Levente Kazó
So, what do I do?
All sorts of stuff, but let's start with my biggest project, my startup, that also started up my journey
After two years in the ideation phase, and half a year of development, I presented my startup aiming to help prepare students for a cashless future to the Hungarian financial sector at the country's biggest financial technology conference!
My startup - PupilPay - won three special awards from VCs and incubators.
After FinTechShow, I applied to CEU's InnovationLab with PupilPay, and started working together, to help prepare students for a cashless future, while providing seamless payment, lunch order and administration solutions to schools, cafeterias, and shops!
Thanks to the help of iLab's amazing mentor network, I was able to explore many opportunities, and meet some amazing people!
PupilPay took part in WebSummit's ALPHA program. As part of that, we had a stand on Day 1 of the event.
Interesting speakers, even more interesting discussions, many new connections, and more importantly, learning from the responses of the visitors and adjusting our pitch accordingly. By the end of the day, I learnt more from the live facial reactions of visitors that you should forget the technical sales pitch; Most people won't know what a "Closed-loop payment system" is.
As a result of this, PupilPay transformed from a "closed-loop payment system", to a "platform centralizing all school-related payments", and I learnt a lot about pitching.
Once PupilPay needed to advance more rapidly, and outsourcing was the only option, I ran into an issue, funding.
While I couldn't afford the costs set by the agencies and the timeframe to raise was too short, luckily one of them seemed to like the idea and decided to help out with two great devs.
Starting work in the beginning of October, with one month until the summit, our aim was to get a demo done. This obviously came with a hard decision; Do we build a demo quickly, or build an MVP? Technical debt can be painful later, so we went with the latter.
Going to WebSummit without a demo was a sacrifice, but half a year later, it paid off. While we were rushing by the end, we were able to finish our MVP, featuring lunch orders, automatic invoicing, complete user and merchant onboarding, and Stripe Connect integrations.
Having a few misfortunes forcing us to restart making our product just in October meant we finished building it in the middle of May; the same month when schools close and summer break begins. This would be a great time to go and do sales during the summer break, but there was just a minor hiccup.
That summer break where I could go do sales was the same summer break when I was leaving my home country to start my university journey abroad, about two thousand kilometers away from the target customers...
While this meant that PupilPay was iced (but still in the freezer for some later time...) it also meant an exciting new journey in the lively city of Madrid, studying at IE University, the perfect place for like minded individuals; Entrepreneurs.
Not even a full semester passed before the startup flame burst out again; I was recruited into a startup at IE, joining a group of second and third year students to change how tutoring happens in universities in Europe.
This time, not being a lone-wolf, as Chief Product & Technology Officer, I could focus on building the perfect platform for making student to student tutoring smoother, and easier.
Tutorie connects students of the same universities with each other, so those struggling in certain classes can easily book a tutoring session from a student who already aced it before. We'll take care of scheduling, payments, communication and whatever else.
So, what have I done?
Cool stuff, here's some big, small and freelance projects I have worked on.
Tutorie connects students of the same universities to help struggling students catch up by getting personalized tutoring by a student who already aced the same course, the same exam taught by the same professor.
We launched Tutorie in a closed-beta testing phase in just 48 days with features like booking management, profiles, payments, and in 108 days (mostly due to legal to-dos) we completely launched, including features like WebSocket powered Live Chat, more complex Scheduling options, and more.
All of these timeframes while being a first year university student at the same time, learning new technologies I haven't used before, like WebSocket, DynamoDB and Vue.
PupilPay is a closed-loop payment, lunch order, and allergy checking system that's tailored specifically around schools.
Our aim is to help schools with administrative workloads, while raising financial literacy in students.
As I had a "lot" of free time next to school and a startup, I decided to make DropSpace! DropSpace is an easy way to self-host your own super-simple but feature-packed file drop!
Imagine if DropSpace would have a big brother.
Share files and folders, on your own server, faster and easier than ever before.
ColDB was a freelance project for someone who needed help keeping track of what's in the freezer.
The features of a stock management system, specialized for reminding you of expiration dates.
ColDB is a play on Col(D) Data Base
Imagine if your file cabinet had a search bar.
DocSpace scans your uploaded files with Optical Character Recognition and stores them in a Meilisearch index. Making all your documents have their own Google.
So, what do you say
we work together?
If you have a web project you need someone for, let's talk!
If you have a project you want to discuss, or just want to get in touch with me, feel free to reach out to my email or use the contact form below.
Working on free and open-source projects still take a lot of time, by supporting my open-source work, I'll be able to work on new features, and dedicate more time to them.