Twenty Minutes Away, A Different World
Around 2023, I was working at a startup incubator — a matchmaking company that connected startups with corporates who needed their services. One of my colleagues there was from Volendam, a small town about twenty minutes north of Amsterdam.
Twenty minutes. That's it. But culturally, it might as well have been another country. The traditions, the community, the way people talked — completely different from Amsterdam. And the language? I couldn't understand a word.
Now, I'm half American, so my Dutch comprehension isn't perfect to begin with. But Amsterdam Dutch? No problem. Volendam Dutch? Completely lost. The dialect is so distinct, so deeply its own thing, that even native Dutch speakers from the city struggle with it. The fact that this level of cultural separation existed just twenty minutes from where I grew up genuinely fascinated me.
Duolingo Meets a Drinking Game
I started digging deeper into Volendam's culture — the traditions, the dialect, the community pride. And I thought: what if there was an app for this? Not a serious language course, but something that felt fun and accessible. Part Duolingo, part drinking game, part love letter to a place most people drive past on the highway.
Learn the dialect through interactive quizzes. Test your friends on local slang. Drink when you get one wrong. It was the same playbook as Kakkermeter — niche, personal, shareable — but for a completely different community.
The File That Sat for Two Years
I actually started building Volendams in 2023, during a period when I was shipping apps left and right. But life got in the way — Skylark launched, marnix.ai took over, and the project sat as a half-finished file somewhere in Xcode. Forgotten, but not deleted.
Recently, when I got back into building personal projects, I opened it up again. The foundation was already there. It literally took about five hours to polish it up and ship it. Five hours from dusty Xcode file to live on the App Store.
Not Every App Needs to Make Money
Volendams isn't a business. It's not going to generate revenue. It's not part of some growth strategy. And that's completely fine.
The best part about this app is watching my Volendam friends actually use it — laughing at the questions, arguing about whether a translation is right, sending it to their family members. That feeling of building something that brings people joy, even if it's just a small group of people in a small town twenty minutes from Amsterdam — that's the whole point.
Not every app has to be a startup. Sometimes you build something because it's fun, because it captures a piece of culture that deserves to exist digitally, and because your friends enjoy it. That's enough.