Rebuilt Pebbles Ai mid-flight → production-ready beta in ~4 months, revenue from month one

Pebbles Ai had a first version that proved the concept, and customers asking for more. CodeLions rebuilt the platform foundations while new features kept shipping, and the product reached a production-ready beta in about four months.

Emin Can Turan, Founder & CEO of Pebbles Ai, tells the rest in his own words.

About Pebbles Ai

Pebbles Ai is a Go-To-Market Operating System (GTMOS™) for B2B. With inbox management and team productivity analytics built in, it's a proper business operating system.

You feed Pebbles Ai your company knowledge. It turns that into a go-to-market strategy, then runs it across lead generation, campaigns, content and inbox. One loop from insight to action to outcome.

It's for mid-market organisations. Even companies with 200 to 5,000 employees are struggling with a fragmented go-to-market, and they're losing ground to the Goliaths because of it.

The challenge

Business challenge

The first version of Pebbles Ai did its job. It proved the concept.

So the challenge was speed and scale at once.

Technical challenge

The neurosymbolic thinking behind Pebbles was ours from day one. It needed a platform strong enough to carry it.

And the hardest thing to find: engineers who could understand our blueprint. Our neurosymbolic architecture is set out in a PhD-grade research paper. Very few teams can read that and build a platform worthy of it.

Delivery challenge

I needed a partner who could rebuild the engine mid-flight, own delivery end to end, and free me to focus on vision, strategy and investors.

Why CodeLions

We ran it properly. We identified 120 IT outsourcing companies and scored every one on a weighted matrix: engineering skills, price, team, integrity, culture and values, and the ratio of engineers to commercial staff, among other factors.

That gave us a shortlist of 30, and all 30 received our tender. Initial conversations took us down to five. Deep conversations with those five led us to CodeLions.

Most teams told me what I already knew. They gave me the obvious answers: “Yes, we can build it,” “Yes, it's fine,” “Let's just add features.”

CodeLions did something different. They showed up aligned to the business, not just the code. Instead of stopping everything to “fix tech debt” the way most software teams do, they proposed an application uplifting approach, built on their ScaleFlex™ methodology: get the platform to production-ready standards while continuing to add the features clients were already asking for.

What decided it in the end: their integrity, their leadership team, their impeccable hard work, and the strength of their senior and lead engineers.

Those engineers understood our blueprint. The calibre, and frankly the IQ, across that organisation is exceptionally high. They work at the level of my own in-house team, and that's the highest compliment I can give.

What CodeLions built

We went from a rescued codebase to a real platform.

For the technical challenge: a foundation strong enough to carry the AI

First, the foundation. Using their ScaleFlex™ methodology, CodeLions fixed the legacy code, moved us off a brittle monolith and built a scalable SaaS architecture. They put proper CI/CD in place and built the cloud infrastructure.

Security and multi-tenancy were built in by design, to the standard enterprise-level companies expect. That was highly complex work: the things you don't see in a demo, but everything depends on.

For the business challenge: features kept shipping during the rebuild

That mattered because it meant we didn't pause product development. In parallel, the parts of the app that weren't built to scale were rebuilt and upgraded, without losing momentum on shipping value.

Then they shipped the product surface that puts our AI in front of customers: onboarding, document upload, tactical outreach, AI-generated emails, single-touch and multi-touch campaigns, Copilot and Intelligence chat, saved campaigns and a library, payments and billing, performance analytics, notifications, and a responsive UI.

For the delivery challenge: a team that owned delivery end to end

We met constantly, at both the Pebbles Ai and CodeLions offices, and it genuinely felt like my own team, not an external shop sending updates from a distance. What I valued most is they weren't ticket takers. They asked questions I hadn't even thought to ask, and those questions forced better decisions.

They also advise in the right way. They listen first, then bring perspective from what they have seen work in real businesses. If something looks risky for the product or the company, they flag it early and propose a better path. It feels like care for the outcome.

They also carried real ownership on their side: product ownership and delivery oversight were end to end, which meant I always knew where the product stood. And while I was focused on growing the business, that peace of mind was worth more than any single feature.

But the biggest change wasn't just what we shipped. It was the delivery machine: bi-weekly demos, sprint and monthly reporting, clear scope, and a clean handover to our in-house team.

What shipped

Outcomes

On the business side, we took the beta to early customers and generated revenue from month one, with several companies using Pebbles Ai extensively.

There's a very practical angle too. Building what Pebbles Ai is today with a London team would have cost £9 million.

We also gained clarity on both the product roadmap and the tech roadmap.

CodeLions was our trampoline. They gave us the lift. From there we built our own in-house engineering team, and world-class engineers joined because they loved the product. That team took Pebbles Ai to #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt, top 1% of 1,097 launches that day and top 10% all time among roughly 100,000 SaaS products.

In Emin's words

“We assessed 120 firms. CodeLions was the one. Always on time. Above expectations. Never a missed meeting, never an extended deadline, never a cut corner. They shipped through blackouts and air raids without dropping a single release.

CodeLions was never just a software vendor to us. The team was embedded, proactive, and creative about our roadmap, and it genuinely felt like my own team. They had Pebbles Ai's back on end-to-end delivery while I focused on product vision and growth, and that peace of mind is worth more than any line of code.

They're innovators. They think outside the box, they adapt, and they stay on top of the market and the latest development tools. From what I hear, they're now bringing smart AI methodologies into their delivery to go even faster, without losing the strategic thinking or the intelligence behind the work.

They also put real effort into understanding each client's industry, from AI to sectors as complex as health tech and fintech.

I personally know the CEOs and leadership teams of two other companies working with CodeLions, and I can tell you they're incredibly happy with Volo and his team.

Volo is the embodiment of CodeLions' culture. When you talk to him, you feel it.”

Where Pebbles Ai is now

Pebbles Ai is in its monetisation phase.

The foundation is built and the proposition is heavily de-risked. The PLG motion is already doing what it should: people sign up, trial it, and pay without a salesperson in the loop, which tells you the product is pulling.