Do you ever feel imposter syndrome at your job? What would you need to do to get rid of it? Would you switch jobs for a couple of years and return when you felt more confident?
Despite frequent success as a student, soldier, and employee, founder Jéter Silveira often felt like he didn’t really know what he was doing. While today he is the confident CEO of a $350,000 ARR Brazilian online legal directory called Registro Rural, his fears of incompetence pushed him to take on many different careers and leave just as many.
First, Jéter dedicated so much time to being a hospital technician (he wanted to be an asset) that he had to retake his fourth year of school. Then, nervous he’d do poorly in university, he joined the military to work on large-scale technical projects in Sao Paulo for seven years. However, he eventually grew restless with the predictability of military life and switched to law school.
While in law school, Jéter became head of product at one of Uber’s primary legal contractors in LATAM running projects across multiple countries.
But even after accomplishing so much, Jéter again felt like an imposter, only one move from failure with no real idea how to build a good tech product.
He left his role and joined Brazil’s largest online legal directory to learn more about making products. Here, he fell in love with their extremely simple (yet effective) monetization system.
Finally, after 14 years of career-building, Jéter saw an opportunity for a startup of his own, an online registry whereanyone could search the legal status of rural properties in Brazil.
Using all the skills he’d picked up as a soldier, employee, and law student, Jéter grew Registro Rural from a $500-a-year solo operation to a six-figure, four-employee business in three years. And, finally, he doesn’t feel like he’s faking it.
Here’s the path Jéter took from nervous genius to confident CEO and his advice to those looking to do the same.
Well-Built Things Work Even When Missing Parts
As a child, Jéter liked discovering how things worked, especially electronics. He’d break his radios and TVs into pieces and put them back together again. It stuck with him just how well many household appliances were constructed.
“I learned that radios do not break even with only half of the parts,” he says. “That’s how you know they’re well made.”
Jéter’s passions eventually landed him a job at a local hospital while in secondary school. He wrote code for temperature systems in surgery rooms and cadaver labs. He put his heart and soul into that work, rushing over to the hospital immediately after class and often finishing his shifts late at night. In fact, he put so much into it that he had to retake his final year of secondary school due to poor grades.
Unfortunately, Jéter’s dreams of becoming a hospital staff technician came crashing to a halt when his boss was ousted over internal politics, and his team was fired.
Suddenly, Jéter was a high school graduate who’d barely passed his classes with nothing to show for his years of dedication at the hospital. Potentially unable to attend a good university, Jéter felt like he’d be out of place in academia (even though it was what he’d wanted to do his whole life), so he took the more secure route, the Brazilian military.
Is the Safe Thing Really the Best Thing?
Jéter’s father was a Brazilian police officer, a position technically considered part of the military in Brazil. Jéter admired the job security his father enjoyed and knew he could easily pass the requisite exams for Sergeant’s School. He entered the military academy and left a sergeant in the Brazilian military. A position he would maintain for almost a decade.
“In Brazil, if you pass the test for public service, you’re not going to be fired from your job,” he says. “I had the stability I’d been looking for.”
Since Brazil wasn’t fighting in any wars at the time, Jéter returned to what he loved doing – product engineering. He moved to Sao Paulo in 2008 with its blossoming tech sector and maneuvered himself into various city engineering projects. His unit set up the infrastructures for war rooms and even worked on the jumbotrons for the World Cup in 2014.
But Jéter missed the highs and lows of working in the private sector and he felt there was so much more for him to learn about the world. When reassigned to his hometown of Santa Maria, he hung up his medals and enrolled in law school.
“My father always said I should become a lawyer because I loved learning so much,” he says.
Imposter Syndrome Strikes Again
Jéter started studying law in his hometown almost immediately, but just like in secondary school, he couldn’t resist the lure of starting a career at the same time.
In September 2017, Jéter was invited to become the first Brazilian employee at legal startup, Emptor. The business had recently secured contracts to run driver background checks for Didi and Uber’s local branches. Jéter started as a software engineer building web crawlers that probed Brazilian legal registries and automating the background-checking process.
But Jéter’s experience in the Brazilian legal system proved much more valuable to Emptor than they’d expected.
“Brazil has a complex legal system with twenty-seven states and federal and state jurisdictions,” he says. “You need to navigate different legislation for each one.”
Jéter quickly rose to product manager at Emptor, helping launch the same background-checking products in Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, Panama, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. But while he enjoyed the product experience, he felt like a faker. He’d never been formally trained in product management and felt like he was just guessing at what Emptor’s product should look like.
“I was creating what product means in this company, and I’d tell people to read these books and I’d organize everything, but I didn’t feel like I had any real concept of what a good product was,” he says.
In 2021, Jéter stepped down as regional head of product operations at Emptor to become a lowly product manager at Jusbrasil, the largest legal website in Brazil. Today, Jusbrasil is one of the highest-traffic webpages in the world and the central repository of legal documents for Brazilians.
What stuck out to Jéter most about Jusbrasil was just how effective a product it had despite its simplicity. For example, Jusbrasil monetized its site by forcing users to pay to copy and paste content, not by limiting article access or search features. Jéter had even begun to pay for it as a law student.
“I thought this was stupid because I could still copy and paste out of the HTML text,” says Jéter. “But, eventually, I actually started paying for it as did all other professionals extracting value from that tool. This was mind-blowing to me because Jusbrasil still had their social purpose of providing free law data but they’d found a way to get the people deriving value from it to pay.”
You can read a bit about Jusbrasil in this Medium article by CEO Rafael Costa.
After a year with Jusbrasil, Jéter realized software products didn’t have to be elaborate. Productizing a service just meant finding a way to extract money from those who derive the most value from it. Right around the time Jéter arrived at his discovery, two former colleagues proposed a new business idea that would eventually lead to Registro Rural.
Do It Again, But With Farmland
Jéter now knew the utility of registries and directories in the legal profession and knew how they could be easily productized with tactical pay-walling. After about a year and a half into Jéter’s time at Jusbrasil, one of the partners at his old law firm and another who was ex Emptor consultant started to call him to talk about new ventures.
Jéter’s former colleagues had recently started consultating with farmers in Brazil trying to get loans from the banks. However, they again found Brazil’s legal complexity extended to rural plots of land and they needed a technical founder they trusted to help them out.
“To get a loan for rural land, you need to enter your property into the rural and environmental registry, the local IRS registry, the notarial service registry, and another one called the SIGEF,” says Jéter. “That’s five different registries and it gets more complex because these registries don’t always communicate with each other. You can have five things in the notary office but none in the rural and environmental registry and vice versa.”
With funding from his former colleagues, Jéter started a directory webpage called Registro Rural consolidating data from all five registries and making it easily searchable for farmers.
For marketing, Jéter used the same tactics he’d seen at Jusbrasil, creating a new webpage for every entry in the directory giving Registro Rural a huge SEO push. He also published community articles on the Jusbrasil blog on how to check the status of rural property in online registries.
“We got a bunch of lawyers coming in from that,” says Jéter.
Finally, Jéter pushed Registro Rural on Google ads by picking up anyone looking for keywords related to rural properties online.
Visitors began to mount, especially since the name Registro Rural seemed reminiscent of an official government site. From here, Jéter needed to determine exactly what sort of paywall to put up.
To start, he’d systematically hide information behind a signup sheet to see if people would hand over their email to see it. They did. Then Jéter started hiding information behind paywalls and they did that too. In the first year, Jéter netted $500 from sales.
Eventually, Jéter noticed a pattern of site visitors who would pay, namely lawyers, real estate brokers, engineers, and land surveyors. Fifty percent of the users were farmers who didn’t pay to see advanced information. Armed with a productized business, Jéter increased the prices on the site fourfold last year in 2023. The resulting pay jump convinced him to quit his job at Jusbrasil to become CEO.
And that’s where Jéter is today, contently running his first profitable venture where he doesn’t feel stifled or overextended. And it’s where he plans to remain for the foreseeable future.
If You Want to Move Fast, Hire Seniors
Looking back on its three years of operation, Jéter believes Registro Rural’s growth slowed because he tried to hire junior positions early on rather than spending more to hire seniors.
“We lost a lot of time and energy,” he says. “I remembered when I was hired, I was a junior and it worked so I thought it would work the same for us. However, I become too distracted from building the product by focusing on building the people.”
The most common myth in Jéter’s opinion about entrepreneurship? That you need to have a high appetite for risk.
“We have three cofounders at Registro Rural and only one of us is a risk taker,” he says. “In general, we are generally very risk averse. I saw opportunities evaporating so that’s why I moved to startups. I felt I needed to experience starting a startup one time in my life. If you can believe it, I did this to increase my odds of not failing.”
He’s also proud to say he’s built a product so good that it would probably still work if it were missing a few parts, just like the radios and televisions he used to break.
“Our company is made up of parts that already existed somewhere else, we just compiled them in one place,” he says. “If something were to break, we’d still keep running.”
