EP #524 - Nenad Nikolic & Herbert Bay: How to Build a Product Dream Team

Timestamps:

3:31 - What’s the best tech team setup?

16:05 - Using OKRs for your tech team

32:53 - The more you automate, the higher the tech debt?

37:21 - Marketing the product before you even build it

This episode was originally a live webinar co-hosted with Holycode, a software development partner that's helped more than 140 startups scale by providing customized products and teams for every stage.

This episode was sponsored by infinity.swiss, Switzerland’s most advanced AI accounting tool. Save 25% by entering code SWISSPRENEUR at checkout.

Episode Summary:

Nenad Nikolic⁠ is the co-founder, Co-CEO and CTO of ⁠Holycode⁠, and also the co-founder of MOVU and the former CIO of Bexio. He holds a MSc in Computer Science from the Faculty of Computer Science (Belgrade, Serbia) and worked for DeinDeal before joining Laurent Decrue on their 10+ year entrepreneurial journey in 2014.

⁠Herbert Bay⁠ is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and board member. He co-founded the image-recognition platform Kooaba, the AR company Shortcut and the mental health tracker ⁠Earkick⁠, where he is currently still active. He holds a PhD in Computer Vision from ETH Zurich and is the original author of the SURF algorithm, used for various Computer Vision and AR applications such as object recognition, image registration, classification and 3D reconstruction.

In this episode, Nenad Nikolic and Herbert Bay share how founders can build strong, lean product teams in the age of AI. They discuss how hiring senior talent early can save founders months of time, why team structures should evolve with a startup’s stage, and how AI is changing the way products are built — not by replacing people, but by multiplying what small, focused teams can achieve.

They also explore the limits of AI, the challenges of building defensible products, and the growing risk of tech debt when speed outpaces structure. From the pitfalls of the no-code trend to the need for proprietary data and workflow integration, both guests stress that success comes from pairing technological ambition with clarity of focus — and from validating your market before writing a single line of code.

The cover portrait was edited by ⁠⁠Smartportrait. ⁠⁠

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