Who is Gabriele Bolognese?

Early life and education

I was born in December 2008 and grew up in the Veneto region. I went to secondary school locally and later enrolled at IIS Viola Marchesini. My school years got messy, because I was running professional work in parallel with studying, and in 2025 I failed the year and had to sit a recovery exam before I could move up.

Outside of school I did karate competitively for most of my adolescence, though how consistently depended entirely on how much else I had on. In 2025 the long stretches of building meant I stopped training for months at a time.

I am self-taught in everything I do professionally. I picked up English almost entirely from online content between eleven and thirteen, without a single lesson, which is probably why I still make the occasional mistake in it. I started learning JavaScript, TypeScript and React on my own in late December 2024.

Career

Content creation (2020–2022)

During the lockdowns of 2020, when I was eleven, I started posting Minecraft videos on YouTube under the name playmoj. I was working on hardware that really was not up to it, teaching myself to edit in Shotcut and then CapCut, and putting out somewhere between one and four videos a day. The channel got to around 1,560 subscribers across more than 600 uploads before it was compromised in 2022 by a third-party service, which deleted everything I had published and turned the account into a scam. That was the end of me as a creator.

Freelance video editing (2022–2025)

At fourteen I made a Fiverr profile, mostly because I wanted to buy a piece of hardware and had no way to pay for it. My first client was a GTA-themed YouTube channel called Emerals, who found me through someone going by the alias hansa. It started at five dollars a video and worked its way up to twenty over about six months. In total that contract earned me around $1,200.

After it ended in mid-2023 my Fiverr listings brought in nothing for months. I came back to freelance editing on and off through 2024 and into 2025, when a client in the finance niche put me on $250 a month for a package of videos. I ended up loosing that one after five deliveries, and honestly it was because of me, I was late constantly and the revisions kept piling up while I was trying to edit, build FlashFX and keep up with school all at once.

Software development and entrepreneurship (2024–present)

I got into software almost by accident, through the AI content automation tools I was playing with in late 2023. On January 3, 2024 I started my first ever project, a browser-based video editor called Vision AI Demo, using an AI assistant and bolt.new, having never programmed before in my life. I lost it to a file-path error that made the codebase unrecoverable, and it cost me €200 that I had borrowed off my younger cousin.

A second run in mid-2024 produced five browser-based prototypes across different categories and not one of them ever shipped. Those failures are what made me rethink the whole thing, and by late 2024 I had worked out that motion design, and not traditional timeline video editing, was the right category for what I actually wanted to build.

Between December 2024 and early 2025 I did nothing but study. JavaScript, TypeScript, React, building small useless utilities one after another until the fundamentals stuck. All of that came before a single line of what became FlashFX.

In mid-2025 I entered the Bolt global hackathon and put together a team of three, including an experienced TypeScript developer I met in the hackathon Discord. We submitted a working FlashFX prototype on June 30, 2025. We did not place, but the reaction from the other participants was definately the first real signal that the idea was worth something. Shortly after, we made FlashFX an actual company and I took the CEO role.

In January 2026 Aziz, who I had known online for years, joined me as co-founder. Me and him then brought in Camille Luciano as marketing manager to run social and community. FlashFX V1, the first properly working public release, launched in early 2026.

Personal profile

The way I work is iterative and it tolerates failure well, mostly because it has had to. I rebuild things from nothing when they break rather then patching around the damage. A lot of how I think about this came from my first editing client, who kept me on when my work was bad and whose real name I never even learned. I have also noticed I start almost everything around January 1, and a strange number of the things that mattered to me began in the first days of January.

I speak Italian and English. The English I picked up informally from the internet starting at eleven, which I think shows sometimes.

Ventures

Elsewhere

• LinkedIn
• GitHub
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Product Hunt
• Peerlist
• Connectively
• flashfx.app, the FlashFX application
• gabrielebolognese.blog, projects, timeline and the long-form story
• Articles, writing on building FlashFX