From 25 failed projects to 22 million downloads

FixMyPics

1.7M+

Restore and colorize old photos

Avatarro

1M+

Transform selfies into AI avatars

Blurito

Blur faces and backgrounds

Video to Photo

500K+

Extract frames from videos

Shaky Video Stabilizer

Fix shaky footage like a gimbal

Where it started

How It All Began

Programmer since 2007. Full-time employee from 2014. Entrepreneur since 2021. Before running my own business, I spent years at Morgan Stanley, Squla, and Nedap — getting paid to learn how to build great products.

2014–2017

Morgan Stanley

Budapest · Fintech software

2017–2020

Squla

Amsterdam · Educational games

2020–2021

Nedap

Groenlo · Remote · Healthcare software

You know that movie The Social Network? Where Mark Zuckerberg codes furiously for a week, drinks some beers, and wakes up to find everyone using his site? Yeah, I wanted that.

Since second year of university, I built side projects obsessively. After work. On weekends. While keeping my full-time job. Every single one was supposed to be my ticket out — my excuse to finally quit and do my own thing.

25 projects. 8 years. All failures. But I loved building, so I never got tired. Each failure taught me something new (the hard way).

I kept thinking: “The next one will be it.” Spoiler — eventually, I was right.

The Side Project Graveyard

Every failure became a lesson worth sharing

New Chapter

AI for Education

Working at Squla sparked my passion for education technology. Since collaborating with Mechai in 2025, I've been building AI tools that help teachers save hours and students learn smarter.

Explore EdTech Projects

The Graveyard

25 Projects That Failed

Here are 6 highlights. Each one was supposed to be “the one” — and each one taught me exactly what not to do.

MyFreeBin.com

The Online Give-Away Community

A platform to save the planet from trash — instead of throwing things out, give them to someone who needs them. This was my first big project, but I underestimated the marketing efforts it would take to succeed. After one year of working on it, I tried Facebook ads with no experience and even went out to the city spreading flyers on the metro, but it was too little for such a big project. The website no longer exists.

Lesson learned

Marketing is as important as the product itself

Bed Boat

The Motorized Inflatable Mattress

An inflatable mattress with engines underneath — I wanted to sleep while moving on water. Initially tried with my own mattress and boat, but police stopped me because it was illegal. They said if it’s a standalone boat, it’s legal. So I went back to the garage, attached engines under the mattress and a PlayStation controller under the pillow to control the whole electric boat. I took it out four times and found myself in social media — 500+ photos and videos were taken of me each time. But I still didn’t know how to make money from it, winter started, and I began my digital nomad lifestyle. The project is still in my friend’s basement in Amsterdam.

Lesson learned

Viral attention doesn’t always equal a business model

MeMelody

Lip Syncing Automation

The main reason I started building mobile apps. I wanted to recreate the success of a video that got me 2 million views on YouTube, but that video took four months to create because of the lip syncing details. I wanted to automate this and create similar videos in hours instead of months. The project took a lot of time — I created it, I finished it, but at the end, it was not successful. However, this accidentally started me on the path to creating successful apps.

Lesson learned

Sometimes ‘failures’ lead you to your true calling

LED Light District

Music Reactive Wearable LEDs

A music reactive LED project with motion sensors attached to my body that lights up the stage as I move. I worked on it for several months and got it to a prototype phase, but I was never satisfied with the results. I always wanted more and more perfection. The moral of the story: I didn’t really know what the end result should be, and my perfectionist mind didn’t want to let me finish and try it out. I wanted to travel the world and made this for myself — if I didn’t get a remote job, I would go to city centers and dance with this invention to sustain my travels. But because it didn’t reach the perfect level I wanted, I never finished the product. Only one prototype exists in my friend’s basement.

Lesson learned

Perfectionism can be the enemy of done

YouDidNotKnow.com

Scientific Articles & SEO Dreams

A website about interesting scientific topics. I started writing articles based on the assumption that I would defeat SEO. Before this project, I had literally just learned about SEO, and stupid me thought I could beat this science with keywords and articles. I mainly focused on making this project successful and profitable by defeating SEO because I’m smart (at least that’s what I thought). But I quickly realized that writing articles is hard and time-consuming, and copying them would downgrade me in SEO. After a few months of being a copywriter and article journalist, I stopped. The website no longer exists, but the Instagram page is still up.

Lesson learned

There are no shortcuts to mastering complex systems

TechMeMe — Idea To App

YouTube Channel for App Promotion

This project connected to my crazy apps that nobody was searching for. I was thinking that if I create fun videos about them, they will spread. I released 4 videos so far — every time I released a video, it spiked the app downloads for those few days, but then still nothing. Each 5-minute video took me 1 week to produce as I focused on high quality. So eventually I stopped and continued creating apps. It was also a lot of time to go to Reddit communities and promote the hard way, getting kicked out of groups all the time. Not so sustainable. Maybe one day I’ll continue.

Lesson learned

High-quality content takes time, and viral marketing isn’t always sustainable