Engin Ferahlı
My story didn't start with a city — it started with a person.
I came to Prague in 2005 and found the love of my life here. I never looked for a reason to go back. Twenty-one years later I'm still here, and across that time I've learned one thing: when you find the right person, everything else — career, city, identity — becomes rebuildable around them.
I was born in Türkiye, came of age in Prague. Today I work in three languages — Turkish, Czech, English — and carry an Italian from a previous chapter. I lived there for a while; the language stayed.
It's not a résumé line worth mentioning. It is, however, my biggest structural advantage as a builder. Four languages mean four ways of thinking.
With a Turkish client I lean on intuition, with a Czech one on structure, with an English-speaking technical founder on directness. I can position the same product across three markets, in three languages, with three different tones — a problem most teams can't solve even with a marketing budget.
Over the years I crossed paths with several projects built on someone else's infrastructure. I always left with the same lesson: a business built on someone else's platform is like a house you rent. You can pay forever — nothing becomes yours.
Since then I've built everything around vertical integration. I run my own servers. I write the code. I design the databases, the AI pipelines, the sales automation that reaches customers. For someone building their own system, independence isn't a luxury — it's a condition of existence.
softnode.ai sits at the center — a SaaS bringing AI chatbot and voice agent infrastructure to small and mid-sized businesses. softnode's difference isn't technical, it's philosophical: I believe the kind of AI experience expensive enterprise tools offer is something a clinic, a restaurant, a small e-commerce shop also deserves.
Around softnode lives franode.com — the umbrella for several parallel ventures: web design, AI solutions (voice agents and agentic AI systems), Amazon retail, mobile app design, and three YouTube channels running on automation.
They look different. They share one thesis: with the right AI infrastructure, what used to require a team can now ship from one person. That's not a forecast — it's the present.
I see two things.
First: AI is no longer a feature — it's becoming an infrastructure layer, like electricity. In that transition, small businesses will be the last to adapt, and that's exactly the gap I'm building in.
Second: AI is raising the ceiling of what one person can do by a hundredfold. Work that used to require a studio now ships from a laptop. I test that ceiling every day.
If you're building something — or something needs building — I'm one email away from Prague.