There’s a particular nervousness that comes from showing your work to people who could probably do it themselves. Not a client pitch, not a room of curious beginners. A room of other independents, in the city where you live, who run their own small operations and know exactly how the sausage gets made.
That was Thursday, and I’m still thinking about it.
What we turned up to
On Thursday 16 July, Solopreneur Superpowers was one of ten projects picked through an open call to exhibit at the first Nomad Entrepreneur Fair, part of the inaugural València Nomads Hub Summer Meetup 2026. It was held at La Harinera, an old flour factory that Valencia has turned into an event space, and organised by València Nomads Hub, an initiative of València Innovation Capital, with the Ajuntament de València. Around 130 people from 47 different nationalities came through over the course of the evening.
Jim and I brought the thing we’ve spent months building: the toolkit we actually use to run a one-person business. The workflows, the small automations, the AI setups that usually live invisibly on our own machines. We put it on a table and waited to find out what other people made of it. The programme billed us as “AI for real-world business,” which, after months of fumbling for the words, is a description I’ve happily stolen.
We weren’t only at the table
The stand wasn’t the whole of it. Earlier in the evening I moderated one of the panels — Digital Nomads: Future of International Talent in Valencia — with three founders who’ve built their companies here: Guilherme Fernandes of Bonding, Tarcísio Corrêa of Lumiere Psy, and Angélica Triviño of Kaizen Consulting.
We’d sat down to talk about attracting international talent, and kept drifting somewhere more honest: what it actually takes to keep going on your own, why remote work only helps if the work itself is sustainable, and how rarely a founder’s own wellbeing gets a mention in the usual startup story. The best questions came from the floor.
Showing up in your own city
I’ve lived in and around Valencia long enough to stop treating it as a novelty, which is its own kind of luck. So this one felt different. These weren’t strangers in a conference town I’d fly home from. Some of them I’ll run into again at the market, or in the same co-working space, or at the next meetup.
That changes how you talk about your work. You can’t oversell to people you’ll see on Tuesday. You end up being more honest, more specific, and a lot more interested in whether the thing you built is genuinely useful to the person standing in front of you.
The Valencia nomad crowd
If you haven’t spent time in it, the international and nomad community here is hard to sum up, because it isn’t one thing. There are the location-independent freelancers who landed for the weather and stayed for the life. There are founders building something small and deliberate rather than chasing a funding round. There are people three months into self-employment, and people ten years in who’ve forgotten what a manager sounds like.
What they share is a comfort with figuring things out alone, and a quiet appetite for anything that makes the alone part less heavy. That was the room we were talking to. It’s almost exactly who we build for.
What the conversations reminded us
I went in half-expecting to explain what AI is for. That wasn’t the conversation we had.
The people we spoke to weren’t asking whether these tools mattered. They were already stitching together their own versions, often held together with more determination than documentation. What they wanted to talk about was the specific friction. The admin that eats a Friday. The client onboarding that never feels finished. The second-brain system they started and abandoned twice.
Over and over, the same reminder surfaced. The technology is the least interesting part. What matters is giving one person the reach that used to need a team, without asking them to become someone else to get it. The best moments weren’t when a demo impressed somebody. They were when someone described their own week back to us, and we could point at the exact part we’d have handed to a machine.
Who this is actually for
It’s easy, building in public, to start picturing an audience that doesn’t exist. A night like this corrects that. The people this is for aren’t waiting for permission or a perfect tool. They’re already independent, already resourceful, and they just want fewer hours lost to the boring, repeatable parts so they can spend more on the work only they can do.
We came home tired and a little wired, with a handful of conversations worth following up and a clearer sense of the job. Not a bigger idea. A more grounded one.
Come and find us
If you were at La Harinera and we talked, thank you. It was the good kind of long day. If you weren’t, we’ll be at more of these, and we’d rather show you the toolkit in person than describe it.
Either way, if any of this sounds like your week, get in touch.
València Innovation Capital wrote up the whole evening — the Nomad Talks, the opening from the city, and the other founders who showed up. You can read their account here.