Matez Jindra: how Bastard.cz's founder beat stagnation with AI

Czech entrepreneur Martin “Matez” Jindra, founder of the online stores Bastard.cz and Skippy, says artificial intelligence helped pull his business out of a two-year slump — and that rising ad prices driven by the expansion of the Temu marketplace, paradoxically, pushed his company toward innovation.

Jindra launched his first online venture two decades ago: in 2006, together with Michal Javorka, he opened the Bastard.cz store, which started out selling toilet paper printed with the face of former prime minister Jiří Paroubek before switching to T-shirts with humorous prints. In 2012 the business added the Skippy brand, which makes onesies and pajamas for adults. Last year the two companies together earned 55 million crowns, excluding VAT and returns — 31 million from Bastard and almost 24 million from Skippy.

According to the entrepreneur, revenue has barely grown over the past two and a half years, while advertising costs have risen sharply — largely because Asian marketplaces led by Temu have been driving up digital ad prices across the entire market, even though they aren’t direct product competitors. Last year alone, Jindra’s team spent nine million crowns on Meta advertising, and Bastard’s operating margin (EBITDA) came in at around ten percent.

The turning point came in the spring, when Jindra attended a meeting of Czech online store owners in Brno, where he first encountered vibe coding — programming an AI with voice commands. He was so taken with the technology that while the company’s in-house developer was on a month-long vacation in Japan, the 39-year-old entrepreneur wrote new internal systems, analytics dashboards and comprehensive data reports himself.

“It energizes me incredibly, and if I can’t do vibe coding for a while, I actually start to feel uncomfortable,” Jindra admits. He says his deep understanding of the business’s economics let him calculate the exact cost of every T-shirt: today, producing an item costs the company roughly the same amount as the online advertising needed to sell it.

Before moving into e-commerce, Jindra also co-founded the consulting agency Lovebrand, which worked with the online supermarket Rohlík and the investment group Natland; the agency was sold to Taste in 2018.