Ferruh, Arjun and Mr. X: The “Accidental” Architects

Funda Celebi | Cybersecurity Marketing Expert

Early in my career, I believed the same myth most people do. That great companies start with a big idea. Something no one has seen before.

But the longer I worked in the IT world, the more that story started to fall apart.

Because the best products I’ve seen didn’t begin with inspiration. They began with irritation.

Not founders chasing an idea. Professionals trying to escape a problem they were personally stuck with.

I’ve started calling these “irritation-driven products.” Tools that weren’t born from brainstorming sessions, but from professionals trying to escape a problem they personally couldn’t ignore.

I remember hearing the story of how Netsparker came to life from Ferruh Mavituna himself at annual in-person meetings when I was at Invicti; back when it was still called Netsparker. We used to get together once a year. We were on a company wide trip to Cappadocia, my beautiful hometown.

He told us, at the time, he wasn’t trying to build a company at first. He was just a cyber security expert at a company in the UK, doing his job. I think it was Portcullis Computer Security. Like most cyber security professionals, his days were filled with repetitive tasks; manual checks, tedious workflows, things that had to be done but drained your energy.

So he did what a lot of engineers eventually do when they get tired enough. He built himself a tool. Not to sell. Not to scale. Just to make his routine a little less boring.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but professional laziness is undoubtedly its father. Or as I call it: geniuses are often the laziest people. Just joking!

Well, that could have been the end of it. A personal shortcut, buried inside one person’s workflow. But then something unusual happened. His colleagues tried his tool and they loved it. They mentioned it to their own managers in different companies and they wanted to pay for it. So Ferruh decided to sell it as a standalone product.

The Power of Psychological Safety

When the idea of turning it into a real product came up, his employers didn’t shut it down. They didn’t argue over ownership or label it a distraction. Instead, they backed him.

They told him: “Go for it. We’ll be your investors. If it works, we all win. If it doesn’t, you still have a place here. We do not want to lose you so we win either way.”

It’s easy to underestimate how rare that is. And how powerful. Because what they really gave him wasn’t funding. They gave him psychological safety.

3 wonderful partners in crime that I had the honour to work for in my early career: Pete Edgeler, Paul Docherty and Mark Lane.

And with that push, the tool didn’t just survive, it evolved. It was tested in real environments, under real pressure, solving real problems. Over time, it became something much bigger than its original purpose: a global standard in DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing).

The Pattern Repeats: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering

Years later, I saw the same pattern again, this time in a completely different context.

This time the journey belongs to someone I do not know personally. But I did like how his story unfolded.

Arjun Raj Jain; the founder of pre.dev. Arjun wasn’t trying to “disrupt AI coding.” He was simply running a development agency. And like many agencies, he kept running into the same frustrating cycle: founders spending serious money on MVPs that nobody actually wanted. It wasn’t a technical failure. It was a clarity failure. So again, the same instinct kicked in.

Instead of trying to fix the market, he fixed his own workflow. He built an internal tool to scope projects properly; to think through architecture, constraints, and requirements before writing code. Something structured. Repeatable. Grounded in experience.

He used it quietly, for years.

While the rest of the world was getting excited about “vibe coding”; throwing prompts at AI and hoping for usable output, he went in the opposite direction. He started encoding judgment. Turning intuition into systems.

Eventually, that internal tool became pre.dev.

And like Ferruh’s tool, it didn’t start as a product but it became one. These weren’t founders searching for ideas. They were professionals trying to escape frustration. They didn’t need validation; they were living the problem.

There’s another part of these stories that often gets overlooked. It’s not the code. Not the market timing. Not even the idea itself. It’s the people around them.

Ferruh had employers who chose to support him rather than control. Arjun had years of real clients acting as an unfiltered feedback loop.

In both cases, there was a form of community; sometimes formal, sometimes accidental, that allowed the product to mature before it was exposed to the world. That matters more than most people realize. Because building something is one challenge. Continuing when it’s uncertain; that’s another. And almost nobody does that well in isolation.

So when people ask where good startup ideas come from, I think they’re asking the wrong question

You don’t need a new idea. You need to pay attention to the problem you understand so well you stopped noticing it. That’s where the real opportunity hides in the friction of real work.

The Next Chapter: Mr. X

Right now, I’m watching this exact story unfold for a third time. I am working with a very shy entrepreneur, let’s call him Mr.X for now, who is standing at that same crossroads; turning a “survival tool” he built for his own desk into a standalone force.

We are in the quiet phase, the extraction phase, where intuition is being turned into a system.

Watching this process again is oddly familiar. The same pattern. The same quiet tool slowly becoming something larger than its creator intended.

And if the pattern holds, this “survival tool” on Mr. X’s desk may not stay there for long. I may be watching another irritation-driven product take shape. Let’s wait and see.