
Martin Novak, Visidom
The SaaS Co-Founder Mistake Most Startups Make
Martin Novak was 24 years old, running a SaaS startup from Prague, Czech Republic, in the shadow of the post-communist era. Together with his SaaS co-founder Michael, he built Visidom - a tool that records website visitor behavior through heatmaps, session playbacks, and form analytics. The two met in high school. Martin had a web design agency, Michael had an online marketing agency. They saw gaps in Google Analytics that no tool was solving well, so they recruited high school friends and started building. They spent tens of thousands of dollars, worked 60-hour weeks while studying at university, and eventually landed a $70K EU government grant that sent them to San Francisco. But underneath the progress, a fundamental SaaS co-founder problem was growing. Both Martin and Michael were CEO types. Employees got conflicting directions. Responsibilities fell through the cracks because each founder assumed the other would handle them. Development slowed because the entire nine-person team was part-time, paid mostly in equity, and hard to hold accountable without real salaries. After returning from San Francisco, the two sat down and made a difficult decision. Martin would step down as co-founder and move into an advisory role. It was the right call for the company, even if it meant walking away from something he had helped build from scratch. Martin also talks about applying to Y Combinator (they got the interview but not the acceptance), why one week of YC prep equaled two months of normal progress, how EU government grants work for startups, and why Peter Thiel's advice about dominating a small market first stuck with him.






















