How I Built Wordy — and What Winning Hungary's Biggest Youth Startup Prize Taught Me

A little while ago, my mentor Albert published an article on the Munch blog about me — about what he saw mentoring a young founder. It felt strange and lovely to read someone tell your story from the outside. So I wanted to write the other half of it: the same story, but from the inside.

Why I built Wordy

It started with a TV show. My English was already at a decent level, but watching series like Suits, I kept bumping into words I didn't know. I had two bad options: pause the episode and reach for a dictionary, or let the word slide by and never really learn it. Both of them killed the thing I actually loved — just watching.

So I built a small tool for myself. It pulled the subtitles, highlighted the words I didn't know, and saved them so I could review them later. Nothing fancy. It was so unfinished that the working name was literally "MVP."

When I finished it, I realized it might be useful to other people too, so I uploaded it to the internet. Then something happened that I did not expect: TechCrunch wrote about it. That was the moment I felt I had to focus on this completely. The little subtitle hack had a name now — Wordy — and a reason to exist beyond my own living room.

The idea behind it has never changed. Textbooks teach you a version of a language nobody actually speaks. Movies and shows teach you the real thing: how people joke, argue, flirt, interrupt each other. My whole bet was that if you could capture that and turn it into learning, you wouldn't need to force yourself to study — you'd just keep watching, and learn anyway.

Winning the OTP Junior Piacralépők

In 2025 I entered a competition called the OTP Junior Piacralépők ("Junior Market Entrants"). For readers outside Hungary: it's an eight-episode entrepreneurship show run by OTP Bank, where young founders pitch and build real businesses on camera. More than two hundred ventures applied; ten made it into the show; and the top three each received three million forints in seed capital plus a three-month mentorship program.

I made the top three. Over that summer, I took the three million forints in seed money and grew it into roughly eight million forints in revenue — and that result won me the ten-million-forint grand prize (about $27,000). I was the very first grand-prize winner in the show's history, which still feels a bit surreal to write.

But honestly, the prize money wasn't the most valuable thing I took away from it. The mentorship was.

What my mentor taught me

My mentor in the program was Albert Wettstein, the co-founder of Munch, the Hungarian food-rescue app. If you don't know it, Munch is a sort of Too Good To Go for Central Europe: restaurants, bakeries and shops sell their unsold-but-perfectly-good food in discounted surprise packages instead of throwing it away. It's a beautiful idea, and the company grew into one of the most recognizable startups in the region.

I had been a fan long before I met Albert — and not in a vague way. When I was preparing my own pitch, I watched dozens of them, Hungarian and international. The one that resonated with me most was Munch's pitch on the Hungarian Shark Tank, where they famously became the first company ever to win an investment from all five sharks. I studied the structure of that pitch and built my own presentation on top of it. So in a real sense, Munch helped me win before Albert ever became my mentor.

What Albert actually taught me, though, wasn't about pitching. It was about values. Munch is built on a simple belief — that food is worth something, and that sustainability shouldn't be a luxury for the few but a normal, everyday choice for everyone. They call it "democratizing sustainability." The more we talked, the more I realized I was trying to do the same thing with language: take something that's usually expensive and gatekept — real fluency, the kind you get from immersion — and make it accessible to anyone with a phone and a Netflix subscription.

A mentor doesn't hand you answers. The best thing Albert did was show me, by example, that you can build something genuinely big without losing the thing that made you start. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, Albert and the Munch team are worth following.

Why I stayed bootstrapped (and said no to the Valley)

Here's the part that surprises people. Around that time I had several opportunities open up, including getting close to one with Y Combinator in San Francisco. I went to their AI Startup School — I was the only Hungarian among the 2,500 people selected — and I brought Albert along with me. And then I said no to the classic path.

The reason is a number I've never been able to forget: statistically, about 90% of startups don't survive their first years. From the very beginning, I knew I didn't want to be in that majority. When you raise a lot of money, you also inherit a lot of pressure — a 0-to-24 pace, constant growth targets, and decisions made for the next funding round instead of for the product. I run on my own company's money, which is ultimately my own money. That makes me far more careful. Revenue and profit aren't a "nice to have" for me; they're the basis of the whole operation.

I also genuinely believe you can build a startup today without outside investment, because the tools have changed. AI both saves the startup world and makes it more ruthless. It saves you by lowering the barrier to entry — when I needed an Android version, I was quoted millions of forints and three months by a contractor, so instead I gave myself a week and a half and built it with about 300,000 forints of AI credits. But AI also kills the startups that see only the tool and never build real value behind it. The way I see it, AI doesn't replace founder thinking. It just amplifies it.

The values underneath all of it

I'm aware this is an unusual thing for a founder to say out loud, but it's the truest part: I'm deliberately building a life and a business where there's room for the things that matter to me — my faith, my family, my friends, and doing work I actually enjoy. The Valley version of success would have cost me most of those. I'd rather grow a little slower and still recognize my own life at the end of it.

That's also, I think, why the Munch story and mine fit together so well. Albert wrote about seeing his own beginnings in me. What I saw in Munch was proof that you can keep your values and still build something that reaches millions.

What's next

Today Wordy has reached over 300,000 learners worldwide, with around 50,000 active every month, an average rating of 4.8 stars, and support for more than 20 languages. The goal is one million users by the end of 2026. On the product side, the next big step is teaching not just words but structure — proper grammar and guided courses — because I learned during the competition that half of my users are beginners, and they need more hand-holding than I first built for.

If any of this resonates — whether you're trying to learn a language or trying to build something of your own — the best thing I can tell you is the same thing the last three years taught me: start with a real problem, ideally your own, and give more value than you take. The rest compounds.

You can try Wordy on iOS, Android, or as a Chrome extension and start learning from the shows you already love.

Sándor Bogyó is the founder of Wordy and the first-ever grand-prize winner of the OTP Junior Piacralépők. He was mentored by Albert Wettstein, co-founder of Munch.