JohanCutych

Location: Prague

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: python, django, react, node, gcp, aws, docker

email: deptaj [at] gmail [dot] com

linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johancutych/ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/predrag-ristic-06b1b97b/ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marek-vybiral/

We are a full-stack product team (product manager/designer, two full-stack devs) with 9+ years of experience in bootstrapping 5 products as well as working as a team for startups. After being acquired by VEED.io we've been part of the company for the past two years building an AI-powered video editor.

We are experienced with validating, building, and growing products from scratch and scaling them.

Cheers!

SEEKING WORK | PRAGUE | REMOTE

We are a full-stack product team (product manager/designer, two full-stack devs) with 9+ years of experience in bootstrapping 5 products as well as working as a team for startups. After being acquired by VEED.io we've been part of the company for the past two years building an AI-powered video editor.

email: deptaj [at] gmail [dot] com

linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johancutych/ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/predrag-ristic-06b1b97b/ - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marek-vybiral/

tech-stack: python, django, react, node, gcp, aws, docker

We are experienced with validating, building, and growing products from scratch and scaling them.

Cheers!

Feels like less work on prompting but yeah, curious to know what are the next steps and how its going to be better than GPT

A year and a half after starting working on Welder we managed to pivot and reshape our local recording solution for recording HQ video remotely into a robust tool to take care of content production for small businesses like us.

And that's why we started Welder in the first place. To help us produce more video content. And it does! Now we live stream every Friday and turn it into 4-6 pieces of video for Youtube, LI & TikTok!

At the end of August this year, we had a clear idea how the solution to ACTUALLY help us should look like. A tool setup your stream easily and make it look great, connect to platforms, start streaming, has the stream recorded, and then transcripted so we can easily select pieces of text and repurpose the recording into multiple pieces of content.

We gave ourselves an ambitious deadline. 1 month for the LIVE studio part (streaming, recording, being able to change bg, overlay etc) and 1 month for the text-based editor to cut, repurpose, and export recorded streams.

Finally, it took us 3 and a half months and I am so pumped to share it with you today!

Location: Prague, Czech Republic

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Product design, UI, UX, Figma, Sketch, Webflow, Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut, HTML, CSS

email: johan [at] getwelder [dot] com (linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johancutych/)

I am a product designer building products for more than 7 years now with my team. I love being in the early stages of the startup. Working closely with founders, listening to their ideas, being deep in the problem space, and talking to users. Mixing all of this to bring functional yet beautiful designs that are not going to break developers’ necks.

In the past 7 years, I built and designed multiple products used by tens of thousands of users.

I am open to fixed term contract (up to 3 months) to help you brainstorm, validate and design the product you envisioned.

Location: Prague, Czech Republic

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Product design, UI, UX, Figma, Sketch, Webflow, Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut, HTML, CSS

email: johan [at] getwelder [dot] com (linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johancutych/)

I am a product designer building products for more than 7 years now with my team. I love being in the early stages of the startup. Working closely with founders, listening to their ideas, being deep in the problem space, and talking to users. Mixing all of this to bring functional yet beautiful designs that are not going to break developers’ necks.

In the past 7 years, I built and designed multiple products used by tens of thousands of users.

I am open to fixed term contract (up to 3 months) to help you brainstorm, validate and design the product you envisioned.

Location: Prague, Czech Republic Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Figma, Sketch, Webflow, Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut, HTML, CSS

email: johan [at] getwelder [dot] com (linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johancutych/)

I build products for more than 7 years now with my tiny team. We bootstrap our own products and help others deliver theirs.

I am the product manager and product designer of the team. I do all the designs needed to have a product - from product ideation, wireframing to beautifully crafted pixels, landing pages, logos, branding, social media presence design, and more.

I am not a typical UI or UX designer. For me, design is the glue of the product. It reflects and combines business needs, the problem and the target audience, the technical team, time frame and so much more to deliver a working and beautiful experience to users.

I am available for a short-term contract (2-3 months). Let me know if you are interested.

Design is the “cheapest” asset your product can have to build trust and empathy.

Sorry for the late reply. Was swamped.

Happy to hear that Welder seems meaningful for you. You should definitely give it a try.

Btw thanks for letting me know what convinced you, we are actually in the process of updating the LP and this is valuable feedback.

So when covid thing happened we started on a few side projects as we though it's a great opportunity to build something that will help people in current situation.

We created MVP of app for therapists to do remote sessions, system for creative people to share their thoughts, Slack bot for devs to streamline their workflow and Welder.

Welder took of the most in our validation phase.

We decide to jump full time into it straight away as the demand was big. Few months in we already had paying customers, but the growth was not as fast as we needed.

We started thinking about VC funding, but finally it didn't feel right, we loved the product, but not as much. We didn't feel like it's the next unicorn. We would be lying to the VCs and we didn't want to.

So after 8 months we decided to put it back on side track as we had two options

1) VC capital and boost the generalistic tool as hell > Nope 2) Finding a niche, stick with it, understand it and deliver solution that is different enough from other generalistic competitors who raised (we didn't love it enough and we didn't feel big enough differentiator is there).

We actualy share a lot of this on our YT channel if you are interested https://www.youtube.com/c/CrazyMonkeys/

Hope this is helpful for you!

We created https://www.getwelder.com/ as side project. Turn into main project and then back to side project haha.

Great for recording content (interviews) remotely easily & in high-quality.

Happy to see you in my thread again, thanks for jumping in.

And thanks for so much insight once more. A lot to think about.

I am actually looking here on HN exactly for this. Experience told by people like you to get a new perspective and new data.

It's a lot to digest and process, so I don't have much smarter answer than this. Again thanks a lot!

Wow thank you for such an extensive and valuable write up. Few parts really hit the home, thanks for that! I will be reading this again.

Really valuable info, thanks again!

Yep, you are totally right. We did lean to building a lot in the past, and I believe we still do even though we try to do our best not to.

That's why I am doing this Ask HN and it's extremely valuable.

I also want to figure out who to talk with next so I can understand their problems. I am thinking talking to companies and startups in general about their problems and challenges might be beneficial too. Might start podcast series about that.

Thanks!

Thanks for sharing your story a lot to learn from it! I will definitely go through the brain food you posted, thanks!

Your process makes a lot of sense. Our problem is defining what you already have - "we're a butique consultancy specialized in machine learning."

I see you put a lot of work into it, it's amazing, congrats! Curious to hear how long you take the contracts for?

I believe that we are aiming for something similar to establish. I totally believe that studio like this can delivery much better work with less people that are well played together and are really good at what they do.

Again, thanks for sharing the story!

Thanks for sharing your story a lot to learn from it! I will definitely go through the brain food you posted, thanks!

Your process makes a lot of sense. Our problem is defining what you already have - "we're a butique consultancy specialized in machine learning."

I see you put a lot of work into it, it's amazing, congrats! Curious to hear how long you take the contracts for?

I believe that we are aiming for something similar to establish. I totally believe that studio like this can delivery much better work with less people that are well played together and are really good at what they do.

Again, thanks for sharing the story!

From our experience yes and no. We built https://www.getwelder.com/ like that.

But year later into the product we feel there are two ways (but it's true that the business model of app like this is just f*ed up too)

Raise money to cover the costs and penetrate the market with this "generalistic" kind of tool.

or

Go for a niche. But this require sticking with the niche for like a year and we found out we don't love the problem space enough to do it. And from current data we don't see enough big differatiors to differentiate ourselves for a niche on short term.

We found this issue with most problem we are solving in vertical we don't understand properly - and by that I mean being part of the problem for at least a year or so and being passionate about it, having people around yourself who have that problem etc.

And you are right, this is about the determination we are not able to do for this kind of vertical for example.

Maybe that's the mistake? But again, there are many things in play with this exact Welder case which I could talk for hours about haha.

We did and actually many of the products we developed were developed like that. Even our last example https://www.getwelder.com/

The issue is that "success" rate of these products is pretty low generally speaking. And you need to dive deeper into the problem, stay with it for at least a year to understand it properly, build it and mostly build your audience that you matter too.

That's where the "hack" of raising money comes in, but it don't feel right. First it feels like just throwing money at the problem and second we want to take investment from the point of power and not desperation to survive.

Thanks for the brain food! Will check it out and be in touch if it sparks questions!

Good advice, we can be positioned like that if this is what companies need. I am just not sure if they really need this. I called this option "Adrenalin shot for your business".

You can't make the product on time? You don't have manpower but need/want to launch this? We are here for you to boost your flow without over-hiring.

Need to validate the need haha

Wow! What a coincidence! I will be in touch with you.

We can have really long conversations about many things related to business that can get quite abstract, and lead us to something new or help us straight our thoughts.

But doing these on Monday completely kills the whole work flow, it kind of depletes our mind capacity for that day.

And we find these talks really valuable so we do them on Sunday, in a relaxed and friendly way with the outcome of having set sprint

You can watch the conversation here - https://youtu.be/T3yLYmYlxh8

That's interesting way of keeping to company flexible for market downturns. But do you hire contractors for even shorter terms? If not, I am curious to hear why. Is it because 3 months are not enough to get them up to speed? Thanks for jumping in!

Thanks for the super valuable insight. Would you be actually up for connecting on LinkedIn? Got some additional question I would love to ask you!

Haha, it was probably meant to be! Thanks for dropping in and letting me know. And thanks for the effort of trying to fix it! Appreciate it!

Thank you for sharing this valuable lesson!

Few questions to understand the context. At what stage were the startup you worked with mostly?

Did you ever encountered a "proper" hand-off of the MVP? If so, what was it like or what would you suggest?

I guess the idea for me is to have the MVP developed based on getting angel investment and start looking for PMF together with already looking for seed and tech co-founder & inhouse tech team and then after you find the PMF rebuilding it completely anyway.

But you are right that finding PMF is continuous process and might take years and many iterations and the big question is what kind of answers you can get from 1 MVP/prototype built in 3 weeks or so (it should not take longer than that as I agree with what you say - make it as small as possible)

p.s. thanks for the articles, great reading. I agree that before MVP there should be prototypes that validates the hypothesis.

I was inspired by this article btw. https://www.groovehq.com/blog/technical-co-founder

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Just to understood, the team you joined was at what stage when they hired the agency? Like was it completely new startup that had capital but not enough man-power?

How big the MVP was? From what I understand it seems more like full blown product that the company wanted to develop?

For sure.

Our main products https://www.getwelder.com/ https://www.sponseasy.com/

Our tiny products https://www.lastmile.studio/ https://www.getvideocandy.com/ https://app.sponspack.com/ https://www.getwazabi.com/

Client works - MVP sprints (unfortunately not all of them are public ATM) - https://www.antistud.io/ (we helped them shape the concept + build LP + lead automation) - https://anticafe.9roads.red/ (WIP) (a community dashboard for co-working spaces so people can meet, also stay in touch when spaces are closed due to covid. We delivered the whole solution) - And few more things I can't share as they are not public

Thanks for jumping in and great points!

First of all this is a code of gentlemen's agreement, so if agreed that we won't compete / won't use the IP gained by working on the project we just don't do that.

But still it's better to have this black on white and signed, thus yeah - a proper agreement -, agreed by both parties on terms that make sense in given situation.

Few empirical points why this would not be a good idea in general. - you own the IP, and it's not transferable. We built many businesses only to find out that we would need to spend like 10 years in the vertical to really become experts enough to build truly successful products the way we want. - scamming client like this would kill the mission we are on and undermine our trust - not worth it at all - if this was our mindset we might as well took the huge investment we got offered by lying that we truly believe in what we do and then just not deliver what's promised

About the price, that really depends. But we aim for 3 weeks sprints in which everything from assessment to delivery and distribution should happen with properly set goals that are measurable so the MVP can start the proper product life cycle. So the range is somewhere between $15-80k depending on resources that are going to be spent on the project.

I don't want to sell here as this is really just for research, but if you are interested in it, hit me at johan@getwelder.com I will be more than happy to chat with you about your MVPs.

Content creators in general and right now podcasters, videocasters, media, podcasting studio and others who want to pre-record content and distribute later in best quality possible.

We found out that the quality of content is not only nicer to watch or listen to, but it actually makes the content easier to consume and digest.

Thank you, this is a feedback we get a lot here. Definitely something we will update!