Ferenc Fekete

Helping non-tech Founders transform Ideas into SaaS products @ VeryCreatives | Product Agency, SaaS & MVP Development | Startups

I've watched many startup founders fail at the same exact point: turning their validated idea into actual software.

They waste months (or even years):
→ Trying to hire the right developers
→ Burning cash on poor planning and execution
→ Second-guessing every technical decision along the way

Meanwhile, competitors move faster, investors demand traction, and the pressure to deliver keeps building more and more.

After watching this pattern destroy countless promising startups, we built VeryCreatives to fix it.

But here's what makes us different:

We don't just build your MVP and disappear. We're product people who think like founders, not just developers who code to spec.

👉 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻-𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵: We start by pressure-testing your assumptions before writing a single line of code. If the market doesn't want it, we'll tell you straight.

👉 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘀𝗲𝘁 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗼𝗻𝗲: We build like it's our own startup, obsessing over user experience, scalability, and investor readiness from the first sprint.

👉 𝗙𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗮 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝘅𝗶𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱: Whether you're at napkin sketch or Series B, we've been there. We've helped founders go from zero to acquisition, and we stick around for the entire journey.

For the past 14 years, we've built products for venture-backed startups, fast-growing scale-ups, and globally recognized brands like Red Bull, Nestlé, and Philips.

The startups we work with have:
✅ Launched investor-ready MVPs in under 90 days
✅ Secured funding from top-tier investors and VCs
✅ Scaled from first users to thousands of paying customers
✅ Successfully exited to strategic acquirers

Got a SaaS idea that's been sitting in your head for months? 
Let's map out your 90-day path to launch → https://verycreatives.com/book-a-call

Co-Founder

At VeryCreatives, we are a team of expert developers who create powerful SaaS apps that solve problems and drive growth for founders with initial funding. We believe in empowering our clients with innovative software that helps them achieve their goals and stand out in their industry.

Our audience consists of driven and ambitious founders who have just received initial funding for their startup. They are looking for a software development partner who understands their vision, can help bring their ideas to life, and deliver results that will help them achieve their business goals.

Founders with initial funding have a pressing need to build their product quickly and efficiently to maximize their chances of success. At VeryCreatives, we understand this need and are dedicated to creating high-quality SaaS apps that not only meet their requirements but also exceed their expectations. We are committed to delivering value and results that help our clients succeed.

VeryCreatives stands out in the market for our ability to deliver high-quality, innovative solutions that meet the needs of our clients. Our unique approach to software development, coupled with our expertise and commitment to excellence, is what drives us to provide outstanding results to our clients.

Industries our clients operate in, using the SaaS products we've built: 
- Digital marketing, Event marketing & Influencer marketing SaaS
- Foodtech & Delivery 
- Fintech, Banking & Investments
- 2-sided marketplace platforms
- Agriculture & Livestock management
- Packaging compliance & Waste

Markets we cover: UAE, EU, UK, US.

We hired the most talented person we'd ever interviewed. Six months later, they nearly broke our team.

On paper, they were perfect. Incredible technical skills, impressive portfolio, confident in interviews.

But once they joined, the cracks started showing.

They pushed their opinions hard. Influenced decisions just to prove they were irreplaceable. Struggled with collaboration at every turn.

They were brilliant, just not team players.

And when you're building a long-term, healthy culture, that's a major problem.

From my experience, "rockstar" doesn't always mean "right fit." It usually just means they're amazing at one specific thing.

But if you want to build a culture that actually lasts, one built on trust, collaboration, and shared goals, you need people who actually want to work WITH others. That's a big emphasis for us at VeryCreatives.

So yes, hire skilled people.

But also hire people you'd want to solve hard problems with. People who care, share, and make your team better.

Skills get people hired. Character keeps teams together.

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big-dwarf

Helping startup founders & innovation labs validate and scale ideas into exit-ready products @ VeryCreatives | 🔥 Two decades in tech

It seems like every SaaS founder wants to add AI features to their product these days. But the truth is, most AI features fail.
 
Why? Because users just don't care.
 
We recently saw a founder proudly showcase an AI feature they spent four months building.
 
Don't get me wrong, it had a beautiful UI and clean architecture. But only 8% of users actually used it. And that number was dropping.
 
After building hundreds of SaaS products, here are three of the biggest mistakes we see with feature implementation:
 
1️⃣ Mistake 1: Building solutions to non‑problems
 
Users already have workarounds. And most of them are fast, familiar, and "good enough." So if your AI feature competes with an existing habit instead of replacing real pain, it doesn't matter how smart it is. They won't adopt it.
 
2️⃣ Mistake 2: Optimizing for accuracy instead of behavior
 
A feature with 94% accuracy that no one uses is not a success. We've seen "smart" search and recommendations ignored because users needed speed in real time, not perfect answers.
 
3️⃣ Mistake 3: Treating AI like just another feature
 
AI needs different metrics, UX decisions, and sales expectations than other features do. So if teams aren't aligned on what success actually looks like, you end up shipping something technically impressive that just ends up getting abandoned.

The common thread? All three mistakes happen before a single line of code is written.
 
So what's the fix?
 
At VeryCreatives, we always use a simple validation framework before writing a single line of code:
 
👉 Map actual user complaints
👉 Run manual "concierge" tests to simulate the AI before we build it
👉 Define 3 success metrics — one that leads, one that lags, and one that catches red flags early
 
If you're thinking about adding AI to your SaaS, ask yourself whether you're solving a real problem or just building what sounds impressive.
 
Sometimes the smartest AI feature is the one you never build.
 
-
 
What's an AI feature from a popular product you've never used? Drop it in the comments below, I'd love to hear your experience.

Talks about #saas, #founders, #startups, #entrepreneurship, and #softwaredevelopment

There are 4 things I wish we had done earlier at VeryCreatives. Each one cost us years of unnecessary struggle.

We've been building the company for 13 years now and have helped build a portfolio of $100M+ in SaaS products for clients. But looking back, these are the lessons that would have saved us the most pain:

1️⃣ Creating content:

When we were first starting out, we grew like everyone else — through referrals.

It was only when we hit our first big plateau that we finally decided to start creating content. First, it was our blog. Then came LinkedIn.

Today, those two channels drive ~60% of our business pipeline.

Truth is, content has always worked. It was just one of those things we kept putting off until it was (nearly) too late.

My advice?

Start creating content from day one. It's free distribution with massive upside.

2️⃣ Introducing finance controlling:

When you're a small business, finance controlling is just one of those things you don't think you need.

But when we hit around $1M per year, we realized we had no clear picture of where the money was going. We were asking ourselves questions like:

👉 What did we actually spend on?
👉 What if we hired five more people?
👉 Which employees generated how much?

At the time, we didn't have any answers. So we brought in a financial expert to help us out.

Today, we have yearly, quarterly, and monthly plans and visibility into every detail. And it's made a massive difference.

3️⃣ Fixing our cash conversion cycle:

In the early years, our clients only paid us AFTER we had delivered the work.

Which is great for clients. But for us, that meant our team worked for free for an entire month, we paid their salaries, and then the client paid us.

The problem was that if the client paid late or went out of business, our cash flow took a major hit.

But we're not a bank. So a few years ago, we changed that model.

Now, most of our clients pay in advance, which has created even more stability than we previously had.

4️⃣ Hiring HR:

By our sixth year, our team was already over 20 people before we finally brought in a part-time HR manager.

Up until then, Maté and I were still the ones handling paperwork, payroll, vacation management, hiring, performance reviews, everything. So when we finally brought on an HR manager to handle those things, it was like a weight lifted off our shoulders.

Having an HR manager is one of the main reasons we have such a humane workplace, and she's a huge part of why our culture is what it is today.

Looking back, each of these changes pushed us forward and shaped us into the company we are today.

Don't wait for pain to force you to act. Build the right business foundations early on if you want to save yourself years of headaches.

-

What's a business lesson you had to learn the hard way? Drop the story in the comments below.

I watched a startup founder turn a 3 month build into 5 months by adding one tiny word to the spec:

Roles

This product was supposed to be simple.

One frontline user.

One main workflow.

Three months to launch.

Then the founder dropped it in a call:

"We also need admin, manager, and country lead views."

On the spreadsheet it looked like three extra rows.

In the product it turned 10 simple screens into 30 plus 12 permission variants and a pile of test cases.

Every button became a meeting:

Can admins see this? Can managers edit this? What about country leads?

Look, roles do not simply add a feature. They multiply the whole product.

And the real mess hit after launch.

A director logged in and could see salary data for people they should never see.

One screenshot hit a group chat and trust in the product evaporated overnight.

We were now building enterprise access control inside something that was supposed to be an MVP. Support burned out. Engineers stopped improving the core workflow and lived inside permission bugs.

My rule for v1 of your SaaS:

Pick one primary actor and serve them deeply.

Everyone else gets a hacked internal dashboard or manual process until real usage proves the need.

What's the "tiny word" that blew up your timeline?

I knew a startup was doomed when I heard the exact same roadmap fight in three different meetings within one month.

It started with a pricing page redesign.

Week 1, we agreed to kill a confusing middle tier and simplify the plans. Launch was tied to a campaign date.

Week 2, a new stakeholder joined.

"We cannot remove that tier, enterprise might need it."

Decision reopened, designers paused, engineers waited.

Week 3, same argument again, now with sales in the room. Nobody could say why we chose the original plan. So the safest option won. Do nothing.

The damage:

👉 Pricing launch slipped by six weeks.
👉 A planned promo died.
👉 One big prospect churned during the confusion.

That is what happens when decisions live only in people's heads.

Every new hire or nervous stakeholder hits reset. The loudest person wins. The roadmap becomes a loop instead of a line.

We stopped the loop with one boring habit.

We call it the argument graveyard. For every big call, we document:

👉 What we chose
👉 The options we rejected
👉 Why we chose it
👉 The trigger that would make us reopen it

Next time someone tries to restart the fight, we point to the graveyard. If the trigger has not happened, the decision stands.

One doc. Fewer pointless meetings. Faster shipping.

What decision keeps getting relitigated on your team?

Your product isn't the problem. Your budget split is.

I've built countless SaaS products and apps over the past decade for some of the biggest brands in the world. Here's the biggest mistake I see first-time SaaS founders make that kills their product:

They map out their entire product budget... and allocate 100% of it to development.

They're planning to build the full product, launch it, then HOPE customers show up.

But the problem is, a good product is only 50% of the equation. The other half is getting it in front of the right people (which costs a lot of money too).

Especially in B2B, you'll need to spend some cash to speed up your learning curve and learn:

👉 Which channels work
👉 What messages resonate
👉 What makes your ideal customers actually convert

Some founders ignore this until it's too late. And by that time, they've burned through their development budget and launched something that MIGHT be great without anyone actually knowing it exists.

That's why whenever we work with clients, we often help them adjust the product scope before building anything out. Because we want to free up budget for marketing, user acquisition, and proper positioning so they can actually get customers and scale the business.

You could have the best product in the world. But if nobody knows it exists, it won't mean a thing.

Before you finalize your budget, ask yourself:

What's my plan to get 100 people to see this?

I once said yes to a feature because I was scared of silence on a client call. That one word cost us 50+ support tickets.

One big customer wanted a board ready revenue report:

Custom filters, export to PDF, special rules for how to group regions. 

I could feel the pressure on the call, so I said yes.

For the next two years, that feature was responsible for roughly a third of our support tickets.

Time zones showed different numbers. Permissions did not match expectations. Someone always needed "one more column." 

Every quarter we burned at least a week of engineering time touching that module and hoping nothing else broke.

The mechanism was simple:

Agencies like billable work. Founders like harmony. 

Both incentives push you toward yes. 

So you build a relationship patch that keeps one logo happy and taxes everyone forever.

Now I run a hard filter before agreeing:

👉What problem is this solving?
👉How often does it happen?
👉What is the current workaround?

If the problem happens less than weekly or the workaround is annoying but real, we offer a time boxed manual workaround first. 

Two weeks in Sheets or n8n. Then we see if they still care.

Courage on the call is cheaper than code in the backlog.

What feature are you still paying for because you couldn't say no?

You created your own bad developers.

I have seen this pattern too many times.

Founder says:

"My devs are slow"
"They do not get it"

Then we look closer.

And see a decision vacuum the team is trying to survive.

There are three calls only you can make as the founder.

If you dodge them, even a strong team will look useless:


👉 Decision 1: Who is our primary user right now?

One founder I worked with tried to serve agencies and tiny solo founders at the same time.

Sales promised custom features to big accounts, product built self serve onboarding for tiny ones, devs got whiplash.

Nine months of work, nobody truly happy.


👉 Decision 2: What is the next business outcome we are willing to bet on?

MRR from a segment, activation rate, expansion from existing customers.

If this is not written down, every feature feels urgent.

You ship a lot of stuff and still cannot answer why revenue or usage is flat.


👉 Decision 3: What constraints are non negotiable?

Time, budget, compliance, integrations.

If these move every week, scope will quietly double and your v1 will arrive six months late.


Which of these three have you been dodging?

Most failed software projects don't fail at the finish line.

They fail in week 2, when the team realizes the core feature can't actually be built.

That's why one of the smartest things you can do as a SaaS founder, before writing a single line of code, is build a proof of concept.

Not a full product or MVP. Just enough to answer one question: "Can we actually build this thing?"

We've gone through this exact process hundreds of times for both our clients and our own internal tools.

Here's how it works:

👉 Proof of Concept (PoC): Does this work technically?

This is where you test your riskiest assumption. Can it even be built the way you imagine? It's not going to be pretty, and it's not public-facing. But it's real.

Skip this, and you're three months into development before realizing your AI feature needs data you can't legally access.

👉 Prototype: What will it look and feel like?

Map the user flow, add just enough UI to walk someone through it, and start shaping the product experience.

Skip this, and your dev team builds something technically correct that no user can figure out how to use.

👉 MVP: Will people actually use and pay for it?

Now you're testing the market. You've built something lean and functional to prove there's demand and that your positioning makes sense.

Skip this, and you spend 18 months perfecting a product nobody asked for.

A good proof of concept helps you spot technical roadblocks early and gives stakeholders the confidence that your idea is real.

It's faster (and cheaper) to find the cracks now than to rebuild everything later.

What's the riskiest technical assumption you've had to validate before building?

Your first 10 customers are friends.

Your next 100 are stress tests.

Most MVPs crack right there.

And it's rarely the thing you're watching for.

Not because of one big bug.

Because of 4 invisible gaps almost every founder forgets:


1. Role and permission basics

A single login is fine at the very start.

Then a bigger account asks "Can my team have different access levels?"

If the answer is no, that deal quietly dies.

👉 By month 6, if you don't have this, you'll start losing deals you never knew you lost.


2. Bulk actions for power users

Clicking one by one feels fine with 10 records.

At 1,000, people hate your product.

They will export to Excel and never come back.

👉 By month 6, if you don't have bulk edit or export, your power users are already halfway out the door.


3. Password reset that does not melt support

In the early days, you just "help people manually."

At 150 accounts, your inbox turns into "I cannot log in" hell.

👉 By month 3, if you don't have a clean self-service reset flow, your support load will bury your roadmap.


4. An internal admin tool

If every tiny change needs a developer, your roadmap will stall.

You cannot build new features and play support at the same time.

👉 By month 9, if you don't have a simple internal panel, your engineers are stuck doing data cleanup instead of shipping.


Audit your stack against this list. What's missing?

One sentence has ruined more SaaS products than I can count:

"We just want to add one more feature."

After getting on over a hundred calls with SaaS founders in the past year, I've heard this over and over again. It causes the most problems down the line in product development.

It usually starts with a well-meaning request from a customer. Seems useful and easy enough to add, so you do.

But the problem is, you're not just adding a new feature. You're increasing maintenance costs, adding complexity to your codebase, and making your product harder to evolve and scale.

One founder I worked with added a reporting dashboard because one enterprise prospect asked for it. Six months later, 25% of their dev time went to maintaining a feature 3% of users touched.

You're not really listening to your customers when you do this. You're simply reacting to edge cases that don't align with your core value prop.

So before saying yes to any new feature request, first ask yourself a few simple questions:

👉 "Is this feature aligned with the main value of my product?"
👉 "Does it solve a problem for my ideal customer segment?"
👉 "Will this make the product more focused or more bloated?"

If the answer isn't clear, skip it.

Most of the time, when it comes to product dev, less is more.

What's a feature you wish you'd said no to?

Social media lied to you about building a business.

Even getting to $25K MRR takes way more time and effort than most people realize.

We've been so conditioned to believe that building a business is easy. You'll see all these incredible success stories on Twitter of founders who "made $100K in just 3 months."

But what they usually skip over is all the grunt work, sleepless nights, and moments when they doubted themselves. Like manually reaching out to customers, chasing conversations, or testing ten different things just to find the one that works.

Even when you're making money, it can still feel fragile.

The growth isn't always exponential, at least not at first. And when the numbers don't look great in Year 1, it's easy to doubt everything.

But that's the game we play as founders. If it were easy, everyone would do it.

So if you're a founder who's feeling a bit discouraged right now, here's a reminder:

Don't mistake slow growth for failure. All it takes is one right idea, one right offer, or one right distribution channel to start compounding.

Keep going. It's worth it.

What's the hardest part of your journey right now?

If you sell SaaS to lawyers or bankers, start by assuming they hate you:

Over the last 15 years, we've built several products for complex industries, like finance, legal, and health.

Not once did the client want us to "wow" the user.

It was always about answering a simple question:

"Will buying this get me fired?"

These buyers start from no.

They picture audits and angry clients long before they picture your UI.

In low trust industries, your product has 30 seconds to prove one thing:

👉 This software is safe to say yes to

The first screen should answer three questions fast:

1️⃣ Show the audit trail immediately:

History on every key object, not just in some admin panel.

A simple History tab that shows:

• Name
• Time
• Previous value for every change

2️⃣ Make mistake-catching visible:

Visible approvals are a minimum.

For risky actions, juniors cannot ship alone.

There is a clear step that moves work to a senior or reviewer.

3️⃣ Default to paranoid:

The product should behave like a paranoid person (sort of).

This means, for example:

• Exports off by default

• No permanent delete without a second human check and a log entry

If you build for a low trust industry

Send this post to your team and ask:

"Can we clearly show these three things today"

I Spent 6 Months Building a Product Nobody Wanted. Then Buffer Launched for $5.

Around 2010, we worked at a media agency.

We saw the chaos every day: social media posts bouncing between marketing, legal, and clients. Approvals lost in email threads. Deadlines missed.

So we decided to build the solution ourselves.

We went all in:

• Multi-tenant account management
• Multi-platform posting (Facebook, Twitter)
• Custom approval workflows
• Notifications, previews, media library
• Analytics dashboard
• Unified posting interface

Six months of nights and weekends. Thousands of lines of code.

We never talked to a single customer.

We thought we knew exactly what agencies needed. We worked in one. We lived the problem.

That was the trap.

While we were perfecting our approval flow logic, Buffer launched with a single post scheduler and a $5 beta signup.

They validated demand before building anything else.

We validated nothing. We just built.

Here's what I learned the hard way:

👉 Working in an industry doesn't mean you understand the market

Your experience is one data point. Not a business case.

👉 Features don't prove demand

Nobody cares about your feature list if they never asked for it.

👉 Skipping customer development is not a shortcut

It's the longest, most expensive path to failure.

The product died quietly. No dramatic crash. Just silence.

If you're building something right now, ask yourself:

Have I talked to 10 people who would pay for this?

If the answer is no, close your IDE and pick up the phone.

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