DEV Community: Fedor Shmidt

From Erotic Photographer with 600k Followers to Building My First iOS App with Zero Coding Experience

Fedor Shmidt — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:28:44 +0000

For most of my 20s I lived what looked like a dream life: top erotic photographer with 600k Instagram followers, YouTube at 100k, and a crazy crypto run in 2017 that gave me a $300k+ portfolio at one point. I genuinely believed I was some kind of genius who could succeed quickly at anything.

Reality eventually corrected me. Crypto crash, failed clothing brand, Instagram ban, multiple depressions, and the painful realization that I wasn’t exceptionally talented — I had just gotten very lucky early. By my early 30s I was in Paris, studying at School 42 (the famous French programming school with no teachers), trying to rebuild from scratch.

I didn’t want another physical product business. I wanted something digital. But my technical skills were weak. Then LLMs opened the door.

The idea for the app came from my own painful relationship with the phone.

For over 10 years I used iPhones that showed only the battery icon, no percentage. I charged when it turned yellow or red. When I finally enabled the percentage on a new phone in 2025, I was shocked by how much battery I was losing to mindless scrolling — often 6–7 hours a day.

I started tracking it manually in Google Sheets. The idea of not charging my phone for two days came to me pretty quickly and intuitively (the battery lasted well beyond that with moderate use), and I really liked it. My screen time gradually decreased and physically couldn’t exceed 3.5 hours a day — otherwise, I wouldn’t have made it to the evening of the second day on a single charge (for comparison, before that I used to spend 6–7 hours a day on my phone). The nature of my usage changed, too — 3 hours of screen time spent scrolling through short videos drains the battery much more than 3 hours of reading messages, checking websites, and so on.

Then the core concept hit me: what if the app forced you into real 1- or 2-day challenges without charging the phone? A widget showing your consumption against the survival line would create constant awareness and a physical limit you couldn’t ignore like regular screen-time blockers.

Everything aligned: I needed a graduation project for school, I wanted to build something genuinely useful for people struggling with the same problem, and LLMs had reached the point where learning iOS development from near zero seemed possible.

I pitched the idea to an experienced iOS developer friend. He immediately said “Let’s build it together.” I agreed — it would remove a huge part of the technical unknown.

We were both excited. In literally one day he put together a basic widget with a 42-hour graph. It was rough, but it was real. I was thrilled.

At the same time I submitted the project to school. Their reaction was sobering: they said it looked more like a fantasy than a proper application and told me to first validate that people actually care about this problem and that current solutions don’t solve it.

My partner started strong but then went into full “chill mode” — weeks with almost zero commits. I realized continuing would likely lead to conflict and delays I couldn’t afford. We split amicably. He sent me the ~600 lines of code he had written, and I decided to go solo despite having almost zero iOS experience.

Around the same time, a subscriber from my old Telegram channel saw one of my frustrated posts and offered to send me his personal Mac Mini M4 to support the project. After a month of complicated logistics, the Mac finally arrived.

That’s how I found myself in front of Xcode for the first time in my life.

In the next part I’ll describe the absolute chaos of my first months in development, Apple’s developer tools nightmare (especially TestFlight), and where the project stands today (spoiler: the App is already in the test flight phase and you can officially try it out: https://testflight.apple.com/join/atkgRfac )

The Fall: Losing Everything After Early Success and How I Ended Up in Programming School at 30

Fedor Shmidt — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 17:55:44 +0000

After the peak in 2017 everything started falling apart.

I didn’t sell my crypto at the top. Within a year most of the gains ($300k+) evaporated. The worst part wasn’t even losing the money. It was how quickly I had gotten used to having it. Losing it hurt much more than gaining it ever felt good.

To fill the hole in my self-identity I threw myself into launching a clothing brand. I drew detailed schemes and processes (I love making diagrams for complex things).

The beautiful plan met reality: bureaucracy, unreliable manufacturers, and six months of stress instead of two. The first batch came out completely defective — the T-shirts were literally cat-sized. I still don’t understand how an entire factory could produce and ship that without anyone noticing.

That failure hit me hard. It was one of my worst depressions." width="800" height="600">

Then came the final blow: my main Instagram account with 600k followers — the center of my income, opportunities, and self-worth — got banned. It felt like losing a big part of my identity.

I tried to rebuild a new account, but the rocket growth never returned. Then COVID hit and a couple of years passed in a lazy, directionless fog. I kept releasing small collections, trying new hobbies, still secretly believing I was more capable than others. That illusion quickly broke. I wasn’t significantly better at music or FPV drones than younger guys who started earlier. The clothing business also proved unsustainable and I closed it in 2022.

Meanwhile the photography market itself was collapsing. Phone cameras got better, banner blindness became normal, and the barrier to entry dropped dramatically. ROI fell by orders of magnitude.

When my original Instagram was finally unbanned after two years, over 100,000 people unfollowed within a week. It was a clear message: the old game was over.

By the age of 30 I finally started to accept that I wasn’t exceptionally talented. I had just gotten very lucky at the right time. This realization was painful but necessary. Depressions became more frequent.

I began considering more “normal” paths I had always dismissed — including IT. That’s how I ended up joining School 21 (the Russian campus of the French 42 School). Later I transferred to the Paris campus.

In the next part I’ll tell how the idea for my first app was born, why I decided to build it with almost zero coding experience, and all the chaotic early steps.

From Biology Nerd to 600k Instagram + $300k Crypto Portfolio at 25 (My Indie Dev Journey - Part 1)

Fedor Shmidt — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:26:06 +0000

In school I was one of the most unpopular kids — short, quiet, classic nerd who loved biology. I competed in olympiads and managed to enter the biology faculty of the top university in the country.

But during my studies everything changed by accident. I got into club event photography, and within a couple of years the shy student turned into a well-known figure in Moscow’s club scene. At 19 I was already heading the photo department of one of the main portals covering that industry.

After defending my microbiology diploma I never even picked it up — by that time I was fully focused on building a career in erotic photography. The next 10 years I lived as a free artist. Everything seemed to fall into my hands naturally.

In 2017 I caught an insane crypto wave and turned a small investment into 10000% profit. At the peak my portfolio exceeded $300,000. That completely broke my brain. I started seeing myself as some kind of genius — not just a photographer, but also a talented investor.

At the same time my Instagram grew to 600,000 followers and my YouTube channel reached 100,000. I was traveling, shooting models, making vlogs. It genuinely felt like the absolute prime of my life. In the moment it seemed this was only the beginning and bigger things were ahead.

I had money, status, attention, and a very strong belief that I was simply better than most people. That anything I tried would eventually work out because I was special.

Looking back now, that period gave me a very distorted self-image. Success came fast and felt easy. It created a dangerous narrative in my head: “I’m not like everyone else. I can quickly succeed in almost anything.”

This belief would later cause me a lot of pain when reality started catching up.

In the next part I will tell what happened after the peak — the painful falls, business failures, Instagram ban, and how I eventually ended up in programming school with zero experience and started building 42h App.