American Immigrant in Portugal. Building Cool Stuff. Havin' Fun.

I'm Justin. A Portuguese-American, Bay Area native who moved to Lisbon in 2022 with my wife and dog. We live here full-time. I'm currently at a B1 level in Portuguese, capable enough to handle daily life, but still working hard to catch the nuance in rapid-fire conversation.

For eight years I ran a marketing consultancy, working with small businesses on their SEO, content and websites. I got good at spotting the thing underneath the thing: the tools that didn't talk to each other, the numbers nobody trusted, the manual work that shouldn't have been manual. I'd flag it every time. Sometimes a client had the appetite to go fix it, usually the scope was what the scope was, and I'd do the job I was hired to do.

What I kept wanting was the other job. Not the specialist brought in for one channel, but someone who builds across the whole pipeline: how people find you, what happens after, what you can actually measure, and whether any of it holds together. I had opinions about every piece of that and nowhere to put them all at once.

So I closed the agency and started building Viajo, a Portuguese learning platform, partly because I moved here and needed to learn Portuguese. Blank slate, no inherited decisions, nobody to negotiate with. The SEO the way I'd argue for it. The email automation, the analytics, the content pipeline, same. It's the first time I've built the whole thing the way I'd actually recommend it, and this site is where I write down how each piece works.

Why Portugal?

Portugal has become a hotspot for Americans recently, but my connection goes back much further.

My first time here was back in 2009. Over the years, I just kept returning. I made friends, learned the neighborhoods, and probably spent a cumulative year here off-and-on. Moving here became the long-term goal.

At 24, I decided to pursue Portuguese citizenship through my ancestry. My grandparents still had the original immigration documents we needed, tucked away in their attic. The citizenship process was long, expensive, and full of bureaucratic hurdles, but with their help, we made it happen. I'll never forget the day my red EU passport arrived in the mail; it felt like the door to a whole new life had just opened.

Later, when COVID changed how many of us think about work and location, my wife and I decided it was time. We've been here since August 2022, and although I know people sometimes complain about it here, I couldn't be happier.

The Big Picture

I build AI tools that take repetitive work off teams, and teach people to use them. The role I'm after is full-time, in AI enablement: building AI tools and workflows for a company's teams, and helping the people who use them get good at it. Marketing automation, lifecycle and marketing operations roles are a strong fit too, since that's where most of my proof is. Three years of building with AI every day is what I'd bring, and this whole site is my argument for why I'd be good at it.

I'm also open to contract work. If that's what you've got, start a conversation.

I write about what I'm building because working in public keeps me honest. The decisions, the things that broke, the stuff I'd do differently. Someone else is probably solving the same problem this week.

Want to see some of the systems I've built? Check out my projects page. For a snapshot of my current focus, visit my now page.

Questions? Want to connect?

Thanks again for stopping by.