I build things and share the lessons nobody told me straight.
I spent a decade shipping other people’s ideas. Now I’m shipping mine.
I’ve spent a decade building and shipping software products, usually running several at once. Helped Hewlett Packard Enterprise launch a proximity system for stores, a digital signage company move 10,000+ TVs without dropping a single screen, a NYC-based Web3 startup get back to shipping after two stalled years, and Groupon run the part of the site where tens of millions of people check out every month.
Side projects the whole way — student magazine, recipes, tutorials, flash games, selling piano sheet music. Still full-time elsewhere, but quietly working to flip it. The current one is Edicek — built solo and in public. Alongside it, I’m sharing the stuff nobody told me straight.
Reputation: fast, demanding, locked on the outcome.
I'll send you an email when I publish something new. No spam, just real stuff.
If Edicek raised money tomorrow, I'd hire someone for marketing first and video second. Neither would start from zero. The brand, the illustrations, the video tool and every decision behind the product are already written down, because I built all of it when I couldn't afford the people. A good hire would open the repository in Claude Code and onboard themselves.
If Edicek raised money tomorrow, I'd hire someone for marketing first and video second. Neither would start from zero. The brand, the illustrations, the video tool and every decision behind the product are already written down, because I built all of it when I couldn't afford the people. A good hire would open the repository in Claude Code and onboard themselves.
Clavard, one of my projects that's shut down now, sold piano sheet music. I wrote all 618 commits of its code and couldn't make, judge or steer a single thing it sold. The people I paid were building the system for me, not the other way round. Accelerators ask how big your idea is. I ask whether I can keep it alive alone.
The new Edicek browser extension was done on a Saturday morning. Making anyone see it took three days and about ten things I didn't plan, and it was only three days because the systems behind it were ready.
In February I wrote that the polish is the product. What I left out is that I could only afford the polish I could code myself. Anything needing a designer stayed on the list. That changed.
Every illustration Edicek has ever had was generated with GPT Image 2.0, and I had exactly two problems with it. Iterating destroyed the picture and nothing came with a transparent background. 2.5 fixed both.
We got a Volvo last year and suddenly Volvos are everywhere on the road. The roads didn't change, my focus did. The scary part is that the same filter runs on people.
After years of leading teams and working with externals, I look for two qualities: people who iterate and people who grow. Both come with a bill attached, and it's worth paying.
Want to make videos like Anthropic does for Claude Code? Go watch the first videos OpenAI ever made for ChatGPT. Everything you envy today was ugly when it started.
Twenty years of projects for Microsoft, Groupon and HP taught me things I could never learn alone. When I started Edicek, all of it came back. Working for someone isn't embarrassing.
A friend's husband jumped out of planes. One day his parachute didn't open. Meanwhile people who won't try a new haircut happily get on a motorbike every Sunday.
Lighting figured out, camera figured out, editing good enough. After a month of daily TikToks there's only one thing left to fix, and it's the one thing you can't order from a store.
The girl at reception was out of my league. Then she showed me a photo of her husband, a regular guy like me, and told me how they met. It broke my brain a little.
A deputy director on €1,000 a month asked for a small raise. They refused, so she left. Then they hired five people for €13,200 a month to replace her. Ego is expensive.
I post one TikTok every day and thought 3 batch days a month would cover me. The plan broke on day one. Even with editing outsourced and a teleprompter, one video still costs me 45 to 50 minutes.
The company I consult for has 20 developers and wants AI in everything. But every feature crosses 20 repositories and 6 approval steps. So I proposed a challenge: same feature, my system vs theirs.
I'm consulting for a team of about 20 developers, and most of them I wouldn't want on my own team. Everyone thinks AI will save them. It won't. It multiplies what's already there.
I pay a designer, a marketer and a video editor to help with Edicek. Then I make them wait five days for feedback because I'd rather code. The math doesn't work.
Twenty years in B2B and I never needed to know what users do in my app. Then I plugged LogSnag into Edicek and found out exactly where people stop. It wasn't where I would have guessed.
I avoided building a browser extension for years without knowing why. Then I planned it with Claude Code, went back to my day job, and when I returned to the window it was done. Approved by Google in one day.
A stranger on Twitter DMed me about a login bug in Edicek. Google sign-in had been silently broken for over a year for a small group of users, while I was paying App Store ads to bring them in.
I offered to bring a fitness app founder his first real users through my personal trainer. He didn't jump at it. I used to do the same thing, and it's the most expensive mistake you can make for free.
My barber told me my haircut doesn't suit me. Try growing it out for six months, he said. Worst case, we go back to what you have now. That math changed how I think about small bets.
Tough leg day Sunday, 10 km walk Monday, sauna after work. By evening I had 39°C fever. The day looked identical to any other. But it wasn't.
Having a full-time job and a side project is hard. Statistically, you'll fail. But working under someone without control over my direction is harder.
When everything piles up, your body wants to sprint. But you're not actually moving faster. You're just doing the same things with more tension.
Promoting one video at a time on TikTok wastes money. I run 5-10 at once and let the algorithm pick the winner.
I don't read to finish books. I read to apply what I find. If something clicks, I'd rather close the book and brainstorm than push through more pages.
My Audi A5 had the best cruise control. Then Volvo reinvented it. The result is terrible. I see the same thing in software every day.
I'm embarrassed by my own videos. But quitting before hitting my goal would be even more embarrassing.
I started with a 125-line custom command. Three months and 35 commits later, it's 1,485 lines. AI tools need constant iteration, not one-time setup.
I couldn't build iOS apps for 10 years. Five failed attempts. When I finally learned, those years of watching others work gave me insight I wouldn't trade.
I built what the client asked for — after talking them out of it six times. 70 machines, millions of records, Google Cloud. No alerts, no warnings — just a $57,000 invoice instead of the usual $70. Here's what actually happened.
I started grinding at 18-19. Worked 8 to 7 every weekday, 4 hours most weekends. Cut out bars and discos. Now at 34, with a wife and son, balance actually matters. But I wouldn't have this lifestyle if I hadn't sacrificed everything in my twenties.
My record is 29 video ideas in one day. I have about 40 in progress at any time. Sometimes I consciously stop myself from capturing more. It feels like opening long-closed boxes inside me where things just pour out.
95% of my video ideas come while driving, not at a computer. I dictate messy brain dumps into Edicek via Wispr Flow, let them sit for 2-3 weeks, then turn them into scripts with a Claude Code command. 50 out of 60 captured ideas became actual videos.
I started building Collections for Edicek a year ago. What looked like one simple feature turned into 8 places and 4 edge cases. Meanwhile, a 15-minute sidebar fix made the app feel more polished than any big feature would.
I have about 1,100 TikTok followers. Most videos get zero comments, maybe 8 likes. But if those 1,100 people became paying customers for Edicek, that would be huge. Follower count alone doesn't say much.
Almost every project I've ever made has a folder called Progress. Screenshots I was already sharing with colleagues or friends, saved instead of deleted. 6 projects, up to 60 screenshots each. A time machine I built by accident.
Every VHS clip of my childhood is the same: 10 seconds of someone asking me to do something for the camera. So when Eduard was born, I started filming him for 2-3 minutes straight without interacting. Just him being himself.
I saw someone who wrote emails to their kid's Gmail from birth. I wanted to do the same but never did. Instead, I started recording voice messages for my son Eduard. One day he'll get them all on a flash drive.
I started highlighting books to survive a 340-page university exam. 10 years and 20 books later, I still do it. The highlighter is my bookmark, and a 20-minute second pass through the yellow parts is worth more than the first read.
I made 3 YouTube programming tutorials in 2 years and couldn't push through. Then I slammed the table, grabbed a phone tripod, and recorded my first TikTok. The block wasn't about video. It was about the wrong format.
I built a web app, an iOS app, a Mac app, and a CLI for Edicek. The web app came first and gets used the least. SaaS isn't dying. People just keep finding new doors to the same service.
I skipped my friend's videos because something about his visibility irritated me. Now I'm on the other side—only my wife supports what I do, and a stranger at the gym recognized me before most of my friends even acknowledged it.
Everyone pictures compounding as a smooth upward line. But across six projects, I've seen a different pattern: long flat stretches of nothing, then a wave that makes all of it count.
Revolut removed their daily budget feature 2 years ago. So I built my own with a standing order and a lock screen widget.
In B2B you ship at 90%. In B2C, that 90% is just the starting point.
Setbacks are just rolls of the dice. You play from where you are now.
Wispr Flow changed how I work — my voice is now my main input, and the open office actively breaks that flow. Offices were built for keyboards. A lot of us aren't typing anymore.
I built Collections in the first week of Edicek. Eight months later, users are asking for it, but it's still hidden behind a feature flag. I'm waiting to make it smarter with AI, but maybe that's just founder perfectionism disguised as better product thinking.
I installed monitoring software to track underperforming team members and damaged trust with everyone else. Three times before I learned to just talk directly.
I tried existing bookmark tools, then hacked Apple Notes with Shortcuts, slammed the table, and built Edicek. Then I found 5 competitors with $20M in VC funding. I keep building because their products focus on saving, not recall—and if theirs worked, I'd honestly just stop.
I built pay-as-you-go pricing for Edicek because subscriptions felt unfair. Then every non-technical user asked the same question: how much per month? Fair and predictable turned out to be two different things.
My second YC application - complete text, founder video, demo video, and what changed since my rejection six months ago.
I thought learning outside my field was pointless. Then one word from journalism school won me my first big programming client. You never know which skill will be the one that matters.
Your workspace, your clothes, what you learn outside your field—these aren't separate from your success. They're reflections of the same thing.
What you do automatically when you have free time reveals your trajectory—whether you choose focused work, real rest, or mindless escape compounds over years.
Everyone says SaaS is dead and AI wrappers won't survive. Here's a simple test: remove all AI from your product. If the core still works and solves the problem, it's not an AI wrapper—the AI just makes it better.
After 95+ cold plunges in 3-degree water, I learned that pain from hard things doesn't disappear—it shifts. You stop fighting it, stop fearing it, and realize that hurt and impossible aren't the same thing.
Every time I hit an obstacle making TikTok videos—lighting inconsistency, teleprompter updates, caption templates—I solved it once and built it into my workflow. Without these boring systems, I'd burn out. With them, I can create multiple videos in a day.
Stop filtering content ideas because you've said something similar before—if the same topic comes back with a different angle or emotion, that's exactly why it's worth repeating.
After sixteen years as a professional software engineer, I finally shipped my first iOS app with AI as my tutor. The breakthrough wasn't the code generation, it was having expertise to guide the architecture while AI translated it into patterns I couldn't grasp before.
The best products come from founders who use them daily. When you're the target user, you feel every friction point before your users complain about it.
Stop working five to ten minutes before you finish a task. The next day you'll know exactly where to start instead of staring at a blank page.
Being small isn't a problem when you're not ready to scale.
I used to feel guilty about skipping gym days. Then I found a way to skip without actually skipping. When I'm too tired to lift, I show up and just stretch for 60 minutes instead. I keep the habit alive without destroying myself. Zero guilt.
I broke Edicek for two days and nobody complained. Not because the bug was invisible—because nobody was there to see it. I have three users. That gives me something valuable: freedom to fail.
I ignored Whoop for years. Out of the blue, I spent $300 on it. What changed? Not the product. Me. My priorities shifted. The product was always right for me—I just wasn't ready for it yet.
Some videos don't flow. The script is choppy, takes aren't landing right. I used to waste hours trying to fix them. Now I take the best version, edit quickly, and publish. I don't know which videos will work anyway. Momentum beats perfection.
I spent five days on one programming tutorial video. Got 120 views. The videos weren't perfect—they were the best I could do, which meant they were average. Volume matters more than perfection when you're starting out.
I used to feel guilty about everything I wasn't doing—books unread, friends not seen, to-do lists ignored. Then I imagined my time as 100 hours a week and consciously decided where they go. Work gets 50. Family gets 20. Piano gets 2. Once you decide, the guilt goes away.
YC wants you to have a co-founder. I've worked on multiple projects with co-founders. One person always does more, always cares more. And 23% of co-founders leave after three years.
It took me 36 takes to record a one-minute YC video. English isn't my first language. I still got rejected. But now I can explain Edicek to anyone without thinking.
YC rejected me. But those five days preparing the application forced me to answer questions I'd been avoiding for months. The document became my compass.
London investors found my GitHub projects and offered funding. I said no. Money alone isn't enough—I need the network and knowledge that comes with the right partners.
YC says ship fast, don't overbuild. Then they ask: How hard is this to copy? These two things go completely against each other.
I'd have a content idea in the morning and think I'd remember it. Then nothing else would come all day. The first idea was blocking everything else. Now I save every idea immediately—not to use it, just to clear space for the next one.
A friend said I don't need a brand. People will use my product because it's good. He's wrong—not about expensive branding, but about consistency.
Everyone said start on Twitter. I tried it. Got 3 views per tweet. Then I tried TikTok and got 300. The difference wasn't just numbers—it was motivation.
You don't need new topics. You need new stories. The Ramsey Show made 3,000+ videos about debt—same message, different proof every time.
Post even when nobody's watching. It's not about today—it's about two years from now when someone discovers you and checks your history.
People stress about what content to create. But when I look at my video ideas, they're not invented—they're reactions to real things that happened. My trainer said once a week wasn't enough. That became a video. Ideas come from living your life, not sitting and inventing topics.
I stressed about finding my content niche. Should I talk about products, fitness, or business? Then I realized the creators I follow—I follow them as people, not their topics. You don't need a category. You are the niche.
When I'm stuck on a coding problem, I go to the sauna. Not for relaxation—for boredom. No phone, no distractions. That's when solutions appear naturally. I solved a 3-day problem in 20 minutes of lying in darkness.
I applied to Y Combinator Summer 2025 with Edicek and got rejected. Here's my complete application - tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it next time.
I spent 3 hours trying to replicate one animation from ChatGPT. Gave up. Top products look simple because every tiny detail is solved.
I have an external mic but record in a room with bad acoustics. Adobe Enhance Speech fixed it. Free tool, 60 seconds added to workflow, massive difference.
I love micro changes. Notice something small, fix it in two minutes. Do that 30 times a month and you've built something beautiful.
I saw someone doing 100 pushups and felt pathetic. Then I remembered I started at 5. You're comparing your day 1 to their day 500. Compare yourself to your own yesterday instead.
I used to wait for free weekends to work on my project for 8 hours straight. Then life would happen and I'd make zero progress. Daily work keeps the project mentally active—even just 10 minutes per day.
My trainer wanted three sessions per week. I gave him one. Two years and 130 workouts later, I went from 5 pushups to over 40. Even the smallest effort beats zero.
I couldn't relax at a friend's house until I got home and realized—their light was cold. Ten years of smart lighting taught me that fixed color temperature doesn't work because your needs change throughout the day.
1,184 improvements in 8 months. Some days 10 minutes, some days 2 hours. The key isn't time, it's momentum. Daily work beats weekend marathons because you never lose context.
After finding the perfect product name, I faced the usual problem: taken on half the social platforms. Here's how I turned a workaround into a feature.
Spent months looking for the right name for my product. Then I named it after my son. Good names come from iteration, not agencies.
I spend all my time building. But I can't find other builders because they're not visible. That's the paradox.
My sauna raised lemonade prices and added expensive ingredients. Their margins got worse, but I now go three times a week.
Battery percentages create unnecessary anxiety in electric cars because we're conditioned by phones to panic at low numbers.
Consistency beats having the perfect name on some platforms. Prefixes beat suffixes. And you need someone else to spot what looks weird.
Clavard, one of my projects that's shut down now, sold piano sheet music. I wrote all 618 commits of its code and couldn't make, judge or steer a single thing it sold. The people I paid were building the system for me, not the other way round. Accelerators ask how big your idea is. I ask whether I can keep it alive alone.
The new Edicek browser extension was done on a Saturday morning. Making anyone see it took three days and about ten things I didn't plan, and it was only three days because the systems behind it were ready.
In February I wrote that the polish is the product. What I left out is that I could only afford the polish I could code myself. Anything needing a designer stayed on the list. That changed.
Every illustration Edicek has ever had was generated with GPT Image 2.0, and I had exactly two problems with it. Iterating destroyed the picture and nothing came with a transparent background. 2.5 fixed both.
We got a Volvo last year and suddenly Volvos are everywhere on the road. The roads didn't change, my focus did. The scary part is that the same filter runs on people.
After years of leading teams and working with externals, I look for two qualities: people who iterate and people who grow. Both come with a bill attached, and it's worth paying.
Want to make videos like Anthropic does for Claude Code? Go watch the first videos OpenAI ever made for ChatGPT. Everything you envy today was ugly when it started.
Twenty years of projects for Microsoft, Groupon and HP taught me things I could never learn alone. When I started Edicek, all of it came back. Working for someone isn't embarrassing.
A friend's husband jumped out of planes. One day his parachute didn't open. Meanwhile people who won't try a new haircut happily get on a motorbike every Sunday.
Lighting figured out, camera figured out, editing good enough. After a month of daily TikToks there's only one thing left to fix, and it's the one thing you can't order from a store.
The girl at reception was out of my league. Then she showed me a photo of her husband, a regular guy like me, and told me how they met. It broke my brain a little.
A deputy director on €1,000 a month asked for a small raise. They refused, so she left. Then they hired five people for €13,200 a month to replace her. Ego is expensive.
I post one TikTok every day and thought 3 batch days a month would cover me. The plan broke on day one. Even with editing outsourced and a teleprompter, one video still costs me 45 to 50 minutes.
The company I consult for has 20 developers and wants AI in everything. But every feature crosses 20 repositories and 6 approval steps. So I proposed a challenge: same feature, my system vs theirs.
I'm consulting for a team of about 20 developers, and most of them I wouldn't want on my own team. Everyone thinks AI will save them. It won't. It multiplies what's already there.
I pay a designer, a marketer and a video editor to help with Edicek. Then I make them wait five days for feedback because I'd rather code. The math doesn't work.
Twenty years in B2B and I never needed to know what users do in my app. Then I plugged LogSnag into Edicek and found out exactly where people stop. It wasn't where I would have guessed.
I avoided building a browser extension for years without knowing why. Then I planned it with Claude Code, went back to my day job, and when I returned to the window it was done. Approved by Google in one day.
A stranger on Twitter DMed me about a login bug in Edicek. Google sign-in had been silently broken for over a year for a small group of users, while I was paying App Store ads to bring them in.
I offered to bring a fitness app founder his first real users through my personal trainer. He didn't jump at it. I used to do the same thing, and it's the most expensive mistake you can make for free.
My barber told me my haircut doesn't suit me. Try growing it out for six months, he said. Worst case, we go back to what you have now. That math changed how I think about small bets.
Tough leg day Sunday, 10 km walk Monday, sauna after work. By evening I had 39°C fever. The day looked identical to any other. But it wasn't.
Having a full-time job and a side project is hard. Statistically, you'll fail. But working under someone without control over my direction is harder.
When everything piles up, your body wants to sprint. But you're not actually moving faster. You're just doing the same things with more tension.
Promoting one video at a time on TikTok wastes money. I run 5-10 at once and let the algorithm pick the winner.
I don't read to finish books. I read to apply what I find. If something clicks, I'd rather close the book and brainstorm than push through more pages.
My Audi A5 had the best cruise control. Then Volvo reinvented it. The result is terrible. I see the same thing in software every day.
I'm embarrassed by my own videos. But quitting before hitting my goal would be even more embarrassing.
I started with a 125-line custom command. Three months and 35 commits later, it's 1,485 lines. AI tools need constant iteration, not one-time setup.
I couldn't build iOS apps for 10 years. Five failed attempts. When I finally learned, those years of watching others work gave me insight I wouldn't trade.
I built what the client asked for — after talking them out of it six times. 70 machines, millions of records, Google Cloud. No alerts, no warnings — just a $57,000 invoice instead of the usual $70. Here's what actually happened.
I started grinding at 18-19. Worked 8 to 7 every weekday, 4 hours most weekends. Cut out bars and discos. Now at 34, with a wife and son, balance actually matters. But I wouldn't have this lifestyle if I hadn't sacrificed everything in my twenties.
My record is 29 video ideas in one day. I have about 40 in progress at any time. Sometimes I consciously stop myself from capturing more. It feels like opening long-closed boxes inside me where things just pour out.
95% of my video ideas come while driving, not at a computer. I dictate messy brain dumps into Edicek via Wispr Flow, let them sit for 2-3 weeks, then turn them into scripts with a Claude Code command. 50 out of 60 captured ideas became actual videos.
I started building Collections for Edicek a year ago. What looked like one simple feature turned into 8 places and 4 edge cases. Meanwhile, a 15-minute sidebar fix made the app feel more polished than any big feature would.
I have about 1,100 TikTok followers. Most videos get zero comments, maybe 8 likes. But if those 1,100 people became paying customers for Edicek, that would be huge. Follower count alone doesn't say much.
Almost every project I've ever made has a folder called Progress. Screenshots I was already sharing with colleagues or friends, saved instead of deleted. 6 projects, up to 60 screenshots each. A time machine I built by accident.
Every VHS clip of my childhood is the same: 10 seconds of someone asking me to do something for the camera. So when Eduard was born, I started filming him for 2-3 minutes straight without interacting. Just him being himself.
I saw someone who wrote emails to their kid's Gmail from birth. I wanted to do the same but never did. Instead, I started recording voice messages for my son Eduard. One day he'll get them all on a flash drive.
I started highlighting books to survive a 340-page university exam. 10 years and 20 books later, I still do it. The highlighter is my bookmark, and a 20-minute second pass through the yellow parts is worth more than the first read.
I made 3 YouTube programming tutorials in 2 years and couldn't push through. Then I slammed the table, grabbed a phone tripod, and recorded my first TikTok. The block wasn't about video. It was about the wrong format.
I built a web app, an iOS app, a Mac app, and a CLI for Edicek. The web app came first and gets used the least. SaaS isn't dying. People just keep finding new doors to the same service.
I skipped my friend's videos because something about his visibility irritated me. Now I'm on the other side—only my wife supports what I do, and a stranger at the gym recognized me before most of my friends even acknowledged it.
Everyone pictures compounding as a smooth upward line. But across six projects, I've seen a different pattern: long flat stretches of nothing, then a wave that makes all of it count.
Revolut removed their daily budget feature 2 years ago. So I built my own with a standing order and a lock screen widget.
In B2B you ship at 90%. In B2C, that 90% is just the starting point.
Setbacks are just rolls of the dice. You play from where you are now.
Wispr Flow changed how I work — my voice is now my main input, and the open office actively breaks that flow. Offices were built for keyboards. A lot of us aren't typing anymore.
I built Collections in the first week of Edicek. Eight months later, users are asking for it, but it's still hidden behind a feature flag. I'm waiting to make it smarter with AI, but maybe that's just founder perfectionism disguised as better product thinking.
I installed monitoring software to track underperforming team members and damaged trust with everyone else. Three times before I learned to just talk directly.
I tried existing bookmark tools, then hacked Apple Notes with Shortcuts, slammed the table, and built Edicek. Then I found 5 competitors with $20M in VC funding. I keep building because their products focus on saving, not recall—and if theirs worked, I'd honestly just stop.
I built pay-as-you-go pricing for Edicek because subscriptions felt unfair. Then every non-technical user asked the same question: how much per month? Fair and predictable turned out to be two different things.
My second YC application - complete text, founder video, demo video, and what changed since my rejection six months ago.
I thought learning outside my field was pointless. Then one word from journalism school won me my first big programming client. You never know which skill will be the one that matters.
Your workspace, your clothes, what you learn outside your field—these aren't separate from your success. They're reflections of the same thing.
What you do automatically when you have free time reveals your trajectory—whether you choose focused work, real rest, or mindless escape compounds over years.
Everyone says SaaS is dead and AI wrappers won't survive. Here's a simple test: remove all AI from your product. If the core still works and solves the problem, it's not an AI wrapper—the AI just makes it better.
After 95+ cold plunges in 3-degree water, I learned that pain from hard things doesn't disappear—it shifts. You stop fighting it, stop fearing it, and realize that hurt and impossible aren't the same thing.
Every time I hit an obstacle making TikTok videos—lighting inconsistency, teleprompter updates, caption templates—I solved it once and built it into my workflow. Without these boring systems, I'd burn out. With them, I can create multiple videos in a day.
Stop filtering content ideas because you've said something similar before—if the same topic comes back with a different angle or emotion, that's exactly why it's worth repeating.
After sixteen years as a professional software engineer, I finally shipped my first iOS app with AI as my tutor. The breakthrough wasn't the code generation, it was having expertise to guide the architecture while AI translated it into patterns I couldn't grasp before.
The best products come from founders who use them daily. When you're the target user, you feel every friction point before your users complain about it.
Stop working five to ten minutes before you finish a task. The next day you'll know exactly where to start instead of staring at a blank page.
Being small isn't a problem when you're not ready to scale.
I used to feel guilty about skipping gym days. Then I found a way to skip without actually skipping. When I'm too tired to lift, I show up and just stretch for 60 minutes instead. I keep the habit alive without destroying myself. Zero guilt.
I broke Edicek for two days and nobody complained. Not because the bug was invisible—because nobody was there to see it. I have three users. That gives me something valuable: freedom to fail.
I ignored Whoop for years. Out of the blue, I spent $300 on it. What changed? Not the product. Me. My priorities shifted. The product was always right for me—I just wasn't ready for it yet.
Some videos don't flow. The script is choppy, takes aren't landing right. I used to waste hours trying to fix them. Now I take the best version, edit quickly, and publish. I don't know which videos will work anyway. Momentum beats perfection.
I spent five days on one programming tutorial video. Got 120 views. The videos weren't perfect—they were the best I could do, which meant they were average. Volume matters more than perfection when you're starting out.
I used to feel guilty about everything I wasn't doing—books unread, friends not seen, to-do lists ignored. Then I imagined my time as 100 hours a week and consciously decided where they go. Work gets 50. Family gets 20. Piano gets 2. Once you decide, the guilt goes away.
YC wants you to have a co-founder. I've worked on multiple projects with co-founders. One person always does more, always cares more. And 23% of co-founders leave after three years.
It took me 36 takes to record a one-minute YC video. English isn't my first language. I still got rejected. But now I can explain Edicek to anyone without thinking.
YC rejected me. But those five days preparing the application forced me to answer questions I'd been avoiding for months. The document became my compass.
London investors found my GitHub projects and offered funding. I said no. Money alone isn't enough—I need the network and knowledge that comes with the right partners.
YC says ship fast, don't overbuild. Then they ask: How hard is this to copy? These two things go completely against each other.
I'd have a content idea in the morning and think I'd remember it. Then nothing else would come all day. The first idea was blocking everything else. Now I save every idea immediately—not to use it, just to clear space for the next one.
A friend said I don't need a brand. People will use my product because it's good. He's wrong—not about expensive branding, but about consistency.
Everyone said start on Twitter. I tried it. Got 3 views per tweet. Then I tried TikTok and got 300. The difference wasn't just numbers—it was motivation.
You don't need new topics. You need new stories. The Ramsey Show made 3,000+ videos about debt—same message, different proof every time.
Post even when nobody's watching. It's not about today—it's about two years from now when someone discovers you and checks your history.
People stress about what content to create. But when I look at my video ideas, they're not invented—they're reactions to real things that happened. My trainer said once a week wasn't enough. That became a video. Ideas come from living your life, not sitting and inventing topics.
I stressed about finding my content niche. Should I talk about products, fitness, or business? Then I realized the creators I follow—I follow them as people, not their topics. You don't need a category. You are the niche.
When I'm stuck on a coding problem, I go to the sauna. Not for relaxation—for boredom. No phone, no distractions. That's when solutions appear naturally. I solved a 3-day problem in 20 minutes of lying in darkness.
I applied to Y Combinator Summer 2025 with Edicek and got rejected. Here's my complete application - tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it next time.
I spent 3 hours trying to replicate one animation from ChatGPT. Gave up. Top products look simple because every tiny detail is solved.
I have an external mic but record in a room with bad acoustics. Adobe Enhance Speech fixed it. Free tool, 60 seconds added to workflow, massive difference.
I love micro changes. Notice something small, fix it in two minutes. Do that 30 times a month and you've built something beautiful.
I saw someone doing 100 pushups and felt pathetic. Then I remembered I started at 5. You're comparing your day 1 to their day 500. Compare yourself to your own yesterday instead.
I used to wait for free weekends to work on my project for 8 hours straight. Then life would happen and I'd make zero progress. Daily work keeps the project mentally active—even just 10 minutes per day.
My trainer wanted three sessions per week. I gave him one. Two years and 130 workouts later, I went from 5 pushups to over 40. Even the smallest effort beats zero.
I couldn't relax at a friend's house until I got home and realized—their light was cold. Ten years of smart lighting taught me that fixed color temperature doesn't work because your needs change throughout the day.
1,184 improvements in 8 months. Some days 10 minutes, some days 2 hours. The key isn't time, it's momentum. Daily work beats weekend marathons because you never lose context.
After finding the perfect product name, I faced the usual problem: taken on half the social platforms. Here's how I turned a workaround into a feature.
Spent months looking for the right name for my product. Then I named it after my son. Good names come from iteration, not agencies.
I spend all my time building. But I can't find other builders because they're not visible. That's the paradox.
My sauna raised lemonade prices and added expensive ingredients. Their margins got worse, but I now go three times a week.
Battery percentages create unnecessary anxiety in electric cars because we're conditioned by phones to panic at low numbers.
Consistency beats having the perfect name on some platforms. Prefixes beat suffixes. And you need someone else to spot what looks weird.
