Ioakim Chatzisavvas

I'm 17 and I live on a small Greek island. I don't have a CS degree, I've never been to Silicon Valley, and nobody in my family works in tech. But none of that stopped me from building things.

I started my first business at 14 — a dropshipping store that made exactly one sale for €15. I didn't care. I just wanted to see if I could make something work on the internet. Since then, I've started over 10 projects. Most of them failed or made very little. A few worked — I made €12K in 45 days reselling streetwear at 15, grew social media pages to 90K+ total followers, built an online community of 2,700 people, and launched a tourism media network generating revenue across Greek islands. None of these were huge wins, but each one taught me something I couldn't learn in school.

Eventually I got frustrated that I had business ideas but couldn't build them myself. So I taught myself to code — React Native, TypeScript, Firebase, Expo. It was hard. I'm still learning every day. But now I can go from idea to working product on my own, and that changed everything for me.

Right now I'm all in on Dream AI — an app where you describe a dream and get a cinematic AI video of yourself living it. You can add friends, family, celebrities, pets — anyone you saw. Instead of telling someone "I saw you in my dream last night," you show them. It's live on the App Store with 100+ downloads and paying subscribers. I built the full product myself — chaining GPT-4, AI image generation, and Kling AI video into one pipeline. In the background, I'm running FullBook.gr with my friend — a tourism marketing platform across Greek islands that keeps steady revenue coming in.

I'm not going to pretend my numbers are impressive by Silicon Valley standards. But I think what matters is that I've been building relentlessly since I was 14, from a small island where nobody was doing this stuff, and I haven't stopped once. I just keep going.