Johan Martínez Ríos

Where I'm from

I was born in El Coquillo, a small village in Guerrero. When I was seven we moved to one of the poorest parts of Iztapalapa, in Mexico City.

Both my parents worked, and their jobs were far from anywhere we could afford to live. Public transport ate the day: they left at six in the morning and came back at eleven at night. So my grandparents raised me, my grandmother most of all. Neither of them ever learned to read or write.

Every time my parents changed jobs, we moved. Every move meant another primary school. I was the new kid so many times I lost count.

At 13 I started selling soccer uniforms. I taught myself to build the business's website from online tutorials, and with the profits I bought my first computer: a terrible little machine I stayed up with every night. At 16, the same uniform money paid for a university cybersecurity diploma. I finished it at 17, while still in high school. Nobody around me called this “entrepreneurship.” It was just what you did when nobody was coming to help.

The scholarship

Grades earned me a 100% merit scholarship to Tec de Monterrey in Santa Fe. A public-school kid on a private-school campus. I got bullied for being poor. I also saw, for the first time in my life, people who assumed they would win. That rewired me more than any class did.

While there, I ran flash soccer tournaments: up to 340 paying players on a Saturday, entry fees, prize pools, free jerseys. I had seen how corruption prices poor kids out of organized football. I won Business Breakdown, a national business competition, with that company. Then the field owners saw the money and took the venues away. That was my first real lesson: Mexican systems don't just fail people without connections. They actively exclude them. I have been building inside broken systems ever since.

Leaving

At 17 I started a Business Intelligence degree at Tec. At 18, HYBE Latin America hired me part-time in IT; nineteen months and two promotions later I was Data & Research Tech Lead, working directly with senior leadership. My last full semester ended in August 2025. That fall I was enrolled in a single elective. The school kept asking me to stay. I just stopped going. There was nothing left in a classroom I couldn't build faster outside of one.

2026: the fast search

This year I ran three experiments in seven months, on purpose.

Vulkn taught me how to sell and operate AI agents in production: clients paying US$1K to $13K a month, starting with an insurer doing MXN 1.4B in revenue, closed with zero network.

Boleto Loco taught me the difference between a business that works and a business that scales. I raised US$45K on one phone call. Then I made a second call, to Ghana, where Ramiro, my collaborator since high school, was in university. He dropped out on that call; I bought his flight to Mexico City and we started building from an Airbnb. I built the growth engine: a playbook for AI-generated videos, the best driving up to US$35K in ticket sales in 37 days. Together we built the ticketing platform and its support and media-buying agents. Within weeks we knew the thesis was wrong: margins too thin, operations too heavy. Learning that cost US$8K of the US$45K. We pivoted to white-label ticketing, returned the other US$37K to our investor, and automated everything. Today AI agents run the day-to-day, my investor has taken over the operation to grow it, and Ramiro and I are fully out. My investor says he'll back whatever I do next. Ramiro has been building with me ever since. He lives at the house.

Convergence: Sigea

Sigea is where everything converges. We build the AI back office for private universities in Latin America: enrollment, payments, academic operations, compliance. These institutions run on manual processes that inflate tuition and lock out students like the one I was. Two agents are in production today: admissions and collections, the two fronts that move money, with five more phased behind them. In our first month of selling we signed two universities on 6 to 12 month contracts (~US$8.5K MRR), with a third in final signing and a pipeline past US$100K MRR. I recruited the team myself: engineers from Oracle, AWS, and a Boston startup.

I dropped out of a Business Intelligence degree to build the actual intelligence layer for the institutions that teach it.

The factory

I also run dropouts.mx, a free hacker house in Polanco, Mexico City. I pay for it myself, out of what I have earned: a three-story house where 10 builders live, eat, and build, and where I live with them. Its manifesto is mine: Don't build the product. Build the machine that builds it. Boleto Loco was the proof. Sigea is the company. The house is the factory.