Diederik Mathijs

MijnMeetstaat is an application that let's architects and builders work together in an efficient manner by giving them an immediate overview of all their projects and the progress that has been made both in amount of work and budget.

It introduces the idea of smart documents, which are documents of which the information can be filled in by the inputs of prior/similar projects.

Leadgy is a startup I've co-founded, taking the role as CTO. The goal is to make it possible for any company in a science-related field to do keyword research to find people working with specific technologies.

This allows companies to create rich networks that have the potential to improve their product development and/or delivery. This is one of my active projects at the moment.

Tablatur was an idea I head when I heard how much artists have to pay as a fee when selling online sheet music. The default market fee at this moment is 40%(!), this means that for every euro they earn with their sheet music, 0.4 directly goes to the platform they're selling on.

I knew that I could do it better as most websites have very poor recommendation systems and old unintuitive websites. This, paired with the enormous costs made me think there was a better platform that could be created.

Issues

As a musician I thought it was evident that composers would come to my application as fees are lower and the setup is super easy. However, it turned out that building a marketplace isn't as simple as it seems, certainly without having strong ties to what could be initial sellers.

The 2 biggest things I missed to make this a success were; 1. Marketing skills/budget, I didn't have the ability to mass distribute this to potential composers. 2. Payment providers support. I was really astounded by how payment providers look towards starting marketplaces. I found no other solution but to go with Stripe, which was really a bad fit for me as they only accept credit cards, which isn't the default payment tool for us Belgians.

TapTheTiles was an idea I was playing with. My interest in apps arose when I created a 3D space/mario game in Unity (C#) which I coded during a summer holiday

TapTheTiles is a simple game that tests your reaction time. Every person that has played it actually liked it. If I ever have time to migrate this to the new Java/Android version, it may get a reboot.

Urbanwear was my (very) short shot at the apparel market. The idea was to allow people to create their own customized 'hashtag' shirts. This is back when hashtag really started to be a 'trend' and people would put hashtags in front of any inspirational tagline they could come up with.

The problem with this idea was that this is customizable apparel. There is a reason there are so few brands that allow customizable clothing. It's a huge risk! If you get returns, it's not like you can re-sell them, having put a custom hashtag on them. Maybe if there ever was some kind of eco-friendly chemical process that would allow easy removal of custom elements, customizable clothing could become a thing.

TasteLocal was my first venture for which I really had to have meetings with people outside my usual 'sphere'. The idea was to create a local and sustainable alternative for Hello Fresh that was just launched in Belgium.

Everything went fine and farmers were getting execited to be able to be part of this opportunity. The idea was for me to drive around in the initial months, personally delivering all the 'packages' with fresh food. The problem was that I couldn't build all relations with farmers so I contacted a sort of collaboration company that already sold all kind of fresh vegetables/fruits in their shop.

Sadly the relation went southwards when the collaborators wouldn't aggree with the idea to ship boxes with meats. That meant that there would only be 'vegan' boxes, something that in 2017 wasn't only very revolutionary, but also targetted at a minority which didn't seem to be wanting to pay the premium to get their food delivered. I decided to stop the project feeling powerless in a team that would die on their hill for their ideas.

Student confessions was an innovative idea. It was at the top of the hype back in 2016 that I launched an application that would group all "confessions" from different universities using the Facebook API. I added a like/dislike system and even allowed comments to be added, that in turn could be upvoted.

Everything was written in android studio (then eclipse) and the app communicated with a back-end written in PHP. I got a few shoutouts from confessions pages that turned up quite some active users for an app that was just completely build by me.

However, in the end, the app was abondoned when I didn't receive access from one of the most succesfull pages to access their posts (understandably so).

Betuned was my first succesfull platform. It allowed users to tune their instruments easily by using their microphone or their ear. It had a variant that was also available in the chrome store.

At the peak of its use, it had around 3.500 weekly users. Getting ready to go to university to start studying computer science, I decided to sell the website and the brand to a US based individual who kept it running for some time.