⚙️ From rebuilding DOOM-style projects at 10 to building VIDI at 21

A lot of people recently asked me if I’m a no-code founder or if VIDI was my first real technical project.

Honestly, that question made me reflect a bit.

11 weeks ago I started building VIDI.

But this story probably started much earlier.

I got obsessed with computers around age 9.

At 10–11, I was already experimenting with C#, Python, and small projects because I became addicted to understanding how systems worked underneath the surface.

A lot of the time I wasn’t building for money or “startup success.”

I genuinely enjoyed:

• rebuilding things,
• rewriting logic,
• testing ideas,
• optimizing systems,
• and seeing if I could recreate ideas myself from scratch.

Sometimes I would watch videos of projects or mechanics and rebuild parts of them just to understand the architecture behind them.

Sometimes I would see an idea in my head and immediately try turning it into code to test whether the logic actually worked in reality.

Before college, I already had multiple small technical projects.

At one point, I even recreated parts of old DOOM-style mechanics in Python using pygame just as a learning challenge.

Not because someone told me to.

I simply liked understanding how systems, movement, mechanics, and logic interacted together underneath the surface.

Around age 14, I became deeply interested in startups.

Not because of money initially - I genuinely found the idea of creating things from zero extremely interesting.

When I entered college at 15, I started participating in startup programs more seriously.

Everything really started with the KazEnergy program.

That was the first time I entered a real startup environment and saw founders building products around real problems.

After that came Startup Orda 2022.

Me and my teammate ended up taking 10th place and received my first prize money connected to building something real.

Honestly, that changed something mentally for me.

It stopped feeling like:

“just coding projects.”

And started feeling like:

building systems that could actually create value in the real world.

After that, things started moving one after another:

• Startup Orda 2022,
• Astana Hub Battle 2023,
• Digital Bridge 2023,
• Startup Garage,
• KazEnergy programs,
• local accelerators like 7hub,
• mobile development competitions,
• and constant product experiments.

One of the biggest moments for me was Astana Hub Battle 2023 during Digital Bridge.

The event gathered more than 30,000 participants from dozens of countries.

I arrived there with two different projects.

The first project was BYTE-MOBILE, an educational mobile platform that I pitched during the final stage of the competition, where I presented 4th among roughly 100 startup founders selected to pitch their projects.

The second project was HYDRO CAR TECH, a small hydrogen-powered car-tech prototype built on top of a remote-controlled vehicle, which our team showcased at a booth during the event.

That environment honestly pushed my interest in startups even further.

Seeing:

• different founders,
• different ways of thinking,
• different business models,
• different product philosophies,
• and completely different approaches to solving problems

became extremely educational for me.

It made me realize how much startup building is actually about thinking, systems, psychology, timing, execution, and understanding markets deeply.

Throughout all of this, I kept building constantly.

In college, my thinking shifted even deeper into:

• systems logic,
• optimization,
• business logic,
• operational structures,
• startup thinking,
• and problem-solving.

I spent a lot of time experimenting with:

• mathematical optimization,
• rewriting cycle-based logic in unusual ways,
• improving software architecture,
• mobile development,
• startup workflows,
• product systems,
• and how real businesses make decisions and build processes.

Around age 20, I also started a small business.

That experience also changed how I looked at products, users, money, operations, and real business problems.

Over time, startups, systems, and product-building became more than just an interest in technology for me.

They became a way to understand how markets, businesses, systems, and people actually work.

For the last 6+ years, startups and product-building have basically been part of my daily life.

I recently turned 21.

What’s interesting is that VIDI became the first project where many years of interest in systems, startups, business, and software started connecting together.

Still extremely early.
Still learning every day.

If anyone’s curious what I’ve been building over the last 11 weeks:

VIDI:
https://vidicontract.tech/