The story so far
From an exchange student who had never heard of a domain name to building the product at Toliv. Keep scrolling.
August 2025
An exchange student at the Pontificia Universidad Católica, on my year abroad from the University of Bath.
Two weeks later
I found Cursor and got hooked. The next day I opened Lovable, and I didn't close it for months.
One week after that
500,000 CLP, knowing nothing about hosting or domains. All I knew was how to prompt. I got paid half, handed over the whole site anyway and moved it to their hosting because they talked me into it. Dumb mistake, learned once.
September 2025
My 360° tour business, shot on an Insta360 X5. I messaged Airbnb hosts and phoned venues off Google Maps, at least 500 of them. One client closed, through word of mouth: 400,000 CLP. Then came the errors, the change requests, and 500 € of tour software I had to buy from a third party.
September 2025
A WhatsApp bot built in n8n: send it a receipt and it logs the spend in a Google Sheet and files the photo in Drive. I tried selling it to students for 2,000 CLP a month, but I didn't have the technical depth yet to make it good enough to keep anyone.
27 September 2025
That is how hooked I was. I paid for the flight myself to meet other founders and learn.
October 2025
A one-month trial as social media manager. I stayed a second month, then asked to turn it into the internship my Bath year abroad needed. Four months in social media, learning product at a crazy pace. Somewhere in there I moved to Claude, and I haven't stopped.
December 2025
Our advisor, co-founder of Netlify, came to visit. My first time face to face with a unicorn founder. I bombarded him with questions. Probably too many.
January 2026
Full front-end and back-end access to our app. I remodelled all of it, from an app that worked into an app that feels good. It had 4,600 users when I arrived. It has 18,400+ now, grown organically. I stretched the internship to eight months rather than leave for a startup in Mexico.
January to March 2026
Marketing and content, and making the app cooler in between. I now build every landing page for Toliv's clients: events, artists, ecommerce. The app is cool. Next it has to be awesome.
April 2026
My first guerrilla campaign, at events sold through our ticketing: download Toliv Social, sign up, get a free shot. About 600 CLP per user. Not bad, but slow. Two events that month.
April 2026
I started dating Antonia Jesús. It's public, and it trended. Meanwhile I kept building the app and the sites for Toliv's clients, as usual.
May 2026
Cris and I took Toliv's social logic to professional events. Attendees add their company, role and goal, and AI tells them who in the room is worth meeting, with an opener: "Luca, John also went to Bath. Ask him…". Unfinished, we launched it anyway, with a banner outside a Belgian-Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce event. About 70% of the people there downloaded it. We're going back to it soon.
June 2026
The whole month working from Geneva, staying with family.
July 2026
Where I started making content. It has grown organically ever since.
August 2026
Cris asked me: what would you actually use, every day, that brings you back to Toliv Social? Build it. So I built Toliv City, our version of the metaverse, where real events meet a digital world. You build, you connect, you explore. A game, but more than anything a retention strategy.
August 2026
Right after: one place for influencers to collect collab and ad proposals, and for artists to collect studio sessions and features. Still building it. An AI agent runs its sales outreach.
Mid-August 2026
We launched tours by Young Cister, Harry Nach and Kuroh.
18 September 2026
Toliv's highest sales ever, thanks to Fiestas Patrias and where we had placed ourselves for it.
Today
Let's see how it goes.
Built, never used
Every one of these was built for real people to use. Nobody did. They stay here because trying is the point.
Click the chest
Ecommerce
My first ecommerce. A French streetwear label — designs, logo, supplier, photoshoots, organic content, all of it mine. I didn't know how to run Meta Ads, it never found an audience, and I shut it down.
0 t-shirts sold · ~£500 spent · 2025, closed
Bot
A WhatsApp bot that logs your receipts in a spreadsheet and saves the photos to Drive. Pitched to students at 2,000 CLP a month.
App
Photograph an item, get an estimated resale value, priced off what the same thing actually sold for.
SaaS
Building-permit paperwork in Santiago, through a web app and a WhatsApp bot that reads your documents for you.
Extension
A Chrome extension that gives browser tabs nicknames that stick, even on sites that keep renaming them. Shipped in a week.
Extension
A Chrome extension that sorts downloads into folders by the site they came from.
App
A duplicate-photo cleaner: swipe to delete. Installs from the browser, in English and Spanish.
Web
A tab-sharing site that plays the tab back in the browser.
The series
One video a day about what I actually shipped that day. No course, no rented car, no advice.
Free to copy
Prompts I paste into AI coding tools as they are. Open one, copy it, drop it into your project.
Prompt
A wordmark whose letters turn into dashed vector outlines under the pointer, with a selection frame, blinking specks and letters you can drag that spring back. From React Bits.
Free to take
Interface pieces running live, with the exact files behind them. Copy, paste, ship.
Background · from React Bits
The field of shapes and ripples behind the headline up top, ported from WebGPU to WebGL2 and plain JavaScript so it runs anywhere. Engine, React wrapper and demo, free to copy.
Component · by dqnamo
A checkout state that prints a real-looking receipt when payment clears: processing, paper feeding out, done.
Luca Marrella. Santiago, Chile.
In public
Building an audience
Two accounts, one target: 10,000 followers on each by the end of 2026.
TikTok
@zosasounds
From 300 followers to 10,200 in three months.
10,200
100% of the way to 10,000
Instagram
@zosasounds
Growing too, from a smaller base.
2,216
22% of the way to 10,000
10,000 on each by 31 December 2026. Counts read on 28 September 2026.