Portfolio

This page provides a brief overview of some of my ongoing or past projects. All of these products have been built, designed, influenced, or started by me.

The HRM Heart Rate Monitor app is mainly a side project that I built for myself and then decided to release to the public. Its main purpose is to transmit the Apple Watch's heart rate reading via BLE to compatible fitness equipment such as bike computers or Peloton bikes. To do so, the system needs both an iOS and an Apple Watch app that communicate with each other.

I learned a few new things on this project, mostly as a software developer. It's my first Apple Watch app and the first time I used SwiftUI for a productive project. Apart from this, the development and launch was a wonderful application of the skills I learned and further honed during the last few years of running a mobile app company – I knew exactly what to do, how to do it, and when to do what. It felt effortless.

My Contribution

• Product Ideation, Concept & -Management
• Product Development
• UX/UI Design

Date Period

Started in 2023, still ongoing

Building, improving, and marketing Photone is what I'm currently spending most of my time with. Photone is the most important product of my company Lightray Innovation and we take great care of it.

I continually learn a lot in building such a product at scale. It is available on both iOS and Android platforms, relies on a lot of scientific research and development, has web-integrated features, and is currently translated to six languages (and counting). The software is developed fully natively using Swift and Kotlin with another integral part being the website and blog that are built using Ghost.

My Contribution

• Product Ideation, Concept & -Management
• Product Development
• UX/UI Design

Date Period

Started in 2019, still ongoing

The LM-3000 came into existence as a stripped-down version of the Photone Grow Light Meter as a generic light meter. Behind the scenes, it's using the same measurement technology, which we've packaged as a reusable module. It's an – so far satisfactory – attempt in scaling our core technology across other verticals and an interesting study in managing our internal resources.

My Contribution

• Product Ideation, Concept & -Management
• Product Development
• UX/UI Design

Date Period

Started in 2020, still ongoing

This project has been my first concept-to-release software project in a corporate environment with a team of almost 50 people spread across Europe, Asia, and North America involved in it. Apart from the technical skills required, I especially learned how to navigate such an environment, how to coordinate change in a global company, the benefits of lean- and direct communication lines, and a lot more.

My Contribution

• Product Ideation & Concept
• UX/UI Design
• Product Owner during initial development

Date Period

My work began in 2020 and finished in 2022

The Display App project was brought up to me within Belimo as a visionary idea, where I then lead a small team of user interaction and user interface designers to create a validated concept for the whole mobile app. In contrast to other Belimo applications that I worked on, the Display App is targeted at non-technical end-users such as office employees or teachers. Therefore, we laid the focus on high intuitiveness with a low learning curve while still fitting into the efficiency-focused Belimo ecosystem.

My Contribution

• Product Concept
• UX/UI Design

Date Period

My work began in 2020 and finished in 2021

Building the chili abo (German for "chili pepper subscription") was a lot of fun and a bit of a different challenge for me. It wasn't as much about software but rather about product selection, sourcing, packaging, and physical delivery. Ultimately, it wasn't for me yet still an important part of my journey.

The main product consisted of a monthly, hand-curated box full of chili pepper products, a brochure describing the products, and recipes. Our three product tiers (variado, picantivor, and connaisseur) each reflected a different kind of chili experience for beginners as well as long-term chili-heads. Our boxes were also available through the major Swiss online retailer Geschenkidee.

The website started from a simple HTML order form and later evolved into a full Shopify-based e-commerce setup.

My Contribution

• Product Ideation, Concept & -Management
• Marketing & Communications
• Photography & Graphic Design
• Software Development

Date Period

Started in 2017, last box shipped in 2019

I learned a lot on this project, became a better developer, and ultimately more mindful: Sharding, scraping the web, building my first ever Ghost blog, and why I shouldn't start what I don't have the capacity to finish.

Insidr was meant to provide insights into crypto market sentiment and trading statistics with the goal to foresee future price movements. The main application consisted of a node.js-based backend with decentralized scraping services and an Angular frontend.

In addition to the actual market insight application, I also created a content-based Ghost website that included articles and tools such as a compound interest calculators and a cryptocurrency portfolio creator.

My Contribution

• Product Ideation, Concept & -Management
• Full Stack Software Development
• UX/UI Design

Date Period

Started in 2017 and dropped in 2018

Still one of my most important projects, that significantly shaped my trajectory. Rieglia was my first startup, which started with the idea of measuring plant well-being remotely. I teamed up with a long-time friend and we quickly discovered that the then new-and-upcoming LoRaWAN low-power wireless network may be an interesting fit and started developing our hardware-, firmware- and cloud platform. Fast-forward a few months and we were a partner of the biggest Swiss telephone company Swisscom before the official launch of their nationwide LoRaWAN network.

In our search for venture capital to fund our hardware production (we only produced prototype batches of 40 sensors so far), we got to know the team that now became the joint-venture Akenza.

My initial focus was very technical with first writing the whole cloud (device gateways, data storage, message queues, and client API) in Java and then completely rewriting it in node.js a few months later. After that, we extensively talked to potential partners and clients, which shifted my focus to the marketing and management side before then ultimately selling the rights to our intellectual property. It was one of the best things that my then 21-year-old self could've done and I learned a lot that heavily influenced my approach to people, products, and businesses.

My Contribution

• Product Ideation, Concept & -Management
• Full Stack Software Development
• UX/UI Design

Date Period

Started in 2016 and was sold in 2017

That's it for now. There have been other (possibly secret 😉) projects along the way, but these are the most important and impactful ones to me. I am very grateful for all the excellent people I've had the chance to work with and everything that I've learned while doing so!

— Dominik