A small studio, run by someone who still builds.

I run RTSoftLabs. I've been building software for more than twenty years. That's long enough to have shipped things I'm proud of, and to have run plenty of experiments that quietly taught me what not to do.

I got into this the way a lot of puzzle-loving kids do: programming competitions. In high school I made it to the national informatics olympiad a few times and came away with some honourable mentions, which was enough to get me properly hooked. From there I studied mathematics and computer science, then did a master's in computer science, both at the University of Bucharest. In my first year there, to my own surprise, I landed a reserve spot on one of the university's ACM programming teams, alongside some seriously talented people. What the competitions really gave me was a habit of breaking a messy problem down until the software that solves it becomes obvious.

In parallel, I'd been freelancing since high school, writing software for clients I'd never met, from the US to Australia. Over the years that added up to a few hundred projects, a lot of them repeat work for the same people, and around a hundred client reviews, almost all of them five stars. Somewhere along the way it became clear which of the two I enjoyed more: contests were fun, but building things real people used and paid for was better. That's what steered me away from academia and big companies, and toward making my own software. The projects were small, but they taught me what still matters most: finish what you promise, answer quickly, and don't call something done until it actually works.

Since then I've built websites, web apps, desktop tools and a handful of my own products. Some found real users, and Penguinhops is the current one I'm most fond of. Others were experiments I eventually set aside. I try to be honest about the difference; I think it's more useful than a wall of success stories.

That's the second half of what I do. Over the years I've learned a great deal about how people find things online (search, content, paid traffic), and I fold that into the work, so a project doesn't end at "it's built" and quietly disappear.

If you've been around search long enough, you might know me from SEO's wild-west days, back when Google was a lot easier to persuade. For a while I held the top spot for competitive terms like “personal loans”, and it paid rather well. That era taught me how search engines actually behave rather than how they say they do, and these days I put it to more respectable use.

I don't pretend to do everything myself. I've worked with freelancers and specialists for years: designers, developers, writers, translators and other good people I bring in when a project deserves more than one pair of hands. Having been a freelancer myself, I try to be the kind of client I'd have wanted, and judging by the dozens of reviews the people I've hired have left me, it mostly works. Keeping the studio small and the network wide is a choice: low overhead, direct communication, and no diluting the work through layers of account managers.

These days I build AI-native, which gives one owner far more leverage than a solo developer used to have. It's a genuinely good time to make things, and I'd rather spend it building than talking about building.

What I'm looking for

Three kinds of conversation, honestly:

• People who want software built. If you have a real problem and the patience to solve it properly, I'd like to hear about it.
• Partners. Collaborators and specialists to build alongside, and people with ideas who need a technical half.
• Investors. If you like backing small, capital-efficient builders who ship their own products, let's talk.

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