Zoltan Szogyenyi
Chief builder at Bergside, creator of Flowbite
Co-founder and CEO of Bergside, a bootstrapped two-person company in Timisoara that builds and acquires digital products used by millions. Started with outsourcing, pivoted to templates on ThemeForest (first one rejected), then hit a spike on Black Friday selling Tailwind and Figma design systems. That momentum led to Flowbite, an open-source UI component library with 30M+ npm downloads and 9.1k+ GitHub stars. Runs the business with co-founder Robert Tanislav, reaching 70k/month without recurring revenue. Believes in premium pricing, community-driven distribution, and never doing discounts.
Events
Advice & Tips
Product Use search demand to decide what features to build
Before building a new feature or component, check what people are actually searching for. Use tools like Semrush to find keywords with real demand. When Flowbite saw search volume for "avatar tailwind" and "datepicker tailwind," they built those components and captured the traffic. Let search data guide your roadmap instead of guessing what users want.
Distribution Spend on influencers instead of ads
If your product has any traction, skip paid ads and invest in influencer marketing instead. Pay 1,000 to 2,000 euros per influencer, feature them on your homepage hero section, and prefer American or Australian creators for the English-speaking market. One influencer creates social proof that attracts others. The ROI on a single well-placed creator video outperforms most ad campaigns for developer tools.
Business & Legal Never discount your prices
Resist the urge to compete on price or offer discounts. Low prices scare away serious clients who associate cost with quality. Once you start discounting, customers learn to wait for sales instead of buying at full price. In the digital products space, maintaining premium pricing attracts better customers and builds a more sustainable business. Flowbite never discounts, and it has not hurt growth.
Distribution Post stories on Reddit, not sales pitches
Reddit rewards authenticity and punishes promotion. When Flowbite launched a new datepicker component, they posted the story of building it, not a sales pitch. Share the journey, the technical decisions, the problems you solved. On X/Twitter, sharing MRR numbers gets engagement. On Reddit, the same post gets buried. Each platform has its own language. Learn to speak it.
SEO Write on Medium and dev.to with canonical links to your site
Publish articles on Medium and dev.to to reach their built-in audiences, but always set the canonical URL to point back to your own blog. This way you get distribution from the platform while search engines credit your domain as the original source. The content should genuinely help the reader, not be a thinly disguised ad. Spammy content gets flagged on both platforms.
Product Set up analytics before you start scaling traffic
Do not invest in scaling traffic until you have analytics running. Use Microsoft Clarity (free) or Hotjar for heatmaps, rage click detection, and session replays. Watch your bounce rate and average time on site (one minute is a reasonable benchmark to start). If users leave immediately, more traffic just means more people leaving. Fix the experience first, then scale.