OnePerMonthChapter 1: The €1 coin that became an app
Death in the family
I landed in Spain with $300 in my pocket.
No safety net. No backup plan. Just a laptop and a bet on myself.
I found a job as a mobile developer at a startup. Things were looking up.
Then my father was diagnosed with cancer.
I negotiated a remote setup and flew to him. For months, I balanced code commits with hospital visits. Work became background noise to a life that was suddenly fragile.
During those nights, sleep stopped coming easy. I'd lie awake for hours, mind racing. That's when I discovered apps like Calm and Headspace — each valued at over $1 billion. Companies built on the simple premise that modern humans have forgotten how to rest.
I filed it away: Maybe someday I'll build something in this space.
Then, at only 58 years old, my father passed away.
The Descent
Grief is strange. After he was gone, I could suddenly fall asleep — but I couldn't wake up.
The exhaustion was bone-deep. I'd sleep 9, sometimes 10 hours. My alarms became suggestions I'd ignore. Waking up was the hardest part of every day.
I was going through the motions. Working, but not really. Living, but not present.
Slowly, my finances unraveled. Despite working, despite trying to course-correct, nothing stuck.
Then came the day I checked my bank account.
€1.
One euro. That was it.
The Coin on the Phone
That number hit different than any alarm ever could.
So I did something strange. I took that €1 coin from my mother to have the physical representation of where I'd let myself drift — and I placed it on top of my phone every night before going to sleep.
Every morning when I reached over to turn off my alarm, the coin would slip and fall to the floor, its sharp clang echoing like a reminder of where I stood financially. It definitely got me out of bed—but it wasn’t the most pleasant reality check to face first thing in the morning.
So, under the coin, I started to put a handwritten letter. A letter from my future self I imagined. Where things are better in life.
Every night before bed, I'd write a new one. About where I was heading. About who I was becoming. About the fact that this wasn't the version of me I wanted to be.
When my morning alarm rang and I reached to turn it off, the coin would fall. It would hit the floor with a small clink — and suddenly I wasn't groggy anymore.
I was awake.
I'd see that coin, read my letter, and remember: This is where you are. This is what you wrote to yourself. Now get up.
It worked.
Slowly, then quickly, I started climbing back.
From Ritual to Product
Months later, somehow stable again, I kept thinking about that ritual.
The coin wasn't magic. The letter wasn't magic. What was magic was hearing from my future self — from the version of me who had it all, speaking to the groggy version who had none.
I thought: What if that could be an app?
An alarm that plays your own voice when you wake up. With of course some additional features that did help me with the process and kept me consistent.
A 30-second message you record the night before — when you're clear-headed, when you remember why tomorrow matters — played back to the version of you who's about to hit snooze. But the trick is to make it sound like the future you is talking to you.
Call it time travel.