Software as a Small Business
Meet Helena Jaramillo, The Woman Who's Putting This Family-First Model on the Map
The tech world keeps telling us we need to choose: scale fast or stay small.
But what if there’s a third option that nobody’s talking about?
Meet Helena Jaramillo, who turned that entire narrative on its head. As co-founder of PamPam—an AI map maker that helps creators build community guides and recommendations—she’s built profitable software that bridges online tools with real-world connection. And she’s doing it alongside her husband, with clear boundaries, sustainable growth, and zero venture capital.
While everyone else is optimizing for unicorn valuations, Helena and her husband have created something different: a technology business that actually supports the life they want to live.
We sat down with Helena to explore:
How to build software that brings people together offline, not just online
What it actually looks like to run a tech company as a family business with boundaries
Why the “move fast and break things” mentality is keeping us from building sustainable wealth
How AI tools are making it possible to create profitable software without the traditional startup infrastructure
The real story behind building technology that serves communities instead of extracting from them
Here are some highlights from Helena.
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Start with Community, Not Code
PamPam is a tool for build community. Every map is its own micro-community—whether it’s parents sharing kid-friendly spots in NYC, designers curating their favorite San Francisco haunts, or matchbook collectors (yes, really) mapping the best places to find designer matchboxes in European cities.
“Every community has their own map,” Helena explains. “They’re the mayors of that, the moderators of that. We’re trying to give control and power to people who know their community the most.”
Before launching PamPam, Helena did user research—over 40 calls with designers and technologists from Twitter. She credits this as the anchor to their product’s success. “Start building community from the beginning, if not beforehand,” she told us. “And better yet, if you already have a community, then lean into that.”
Work in Shifts
Here’s what a typical day looks like for Helena:
First shift: Her day job (yes, she still has one)
Second shift: Parenting her 5-year-old son
Third shift: Building PamPam with her husband at night
“People ask ‘how do you do it?’ and the truth is I don’t go out at night a lot,” Helena says with refreshing honesty. “That’s the part people don’t really want to hear.”
She doesn’t see this as sacrifice. Each shift gives her something different. Her day job lets her not be an entrepreneur for a while. “I don’t have to make the really big decisions,” she says. “That’s really cool in its own way.”
Helena’s key to making this work? Mental compartmentalization. “When I’m in my day job, I’m doing that job. When I’m with my kid, I’m doing that. And then same with Pam.”
It’s not work-life balance in the traditional sense—it’s work-work-life integration with clear boundaries.
Couples Need an Invisible Conference Room
Building a business with your husband comes with unique challenges, especially when your “office” is your kitchen.
Helena and her co-founder husband solved this with what she calls “invisible conference rooms”—creating context for conversations even when you’re not in an actual meeting space.
“We might be having conversations at different times of the day, in the kitchen, in the dining room,” Helena explains. “You need to almost create this invisible space like, ‘this is the type of conversation that’s happening right now,’ even though we’re not in a conference room or by the whiteboard.”
Their boundaries include:
Role clarity: Helena is the CEO, handling marketing, customer relations, and high-level design. Her husband does UI design and most of the coding.
The pause button: Constant check-ins like “Should we have this conversation right now? Are you ready?”
Scheduled syncs: Monday morning PamPam meetings, plus working together at night
Hat switching: Being explicit about what perspective you’re bringing (”I’m putting on my marketer hat right now”)
Definitely Monetize Early
Another lesson from Helena on PamPam’s journey: monetize immediately.
“It needs to be clear right away how this is going to be sustainable,” she says. “Getting your pricing and business model right is part of the product. It matters a lot less if you have a lot of money to waste, but if you don’t, then that’s a really core part of it.”
This is radically different from the VC-funded approach, where you’re expected to burn money for years while figuring out monetization. Helena and her husband couldn’t afford that luxury—but it turned out to be a strength, not a weakness.
Their low costs and sustainable business model mean they can actually maintain PamPam as a two-person team. If they’d raised money and weren’t scaling “like crazy,” they’d be dead. Instead, they’re profitable.
Give the People Boring Features
Here’s something they didn’t teach you in design school: the most popular PamPam feature isn’t cutesy/aesthetic. It’s the spreadsheet import feature.
“The most boring features end up being what people need,” Helena admits. “Most people make PamPam maps from a spreadsheet. We never considered that for the first eight months.”
They initially envisioned PamPam as a creative canvas—you could even draw directly on maps with pens and markers. But that feature barely gets used now. Meanwhile, brands and businesses needed their data in spreadsheet format for collaboration and workflow reasons.
Early on, PamPam was also heavily multiplayer—you could see everyone’s cursors moving around the map in real-time, like Figma. It was fun and community-driven, but when brands started using PamPam maps as websites, 50 cursors flying around became more distracting than delightful.
The lesson: Your users will tell you what they need, but only after you give them something to react to. Stay flexible.
Simplicity = Addition by Subtraction
When you’re a two-person team, every feature you build is a feature you have to maintain.
This forces Helena and her husband to be ruthless about simplicity. They’re even considering sunsetting some features they built this year because they’re not getting enough usage.
“We try to be really strict,” Helena says. “The simplicity of it is really important. That simplicity factors into why we’re able to maintain it at the level of quality that a two-person team can maintain.”
They get requests all the time—data visualization, highlighting neighborhoods, new mapping features. But each new capability would complicate the core product.
Their North Star? “Keep on making it quality.”
The lesson: Addition by subtraction. The features you say no to are just as important as the ones you say yes to.
AI made the impossible possible
Ask Helena how a two-person team provides customer support to users around the world, and she’ll tell you honestly: they couldn’t do it without AI.
They use three main AI tools:
Intercom’s Fin: An AI agent that handles customer support during off-hours using their knowledge base
Cursor: Makes coding faster and unlocks capabilities Helena didn’t have before
ChatGPT: For learning new skills, especially marketing and customer support strategies
“That’s really an amazing example of something we just wouldn’t be able to do without AI,” Helena says about Intercom’s tool. Her customer support hours are in the evening—and AI covers the rest.
For coding, Cursor lets them prototype features quickly in PamPam, test them, and scrap them if they don’t feel right. “Certain things are now possible that weren’t possible before,” she says.
The lesson: AI isn’t replacing human creativity—it’s removing barriers to entry.
Philly’s DIY Ethos = Competitive Edge
Helena has lived in nine cities across three continents, but she’s building PamPam in Philadelphia. And that’s not an accident.
“Philly has a really big DIY ethos,” she explains. “It’s very much just like, do what you can to get it done. That’s been really infectious and very different than the Silicon Valley way of doing things.”
This DIY approach extends to their marketing too. They host a series called “On a Walk”—public walks around Philadelphia where the routes are mapped on PamPam, but during the walk itself, phones stay away. It’s about being in community together.
It’s a perfect embodiment of PamPam’s mission: using technology to facilitate real-world connection, not replace it.
Software should help you log off
Here’s Helena’s hope for the future of software: “I want software to be more community-centric, focused on the needs of the communities using it. And more purpose-built too—here’s the thing this software is doing, and then you do it and you get out and go live your life.”
This is revolutionary in an industry built on engagement metrics and maximizing screen time.
PamPam is designed to be a means to an end. You create a map, you share it, people use it to discover places, and then they go to those places. The software facilitates the connection, but the real magic happens offline.
Helena herself struggles with too much screen time (she works on computers all day and codes at night). Her solution? Nature. “Going to the ocean, seeing trees, being in the woods. Nature definitely has a place that is really important.”
Success on your own terms
When asked about PamPam’s North Star vision, Helena’s answer might surprise you.
“It’s always kind of shifting for us,” she admits. “What stays really core is we want to create something we’re really proud of. If there are amazing examples of how communities are using it—which there already are—that feels successful.”
They’re building quality software, serving real communities, and maintaining a sustainable lifestyle.
Their next goal? Keep growing, but on their terms.
Already, PamPam has enabled incredible use cases:
Queering the Map: A Montreal project sharing queer stories on a map (a major inspiration for Helena)
Getting to Green: Philly artists showing bus routes to parks and outdoor spaces
Oh What a Match: Maps of the best designer matchboxes in cities worldwide
NYC Kids Map: Over 300 spots for parents to discover with their children
An Alternative Way Forward
Helena and PamPam prove there’s another path between hypergrowth and staying small forever. It’s a path defined by:
Focusing on quality over quantity
Serving real communities with real needs
Maintaining boundaries that protect what matters
Defining success on your own terms
There are walks through Philadelphia with strangers who become friends. There are communities all over the world using custom maps to connect people to places and each other.
And there are two founders who built something they’re genuinely proud of—while still having dinner together as a family. Their 5-year-old even draws maps and says he wants to work on PamPam when he grows up! So cute.
That’s not the kind of story we might hear out of Silicon Valley, but it’s the story we want to hear :)
The bigger picture: This conversation is part of reimagining what’s possible when we stop treating software like it has to follow the venture-backed playbook. We’re talking about building technology businesses that generate real wealth while supporting the communities and relationships that matter most.
Whether you’re a creative thinking about your first tech product, a couple considering working together, or anyone who’s wondered if there’s a better way to build in tech—it’s important to talk about what’s possible when you design software to serve your actual life, loved ones, and community.
Want to try PamPam for yourself? Visit pampam.world. Follow Helena’s journey on social media and check out their “On a Walk” series if you’re in the Philadelphia area.
This conversation was part of the Online & IRL workshop series, exploring how to think about the internet differently. For more conversations like this, subscribe below.