DEX

Stefan Endres and his business partner Adam had been running International Magic, a high-end design and web development agency, for three years. They worked with impressive clients like FKA Twigs and O32C, creating cutting-edge digital experiences. But there was a constant frustration: presentations took two to three days to create, and when they sent them to clients, font issues and compatibility problems made all that careful design work fall apart. The problem was personal and visceral—Stefan watched beautiful creative work decay over time once projects were handed off to clients. That's when the seed for DEX was planted: a modern presentation tool that understood designers' needs.

For three years, the idea sat in Stefan and Adam's heads while they juggled client work. In June 2024, Stefan made the decision to finally execute. He assembled a small, trusted team: two experienced developers (including James in London and a developer in Sweden) he'd worked with for five or six years, plus a producer to manage timelines. The team split International Magic's capacity 50/50—half on client work, half on DEX. Rather than sacrificing design quality for speed (the typical bootstrapper mantra), Stefan made a bold decision: they would spend a full month building a custom UI component framework in Vue.js before touching the product itself. This felt counterintuitive—no visible progress for 30 days—but it paid off immediately. Once the framework was done, the product page took less than two weeks to build, with components simply snapping together like Lego blocks. Stefan understood that while ideas are free and anyone can copy them, your design, brand, and execution are what you actually own.

Stefan initially thought DEX's audience was "everyone who makes presentations," but quickly narrowed his focus to creatives, designers, and innovative agencies—the people he understood best and who deeply felt the pain he was solving. About two weeks after a talk at the "us by night" design festival in Antwerp (where 250 people signed up on an impromptu landing page), Stefan launched DEX on Site Inspire, a platform where designers and creatives share and discover beautiful web design. The timing was perfect. In the first three days after the Site Inspire feature, he got 900 signups. These weren't random Product Hunt clickers; they were exactly his target audience. Stefan then sent every signup a welcome email with a survey link, asking them to become an "early adopter." To his surprise, people actually filled it out. He got back to over 1,000 responses—real, engaged users with opinions about features.

The survey data completely reordered DEX's MVP feature list. Stefan and Adam had assumed certain features were crucial (like video integration), but the market told them people wanted something different (like PDF import). The emotional, intuition-driven feature ideas they'd debated got checked against hard data. Stefan learned that people are "by default nice and helpful"—no one sent hostile feedback, only genuine support and thoughtful input. He also learned that coming from a design background was both a constraint and a superpower. Most indie hacker advice says to move fast and ignore design, but for a presentation tool being built by designers, polish *was* the differentiator. By investing in the UI framework upfront, Stefan actually moved faster while maintaining the quality edge no bootstrapped competitor would have.

At the time of the interview, DEX was generating $500 in monthly recurring revenue and had an email list of 1,000+ engaged early adopters surveyed about their needs. The product was roughly three months away from a full launch, with time to acquire more excited users before release. Stefan was explicit about his long-term vision: he didn't want DEX to replace International Magic's client work—the client projects keep the creative energy flowing and supply ideas for DEX's roadmap. Instead, DEX would be a perpetual project, something that never really "ships" and dies like client work does, but continuously evolves. His biggest piece of advice to other founders was simple: educate yourself relentlessly (podcasts, books, YouTube), find a team you trust, and put in the hours. There's no shortcut, but if you own your execution and your brand, the idea—however common—becomes yours.