From a Latvian Word to a Live Product: Building Vehrts on Replit
The problem nobody wanted to look at
Every HR team I have ever worked with had the same uncomfortable secret: performance reviews exist, but nobody can actually see what they mean. Spreadsheets get buried. Talent decisions get made in hallways. The 9-box matrix, a tool that has been around for decades, almost never makes it out of a consultant's slide deck and into the daily life of a manager.
I wanted to fix that. So I started building.
"Vērts" — worth, in Latvian
The product is called Vehrts. It comes from the Latvian word vērts, meaning "worth." That is the whole thesis: every employee has a worth that is more than a number on a payslip, and a manager deserves a tool that shows it clearly.
Vehrts visualizes employees on a 9-box matrix across three axes — performance, potential, and impact — with strict role-based privacy between super users, managers, and employees. Nobody sees what they should not see. Everybody sees what they need.
From "Performance Matrix" prototype to a real product
The first version was a prototype called Performance Matrix. It worked. One real client used it. The feedback was good. But it had one fatal limitation: it was built for a single organization. One database. One tenant. One company.
That is fine for a demo. It is not a product.
The hackathon
On May 2nd, I sat down with Anete — a CEO who had already used the prototype inside her own company and knew exactly where it hurt. We ran a personal hackathon with one goal: turn the prototype into something multiple independent companies could sign up for and use.
The technical core of the day was unglamorous but critical:
Add an organizations table
Add organizationId to every existing data model
Build a clean onboarding flow
End the day with a public URL that strangers could actually use
The stack stayed honest: React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, shadcn/ui, TanStack Query on the frontend. Node, Express, PostgreSQL, Drizzle ORM, Passport with Google OAuth on the backend. All of it hosted on Replit.
What Replit gave me
Replit let me move fast without the usual setup tax. Replit Agent handled UI iteration while I focused on architecture, schema migrations, and the parts where mistakes are expensive. That division of labor mattered. I had read about the PocketOS incident — an AI agent that wiped a production database and all backups in a single call — and I built my own protocol around it: branch before every session, dump the database before schema changes, review every Agent action before confirming, never use broad destructive prompts, and stop the moment something feels off rather than try to compound a fix.
Boring discipline. It is the only reason the prototype survived long enough to become a product.
Where Vehrts is now
The rebrand from Performance Matrix to Vehrts is done. The pitch deck is done. The domain — vehrts.com — is secured. The first paying-style client is happily using it. Multi-tenancy is the bridge from "interesting prototype" to "company other founders can buy."
I am applying to Shipyard AI's 2026 batch in Riga as a Track A proven founder, and the Replit Buildathon is the next checkpoint on that path.
The lesson, if there is one
Do not build new ideas. Extend validated ones. The 9-box matrix is forty years old. Performance reviews are not a new pain. The only thing that was missing was a tool that respected privacy, looked sharp, and could be set up by a CEO in an afternoon instead of a consulting engagement.
Vehrts. Your employee matrix. Simple. Powerful.
Live. Not a prototype.
