NEKTAR
STOCK.

We started NektarStock during COVID, in 2020. Our first project based out of Europe.

Nektar Design, a Frankfurt studio, had built an internal data tool for themselves — scraping earnings, downloads, and trends across 10+ microstock platforms (Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, and the rest) into one dashboard. The tool worked. They thought other content creators would want it too.

So did we. We agreed to help turn it into a SaaS product.

Built the product

Over two years, the product evolved from a private internal tool into a real subscription business:

• — A ReactJS frontend with cleaned-up UX for the analytics dashboards
• — A Python and Java microservices backend on Google Cloud
• — Browser extensions that pulled creator data from microstock platforms reliably
• — PayPal subscription billing for the SaaS conversion
• — Onboarding flows, account management, the full surface of a product someone could actually pay for

The engineering wasn't the problem. The product was real and working.

Went beyond engineering

This is the part most agencies skip. We did it here, and we'd do it again.

We didn't just ship code. We worked alongside Nektar on the parts that determine whether a SaaS product survives:

• — ICP work — who exactly is this for, and who isn't it for
• — Customer interviews — we got on calls with microstock contributors ourselves to understand the workflow and the willingness to pay
• — Pricing experiments — what creators would actually pay versus what they said they'd pay
• — Positioning — was this an analytics tool, a portfolio tool, or something else

We learned a lot about the microstock ecosystem. About a niche that looks bigger from the outside than it does from inside. About the gap between "people would find this useful" and "people will pay enough to sustain a SaaS business."

The market wasn't large enough. Microstock contributors are a real audience, but the addressable, paying segment turned out to be too small to carry a SaaS business with the kind of growth trajectory both teams wanted.

It wasn't a falling-out. It wasn't a delivery problem. It was an honest market assessment — the kind of conversation we'd rather have at the two-year mark than five years and a lot more burned capital later.

We wound the project down together in 2022.

And four years later, we still visit each other. The Nektar founders are friends. We catch up when one of us is in the other's city. We talk shop, recommend each other's work, share what we're each building now.

This is the part we want founders considering Akvasoft to understand. A real partnership doesn't end when the business outcome doesn't go the way you hoped. The product was the project. The relationship is the proof.

We don't only show the wins. We show the projects that ended honestly, because that's how we work.

If a market isn't there, we'll tell you. If a product needs to wind down, we'll help you do it cleanly. And we'll still pick up the phone four years later.

That's the kind of partner most founders say they want. We're one of the few who actually behave that way when it matters.