Czech Shoptet founder Miroslav Udann builds a business with no staff

Miroslav Udann, the founder and former CEO of Shoptet, admits that while working intensively on his new project he cut his gym sessions short by half an hour so he could get back sooner to “vibe coding” — AI-assisted programming that, he says, turns months of development into hours of work.

The 46-year-old entrepreneur founded Shoptet in 2009 and built it into the leading provider of e-commerce platforms in Czechia and Slovakia, running the company until 2021. He gradually sold his stake to billionaire Ondřej Tomek, who last year sold the business on to the Belgian group Team.blue for billions of crowns.

After leaving Shoptet, Udann launched the startup Out of Dark, focused on improving customer experience, but the project folded after two years of development. “Twenty million crowns down the drain, but it’s an experience I don’t regret,” he said of the failure at the time. The entrepreneur later turned to angel investing, backing around ten startups, including Flowlance, HTG Medical, Customerscore.io and the now-bankrupt Bagind.

Last year, together with Zbyněk Maršálek, Udann launched Mincmistr, an online shop for coin collectors, and this year he took the idea further, creating a catalogue app for coin collectors — again under the name Out of Dark. When three agencies quoted two million crowns and six months of work to build a prototype, the entrepreneur decided to try writing the app himself with the help of artificial intelligence.

The result stunned him: tasks that used to take months are now solved in an hour. “It’s a complete rout,” says Udann. He says that back at Shoptet, with a team of more than a hundred people, at least 300 tasks were always left unresolved, whereas now, working alone, he completed 800 tasks in just five weeks. “I got incredibly hooked on it. It was like locking a child in a candy shop overnight,” he says, describing the experience in detail on his blog.