MindsetDesign the company around the life you need, even if that means no cofounders
Ex-Microsoft engineer reading every public tender in Romania
Mihai came out of a burnout at Microsoft with a hard constraint: he needed to remove obligatory human contact from his working life for a while. So he designed the company around that constraint, no cofounders, no employees, full control over every product decision. The standard advice says find a cofounder, split the load, hire early, but standard advice optimizes for growth, not for the founder staying functional. A company shaped around your actual capacity is one you can run for years; a company shaped around a template is one you abandon. Constraints like health, energy, and tolerance for people are real inputs to company design, not weaknesses to overcome. Decide what you need to stay in the game, then build the business that fits inside it.
Related advice
Mihai NegreaInterview customers about their workflow, never their wishlist
Of the thirty or so customer interviews Mihai scheduled, ten to twelve happened, and in every one he refuses the founder's favorite question. He never asks what features people want; he asks what they do: walk me through the process, how many hours does it take, who on the team touches it. Feature requests are guesses filtered through what the customer imagines software can do, while workflow descriptions are facts, and the product opportunities sit visibly inside them, the daily bookmark-folder patrol, the hours lost to six SEAP menus. The show-up rate is also part of the lesson: schedule three times the interviews you need, because most will evaporate. Treat customer conversations as ethnography rather than requirements gathering, and the roadmap writes itself from the pain you observed instead of the wishlist you collected.
Mihai NegreaCopycats clone your pitch, not your pipeline
When Romanian copycats started advertising "AI agents for public tenders," Mihai did not panic, because he could see what they actually shipped: a GPT wrapper over the same misclassified official data everyone can access. What they cannot clone from his landing page is the part that took years, a crawler covering ten thousand sources, an OCR pipeline reading every document, a hand-built taxonomy, and a retrieval stack that makes the data usable. Even the funded European competitor with fourteen people concentrates on sales rather than technology, which is precisely why he declined to join forces. The reassurance for any founder watching lookalikes appear is that marketing copy is the only layer that copies cheaply; if your advantage lives in accumulated data and infrastructure, every copycat validates the market while inheriting none of the moat. Fear the competitor who rebuilds your pipeline, not the one who rewrites your homepage.
Mihai NegreaPrice against the manual workflow you replace, not the software you wrote
Mihai's first serious customer was a security firm whose tender discovery process was a bookmark folder organized by county and an employee who opened town hall websites every single day. They happily paid 2,000 lei per month for complete automated coverage, a hundred times his 19 lei list price at the time, because the alternative was a salary. The lesson is that software is not priced against its build cost or against other software, it is priced against the manual grind it replaces. Find the customer who is already paying a human to do the thing badly, and the budget already exists; you are not creating a line item, you are shrinking one. Before setting a price, ask what the current workflow costs in hours and salaries, and anchor there.
Mihai NegreaRead the source documents, because official classifications lie
Public tenders in Romania carry official CPV codes, a taxonomy of roughly 10,000 subcategories, and Mihai found the labels wrong often enough to be dangerous, including food accessories classified under laptops. So DataDriven ignores the metadata and reads the actual tender documentation, OCRing PDFs and scans, then classifies everything against a hand-built taxonomy of about 180 categories that mirrors how companies really describe their work. That is the product's core advantage: competitors who filter on the official codes inherit the errors, and their users miss winnable contracts. Whenever your product sits on top of someone else's data, ask whether the labels are trustworthy or just convenient. Going to the primary source is expensive, which is exactly why doing it becomes a moat.