About
I've built a lot of things. Not all of them worked.
I'm Peter. I've been designing and building software products for eleven years. I started as a developer, moved into UX design, and eventually became one of three founders of a studio that grew to nine people.
I still do it. Right now, most weeks, I'm designing the interface for a blood logistics system used in a medical setting. I can't show you a screenshot of it. It's under NDA and it will stay that way. But it's the reason I'm careful about the difference between software that has to work and software that has to look like it works.
- Years in software
- 11
- Based in
- Budapest
- Currently
- Client work + my own products
01 / The studio
What the studio taught me
We ran Enlight for five years. At our peak, we were nine people and I was proud of what we had built. It eventually stopped growing, and it took me a long time to be honest about why.
Those five years taught me much more than how to build software. I learned how to price and sell projects, negotiate contracts, manage cash flow, deal with HR, and figure out what actually needs to happen when a project doesn't go according to plan.
There were great months and terrible ones. The first big clients. The first big contract we lost. The satisfaction of watching the numbers work, and the stomach ache of watching the cash flow go the other way. We had projects that went smoothly and projects where delivery went wrong and we had to sit down with the client, work out what happened, and negotiate our way forward.
I also spent far too much time on things that felt urgent. Quotes, contracts, a client thing, a bug. Every one of them was a legitimate task. That's what made it work as procrastination. Strategy, sales, marketing, and growth got the leftover hours, which meant they got very little.
And then there was the three-founder problem. Running a business with other owners creates a different kind of challenge. You have to figure out where you want the company to go, whether you still share the same vision, how decisions get made, and what happens when you don't agree.
We eventually wanted different things, and our paths went in different directions. That story has its good parts and its difficult ones. I'll write about it eventually, because the dynamics of building a company together are much more interesting than a simple story about who was right.
02 / The mistake
The €20,000
2023 · law-tech · about a year
In 2023 we built a whistleblowing product. A change in the law had made proper reporting systems mandatory for companies above a certain size.
We did everything the way you're supposed to. We researched the market, studied the competition, talked to potential customers, and built the business case. We even sold a few multi-year subscriptions before the law came into effect.
Then nothing happened. The law was never really enforced. Nobody was fined for ignoring it. A few companies had already signed with someone else, and the rest simply weren't worried enough to act.
That cost more than €20,000 and about a year.
What I got for the money was a question I now ask about everything: not just whether someone will pay for this, but why they will pay for it, and whether that reason will still be there in a year.
03 / Why now
Why now
AI has changed the economics of building software. I wanted to find out what that actually means in practice, so I started building my own products alongside the client work.
It's not a story about AI being magic. The expensive part has moved. Execution is faster and cheaper than it used to be. That makes other things more important: knowing what to build, what to leave out, when to ship, and how to describe a product clearly enough that the machine can actually build it.
That's where the last eleven years become useful.
I'm not leaving the client work. I'm building my own products alongside it. No funding, no team, no quitting. Just the hours I have after the day job.
Building something is only half of it. The other half is turning it into something that works as a business: who it's for, what it costs, what people will pay, and how they find it in the first place. That's the part almost nobody shows, and it's the part I'm putting here.
04 / Before software
Six years on the national rowing team
- U23 World Championships
- 5th & 6th
- European University Champs
- Won
- Rowing, age 10 → 23
- 13 years
Before I started working in tech, I spent six years on the Hungarian national rowing team. From the age of ten to twenty-three, rowing was the main focus of my life. I was also studying computer engineering at university, but sport was my full-time commitment.
I raced at two U23 World Championships, finishing fifth and sixth, won the European University Championships, and won several national titles.
Rowing taught me things that have stayed with me ever since: how to work as part of a team, how to focus on one goal for years, how to deal with hierarchy, how to train your mind as well as your body, and how to start again when things don't go your way.
A lot of those lessons still show up in how I work today. They will probably show up in what I write about here, too.
You don't have to quit your job to build something that's yours.