How Inova Studio Evolved

I had a problem I wanted to solve, a limited budget, and plenty of curiosity.

Looking back, that combination explains a lot of how Inova Studio came to exist.

The first thing I built

In 2017, I was exploring an idea that eventually became Trvry, a marketplace connecting travelers with people who needed to send or bring things between countries.

Living between countries, I kept hearing the same questions: Who’s traveling next month? Can someone bring a document? Does anyone have room in their suitcase?

Meanwhile, travelers often had unused luggage space. There seemed to be an opportunity to connect the two sides.

I researched similar businesses, explored different ways to build the platform, and got quotes from software companies. At the time, I didn’t have the coding skills to build it myself, and paying someone else to develop the entire idea was a big commitment.

Then I attended a webinar at the NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center and discovered visual development tools. I started experimenting and built an early version in five days.

It was a prototype. There was still plenty to figure out. But being able to turn an idea into something people could actually use changed my relationship with technology.

Suddenly, I could test things myself. I could make a change, see what happened, and keep going.

When an experiment became a business

A friend who owned a restaurant asked me to build a digital platform for his business. He paid me for the work, and that became an early step toward doing this professionally.

Freelance work grew into a part-time business, then eventually became my full-time work under I2B.

I started working with founders and small businesses who had ideas, operational problems, or existing products that needed improvement. Bubble became an important part of that work because it allowed us to build and make changes quickly.

Over time, the work grew beyond what I could do alone. Building a team meant learning how to explain decisions, share responsibility, review work, and help other people develop their skills.

Knowing how to build something and knowing how to run a business that builds things turned out to be two separate learning curves. Apparently, learning one was not enough homework.

What working with founders taught me

Working across different businesses gave me an education I couldn’t have planned.

Some products grew and found paying customers. Some helped founders raise money. Others struggled, changed direction, or stopped altogether.

Those experiences made me more careful about what I considered progress.

A product can have a beautiful interface and still be difficult to sell. A founder can have a long feature list without a clear understanding of what customers need. A working prototype can be useful, but it leaves many questions unanswered.

I started paying more attention to those questions. Who is going to use this? How does it fit into their day? How will people find it? What happens when the business grows?

I also learned from building my own ventures. With Ridekarma, for example, the difficulty of finding a workable business model influenced the direction far more than adding another feature ever could.

Experiences like that shaped how I approached working with business partners. I wanted to understand the business well enough to make better decisions about the software.

Building tools for other builders

Along the way, we also started building plugins and developer tools.

When you work on enough projects, you run into similar needs more than once: connecting services, adding capabilities to a platform, or making a repetitive task easier. Some of that work became tools other developers could use in their own products.

Today, our developer tools are used by more than 20,000 developers.

That became a meaningful part of our journey. Something we built could help someone we had never met, working on a business we knew nothing about.

It also gave us experience building for a wider group of users. We had to think about documentation, compatibility, support, and how a tool would behave in situations we hadn’t anticipated.

Those tools gave us an early look at what it meant to build something once and keep improving it for many people. They also made me want to create more products of our own.

Growing beyond our first tools

For years, describing I2B as a no-code studio made sense. It explained how we could help founders build products with smaller budgets and shorter development cycles.

As projects became more complex, our work expanded.

We built plugins, connected external services, worked with APIs, and explored hardware integrations. We spent more time thinking about architecture, performance, security, and how to keep products maintainable as they grew.

My own background expanded alongside the business. I moved deeper into software engineering and infrastructure, while continuing to use visual tools where they made sense.

The original label gradually covered less of what we actually did.

That helped lead to Inova Studio becoming the home for our software work under I2B. The name gave us room to grow as our capabilities and interests developed.

The AI twist

I originally wanted to build my own products. Learning how to do that led me into a business helping other people build theirs.

Working with business partners gave us experience, relationships, and the revenue to keep going. It also came with a practical challenge: our own ideas had to compete for the same time and attention as projects that were already paying the bills.

You can probably guess which ones usually won.

AI started changing that balance.

With AI helping us write code, explore technical approaches, and work through implementation, a small team could move more of its own ideas forward. Experiments that once required a larger commitment became easier to fit alongside our work with business partners.

That gave us room to build more products and put more of our energy into things we owned.

There was a twist I hadn’t expected. The first generation of tools helped me start a service business. This next generation is helping me move closer to the reason I started building in the first place.

AI made the shift toward our own products more practical.

Faster building still needs judgment

Working with AI also introduced new questions.

How do we review work that was generated quickly? How do we know the person building a feature understands it? How much time should we spend exploring an idea before deciding whether to continue?

It is easy to start more experiments when starting becomes cheaper. Finishing them, maintaining them, and finding customers still take commitment.

I’m learning to be more deliberate about where we spend the time AI gives us back. Some of that time goes toward building. Some needs to go toward talking to users, testing assumptions, and deciding whether a product deserves to exist.

Having more capacity makes choosing what to work on even more important.

Building products we own

That is the direction Inova is moving in: more of our work going into products we build, operate, and improve over time.

FlowCP is one example. It grew from our experience with Bubble and APIs, and from exploring how AI assistants could interact with existing applications.

It brings together several parts of our journey: working with founders, building developer tools, understanding integrations, and using newer technology to make software more useful.

Building our own products means taking responsibility for everything around the software too. We have to find customers, explain the value, offer support, and decide what deserves our limited time.

Working with business partners remains part of that journey. It keeps us close to real businesses and the problems they face. But our own products now have more room to grow, and AI has helped us create that room.

Still evolving

Inova’s journey has followed the things we learned by doing the work.

An idea led me to learn a tool. A friend’s project became paid work. That work became a business, a team, and an opportunity to help other founders. Our developer tools reached more people than we could have worked with individually. Now AI is helping us take the next step toward building more products of our own.

In some ways, it feels like coming back to where I started, with a lot more experience and a team around me.

I still enjoy seeing a problem and wondering whether we can build something useful to solve it.

These days, we have more ways to find out.