Three rings and a boarding pass

I’m in the duty free hall at Frankfurt Terminal 3, standing under three aluminium rings I welded when I was 20.

Five millimetre plate. Rolled, welded, straightened, ground. The smallest is 3.5 metres across, the largest 8. I hung them under that ceiling myself on climbing gear, then bent and fitted the tubes that sweep around them.

Aluminium pulls as it cools, and unlike steel you can’t flame-straighten it back afterwards. So you plan the weld sequence, and then the metal tells you how much it agrees with you. Three rings, no dents, six months after my trade exam.

WHY I LEFT THE FIRST TIME

Those rings were the last thing I built before I flew to Australia for the first time. Then I handed in my notice. €30 an hour plus site allowances, at 20, in a trade where that is a good wage — gone, for a plan that fitted in one sentence: go and see how work actually works.

I spent two years there, one of them in farming. Not to find a business idea. To stand in enough different operations that I couldn’t end up solving a problem nobody has.

Terminal 3 opened on 22 April this year. Today I’m walking through it as a passenger, with a boarding pass to Brisbane.

Workshop, 2023. The largest of the three rings: 5 mm aluminium, 8 metres across.

WHAT EACH JUMP BOUGHT

People call these pivot points. Mine have turned into a habit, so I’ve started checking what each one actually paid for.

The trade got me through the gate — nobody lets a stranger into their yard, but they’ll take a set of hands. Farming showed me how the operation runs at 5:00 am, not how it’s described in a brochure. The business degree and 20 hours a week as a fraud analyst taught me the part I was missing: how you turn data into information, and information into knowledge.

That’s three of four steps. The one still open is knowledge into action.

Which is the whole product. BovaryX builds LPOS — decision intelligence for feedlots. Rations, bunk calls, inductions, treatments, movements, weather, market feeds: today those sit in separate systems, in spreadsheets, on whiteboards, and in people’s heads. LPOS pulls them into one backbone and turns them into recommendations that carry their reasoning with them. Not another dashboard for someone to interpret at the start of shift.

WHY THE PLANE AGAIN

I finished my last shift as an analyst on 20 August. Three days later I’m on this flight. The six weeks cost me a mid four-figure sum and the last steady pay cheque I’ll see for a while.

I’m going because I don’t trust what I currently know. A thesis built from research and conversations is enough to build a mockup. It isn’t enough to build the thing.

Two answers out there would tell me to stop. Too early: the yards aren’t ready to work off a screen. Too late: everyone already sits on a competitor’s contract and there’s nothing left to do better. The third answer is the one I’m betting on — the established suppliers are too slow to keep up with what is now technically possible, and the gap is open.

Any of the three is worth the ticket. That’s not optimism. It’s the only way I know to look at reality without needing it to agree with me.

WHAT HASN’T CHANGED

Since the day I quit at Arnold, one thing has stayed the same. I want to build products so obviously useful that no marketing has to invent the need first. If a product has to be pushed into a market, somebody didn’t understand the process.

You’re getting this because you’ve had a hand in this somewhere — a conversation, a hard question, an introduction. Thank you for that.

Weekly while I’m on the ground, starting 2 September. Fortnightly once I’m back. Each one short: what happened, what I saw, what it changed, and what I still don’t know.

The rings will still be up there in October. If I welded them properly, nobody will ever notice them. That’s roughly the standard I’m aiming for with the software.

Talk soon,
Yannik