From Med School to SaaS: How I Got Lost in Toxic Ambition ... and Found My Way Back

Stéphane — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:18:33 +0000

It has probably been months since I last wrote a text entirely without AI .. I got lost in an excessive ambition

To understand my story a little better, we need to go back to where it all began

I. My childhood and schooling

During my schooling I had the opportunity to skip 2 grades, yet I had never been so bored as during that period. I was an average student with a few facilities, who spent his days daydreaming and admiring all those entrepreneurs building empires from dust, changing the world, defying all limits or statistics. But there you go, I always had a parallel dream… to become a doctor.

After the baccalaureate, I therefore abandoned this dream of entrepreneurship, of creating something without entering a mold imposed by society and I launched myself into medical studies.`

It was then that I discovered in myself a motivation and an ambition still unsuspected, I went from a student incapable of working more than 1 hour per day to a first-year student working in a military way more than 12 hours per day, every day, without vacations, without weekends, without going out… I fully acknowledge it was unreasonable but it allowed me to obtain rankings sufficient to enter the 2nd year of medicine (around 8% of the best students) while still being in the middle of the class.

Then came COVID, while the vast majority of my classmates were lounging in the sun knowing that exams would be done remotely, I was spending my days working relentlessly.. an idea had sprouted in my mind.

I could not stand having a boss, a leader, someone to report to … and above all I was terrified of regret.

To regret not having absolutely given everything I had deep in my guts, to discover my limits and see how far I could go, so I set myself the ambition of performing at the 6th-year exam (which in my country allows you to choose your specialty through a national ranking among all medical students).

I undertook in parallel a master’s degree where I finished top of my class, then came the 4th-year exams where I finished 1st in my class .. I was finally seeing something concrete taking shape… finally I was no longer simply the “lucky one” who had skipped 2 grades but the hard worker capable of surpassing his limits and above all the one who managed to climb back up during mentally dark periods throughout those years. I was fighting alone against myself so as not to crack, not to give up, with an incalculable number of doubts, nervous breakdowns, burnouts, and desires to quit.

I managed to maintain this pace for 2 more years to reach the exam.. finally the concretization, those 5 years of work, of friendly/family sacrifice, of doubt, of tears, of breakdowns .. everything was going to be decided in those 3 days.

The results came out, top 0.5% of the national exam.. there you go I could choose whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted I could build the life of my dreams…

But after a period of euphoria .. here I was alone facing myself with a bitter taste of regret. Who could I talk to about it? No one could have understood this feeling with the rankings I had obtained.

Yet this bitterness was becoming more and more intense.. what if in the end I was in fact realizing everything that frightened the adolescent in me? Was I not in the process of entering this societal mold, even if very comfortable, of medicine?

I then decided to look again at this dream of entrepreneurship, of changing the world, of creating from nothing and above all that my creation be useful to people.

II. The pursuit of the child’s dream within me

During those holidays when all my classmates were enjoying themselves (rightly so), I decided to learn how to code.. as you probably understood I don’t know how to do things halfway, it’s all or nothing. So here I went for 1 month at more than 10 hours per day learning from scratch.

After this month, 14 more days allowed me to launch my first SaaS: a tool that from a dictaphone audio (typically a lecture in an amphitheater) generates a structured course (title, subtitle, paragraph removing digressions, repetitions, etc.) in the space of a few minutes without doing anything.

Happy with what I had built, rather very efficient and convinced that millions of users would arrive the next day, here I was launching into marketing and…. first WALL I am terribly bad at it. 0 users after 2 weeks.

I then pivoted and tried to sell this tool not to individuals anymore but to companies .. typically medical prep schools that paid individual students to do the work of my SaaS.

So here I was prospecting on LinkedIn, quite surprisingly the directors were convinced. Phone meetings followed one another, I was brought to meet them in their offices to discuss usage modalities, their very important needs, negotiate contracts of several thousand euros.. finally I was touching this freedom.

But then came that call that changed everything, NotebookLLM had entered the game .. faster, more powerful and .. free.

All those weeks of work wiped out in one phone call.

My first real failure in years and my God how painful it is. Shouldn’t I have stayed in the comfort I had earned in medicine?

Impossible, I wanted this freedom (maybe a little too much..), I ended up coming across part of the indie hacker community on Twitter, I found myself bathing in the tweets of dream sellers .. here is how I made $1M in 1 month with my app and marketing.

I then learned to code in React and here I was coding my first mobile app between two consultations, in the evening when coming back from work, the day after being on call or during my lunch break. The concept is simple -> take a photo of your face and it generates a real skincare routine with adapted products, which optimizes itself without interactions.

The backend was ingenious, there was genuinely no bullshit, I had tried to be as medically relevant as possible and the result was really ultra convincing.

After 1 week my first paying user and the second right after, but I never managed to make this app take off further despite attempts to recruit American influencers, students to do UGC …

I then made other SaaS, one to intelligently split YouTube videos and automatically repost them on TikTok.

Another to humanize texts and no longer get flagged by AI.

Or even an equivalent of Quittr but to stop addiction to financial spending.

You start to see where I’m going? Apart from my first SaaS and more or less the second, everything else was no longer driven by the will to be authentically useful for me and for others (in my opinion), but by the desire to make money. I got lost in dreams I never had, in a toxic ambition, I was no longer the teenager full of dreams but the immature adult who only wanted to feed an ego without bringing real value to his work.

So I quit everything for 2 months, while continuing my medical residency.

So here I am today behind this keyboard writing these lines, a 23-year-old, currently in my 8th year of medicine who has gone through an incalculable number of mistakes but who is finally in the process of creating software that is useful in my eyes and I hope for others.

Pulsaro is my desktop software that allows, via a simple shortcut, to toggle a transparent chat window allowing you to talk with all the most recent LLMs as well as the most powerful AIs for image and video generation, while continuing to work on your computer with the window open in parallel that I can close at any time.

With other shortcuts I can screenshot parts of my screen and quickly discuss with the most relevant LLM about the action to take, all with a single subscription which allows me to save time and money.

NB: I would be delighted to receive honest feedback from some of you after using it 

I hadn’t authentically written a text for months, always asking AI to optimize its performance, but finally I want to reconnect with this teenager full of dreams. Maybe some of you recognize yourselves partly in this story, what challenges have you been confronted with?

DEV Community: Stéphane

From Med School to SaaS: How I Got Lost in Toxic Ambition ... and Found My Way Back

It has probably been months since I last wrote a text entirely without AI .. I got lost in an excessive ambition

I. My childhood and schooling

II. The pursuit of the child’s dream within me