From Cinema Manager to SaaS Founder: Building PitBook for European Auto Workshops

Zoltán Mogyorós — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:03:05 +0000

For 25 years, I worked in cinema operations across Hungary — selling tickets, distributing projection equipment, and helping bring live Metropolitan Opera screenings to local audiences.

For the past several years, I've been teaching mathematics, digital culture, and IT at a vocational school in Kecskemét, while also running the school's IT infrastructure as system administrator. Somewhere along the way, I started building software seriously — and eventually began shipping my own products.

Last week, I launched PitBook — a SaaS booking and tyre storage platform for auto and tyre service workshops, now live in 28 European countries.

This is the honest story of how I got here, what the product actually does, and what I'm still figuring out.

If you're a B2B SaaS founder, a developer working on multi-language platforms, or someone interested in the kind of unglamorous niches where software still creates real value — this might be worth your time.

The problem

Most auto and tyre workshops across Europe still handle bookings by phone.

In countries like Germany, Austria, Romania, and Hungary — where seasonal tyre changes are effectively mandatory — workshop owners spend hours every spring and autumn answering calls, writing appointments in notebooks, and trying to track which customer left which set of tyres in storage.

Generic booking tools exist — Calendly, Setmore, Acuity. They're excellent at scheduling meetings. They don't solve how workshops actually operate.

Specifically, they miss four critical realities:

Tyre storage tracking — knowing exactly where each customer's tyres are stored, across racks, zones, and seasons
Vehicle history — workshops manage cars, not calendar events
Multi-bay scheduling — 3–6 parallel workstations, not a single resource
True localization — not translated UI, but market-native workflows and communication

PitBook is built around these four constraints.

What PitBook does

The product focuses on six core capabilities, shaped directly by vendor conversations:

Online appointment booking — embeddable, mobile-first, available 24/7
Tyre storage management — structured tracking by zone and position
SMS reminders — localized messaging with predictable cost control
Multi-location dashboards — for chains and franchise operations
Lightweight CRM — vehicles, customers, and service history in one place
Multi-currency subscription billing — 11 currencies via Stripe, plus 28-language email and SMS templates

Pricing is simple: 30-day free trial → €25/month (Pro). Optional €3/month "Guardian" tier for off-season data retention.

The tech stack

I'm not a traditional engineer. I came to software through teaching IT and running my school's infrastructure — so my stack favors operational simplicity over trendiness.

Next.js (App Router) — server-rendered, SEO-friendly, powering 28 localized pages
PostgreSQL — scheduling and storage require relational structure
Stripe — multi-currency subscription billing across 11 markets
Cloudflare — caching, DNS, and global performance
Hetzner — full infrastructure (~€30/month total)
systemd, no Docker — simpler operations for a single-developer SaaS
PWA instead of native apps — installable, no app store friction, no duplicate codebase

Deployment is intentionally minimal: build → sync → restart. No CI/CD pipeline, no Kubernetes — just something that works reliably and that I can debug at 2 AM if needed.

The hardest part: 28-language localization

This is the part I underestimated the most.

Localization in Europe is not just translation. It's:

Formatting — dates, decimals, currencies
Communication style — formal vs direct vs warm
Market expectations — what feels professional in one country feels cold in another

German workshops expect formal communication. Romanian vendors respond better to direct, slightly warmer phrasing. Nordic markets prefer brevity. Southern markets expect more context and tone.

To handle this, I built a multi-model review pipeline:

Claude as the primary editor
GPT-5, Gemini, and DeepSeek as language-specific reviewers

Each string passes through multiple AI passes, with disagreements flagged for manual review. It's slower than direct translation — but the output approaches native B2B copywriting quality at a fraction of the time and cost.

Ironically, this localization system is more complex than the booking engine itself. And it's the part users will never notice.

Where PitBook stands today

Five days after the pan-European launch, May 2026:

28 localized landing pages — live, indexed, with proper hreflang
Full core functionality live
One paying customer — my own tyre workshop in Hungary
Zero customers (yet) in Germany, Austria, Romania, and Poland

The product works. The infrastructure holds. Dogfooding is real.

What's missing is distribution.

What I'm trying to figure out

Over the next 90 days, I'm focused on one question:

How do you build trust market-by-market across Europe as a small team?

Country landing pages alone are not enough. I'm working through Google Business Profiles, B2B directory listings, country-specific content, and direct outreach to workshop networks. I'll be sharing what works and what doesn't, publicly, as I go.

What I'm asking from this community

Workshop owners (EU) — would PitBook solve a real problem for you? What's missing?
B2B SaaS founders — how did you approach multi-country trust building?
Developers — how do you handle localization at scale?
Anyone — be brutal. Honest product critique welcome at pitbook.app.

Background

I'm Zoltán Mogyorós, founder of Profi Szerviz Team Bt. in Kecskemét, Hungary.

Previously and currently:

Cinema operations across Hungary (1995–2020)
Mathematics, digital culture, and IT teacher + system administrator (vocational school in Kecskemét)
Nászdal — Hungary's largest wedding vendor directory, 4,000+ businesses
PitBook — built on the Nászdal infrastructure, applied to a different industry

If this resonates, feel free to follow along. I'll keep sharing real numbers, what works, what doesn't, and how the GTM evolves.

→ pitbook.app 🇪🇺

DEV Community: Zoltán Mogyorós