I’ve had my first business selling food do my student hostel mates. I’ve recognised that they are lazy, and figured if I’d make food, delivered to their room, they would like it. They did. That’s when I first felt the feeling of success - I was 17.
I was then an agent selling insurances, and mortgages. I made an excel program creating dynamic content based on their financial situation. We were doing cold calls, and figured an online presence would accelerate my business. It didn’t, but I liked the taste of programming. I did it from age 18-20.
While that I’ve met an influencer guy, and pop sockets just became similar abroad (I was from Hungary), and wanted to be the first player in my country - learnt how to make professional looking pictures, learnt Photoshop. Partnered up with the influencer, but haven’t got enough money. Failure.
There was a competition for an idea for improving financial skills for young people. I’ve made an app idea, and needed to create a prototype for it - I’ve made a video, had to learn After Effects. Got into the first round for qualifiers, but failed after.
At 20, learnt software development. The project I was learning on was a project management app (my idea) that was trying to create a system breaking down 6 months projects into monthly projects, those to weekly projects, those to daily, and hourly (later it became a failure as well).
After 6 months I moved to London to get a developer job. For 4 months I’ve applied for 1000+ developer jobs. While that to get some money I was working in kitchen (that will be important later).
While that I’ve had an idea to create 3D websites (somehow I thought people would need that). It was a failure.
Then I got my first developer job, and was very grateful for it. While there, I realised current design apps are too far away from how CSS works. I realised the same work is done twice, the designer creates the design, but then the developer has to translate it, and figure out the layout. I’ve made an app that was the same drag-and-drop, resize style, but behind the scenes translating it into CSS, automatically generating a theme. That was a failure too.
When Covid came, time spent travelling to work has been freed up, so learnt how AI works, even made my own model - a VAE that is able to adjust features for content generation (however that had no further future - yet?).
Then every year moved up the ladder, made my consultant company, earning decent amount of money, but it’s just not satisfactory.
Back when I was working in the kitchen, I realised too much waste is made just because of human mistake. Too much ingredients were ordered, and prepared, but sometimes not enough was prepared. That’s when I got the idea if meals would be broken down to core ingredients, in a multi-level manner, knowing the preparation time, and order data, an AI model could suggest quite accurate data about when to order, and prepare what. I’ve spent 2 years developing that product, without asking anyone about the idea. Then my mother has died, and wanted to rush into something to distract my thoughts. I wanted to release the product, and did what I should have done before developing the product - checking competitors. A very big data company has made almost the exact same thing, but much better. It was a down point.
When I was booking my holiday earlier this year I spent hours researching, and more than 10 browser tabs to figure out where to go. I had one criteria - it has to be beach, and best price-value ratio. That’s when the idea came I should solve this problem as huge players in the travel booking industry didn’t yet. But back then I was focused on the restaurant app. Once it failed, I still had to do something, and started working on this. I learnt from the previous mistake, and haven’t started developing. But then I received feedback from the channel that weren’t too promising, and also realised a smaller player has did almost the same thing.
I’m sorry about the long post, but had to write the context. After 5 failures in a row, it’s hard to keep motivated. But I still know I have to have a startup. Since then I keep reading books, watching case studies about successful, and unsuccessful startups, why they succeeded/failed. Also watching courses.
But it still doesn’t help the depression about failure. How do you help yourself after failing this much?
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