Building Emblox from Scratch: The Journey Begins

Starting a new venture is always a mix of excitement and uncertainty. When we began building Emblox this summer, we knew that we wanted to create something that would fundamentally change how people in general approach web development. More often than not, we saw small businesses overspend on websites that didn't really perform. And even when they worked with web agencies, the process still demanded a surprising amount of time, reviewing copy, images, and design in endless back-and-forths, just to arrive at something that somewhat matched their vision. While new AI platforms for generating code have emerged in 2025, most of them are general-purpose and too feature-bloated for non-technical users who simply want a performant website with proper SEO capabilities so customers can find them whether they search on traditional search engines like Google or through AI.

The Vision

The idea was simple: leverage Agentic AI to make web development and website creation accessible to everyone regardless of technical skill, while not just maintaining a professional quality, but elevating it. But as any founder knows, simple ideas often lead to complex implementations.

Technical Foundations

From day one, we focused on building a robust technical foundation but with a narrowed down scope in terms of target group. Here are the key decisions that shaped Emblox:

1. Next.js as the Core

Next.js provided the perfect balance of performance and development experience with Single-page app architecture (SPA) for our users. The App Router architecture allows for building scalable, server-side rendered websites that performs both in terms of loading speed as well as being able to provide Search Engine Optimization (SEO) capabilities out of the box. With Next.js we also have proven server code (backend) capabilities that our users can utilize to create secure server side functionality and integrations.

2. AI Integration & Automation

Integrating Claude and OpenAI was a crucial part of the journey. The challenge wasn't just getting the agent to produce output, but ensuring it consistently generated high-quality, production-ready code and full web applications that solved real problems and errors behind the scenes. Automation played an equally important role, helping us create a seamless experience for users, from building and iterating on their site to publishing it and adding a custom domain without friction.

3. Scalable Infrastructure

The last, most important and for sure most complex pillar of Emblox is the infrastructure designed to scale to millions of users. Building a foundation that is both easy to manage and capable of delivering cost-efficient scalability, along with great speed and performance for every user from day one, was one of the best decisions we made, and one we're confident will pay off.

Challenges

No journey like this comes without obstacles, and building Emblox was no exception. Some challenges were technical, others strategic, but each of them played a crucial role in shaping the MVP. Here I want to share a few of our challenges.

One of the earliest and most demanding challenges was ensuring the security of our AI agent. How do you allow an agent to write files, execute scripts, and generate new endpoints, while still keeping every customer project completely isolated from one another and from the underlying machine? Striking the balance between power and security required careful architecture, strict sandboxing, and a deep focus on keeping the platform secure at every layer.

Another major challenge was startup times for new projects. In the beginning, spinning up a project could take two minutes or more, far too slow for the kind of instant creation experience we envisioned. Through continuous optimization, improved caching, and restructuring parts of the system, we managed to bring those startup times down to just a few seconds, making the platform feel alive and responsive.

And perhaps the most strategically difficult challenge was deciding what to build. We can't build everything with two part time technical founders, even if the ideas are exciting. So we had to constantly narrow the scope, prioritize what brings the most value to our initial users, and stay disciplined in delivering the features that matter most. This forced us to think deeply about customer needs, feedback loops, and how each decision shapes the long-term direction of Emblox.

Lessons Learned

Start small and iterate fast, that was a principle we followed closely as we worked to narrow down who our end user really was. The result was a more focused product with less complexity and less code to maintain, while still addressing a large global market. One thing that founders tend to forget is that having a broad scope with lots of functionality also means that the complexity of maintaining a product as well as the technical debt increases. That means that each bug and new valuable feature becomes much more expensive in time and user experience.

Another important lesson was the value of market validation and research before committing fully to development. For example, we studied competitors, made calls, and ran ads for Emblox before writing a single line of code, mainly to test interest and understand the growth potential based on feedback and early access signups. But also understand the needs and struggles of current methods. This gave us strong validation and the confidence that we were building something people actually wanted before investing development time.

What's Next

As exciting as the first steps of Emblox have been with finally releasing the MVP, the journey ahead is where things truly becomes meaningful. Our vision is to keep enhancing what websites built with Emblox can do, introducing improvements and capabilities that feel innovative, practical, and genuinely valuable for the people who use them.

But Emblox vision has always been more than a website builder. With the platform foundation now in place, we will in time expand our focus to support the creation of scalable micro SaaS web applications. Not as a rushed next step, but as a natural evolution of what the platform is capable of, backed by the same infrastructure that powers Emblox itself.

Looking further ahead, we are laying the groundwork for real enterprise-grade capabilities. We want to build a developer friendly platform where developers also feel at home, with tools that make it simple to extend Emblox rather than work around it. The goal is to offer a foundation that helps companies move faster, build more efficiently, and stay competitive in how they develop and ship their products.

The story of Emblox is just beginning, and the next chapters will be shaped by thoughtful progress rather than speed, focused on unlocking what people can create when the platform beneath them is built to grow with them.