Put a jar with a đ in the jungle and a monkey will eventually reach in â only to find his clenched fist stuck. The banana is too valuable to release, even though letting go is the only way out. It is a simple metaphor for life: what we hold onto most tightly often holds us back. These patterns are easy to miss when weâre too close to them. They become visible only when we step back and observe without preconceptionsâwhen we allow ideas to surface on their own rather than forcing conclusions.
Iâve had a loooot of these monkey traps in my past â some failed technologically, others because of the market and some human-wise. Actually, I keep a list of more than 100 ideas on my phoneâ most of which I dropped right away, but some I followed for quite a while. On that list are some rather morally questionable ideas and others that were simply unrealistic unless your last name is Musk. But some ideas I took much further.
The first real project I ever followed during my school years was an idea for a lucid dreaming mask. For those who donât know: lucid dreaming is the skill of realizing that youâre dreaming â and then taking control of the dream. My idea was to build a small gadget that wakes you up just a little bit â not enough to actually wake you up, but enough to help you become aware that youâre dreaming. For that, I used amplifiers to build a low-budget EOG (electrooculography) device to detect eye movements. I struggled a lot with skin contact issues on the electrodes â due to this issue I even tried once to order graphene to experiment with dry electrodes, but they refused to send it to me đ. During that time, I actually had a bunch of lucid dreams (without the device). Itâs a cool skill, but honestly, not as magical as people on the internet make it sound.
My next big project came when Germany was discussing the legalization of cannabis. The initial government draft was overly bureaucratic, so my idea was to create software that would simplify the process for the growing communities. I sacrificed my vacation to build an MVP and contacted the first clubs â just to hear from them that Iâm not the first, not the second and also not the third (actually the 14th) to reach out to them. And that was only within five weeks since the first governmental draft of the law was released. My motivation immediately dropped to zero and I abandoned the project â luckily so, because the final law turned out to be poorly written and unclear. Anyway I learned a ton about SaaS development through this project.
So my cs bachelor was done and I started my Masterâs in Entrepreneurship, without a concrete ideaâŚ
I brainstormed and browsed the internet for the next idea and came up with FeedFlick.ai, an AI video generation tool. As always, I over-engineered it (I canât help myself). And soon after, I saw more and more similar AI tools popping up, and I noticed the growing issue of AI content âslopâ. Thatâs when my motivation faded againâŚ
Still eager to work on something meaningful, I decided to join an existing project instead of founding one on my own. On paper, it sounded like a great idea (and I still think it is) â but in reality, I was naĂŻve and taken advantage of⌠It should have been an âimpact-drivenâ startup, but ego and vanity still dominated and the real goal was to gather state funds behind the 'impact' shell⌠I could have realized it earlier but stayed half a year... before quitting shortly before submitting my Masterâs thesis.
And once again I found myself without a concrete project. So I poured my energy into something called Wav2Vis â an AI model that converts sound into animations. I see a great demand for such a model - but it still doesnât work, while it has already eaten up more than a hundred hours of my life.
Meanwhile, I also started my career as an employed software developer, because, well, you canât be a student forever. When I look back at all these failed or unfinished projects, I donât really see them as losses but I really miss the sustainable outcome. Yes I was young and naive, but each one brings me somehow a small progress in the bigger picture... but yeah... let's see what the future brings next, my list is still very looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong.