I have been to zero. Twice is the plan for nobody.

I was fourteen when I first got paid for work. The name was Fantasy Pictures and it was not a company, it was a kid with a camera, an editing timeline and considerably more ambition than equipment.

It taught me the one thing that never stopped being true: nobody hands you a first client. You go and find them, or there is no work.

As part of the country's nation branding, the government launched #OurLuxembourg: post your picture of Luxembourg on Instagram. More than 1,300 people did. I posted a frame of people walking down Avenue de la Liberté on a day the street was closed to traffic.

The public prize went to the photos with the most hearts on the official Luxembourg account. Mine came first. The announcement from the government on 13 June 2018 lists it in one line: premier prix du public, Noe Nei. I was sixteen.

I am not putting this here because a prize matters. I am putting it here because it was the first signal from outside my own head that the camera was not just a hobby. Two years later I registered the company, and seven years later national news desks were still running my frames with my name under them.

The moment I was legally allowed to, I registered my own company. Fapic: music production, video, photography, web design. Some big names came through it.

I was a producer and a musician before I was ever a developer. In May 2020 the Lëtzebuerger Journal ran a full interview with me about the music, under the headline Träume leben: live your dreams. The point I made then was that your listeners should not lose sight of their goals. It reads differently now that I know what the next four years were going to do to mine.

For a while, the music paid.

The music side had a part I did not sign up for. Not everyone settles a price disagreement with an email. I was threatened more than once, at one point at knifepoint.

So I stopped taking that work and pointed Fapic at small and medium businesses instead: brands, shops, websites, clients who settle an invoice by bank transfer. It was the first time I deliberately chose the boring, durable version of a business over the exciting one. It would not be the last.

My sales skills were genuinely poor and I knew it. So I took a field sales job at bofrost and set myself one condition for leaving: I would not quit until I was the best seller in the branch.

I sold wine to winemakers. I became the top seller. Then I left, took those skills back to my own company, and closed a 30,000 euro deal with an internationally operating business. The largest contract I had ever signed.

Wolt booked Fapic to shoot their restaurants. I photographed around two hundred of them. Somewhere in that job I stopped being a supplier and started being a student. I wanted to know how a company like that actually works: customer relations, customer experience, the attitude they keep internally towards their own people. Their whole ecosystem fascinated me. So I applied, and I joined them in support.

I went in to reorient myself and I came out with more than I went looking for. I learned the market from the inside, and from the inside I could see the gap. Everybody in this country knew restaurant delivery. Nobody was doing groceries and household goods, instantly, across the whole of Luxembourg.

That gap became Umarket. I launched it in March 2024, while I was still on their payroll.

In May they let me go, once they realised what I was building. I understand the decision, and I am still grateful for what those months taught me. That company motivates me to this day.

Today every supermarket here delivers, a lot of it through Wolt. It is completely normal now. It was not when we started.

I put the 30k and every other euro I owned into Umarket, a 24/7 delivery service for Luxembourg: groceries and household goods, not restaurant food. Stock, advertising, fit out, all of it.

For six months I lived in the office. I slept on the couch and my back still remembers it. I ate instant noodles from Action so that rent got paid, because anything that was not survival went into the company. One night, while I was out on a shoot, the office was broken into. Nothing was taken. It still cost me a week of sleep.

I believed in that company the way you only manage to believe in something once.

And it worked. In Q2 2024, its first full quarter, Umarket was the fifth most downloaded food delivery app in Luxembourg, on the same list as Wolt and Uber Eats. A self-financed app out of an office I was sleeping in, next to companies carrying a few hundred million in funding.

It failed on a person. My partner had me pay for renovating the building, then pulled the building across to his own company and set about rebuilding what I had built.

No names, that chapter is closed. What I will say is this: he ended up with a renovated building I had financed and the goods I had paid for, and he still did not come close. His company filed for insolvency.

I was insolvent and everyone involved knew it. I still called every single supplier I owed money to and negotiated an arrangement with each of them, one by one, when I was under no practical obligation to do so.

Over the months that followed I paid roughly 30,000 euros of company debt out of my own salary.

I signed up for a Fräiwëllegendéngscht, the voluntary service run by the SNJ, Luxembourg's national youth service, and was placed at Stëmm vun der Strooss from January to March 2025. That is the organisation behind the day centres, the canteens and the second-hand shops for people in social distress in this country.

I went in full time as Assistant in Communication, covering communication and IT: I produced video series for them and handled the technical support. The work I already knew how to do, handed to an organisation that looks after people who were a short step from where I had just been.

It gave me a structure to get up for and an allowance that went straight into paying the company debt down. Three months in, I left early, because a job finally came. Later that year I wrote about those months in Forum magazine, alongside two other volunteers.

Alongside it I applied everywhere. For the roles I actually wanted I was not qualified enough on paper: no degree, just a company I had run. For a fast food job I was overqualified, and they told me so. I sat precisely in between, and nobody was hiring the middle.

That is the part nobody warns you about. Five years of running a business reads as nothing at all when a form asks for a diploma, and as far too much when it asks for a shift.

Then a journalist wrote about it in the Luxembourg Times. That piece is what broke it open: companies got in touch, and that is how I found the job I have now.

The paperwork side still ended badly. A creditor put a bailiff on the phone with an assignation en faillite: five thousand euros inside 72 hours. I did not have five thousand euros sitting anywhere. I offered a thousand a month. That was refused, and by the time it was suddenly accepted, shortly before the court date, I had nothing left to give the process.

I had spent a year trying to be fair to everybody. The company went into insolvency. I am not hiding it and I am not blaming it on anyone: by then it was my decision to stop fighting.

I used the quiet to learn. I went deep into programming and started building the software I had needed as a company director and could never afford to buy.

That is where LUXPOS came from, a point of sale and loyalty and accounting system for Luxembourg retail. And Salonify, a booking platform for salons. And BoxBee. And the rest of them.

Since March 2025 I have been Head Developer at DSP Invest, leading Doctomap, a doctor management SaaS integrated with Luxembourg's national e-health stack. I run my own products alongside it, with real paying customers and real support tickets.

I am not here because it went well. I am here because it did not, and I rebuilt anyway.