From College Projects to Market Reality: Lessons from YouTube and Playtomic
When College Projects Predict the Future: Lessons on Trusting Your Ideas and Executing Boldly
One of the ways I stay up to date with industry trends is by regularly reading sites like TechCrunch. Last week, I came across a post announcing YouTube's latest innovation: an interactive product feed for shoppable TV ads. YouTube executives revealed this enhanced ad format as part of their broader push into Connected TV (CTV), aiming to transform how users interact with ads on the big screen.
Reading that instantly brought me back to a college project I worked on in 2011. We developed iBuyTV, a tool for Samsung TVs that allowed viewers to buy items directly from TV shows—years ahead of its time. It’s surreal to see Google now exploring this very same space.
A few months ago, I also read that Playtomic, a social sports platform, raised €65 million to expand into the U.S. This news brought back memories of another bachelor’s final project I built—Gridmi (short for Greed + Me). It was a platform designed to help tennis players connect and schedule matches, especially useful for those living abroad. At the time, I was trying to solve a real problem I experienced myself, and it's inspiring to see a company like Playtomic now scaling that concept globally.
Now, I don’t consider myself a visionary. But these two moments reminded me of something essential: trusting your ideas is important, but execution is everything.
Sometimes we come up with promising ideas, but we're missing the right context, experience, or courage to take them further. Looking back, I do feel a mix of frustration and pride. Frustration from the missed opportunities—what could have happened if I’d pushed harder, built a team, raised funds, or simply believed in the problem more. But also pride in knowing I was on the right track years ago, thinking about solutions to problems others are now tackling at scale.
Life is a series of decisions. And while we can’t go back (at least not yet—though maybe AI will change that someday), we can always learn. And what I’ve learned is this:
Fall in love with the problem.
Analyze how big it can become.
Think about how you can monetize it.
And most importantly—trust your execution.
Below are some screenshots from my early projects:
iBuyTV, our concept for shoppable TV content on Samsung.
Gridmi, our platform to connect with tennis players around the world.
They were early attempts, imperfect for sure, but valuable lessons nonetheless. And who knows? Maybe the next idea won’t just foreshadow the future, it’ll help shape it.