The Long Version

I started coding in 2007. School projects, PHP, microcontrollers, the usual path.

By 2011 I was a RedHat Certified Instructor, teaching JBoss in Germany, Austria, and the UAE. Then consulting - Siemens, Swiss Post, Prague Airport, a German telco.

In December 2015, at 25, I quit my job and went freelance.

My first client was ING Bank. What started as a contract turned into six years building real-time streaming platforms - Kafka, Flink, eventually leading a 40-person global team as architect and interim product owner. A year in, I founded LionMint GmbH and moved the contract there.

By 2020, I had grown the consultancy to 7 people.

Then I hit a wall.

People business scales linear. You hire, you sell their time, you manage, repeat. It wasn't mentally challenging anymore. Worse - I found it hard to sell a vision when the actual work was lending talent to other companies' visions.

I'm proud of what we built. Every junior we hired went on to a great career. They learned, I learned. But it wasn't what I wanted to do forever.

So in 2021 I pivoted. Went solo. Kept one good client (energy trading, still ongoing). Used the income to fund experiments.

SoTrusty - commerce platform, co-founded with my wife Daniela. Launched in Germany and Mexico.

EmbedElite - document intelligence. Won the Microsoft Semantic Kernel Hackathon. They called it "a game-changer."

Audioscrape - podcast search engine. 1M+ hours indexed. First MCP integration for Claude. 43,000 lines of Rust, built solo in 5 months.

None of them have "hit" yet. But each one taught me something. And I'm still swinging.

The goal hasn't changed: find the product that scales. Until then, I keep one good client, stay lean, and use the runway to keep building.

- Lukas