Nyfic started as a personal challenge. Before Nyfic most of my "business attempts" had been hopping on and off different side-hustle schemes like digital marketing, website consulting, etc. With Nyfic I wanted to move beyond that and build something that genuinely would be helpful to myself. As a student, a study tracker felt like the natural choice.
Achievements
Probably the biggest achievement for me with Nyfic was that I went from a blank screen to 300 users and my first couple of paid customers. Proving that I could build something people would actually pay for was a big achievement for me.
I moved from consulting into true product building, learning how to manage full-stack systems and iterate on feedback.
I still believe in the core philosophy of Nyfic: Learning should be a calm, lifelong practice of "becoming," rather than a sprint toward an exam.
Mistakes
I built features like AI mentoring because they were technically cool but users mainly just wanted a simple, reliable tracker, and lots of the positive feedback I would get was about the minimalism and design of the tool, not about the features themselves. So I learned to be ruthless about seeking feedback before writing any code.
Marketing to individuals in a saturated market is exhausting. I realized that while students have "pains" they are often unwilling or unable to pay for solutions when free alternatives exist. The pain might be there, but the problem might not be painful enough for someone to pay for a solution.
Cold outreach in a crowded space of "study tools" felt very overwhelming to me. I've definitely realized that my personal weak link is marketing. It drained lots of my energy because the problem didn't feel "big" enough to justify the effort.
Why I moved on
If I ask myself if I want to be building study trackers in three years, the answer is no. Nyfic also taught me that I am most energized by deep tech and B2B problems.
I want my work to run parallel to my passions for physics, deep tech, and mathematics. I would love to work on something where working on research problems means also working on business efforts, and vice versa, where the different aspects are deeply interconnected.