You can just send me an email to hello[at]albertogalca.com.
See you in 2026. With more nonsense.
2025-10-13 08:00:00
Ever since I was a child, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with death. It’s a topic many cultures don’t discuss much, yet it’s fundamental for the simple fact that we’re all going to die at some point.
I’ve always had this idea of collecting reflections from others, not so much to think about death, but rather to learn how to live. To learn what mattered to those who are no longer here and how, thanks to that, we can reevaluate our existence on this planet until we’re no longer here.
The title of this essay encapsulates the philosophy of my life perfectly:
The continuous work of our life is to build death
No one embodies this philosophy better than Montaigne.
He was a skeptic through and through, so much so that his main motto was: “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?). But his doubt wasn’t paralyzing, it was liberating. By recognizing the limits of his knowledge, he freed himself from pretending to live perfectly or appearing to be someone he wasn’t.
In 1571, he retreated to his castle tower to write. There, surrounded by books and aware of his mortality, he decided to observe himself without filters. He wrote about everything: his fears, his contradictions, his failures, even the most mundane aspects of his existence. He explored, doubted, contradicted himself from one essay to another. His writing is radical in its honesty: personal, contradictory, profoundly human.
Montaigne viscerally understood something Euripides had expressed centuries before:
How can you think yourself a great man, when the first accident that comes along can wipe you out completely?
This awareness of fragility didn’t paralyze him, it awakened him. He knew his time was limited and that spending it on pretensions or living for others was wasting it. That’s why meditating on death didn’t seem morbid to him, but practical: know yourself, accept yourself, and live calmly, without thinking you’re more than you are, knowing your time is limited.
For Montaigne, preparing to die was the first step to living well. Accepting that you are ephemeral, contradictory, and imperfect finally allows you to be fully alive.
You’re in that tower, whether you know it or not. The question isn’t whether you’re going to die, but whether you’re going to live before you do.
Some of the references in these essays are from the book How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer , which I recommend.
