I hold a Master's degree in Software Engineering.
But I actually built a hardware startup (embedded OS, hardware tinkering, mobile apps, web apps, embedded apps, wireless syncing OTA, and other tech single-handedly) with my co-founder looking after Business and everything non-tech.
It was called SpotPlay. Connect your Pendrive or hard disk to SpotPlay device and all the content in it is available via WiFi locally without using the Internet. Think of it like an offline Netflix. I already built streaming from laptops (with my previous product mHotspot) to mobile phones. However, I was approached by my batchmate with the idea of moving the technology to a portable device and catering to buses and cabs for entertainment during travel. He became my business co-founder and CEO!
I came up with a new protocol for local CDN that can stream HD movies over wifi without buffering using a device that has 32MB of RAM. Our competitors we using Raspberry Pi and other media servers with 2GB of RAM. It was really a breakthrough and we filed for a patent. This was in 2016. We were selected for Startup-Chile as well!
But we couldn't generate meaningful revenues due to various reasons. Cheap 4G availability being the main reason! Sometimes you just have bad luck no matter how hard you work.
Now I'm building Superblog as a solo indiehacker. It is used by large brands like Swiggy, Juspay, Aisle, Drivelah, Truepush, etc.
We just need to keep building irrespective of failures. :)
Here is a video of SpotPlay demo in the startup Chile office.