Eva Matova

Hey everyone, Elitza here, founder of own.page

A few days ago, own.page reached #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt.

As a solo founder competing against products backed by much larger teams, this wasn't something I expected - but it was something I was determined to achieve. There were moments during the launch when I thought it would be incredibly difficult.

But this incredible community showed up.

I ve been thinking about this over the past few weeks, especially as larger tech corporations that weren t originally built around AI (Oracle, Meta, ClickUp, etc.) have started mass layoffs in favour of more efficient AI-driven solutions.

From that, it seems like AI companies must be doing extremely well and are actively trying to protect their positions. This also suggests that to strengthen their position (besides AI itself), they still need human capital to help them grow.

My name is Eva and I'm from Czechia. I studied Russian translation at university, that was supposed to be my path. For a few years it was: I worked as a project coordinator at a power engineering company. Then things shifted, my field got affected by what was happening in the world, and I had to rethink my career.

I had been curious about programming for a long time, partly because my boyfriend is a software engineer and watching him work made it feel less abstract. There was a boom of programming courses in Czechia at the time, so I took the chance and started from zero, spending evenings building little card games and trying to make sense of JavaScript.

A few months later, I found a job as a frontend engineer at a digital agency. That first year was hard. I was learning fast, building real products for real clients, and constantly feeling behind. Impostor syndrome was a daily companion. But I kept going. My partner became my mentor, and I owe him a lot of who I am as a developer today.

A year later, I joined Native, an American startup building a B2B AI conversation platform. For a language enthusiast like me, it was a dream. Over three years I grew from frontend engineer to senior product engineer, architecting real-time WebSocket systems, driving activation growth, working closely with design and product. That place taught me how much of engineering is actually about people, trade-offs, and listening.