About Dora

The past three months have been quite interesting. In February, I started working on Dora.

We were deep in the Carpathians. I had no plan in mind except curiosity to build something with AI, and ended up vibe coding Dora, a small SaaS platform for interior designers and architects. Dora helps create project specficiations and schedules, maintain project plans and keep everything on track in one place.

Nastia has been supporting this since day 1, sharing her expertise and talking about the pain her team was experiencing while working on project specifications and schedules. Thanks to this, the tool turned out to be quite useful for some audiences here in Ukraine and abroad.

Initial promotion started pretty randomly. We were lucky that Dmytro Sivak, one of the well-known Ukrainian designers and architects, noticed my post on Threads, then signed up on Dora and shared positive feedback on his social media. That brought the very first wave of users, which helped me keep focus, stay on track, and continuously work on platform improvements. So far, Dmytro and his team have been invaluable in the product development, directly and openly sharing their experience using other tools like Asana, Programa, Instagantt, etc., while testing Dora, reporting bugs, and highlighting areas for improvement.

Today, there’re are 180 Dora users. The number of paid subscriptions is obviously lower. Dora’s current economics are yet to be improved. However, they allow us to cover the costs of development, including AI usage, hosting, deployment, and system emailing. Some of the challenges I’m facing now are awareness and lead generation, market expansion beyond Ukraine, and product development strategy. The latter is the most complicated one because there’re so many ways where Dora can evolve so I need to make wise decisions.

I have no clue where this is going and if this is a temporary thing or a real startup. Anyway, I spend most of my spare time working on Dora - thinking about features and user experience, polishing interface, fixing bugs, and promoting the service on social media.

This has been an exciting journey so far. I celebrate every time a new user registers or a new subscription is paid. The only downside is that when none of this happens, I get frustrated and start losing hope - right until somebody says something like, “Damn, Dora’s so cool!”

Last thing I wanted to mention is the importance of people around you and the support they provide. None of this wouldn’t survive the first couple of weeks if it wasn’t for Nastia, my friends and first users.