The unconventional path to code
Joe and Stopa didn’t take the straight path into tech. For Joe, after a few years in management consulting, he realized the suits and slide decks weren’t it. Around that same time in 2012, “Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars,” he recalls. “I don’t know any other company that you can make in a year and sell for a billion dollars. I don’t know what’s going on with coding, but I want to learn how to code.” That curiosity pulled him into a coding bootcamp which was an unconventional move at the time. It was risky, no guarantee of landing a job, but to him it felt less like a leap and more like the only logical next step.
That bootcamp turned out to be more than a crash course in coding. It was also where Joe first crossed paths with Stopa. Like Joe, Stopa had been carving out his own path into tech, teaching himself to code while launching products across Asia, from a call-tracking app for dentists in China to hotel booking systems in Taiwan and Mongolia.
The two bonded quickly after they met, not just over their Georgian roots but over a deeper conviction: “We always knew that we wanted to do our own thing and we always knew we wanted to be entrepreneurs.”
The path from there wasn’t quick. Joe spent two years at a YC-backed startup learning what speed and scrappiness really meant. Stopa had his own run through early-stage companies before landing at Facebook. Joe eventually followed him there, drawn not just by the scale but by the chance to work side by side with someone who thought about building in the same way he did. Together, they would end up working for several years across both Facebook and Airbnb.
Lessons from Big Tech
At Facebook, they saw firsthand what it meant when infrastructure gave developers superpowers. The company’s internal graph abstraction gave front-end engineers the ability to move independently, without endless cross-team sign-offs. Joe recalls, "Wait, this is such a large company and you’re telling me just one engineer can go and actually ship something that’s going to go to all of these people?”
Airbnb, by contrast, used Firebase for its backend. It demonstrated to Joe and Stopa how quickly prototypes could be built while working offline, and it supported multiplayer collaboration.
Their years of collaboration across Facebook and Airbnb forged what Joe describes as their “co-foundership” and provided them with direct insight into how developer experience plays out in organizations that are both large and fast-growing.
The jump from Big Tech to startups
Just before joining Airbnb, Joe and Stopa gave themselves a small test run. In one month, they built jobsearch.dev, a course designed to help senior and staff engineers prep for interviews. It wasn’t about revenue; it was meant to be a test of the fundamentals: could they work well together, and could they ship something people found useful? The answer was a clear yes. “We validated and we made something useful,” Joe says. A few months later, someone even stopped them in an ice cream shop, “Are you the jobsearch.dev guys?” They took pride in their work and the positive effect it had on other developers, which made them feel good about working together.
At Airbnb, they spent nights and weekends brainstorming and working on side projects, but the pace of full-time work kept getting in the way. By the one-year mark at Airbnb, the itch to build something on their own had become impossible to ignore. They quit in 2020 and made a pact for how they would build together: build something they wanted to use, increase the ambition with each new project, and treat it like a real business.
Their first experiment was Zeneca, a visual reading app built for themselves. Stopa had always wanted a personal library; Joe offered, “I can’t get you a library, but what if I built you a virtual library?” It was designed to be lightweight, social, and fun: less Goodreads, more visual feeds. Under the hood, they leaned into using a relational database they liked working with. The app hit #3 on Product Hunt, but they quickly learned that enthusiasm on launch day doesn’t guarantee long-term usage. As Joe put it, “books are something that even people who do like to read on average engage with once a week.” That wasn’t the kind of cadence they were aiming for, so they pivoted.
Consistent was the opposite: a fitness app for men to get six-pack abs that is meant to be used every single day. On the surface, it seemed like a drastic turn from Zeneca, but Joe and Stopa continued to follow their pact of building something they wanted to use and building more ambitiously each time. Consistent was built on Firebase, which allowed it to work in real-time and offline. “And that was very important,” Joe shared, “because in the app you could do things like log your diet, and sometimes people would be in areas where they're offline, and most of your apps don't work offline. But everyone would know Consistent works offline.”
Pitching six-pack abs to YC
Joe and Stopa first applied to YC with their idea for Zeneca, but by the time the interview rolled around, they had moved on, so they pitched Consistent. “We’re building six-pack abs for men,” they told the partners. Michael Seibel asked the obvious: “Do you guys have six-pack abs?” Their answer, “not yet,” didn’t help their case. Much later, they learned YC initially didn’t take their pitch seriously and had to confirm they were genuine and legitimate, which was understandable.
Still, they didn’t abandon the idea. They weren’t being stubborn. It was just how they made decisions.
They launched by charging users $800 upfront, and in a matter of weeks, they pulled in $25K in revenue. But this win came with a twist. They quickly learned that users were sticking around, not for the app but for them. Users liked the one-on-one coaching, the calls, and the relationship. As Joe put it: “They were renewing because they enjoyed talking to Stopa and me.” That was flattering, but it wasn’t the business they wanted to build. They weren’t trying to be coaches. They wanted to build software people use, so they pivoted.
Building the product they always wanted
Instead of feeling defeated from another pivot, they felt energized. The setbacks didn’t wear them down, but instead, it sharpened their instincts. “Our experience from Facebook, Airbnb, working on our own projects,” Joe said, “that was the thing that really made us feel like we’re onto something.”
When they sat down to sketch the next idea, they weren’t starting from scratch. Their vision came straight from their lived experiences as developers. Every tool they wished they had. Every bottleneck they hated. Every workaround they’d seen developers duct-tape into existence. They aim to synthesize the best aspects they have enjoyed throughout their experience as engineers. From Facebook: the power of graph abstraction that allowed solo front-end engineers to ship fast. From Airbnb: the rapid prototyping capabilities with Firebase. From Zeneca: the simplicity of a clean relational database. From Consistent: the power of real-time and offline experiences.
The existing Backend-as-a-Service tools like Firebase and Supabase were great in some of these areas, but lacked in others. For example, Firebase was great at building fast and real-time backend for engineers, but if you ever need to change the relationship between your data, good luck. You’ll have to re-architect your whole data model.
Joe and Stopa wanted to fix that. To give engineers the speed of Firebase, but with the flexibility of relational data.
In 2022, they reapplied to YC with this vision for Instant, and this time, they got in. They joined the S22 batch and went all in on figuring out how to build their vision. Days blurred into nights as they shipped new features, rewrote code, and spent hours talking to early users.
Scaling Instant
As they envisioned, Instant was launched to give developers an easy-to-use backend that was fast, real-time, and flexible, so they could spend more time crafting great frontend experiences and ship faster.
In the summer of 2024, Joe and Stopa open-sourced Instant and shared this in a Hacker News post. By evening, the post was #1 and stayed there, drawing in thousands of engineers. “We didn’t expect it to blow up,” Joe says. “We figured we’d get a little fanfare, but not that much attention. That’s when it really felt like, okay, we’re onto something.”
Big names caught on, too. Replit and Vercel reached out about potential partnerships. Most founders would be thrilled to pursue this direction. Instead of individual engineers using the product for free or paying a low $30 per month, they could bring in more than $100K through annual enterprise contracts. However, Joe and Stopa recognized they lacked the capacity to target both hobbyist developers and enterprise clients simultaneously. They understood the importance of concentrating their efforts on a single, ideal customer group. Then they remembered the advice given by James Tamplin, the Firebase co-founder: “For dev tools, what matters is usage by developers. People build with it, love it, and eventually bring it into their workplace. That’s how it scales to enterprise.” Joe and Stopa decided to focus on building for the IC engineers and grayed out the enterprise option on their pricing page.
Interestingly, Instant didn’t launch with pricing. In the early days, it was completely free. Not because they were avoiding monetization, but because they wanted to remove all friction. But something unexpected happened. Developers thought the product was “suspicious” because of the free plan. So they added a paid plan.
As the usage of Instant is increasing quickly, they’re pushing to ship faster, and they’re hiring more people to help. “What gives us conviction is seeing what people are building. More and more YC companies are using Instant, telling us, ‘We’ve never been able to move this fast before.’ When they drop by the office to show us what they’ve built, that’s what gives us energy.”
Coming full circle
Joe and Stopa didn’t take the conventional path into tech. They weren’t Computer Science majors. They didn’t set out to reinvent anything. They just wanted to build something they’d want to use themselves.
And now, others are too. Developers are using Instant to spin up ideas faster. Some for weekend hacks and others for real products. The experience is clean, fast, and delightful, just like how they felt using Firebase and Heroku back in the day. And that’s not a coincidence.
Joe and Stopa are inspired to give the next generation of engineers what Firebase and Heroku did for them when they started as developers through the bootcamp: the confidence and power to build.