Cristian Tăbăcitu · Product builder · Bucharest, Romania
I take products from idea to paying customers.
Two decades of turning ideas into online businesses — my own, my clients', and one that 2,000+ companies use every single day.1 Research, build, launch, sell: the whole loop, one accountable person.
A few of the companies running Backpack in production — the product I've built and maintained since 2016.
Most people do one slice of this. I do the whole loop — and I've done it enough times to know exactly where it breaks.
Research
Find the pain worth paying for. Customer interviews, market maps, pricing signals — before a single line of code.
Validate
Kill the weak versions early and cheaply. I've buried at least six products so the good ones could live.
Build
Ship the boring-tech version in weeks, not quarters. Proven stacks, no resume-driven engineering.
Launch
The first go-to-market motion: positioning, pricing, the first funnel that actually converts.
Sell
Get the first paying customers in the door — then make it repeatable without me.
Backpack for Laravel
The admin-panel standard for Laravel. Bootstrapped, profitable for a decade, now running on autopilot inside thousands of companies.
3.8M+ installs 02POV Tickets
A complete ticketing platform for live events — payments, refunds, compliance, venue tools. Built 0→1, launching now.
launching 03UPDIVISION
Custom-software house in Bucharest & London. I helped grow it from 3 people to a 50-person team that has shipped 200+ products.
3 → 50 people 04TicketList
"Your playlist for real life": every upcoming event in Romania, in one place — 4,500+ events from 2,000+ venues across 339 cities. In alpha while I interview customers — my 0→1 process, live and in public.
alpha 05The graveyard
Complement, :DigitallyHappy, MonitorulNeoficial and friends — built, launched, shut down. Plus one zombie, and a few I've honestly forgotten. The tuition behind everything above.
†Scratch your own itch — then check if anyone else itches.
How Backpack happened
Boring technology. Exciting products.
Why my stack still pays rent after ten years
Writing good code is not only about writing good code — it's also about the words around it.
If it won't be selling in months, it shouldn't be building for years.
Paid for in scar tissue
Backpack runs itself now. For the first time in ten years, I have room for one big thing — and I'm choosing it carefully.
If you're sitting on a real problem, with real distribution or capital behind it, I'd like to hear about it. I read every serious pitch.
- Developers & companies using Backpack daily, per backpackforlaravel.com. ↩
- Total installs of backpack/crud on Packagist, September 2026.
- UPDIVISION, Bucharest & London — I joined when it was 3 people; it's 50+ today. Still on the board.
- Six I can name, a few I've honestly forgotten, and one zombie that refuses to die. Knowing when to stop is a feature, not a failure. Tour the graveyard.