Seven Products, One Team: Lessons from Building SaaS Products in Bulgaria

People sometimes raise an eyebrow when I list our products. Hotel software, a website carbon calculator, salon bookings, fitness studios, invoicing and payroll, e-commerce. “Isn’t that a lot for one team?” It is. But building SaaS products this way, from Bulgaria, with a small team, has taught me more than any business book. Here are the lessons worth sharing.

The portfolio

• Roombre – hotel management software (PMS) for independent hotels and guesthouses. Free plan to get started.
• EpicStamp – measures the carbon footprint of websites. 18,840 tests so far.
• Krasotata – online bookings for beauty salons.
• bukitime – discreet appointment booking for lawyers, doctors, psychologists and consultants
• Vedro.ONE – software for fitness clubs and studios.
• HotDox – invoices, payroll and health-and-safety paperwork for Bulgarian companies.
• bfree – an e-commerce platform that runs on your own server, with no percentage of your turnover. Tested with 300,000 products.

All of them come from the same team behind Dynomica, our software company, with my partner Alex Nenov, our CTO, keeping the engineering honest.

Lesson 1: Build from real client pain, not from a whiteboard

None of these products started as a “startup idea”. They started as custom projects or repeated requests from clients. When the third hotel asks for the same booking logic, you stop building it three times and start building a product.

That is the quiet advantage of running a custom software company alongside SaaS: the market research happens every week, for free, in client meetings.

Lesson 2: Freemium is a promise, not a trick

Roombre has a free plan. That was a deliberate decision. Small hotels are, rightly, sceptical. They have been sold complicated systems before. A free plan lets them try without a sales call and without risk.

What I have learnt about freemium:

• The free plan must be genuinely useful. A crippled demo creates resentment, not customers.
• Upgrades should follow growth. People pay happily when the product helps them earn more.
• Support costs are real. Automate onboarding or free users will eat your week.

Lesson 3: Multilingual SEO is a growth engine

I have been doing SEO since 2004, so I am biased. But for a company from a small market, multilingual SEO is not optional. Bulgaria has fewer than seven million people. The world does not.

What works for us:

• Separate language versions with proper URLs, not machine-translated overlays.
• Content adapted, not just translated. A hotelier in London asks different questions from one in Varna.
• Technical basics done right: hreflang, fast pages, clean structure.
• Optimising for AI assistants too. People now ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for recommendations. Clear, factual pages help there as well.

Lesson 4: Reseller partners abroad beat a sales office you can’t afford

Opening offices in ten countries is expensive and slow. Working with local partners who already know the market, the language and the customers is faster and more honest. They understand local habits; we bring the product and the engineering.

For a small team, partnerships are how you scale sales without scaling headcount.

If you run an agency, consultancy or IT company that serves hotels, salons or studios in your country, I would genuinely like to talk.

Lesson 5: Automation over headcount

This one runs through everything we do. At Reshenia, our digital agency, a team of five serves clients in 17 countries. At Dynomica, a small team runs several products without an army of support staff. The secret is not superhuman effort. It is automation:

• Onboarding flows that answer the questions before they are asked.
• Monitoring that spots problems before users do.
• Shared code and infrastructure across products.
• Billing, reminders and reports that run themselves.

Every hour saved by a script is an hour for building something new, or, occasionally, for a day on the boat.

Lesson 6: Shared foundations, separate personalities

Seven products do not mean seven completely separate codebases. Authentication, billing, notifications and booking logic can be shared where it makes sense. But each product needs its own identity, its own language for its users and its own focus. A salon owner and a hotelier should never feel they are using a generic tool with a different logo.

Lesson 7: Say no to features, yes to reliability

Every user has a feature request. If you say yes to all of them, you build a product nobody can use. We prefer boring reliability: 99.9% uptime on Roombre matters more to a hotel at midnight than a shiny new button.

It also means being honest about what a product does not do. Roombre, for example, is a PMS; we don’t sell it as a channel manager.

What building SaaS products from Bulgaria gives us

• A small, stable team that uses AI-assisted development to move fast.
• A European base, with EU standards in mind from the start.
• A tourist country on our doorstep, which makes hospitality software very tangible.
• Humility. Coming from a small market, you never assume the world will come to you.

There is also a practical side. Our time zone overlaps comfortably with both Western Europe and the Middle East, and a flight to most European capitals takes a few hours. That makes meeting partners in person, which I still believe in, easy and frequent. Some of the best product ideas I have heard came over dinner at an event, not in a video call.

One product teaches you how to build. Seven teach you what to leave out.

Let’s build something together

Whether you want to use one of our products, resell it in your market, or build a SaaS product of your own, get in touch with me. I enjoy these conversations, ideally with a coffee, occasionally with a sea view.