Why I Built Unlockd: A Founder's Letter

I started unlockd on 1 January 2026, in Belgrade, on the assumption that the kind of studio I wanted to hire did not exist. Five months in, I am still mostly correct about that. This is the short version of why I built it.

What I kept seeing

For more than five years I have been on both sides of the table, sometimes the client, sometimes the studio. What I kept seeing was the same set of failures, repeated across cities, sectors, and budgets.

A studio would win a project on a strong pitch. The pitch would be delivered by the founder, often charismatic, often brilliant. The founder would attend the kickoff. Then the project would be handed off to a team the client had not met, and the founder would reappear at the final presentation. The work would be fine. Sometimes very good. Rarely was it the work the founder would have made if they had stayed in the file.

The other failure mode was the inverse. A small studio, founder-built, founder-shipped, but with no real engineering capability. The brand would be beautiful. The website would be built in Webflow and break six months later when the founder of the studio took on a new project and stopped responding. The product would be a mood-boarded mockup that never made it to production.

I wanted to build something that did not have either failure mode. A studio where the founder was in every file, every project. And where the engineering was real, not a Webflow wrapper, not a templated site, but production code in a real stack with real maintenance.

What unlockd is

We build websites, brands, and software, for founders and teams who want the studio's principal in every file. We work from Belgrade, with clients across Europe. We write in our clients' languages and take calls in English or Serbian. We bill flat fees. We do not run more than two projects at a time.

The disciplines are not separate. The website is built by the same person who designed the brand. The software is built by the same person who wrote the marketing copy. This is not a virtue in itself. It is the only way to keep the work coherent when the work spans surfaces.

I do not think this is the right model for every studio. It is the right model for the kind of work we want to do, and for the kind of client who values that the person they spoke to at the pitch is the person who built the thing.

Who unlockd is for

We work with founders and small teams, mostly in tech and adjacent industries. The projects we like best have three properties:

1. A real launch behind them. Something is shipping. The brand or the site or the product is in service of a launch. We are not interested in projects without a destination.
2. A founder who is engaged. They will be in the workshops, they will look at the work, they will respond within a day. Not because they have to, but because they care.
3. A budget that matches the work. We are not cheap. We are not the most expensive. We are roughly the price of a senior engineer for the duration of the project, paid in flat fees. Clients who balk at the number are usually the wrong fit.

These are not screening criteria written down. They are patterns I have noticed in five months of doing this. The projects that fit these patterns go well. The projects that do not, do not.

What unlockd is not

It is not a scale play. I am not trying to build an agency with fifty designers and a New York office. I am building a small studio that does excellent work for a small number of clients. The cap on growth is the founder's hands. The cap is the feature, not the bug.

It is also not an experimental project. Everything we ship is meant to last. The software runs in production. The brands are documented for engineering. The websites are built to perform at Core Web Vitals limits. We are not making art. We are making working products with taste.

What I have learned in five months

Five months in, the things I underestimated:

• How hard it is to maintain a real screening pipeline. Most inbound is fine, not great. Saying no to fine projects is the hardest discipline. It is also the most important one.
• How much clients value seeing the founder in the file. The clients who choose us do so because they want me specifically. The clients who do not, do not. There is no middle ground.
• How quickly word travels. Every industry is smaller than it looks. The buyers all know each other. Doing one project well is worth more than ten weeks of marketing.

The things I overestimated:

• How much process documentation matters externally. Clients do not read process pages. They want to talk to a person and see work that resembles their problem.
• How much my old portfolio mattered. The first three clients hired us based on conversations, not the work. By project four, the new work began to do the recruiting.

What is next

We will keep this small. We will keep the work coherent. We will keep saying no to projects that do not fit. We will publish what we learn in this journal, about brand systems, about software, about pricing, about the studio model. Some of it will be useful to clients. Some of it will be useful to other studios. All of it is the honest version of what we actually do.

If you are a founder thinking about a website, a brand, or a software project, we are open. Email me directly. I read everything that comes in. The studio is small. The work is direct. That is the offer.