Ondra Urban

In startups, there's no concept of being on call. At Alma, Everyone is on call. Always. At 2 AM when our document processing pipeline went down, it wasn't the "designated on-call engineer" who fixed it. It was whoever saw the Slack notification first. But here's what's changing fast - AI is reshaping what "on-call" actually means. Traditional on-call: Get paged → SSH into server → Debug logs → Apply hotfix → Write postmortem AI-enhanced on-call: Get intelligent alert → AI suggests root cause → Review proposed fix → Approve deployment → AI writes incident summary A few startups are already building this. The engineer's role is shifting from "human debugger" to "decision maker" btw, if you're an immigrant who's exploring work visa options like O-1, H-1B, EB-1A etc. - get in touch with us at Alma.

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We pay our engineers commission not just for building software, but for driving revenue. Every month, I share four numbers with the whole team: New bookings revenue Total MRR Churn Profit We are growing by 20% per month, and we pay commission to engineers based on monthly profit. There is a clear path to an additional $5k per month for engineers just in commission. Why? Because after 20 years in SaaS, I’ve seen the same pattern at every company: Sales and engineering operate in silos Engineers are told to “just build” Sales signs bad-fit deals CS puts out fires Nobody is aligned on outcomes And it’s always pissed me off. So we changed it. Since we rolled this out, engineers now: Flag ICP issues before we close deals, because bad-fit customers = churn = less commission Sit with CS to understand recurring pain points, and quietly build product to solve them Prioritise features that reduce churn or increase conversion, because it impacts their pay Question infra decisions, because cost hits profit, and profit drives bonus Proactively review onboarding and activation flows, because time-to-value matters A few real outcomes: Onboarding time dropped 40% after engineers built internal tools (unsolicited) A single feature update cut churn by 19% We walked from a big deal flagged by engineering as a churn risk. They were right. It’s simple: When engineers think like owners, the whole company wins. So we show them the numbers. We give them real incentive. And they show up in ways we never had to ask for.

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Lovable just raised at a $1.8B valuation. And honestly? Not surprised. They’re not just capturing the existing developer market (47M globally)—they’re claiming to unlocking a new one where 1B+ potential developers will be adopting vibe coding. That is a bold vision and definitely off to a great execution :) Also, that’s not just a TAM expansion. That’s a tectonic shift. From idea to MVP in under 48 hours From “what if” to “ship it” over the weekend From vibe to velocity There is a Billion dollar company being built in someone's basement right now - Thanks to Vibe coding I've built a few apps. And with just a few tries the polish and functionality are near production-grade. It’s exciting. It’s empowering. It's overwhelming. Now let's look at the other side - Vibe coding is democratizing access. But with great power (and great prompts) comes great risk. What about security? What about privacy? What about users unknowingly sharing PI and credit card details, trusting that a prompt to integrate Stripe means end-to-end safety? These platforms—Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Base44 and others —are incredible. But none of them will own your data breaches, exposed endpoints, or auth flows that live on the frontend. That still falls on the builder. The founder. The weekend hacker. So yes—code with vibes. Build fast. Dream big. Just don’t ship with blind trust. Secure it like it’s a real company. Because if you do this right… it will be. Happy Vibe Coding! #Startups #AI #NoCode #DeveloperTools #VibeCoding #TechFounders

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I never answer team member Slack DMs.   Instead, I ask them to repost it in a public channel.   I can practically hear the confusion through the screen. Did the CEO just...redirect me? Yes, I did, and for a very specific reason.   Questions, decisions, updates, discussions...everything happens on open channels where others can see it. This is an unwritten rule at Smile.io that throws new hires for a loop every single time.   When you work in an office, you overhear conversations and learn without even trying. Someone chatting over coffee, a teammate sharing a win, a question shouted across the desk. You pick up context just by existing in the same space.   But when you’re working remotely, all that knowledge gets trapped in DMs and 1:1 calls.   The sales team learns something important about customer behavior, but product never hears about it. Engineering discovers a workaround, but support is still manually fixing the same issue.   You only hear what you’re explicitly told, and that’s dangerous for team alignment, context, and growth.   That’s why, at Smile, we live by one core value: If it doesn’t have to be private, say it in public.   As a result, we’ve seen:   • Faster onboarding: New hires don’t need hours of training sessions; they ramp faster by observing real conversations as they happen. • Shared context: Teams better understand each other’s workflows, roadblocks, and the ripple effects of their decisions. • Better questions: When you know 50 people might see your question, you think before you type. • Searchable knowledge: Everything becomes documentation. That debugging session from six months ago? It’s right there in the thread, open to all.   When information lives in DMs, you're building a company where only half the team knows what's happening.

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What I learned watching thousands of people use our tools: We see it in forum posts. In support tickets. In cloneables people share. In live projects clients send us to review. And a few patterns come up over and over: 1.) Most “bugs” are actually unclear instructions. The product works but the way we explained it didn’t. Better docs or clearer UI can be the difference between “this doesn’t work” and “that was easy.” 2.) People learn in very different ways. One person calls our docs “the best they’ve ever used.” Another says the exact same docs are “the worst.” The same instructions can be crystal clear to one person and confusing to the next. That’s why we need written guides, videos, forum answers, and examples. 3.) Support really matters. It’s often the difference between a new subscription and a lost user. We invest our time and resources to get users through their use case implementation, even if they are not a paid user of the product. That first successful implementation can create a lifelong customer. 4.) We can’t make everyone happy. We used to try. But people think differently, work differently, and want different things. Now we focus on making our happiest customers even happier. Because the better we serve them, the stronger the community gets. Watching people use your product is humbling. It forces you to see where the real friction is and where the real value comes from. If you're not learning from your users, you're just guessing.

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Here's what I've learned building digital products at Fcode Labs and others that actually keep users coming back. The first 5 minutes of your app experience is very important. When was the last time you gave an app a second chance after a confusing first experience? This is what actually works: • Make onboarding interactive, not just a slideshow. Let users learn by doing, not just reading. • Personalize the experience. A tech-savvy developer needs different guidance than someone who's less comfortable with technology. The most overlooked part is the Analytics. Specially when you are in early stage. You need solid analytics to see exactly where users drop off. Are they stuck on the signup? Confused by the dashboard? Without data, you're just guessing. Recently, we saw a reduction of 40% users dropping in Linkify just by redesigning onboarding flow based on actual user behavior patterns. Onboarding isn't just about teaching features. It's about showing value quickly. Users need to think "This solves my problem" within minutes, not days. What apps or platforms do you think have the best first-time experience? #ProductDevelopment #UserExperience #Analytics

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was at OpenAI hq yesterday and got to talk with their head of product about the new agentkit 🤯 a lot of people think this kills zapier (i even thought so at first). it doesn’t. agentkit is for devs, not no-coders. it’s about putting ai inside products, not automating workflows. this makes it easier for teams to build agents that live inside their own apps, not connect tools together. so yeah, this isn’t about replacing zapier. it’s about replacing ui. #ai #openai #chatgpt #agents #startups #developers

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Before we wrote a single line of code for our product, we launched an open-source project. We knew contracts were broken. But we also knew that another tool to manage the same old documents could only help so much. First, we had to change the documents themselves. So we built a library of standard agreements: simple, modern, fair contracts that didn’t require $10k in legal fees to understand. And we made them free and open source. The idea was simple: if we could help startups close faster with better templates, they’d naturally ask, “can you help us manage these too?” That’s exactly what happened. Our open-source contracts became our best growth channel, a signal of trust, credibility, and actual usefulness before we ever asked anyone to pay us. Sometimes the best way to get paying customers is to give something away for free

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