From Game Development to Bootstrapped Success. The Artisan of the Day Is Val Hinov.
Valentin “Val” Hinov never set out to become a web developer. His background was in game development and later mobile apps. But when the opportunity arose in 2019 to join a startup with its MVP built in Laravel, he took the leap despite having “zero experience in web dev, zero experience in server-side, in Vue, in anything like that.”
“I was like, sure, let’s just learn it,” Val recalls. What surprised him was how quickly Laravel won him over. “The code I inherited wasn’t great, but Laravel itself was so nice to work with. Even back then, I could see it had plenty of guardrails. I could see what I could work with here.”
That experience planted a seed. When the startup eventually folded, Val knew Laravel would be the foundation for his next venture.
Bootstrapping Thankbox
In 2020, Val launched Thankbox, a platform that lets people create and send group cards online. Co-founded with his wife (they’re still the sole owners), the project was born over the pandemic, when paper card giving and in-person collections became impossible due to remote work.
“I reached out to Laravel immediately,” Val says. “With just a month of shadowing someone who had used it before, I was good to go. Laravel gave me everything I needed to start building fast.”
In the early days, the framework’s ecosystem made all the difference. “Any new thing I needed—queues, mail, Slack, Stripe integrations—Laravel already had it handled. I could actually move quite quickly, focus on business tasks, and not worry too much about the coding.”
What began as a family project has since grown into a fully bootstrapped business, sustaining a team of seven and closing in on $1M in revenue.
Meeting the Laravel Community Online
Laravel also opened doors to people who would shape the company’s growth.
“I met my first developer on Twitter, just by tweeting about Laravel,” Val says. “That person now writes more code than I do.” As the business has scaled, Val has shifted toward the CEO role, spending less time coding and more on strategy and operations.
But he still makes time to return to his roots: “I try at least one day a week to spend fully coding and working with Laravel. It’s always a joy.”
Flow State and Developer Experience
For Val, one of Laravel’s greatest strengths is how it enables deep focus and creativity.
“It’s made getting into a flow state so much easier than when I was doing mobile app development,” he explains. “I don’t know if it’s just the web in general or Laravel specifically, but I’m so happy this was the first framework I landed on.”
He’s quick to acknowledge that no framework is perfect. “Obviously, it has its flaws. But in terms of the general development experience, I think you’ve nailed it pretty well.”
On the personal front, Val is also thankful to the Laravel Community for his livelihood: “It’s safe to say that the business I’ve managed to create (now sustaining my family and the family of at least two or three other people) wouldn’t have been possible without Laravel,” he says. “So thank you for making it. And keep shipping.”
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