Today we’d like to introduce you to Marco Esquivel.
Hi Marco, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
**I am going to keep this broad time wise**
** HIGHSCHOOL ** 2017
Going all the way back to highschool, I always wanted to be a football player and pursued it pretty relentlessly. As a team, we found a lot of success winning a California State Championship my junior year, but I realized football was not going to be my future.
So, I started thinking about what I wanted to do in College. Computer Science(Software Engineering) caught my attention. From a young age, I was always interested in how video games were made and wanted to make my own. Then movies like The Social Network inspired me to be able to create through software and computers.
Senior year of highschool I enrolled in a night time Computer Science class offered at a different high school, where I would actually have to leave football practice early some nights so I could go learn at a highschool 30 minutes away. I was hooked from the start, as I came to learn software engineering is really just abstract problem solving.
**COLLEGE** 2017-2021
Fast forward to college, I attended Arizona State University where I spent a lot of time focusing on school. I also raced for the club Snowboarding team sophomore year and spent the remaining years working for and then taking over a student run start up called RVoice.
I met one of the faculty advisors (Greg), in passing during a study abroad info event and they happened to be looking for a student developer to help build out a mobile app for their venture. I was happy to jump on board and started building out the app with the founder (Nick).
RVoice at the time was designed primarily to educate students on how the government worked and also who their elected officials were. After my junior year Nick had graduated and went to work at Verizon. At the time, I decided to take the project over with two of my friends and transition it more into a civic social platform. I did this for the rest of college until graduating where I decided to move to New York City and accept a job offer at American Express, but this wasn’t the end for RVoice.
**POST GRAD PRE BUILD LEAN** 2021-2025
I spent 3 years living in Manhattan moving there in 2021 while working at American Express having fun, enjoying the city, traveling, and going to music events. During this period, I would say I stepped away from the entrepreneurial spirit and was really just young in my 20s enjoying living the big city with a good job.
Then fast forward to January 2024 and I am 25 now and started dating a girl (Erica) who I am still with today. We moved into an apartment in Jersey City together in July 2024. Getting older and settling down a bit I stopped going out as much, and started spending more time with her and healthier habits. By the end of 2024, I had just ran the NYC Marathon and was going through the interview process at Meta and Amazon.
During the interview process, I started to realize I wasn’t motivated to study and go after these “better” jobs, but I was still motivated and interested in starting my own company. Subsequently, I returned to pursue RVoice.
While I didn’t leave American Express yet, I started exploring different use cases and approaches to revive RVoice. I started with a voter registered verification forum similar to Blind or Reddit, but you are in private forums for your voting districts. After exploring this for a little while I pivoted to something more in the AI space and local government levels. This was when RVoice turned into a city council meeting agenda AI researcher and newsletter writer. I did fully launch this product in New Jersey (Jersey City and Hoboken) for about a month.
Then, for a last RVoice pivot, I removed the city council specific newsletters and made a platform that anyone can pick a topic for AI to research and then write recurring email newsletters on. This is the one that I actually set up a business for and tried to market for a couple months.
**BUILD LEAN** 2025-Present
In November of 2025, while still at Amex and trying to run RVoice, I realized promoting a direct to consumer product was extremely challenging and would take a very long time to be self sustaining, so I started thinking of different ideas. After building at Amex for almost 5 years and then building and operating bootstrapped SaaS businesses on the side, I realized the skills I have gained are extremely valuable for businesses and saw my dad getting charged $2,000 for a pretty simple website with intake forms and marketing.
So I started exploring the custom software market. I compared what I was seeing from existing established agencies and compared it to the work I was already doing. That’s when I realized a combination of skills I developed over the years matched this business model extremely well. With the addition of new AI tools like Claude, it made building software easier and running a business easier. Both these things I was learning how to do already, but didn’t have the knowledge yet to put it into a business model.
At this point though, I knew this was the play that I actually go all in with. I obsessed over this idea, everyway it could maybe not work, every marketing avenue, and sales approaches. By March 2026 I knew I wanted to leave American Express to do this full time, but living in Jersey City now with my girlfriend it would be hard to juggle expenses while bootstrapping a new business. Luckily my girlfriend now had a remote job and was open enough to move back to California with me and temporarily back in with the parents while I pursue this venture at 27 years old.
We made a plan that included me leaving Amex in May to pursue this full time and then move away from the east coast in the end of May to hopefully give us some more financial cushion while I am really trying to ramp this business up, but I was still putting myself on a clock to achieve some type of growth and success for both of our sakes.
My last day at American Express after almost 5 years and a ton of great work and relationships was May 1st 2026. I was very excited and nervous to pursue this full time while also moving across the country, and quite frankly still feel like I am in this stage as it was just a couple months ago now.
Build Lean is something I am excited about and is going well with multiple delivered projects. With AI Transformation Consulting engagements now in the works, I am continuing to try to better educate myself to be able to help SMB and Mid-Market businesses get the most out of modern Software and AI Solutions. It is something I am passionate about because I really believe although AI gets a bad wrap in the hands of big corporations. It also lets smaller ones compete at a scale that was never possible before taking more control over their tech and data landscape.
I don’t think the repercussions of AI are clear yet, but I am happy to be on the side of giving smaller business ownership of their own solutions and being invested in their success instead of taking the traditional SaaS route where the SaaS company bottom line matters more than anything.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Definitely not a smooth road. Between the failed interview cycles, 3 RVoice pivots and then completely abandoning my first venture, major lifestyle changes going from a young 20 year old partying around the world to trying to change my habits into a disciplined hard working business owner. Then trying to juggle a full-time job while exploring business ventures on the side had me majorly burning out.
Most recently trying to go all in on a business while also moving across the country and back in with your parents and girlfriend.
Also the mental struggle of being a solo founder and operator is tough to deal with everyday.
I could go into more detail about any of these and more, but they each came with their own mental challenges that have been hard. None these are enough to deter me though for now. I am not sure why, but with any new challenge the goal of trying to be a business owner and going back to the 9-5 never enters my head.
As you know, we’re big fans of Build Lean. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
The company name is Build Lean @ buildlean.dev. We offer 2 main services AI transformation consulting and custom software solutions.
We specialize in modern cloud architecture, system integrations, automations, and AI-native platforms and features. We are also product and industry agnostic, while still serving a lot of clients in the Construction industry (General Contractors and Speciality trades).
I would say the biggest thing that separates us from competitors is being a 1 stop shop for everything from Strategy, Implementation, Adoption, and Monitoring of systems. You don’t just get an engineer, solutions architect, auditor, or consultant. You get what goes into an entire successful technology initiative end to end.
Also Build Lean stands by its name of being lean as a solo operator that leans heavily into AI tools I am able to handle the entire relationship from sales, advising, building, adoption, testing etc with 0 sales team, account managers, separate engineers etc. By being a lean operator myself running my own business and building my own systems for myself often translates to client solutions from my own personal experiences.
As a result the output, reliability, and speed of delivery at this price point was not even possible a year ago. I have developed an almost factory line of delivery to be able to execute this quickly and effectively.
Brand wise I am most proud of our commitment to being invested in the success of business we partner with, full ownership of any code or IP we develop passed directly to the partners, enterprise level reliability and security practices in place, and consideration that the investment makes sense before any contract is signed.
I think very few firms can honestly say all of that, but I believe in a service based business like this one operating with integrity and being invested in the success of those you work with will ultimately lead to success yourself.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
Serving clients nationwide, located in Carlsbad California currently, but lived in NYC and Jersey City as well.
Pricing:
- Custom solution builds start at 1.5k
- AI Transformation Consulting engagements start at 8k and run 2-4 months
Contact Info:
- Website: https://buildlean.dev
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marco-esquivel-155342138
